Kent E Calder

Super Continent

The Logic of Eurasian Integration

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A Eurasian transformation is underway, and it flows from China. With a geopolitically central location, the country's domestic and international policies are poised to change the face of global affairs. The Belt and Road Initiative has called attention to a deepening Eurasian continentalism that has, argues Kent Calder, much more significant implications than have yet been recognized. In Super Continent, Calder presents a theoretically guided and empirically grounded explanation for these changes. He shows that key inflection points, beginning with the Four Modernizations and the collapse of the Soviet Union; and culminating in China's response to the Global Financial Crisis and Crimea's annexation, are triggering tectonic shifts. Furthermore, understanding China's emerging regional and global roles involves comprehending two ongoing transformations-within China and across Eurasia as a whole-and that the two are profoundly interrelated. Calder underlines that the geo-economic logic that prevailed across Eurasia before Columbus, and that made the Silk Road a central thoroughfare of world affairs for close to two millennia, is reasserting itself once again.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 344
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. April 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 160mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 658g
• ISBN-13: 9781503608153
• ISBN-10: 1503608158
• Artikelnr.: 53534790

Autorenporträt

Kent E. Calder is Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies, and Interim Dean of Johns Hopkins University SAIS in Washington, D.C.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This section chronicles the emergence in North America during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of what was to become a Super
Continent, in the form of a cohesive contiguous geographic unit destined
for global prominence. This introduction emphasizes, in its consideration
of how the American Super Continent emerged, the importance of strategic
infrastructure. It describes how both the transcontinental railway and the
Panama Canal came to be and assesses the geo-economic implications of this
strategic infrastructure for America's emerging global role. This
introduction to the book prefigures the assessment to follow of China's
Belt and Road Initiative, and the BRI's relationship to Chinese grand
strategy today.
1Eurasian Reconnection and Renaissance
chapter abstract
This chapter summarizes main themes of the book and relates them to broader
theory in politics and international political economy. It builds, in
particular, on the classic decision-making typology of Theodore Lowi and
relates it to the incentive structures being created today by China's Belt
and Road Initiative. The central empirical theme presented is that the
eastern and western poles of Eurasia-Europe and China-are reconnecting, in
part due to BRI, and that such reconnection is leading both to greater
prosperity for the continent as a whole and to greater geopolitical
influence for nations of the continent collectively in world affairs. This
revival of transcontinental connectivity is producing a more plural
regional and global leadership structure, which is distributive rather than
regulatory in nature, making the systemic transitions relating to China's
role (including the BRI) less likely to be conflictual than classic
hegemonic transitions or than theorists suggest.
2The Silk Road Syndrome
chapter abstract
This chapter first recounts the classical history of transcontinental
interaction across Eurasia, and then summarizes and compares the diverse
visions of modern leaders across the continent, ranging from Erdöan, Putin,
and Moon Jae-in to Xi Jinping regarding how transcontinental connectivity
should evolve. It notes that economic and cultural exchange across Eurasia
has venerable origins, well over two thousand years ago, but that
long-distance contact has until recently been only intermittent and
dominated by middlemen. Past Silk Roads have never been a vehicle for
Chinese dominance, and Chinese have only rarely ventured far outside China,
so Xi Jinping's current BRI formulation is notably ambitious from a
historical perspective.
3Eurasia in the Making
chapter abstract
This chapter deals, from a historical perspective, with the political
processes through which the nations of Eurasia have begun to evolve since
the late 1970s into an increasingly coherent and interactive entity. The
chapter contends that the process of integration has been highly
discontinuous, proceeding through a series of four "critical junctures"
that have radically transformed the continent and its relations with the
broader world. These four critical junctures are China's Four
Modernizations (1978), the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), the global
financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers (2008), and the
Ukraine crisis of 2014.
