Former President Tsai Ing-wen has continued to take on a role as an unofficial diplomat for Taiwan with a recent tour of Europe. Tsai has made stops in Lithuania, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to date.
This is the second overseas trip that Tsai has made since she stepped down as president last year. The first trip, also to Europe, included visits to Belgium, Czechia, and France, during which Tsai visited the European Parliament and spoke at the Forum 2000 conference in Czechia.
This time, Tsai’s first stop was in Lithuania, where she spoke at Vilnius University and met with former Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė. Grybauskaitė was in office between 2009 and 2019, overlapping with roughly half of Tsai’s two-term presidency. Lithuania is of special interest to Taiwan because the Baltic state became a target for China’s economic coercion after Taiwan opened a representative office in Vilnius. Taipei rallied for Lithuania – as did the entire European Union, which moved to create a new “Anti-Coercion Instrument” in response.
In Denmark, Tsai spoke at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. The event is organized by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, which is chaired by former NATO secretary-general and Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Outreach from the foundation toTaiwan dates back to when Tsai was in power, with a strong focus on establishing ties with civil society organizations, and can be seen as a sign of strengthening ties between Taiwan and Nordic countries. Tsai also spoke at the Danish parliament.
The other attendees at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit are worth noting. Participants included former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who traveled to Taiwan in August 2022 as the first speaker to visit in a quarter-century, as well as former U.K. prime ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron. (Johnson and Pelosi attended virtually.) Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Kajsa Ollongren, former minister of defense for the Netherlands were in attendance.
Taiwanese attendees besides Tsai included television host Janet Hsieh and Hsin-mei Cheng, the screenwriter and producer of “Zero Day” – an upcoming Taiwanese television miniseries dramatizing Chinese military action against Taiwan, specifically focusing on a blockade scenario. “Zero Day” has been reported on widely internationally, as a production funded by UMC founder Robert Tsao, who has become a funder of various civil defense efforts in Taiwan.
It is possible that the Lai administration intends to keep up an emphasis on ties with Nordic countries. Shortly after Tsai’s Denmark stop, it was announced that former legislator Freddy Lim would be taking up a position as ambassador to Finland. Lim is a heavy metal singer and political activist who later became a legislator in the wake of the youth-led 2014 Sunflower Movement. The Tsai administration rode into power in the aftermath of the Sunflower Movement.
Tsai also visited the United Kingdom, but curiously this leg of her trip was not announced in advance. Tsai had been scheduled to stop in the U.K. during her previous tour of Europe in October last year. However, the U.K. leg of Tsai’s trip was called off because then-British Foreign Secretary David Lammy was scheduled to visit China at the same time, and the U.K. government did not wish to offend China.
In the United Kingdom, Tsai visited the U.K. parliament and Westminster Palace, meeting with members of the British-Taiwanese All-Party Parliamentary Group and House of Commons Speaker Lindsey Hoyle. Tsai also visited the SOAS, which is known for its Taiwan studies program, and spoke at both Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, Tsai’s alma mater. Tsai is known for her strong ties with the U.K. due to completing her doctorate there and notably speaks English with a British accent. As a former Taiwanese head of state, Tsai’s visit to U.K. institutions of governance was touted domestically by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as a diplomatic breakthrough.
In looking at Tsai’s two European trips, her destinations have often been to countries that shored up ties with Taiwan when she was in power. Countries such as Czechia, Denmark, and Lithuania have been encouraged to strengthen ties because of their political history with the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, as well as contemporary geopolitical threats that they face from Russia.
In her public comments, Tsai’s themes are familiar. She has often called for strengthening political and economic ties between Taiwan and the European countries she visits, while emphasizing the need for like-minded democracies to cooperate in the face of rising authoritarianism. Tsai specifically thanked the U.K. House of Commons for a resolution in November of last year stating that U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 did not mention Taiwan, as China often claims.
Tsai also emphasized several areas of cooperation: digital trade, renewable energy, combating disinformation, and strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure like submarine cables or other forms of digital infrastructure. The outlying islands of Taiwan have faced several incidents where submarine cables were cut by Chinese vessels; Baltic states have also seen their submarine cables severed by Chinese-flagged vessels.
In response to Tsai’s European tour, the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) dispatched vice chair Andrew Hsia to Belgium, Denmark, and the U.K. Hsia, too, spoke at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. It can be observed, given the overlap between Hsia’s itinerary and Tsai’s past two itineraries, that the KMT aims to convey parity with DPP politicians through the choice of Hsia’s destinations. Hsia has often been dispatched by the KMT as a diplomat. A number of his visits have been to China, but he has also toured the United States and other Western countries as part of an effort to moderate the KMT’s China-leaning image.
Tsai’s European travels are reminiscent of past tours of Europe by Joseph Wu when he served as her foreign minister. This includes how new stops were, at times, announced partway through without prior notice.
Tsai’s European trip took place in the same timeframe as Taiwan again being denied access to the World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. The WHA is the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations agency responsible for global health. Taiwan has been denied observer status in the WHO since 2016, when Tsai took power, as a result of Chinese pressure. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. (both under the the first Trump administration and the Biden administration) pushed the WHO to allow for Taiwan’s participation as an observer, with no success. The second Trump administration withdrew the United States from the WHO as one of its first acts.
Likewise, Tsai’s European tour overlapped with a trip to the Vatican by her former vice president and later premier, Chen Chien-jen, to meet with newly elected Pope Leo XIV. Chen, a doctor by training who gained national fame as Taiwan’s health minister during the 2003 SARS epidemic – an event that also highlighted Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO as a full member – is among Taiwan’s best-known Catholics. During a brief exchange between the two, Pope Leo XIV expressed recognition when showed a photograph of himself taken during a prior visit to Taiwan, and nodded when Chen invited him to Taiwan but did not verbally respond.
Chen’s appointment as vice president during Tsai’s first term was likely an attempt to make inroads among Taiwanese Catholics, a denomination traditionally seen as leaning toward the KMT. But Chen’s elevation was also helpful for shoring up ties with the Holy See. The Vatican is one of just 12 remaining states that diplomatically recognize Taiwan, and the only one in Europe. Past popes – including Leo XIV’s predecessor, the late Pope Francis – have sometimes been read as wishing to strengthen ties with China at Taiwan’s potential expense.
With this context in mind, Tsai’s European tour serves to highlight not only how Tsai is increasingly called upon to serve as a de facto diplomat for Taiwan after the end of her presidency, but also how Taiwan’s diplomatic ties with Europe are still largely shaped by her administration. The political administration of Lai Ching-te, Tsai’s former vice president, marked its one-year anniversary with Tsai still in the United Kingdom, and one year on, Tsai’s diplomatic strategy still has a powerful impact on the Lai administration.
