Great Power Multilateralism and the Prevention of War: Debating a 21st Century Concert of Powers by Harald Muller & Carsten Rauch

Author:Harald Muller & Carsten Rauch [Muller, Harald & Rauch, Carsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138634435
Google: 5UN3AQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34566751
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Others, however, for exactly the same reasons consider China’s rise a growing threat that should not be met by engagement but rather by sufficiently early containment: “In the rise of China, what is really at stake is not American competitiveness or power, but the future of the liberal international order. There is indeed a new China threat, but it’s an ideological one” (Barma and Ratner 2006, 57).11 This raises the question of where to place the concert of powers.

Interestingly and contrary to the expectation of authoritarian streamlining, the debate within China on the peculiarities of its model, which is officially endowed with a communist teleology and a state capitalist reality, shows an equally contradictory attitude on (possibly not so) universal democratic values. This concerns the controversial question as to whether China really has a development model of its own and the no less controversial question of whether this presumed model ought to be exported or not. Here three variants can be found.12 Some make the point that on principle such exportation should not take place at all. Others acknowledge that China indeed has something to offer but should refrain from doing so because, for instance, the Chinese model may not be applicable to different conditions and may thus create unnecessary problems. Finally, there are adherents to China’s unique development model who advocate that China should make active use of the opportunity presented by its singular rise and the corresponding increase in its attractiveness. In their view, this would put China on a quite justifiably equal footing with the United States.

The divergence of Chinese views, which used to be more explicit under the previous leadership than under the much more streamlined current one, encompasses all three attitudinal variants (self-determination, self-assurance, active promotion), which in itself is unique compared to the fog of propaganda campaigns and the intellectually paralyzing homogeneity characteristic of socialism in the past. Viewed from a different perspective, this demonstrates that China owes its phenomenal success to a singular combination of liberal change and statist persistence, a combination of “hyper state and hyper market” (Jacques 2011, 5). Such flexibility bodes well for a concert of powers, as does the fact that China is still fairly clearly removed from the critical eyes of civil society and relevant advocacy groups in the West. This does not apply to the second contender: Russia.

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