Happy birthday, Congo!

The Democratic Republic of Congo celebrates its 50^th anniversary of independence from Belgium today. The new country had a rough start. Within a week, the army had mutinied. Within a month, the United Nations sent peacekeepers to keep order.

The country has suffered many more crises since then. In the 1990s, it was the epicentre of a regional war. Over the past decade, the UN has overseen another extended effort to put Congo on the right track. The government has promoted the anniversary with a billboard campaign declaring that the nation is "resolutely turned towards the future".

The EU has invested a lot in that future. It has sent soldiers, police and cash to help the UN. In 2008, the European Commission announced that it had given Congo €300 million in aid in the previous five years and would give a further €500m by 2013.

But the EU has not managed to use its leverage to persuade Congo's government to uproot endemic corruption or rein in the notoriously brutal armed forces. The government says it wants to shrink the army, but consistently inflates the costs involved.

Familiar policy pattern

This is a pattern familiar to EU policymakers from the Balkans and Afghanistan. You can get a government to sign almost any reform, but that does not mean they believe in it.

Joseph Kabila, Congo's president, who is facing elections in 2011, wants to be free from Western interference. Earlier this year, he called on the UN to pull its 20,000 peacekeepers out by 2012. Discreet diplomatic pressure has made him temper his demands, at least for now.

Uncool Congo

Yet some cash-strapped EU governments are starting to ask whether it is still worth ploughing funds into Congo. "Congo is not cool anymore," says one European diplomat. Other humanitarian crises, from Haiti to Sudan, have priority.

Western officials also worry that, hefty as their investments in Congo have been, they will ultimately lose a battle for economic influence there with China, which needs the country's copious minerals. In 2008, the Chinese government struck a $9 billion (€7.3bn) bargain with Congo, promising huge infrastructure investments in exchange for mining rights.

EU and World Bank officials feared that this deal would undercut their leverage. Ironically, the global economic downturn played to their advantage. In 2009, the Congolese economy almost collapsed (at one stage, government reserves fell to just $33m, or €27m). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in - buttressing Western influence.

But with Chinese demand rising again, Congo is looking east once more. As Catherine Ashton remarked at a recent event in London, Congo is a place where "economics equals politics". There's no point in being sanctimonious about China's enterprise: European and US firms want Congo's resources too. So do the country's neighbours. Rwanda has de facto control over a big chunk of North Kivu, a mineral-rich province in eastern Congo.

There is a risk that if the UN peacekeepers start to pull back, Congo will be pulled apart by a warlords and profiteers. Nothing new there: in the post-independence chaos in 1960, Belgian forces promoted secession in Katanga, another eastern province with huge resources.

This year, a previously largely overlooked insurgency flared up in the north of the country. Yet the clear risk of instability may create a diplomatic opening: neither China, nor the EU nor other investors in Congo would benefit from another widespread war.

EU leaders - possibly represented by Ashton, who could carve out a leadership role on this ‘uncool' but urgent issue - need to undertake pragmatic talks with China about fostering stability in Congo. This requires collaboration with the US, World Bank, IMF and African Union. But the path to an orderly Congo may run through Beijing.

A version of this piece was published in European Voice.