Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
be? Will China seek to oppose and overturn the evolving Western-centered liberal interna-
tional order, or will it integrate into and assert authority within that order?
China is in critical respects the “swing state” in world politics. It is possible that China
could emerge as a world power and resist integration into the existing American-led system
of rules and institutions. It could seek to construct a rival order—non-Western and nonliberal.
In doing so, it could draw in other states that were similarly estranged from the existing sys-
tem, perhaps including Russia and Iran. But if China resists this move and takes gradual steps
toward integration and participation in a reformed and updated liberal international order, it
is almost impossible to envisage a rump coalition of states that would be sufficiently large
and powerful to create a rival order. As China goes, so goes the international system. The fu-
ture of a one-world system that is open and loosely rule-based hinges on China. But China's
choices also hinge on how the United States and the other liberal democracies act to reform
and renew the existing rules and institutions. Indeed, there are reasons to think that China will
continue to actively seek to integrate into an expanded and reorganized liberal international
order.
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Several features of this Western-oriented system are particularly relevant to how China
makes decisions about whether to join or oppose it. One relates to the rules and institutions
of the capitalist world economy. More so than the imperial systems of the past, the liberal
international order is built around rules and norms of nondiscrimination and market open-
ness—creating conditions for rising states to participate within the order and advance their
expanding economic and political goals within it. Across history, international orders have
varied widely in terms of whether the material benefits that are generated accrue dispropor-
tionately to the leading state or whether the material benefits of participation within the order
are more widely shared. In the Western system, the barriers to economic entry are low and
the potential benefits are high. China has already discovered the massive economic returns
that are possible through operating within this open market system.
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A second feature of this order is the coalition-based character of its leadership. It is Amer-
ican led, but it is also an order in which a group of advanced liberal democratic states work
together and assert collective leadership. It is not just an American order—and a reformed
liberal international order would be even less dominated by the United States. A wider group
of states are bound together and govern the system. These leading states do not always agree,
but they are engaged in a continuous process of give-and-take over economics, politics, and
security. This, too, is distinctive—past orders have tended to be dominated by one state. The
stakeholders in the current order include a coalition of
status quo
great powers that are ar-
rayed around the old hegemonic state. This is important. Power transitions are typically seen
as playing out in dyadic fashion between two countries: a rising state and a declining hege-
mon. This larger aggregation of democratic-capitalist states—and the resulting aggregation
of geopolitical power—shifts the balance back in favor of the old order.
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