4The Logic of Integration
chapter abstract
This chapter first reviews enduring geophysical features of Eurasia with
special relevance for the continent's geopolitics, and then examines how
energy, finance, and transit trade interact with the physical traits to
shape Eurasian development. Important geographic realities include China's
dominant position on overland routes from East Asia to the west, the
complexities of Sino-Russian maritime access, and India's tortuous overland
options. Energy forces China into dependence on Russia and the Middle East;
finance serves as a critical catalyst for transit trade that advantages
China over India, and deepens the ability of China's BRI to serve as a
catalyst for the emergence of deeper Sino-European ties, and ultimately of
a Super Continent linking Europe and China.
5Quiet Revolution in China
chapter abstract
The chapter begins by reviewing China's rising scale within the Eurasian
continental economy-from around 22.5 percent of the continental total GDP
in PPP terms in 2000 to 43.1 percent in 2015 and prospectively 47.8 percent
in 2030. It then considers the changing profile of Chinese growth-from a
heavy export orientation before 2008 to growth propelled by domestic
infrastructure spending and capital investment in related sectors like
steel over the past decade. The chapter shows how this domestic
transformation, which prioritizes inland development within China, helps
drive BRI across the continent, both by creating vested interests in
infrastructure spending and by shifting China's center of geo-economic
gravity and developmental priorities westward. Chinese domestic
developments since 2008, particularly heavily infrastructure spending in
the west and the south, are having broad and originally unintended
continental implications.
6Southeast Asia: The First Experiment
chapter abstract
China's relations with Southeast Asia are venerable, dating back to the Han
period. They have long been subject to major social and geopolitical
challenges, which this chapter enumerates. Yet important new synergies have
emerged since the late 1970s. Southeast Asian leaders, especially Lee Kuan
Yew, helped mediate China's global emergence, and Southeast Asia has
benefitted economically from China's rise. Technological cooperation is
deepening and infrastructural links are improving, both overland and via
the Maritime Silk Road, despite continuing frictions in the South China
Sea.
7Russia: An Unbalanced Entente
chapter abstract
China and Russia have longstanding historical rivalries, but their
relationship has deepened substantially over the quarter century since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Both economic and political-military ties
have deepened, although increasingly on Chinese terms, as China's economy
has grown from parity with Russia to roughly six times its size, and as
Russia's diplomatic options have narrowed, especially since the 2013-2014
Ukraine crisis. Russia's attraction for China is increasingly as a transit
zone en route to Europe. Some Russian leverage does continue, however, in
defense technology, Arctic transit, and periodically in sellers' markets
for energy.
8The New Europe: Deepening Synergies
chapter abstract
Europe was fascinated from afar with China for centuries, but direct
historical contact was limited to a few adventurers like Marco Polo and
missionaries such as the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. Sino-European relations have
entered a much more dynamic era, however, since the collapse of the Soviet
Union and especially since the 2008 global financial crisis. Central and
Eastern Europe, in particular, are rapidly deepening ties with China, with
Chinese infrastructural and commercial investment increasing. Both the
EU-China Dialogue and the 16+1 Cooperation Framework are institutionalizing
transcontinental relationships, which are also being reinforced by
transcontinental infrastructure. Deepening EU-China ties, animated further
by US protectionism, are assuming global importance.
9Shadows and Critical Uncertainties
chapter abstract
In general, this book paints a relatively optimistic picture of prospects
for deepening Eurasian interdependence, economic growth, and global role.
This chapter details the uncertainties surrounding this forecast, as well
as some negative implications of rising interdependence that may not be
avoidable. Predictable shadows on the future include demographic change,
especially aging; negative impacts of globalization, including rising
inequality; ethnic conflict, itself flowing in part from interdependence;
proliferating weapons of mass destruction; as well as resource shortages
and environmental damage resulting from otherwise positive economic growth.
Critical uncertainties include the possibility (arguably remote) of
intra-Eurasian great-power conflict, the implications for policy of clearly
rising populism, and-importantly-the evolution of the US-Eurasian
relationship.
10Toward a New World Order
chapter abstract
The gradual reconnection of Eurasia, the largest continent on earth,
naturally raises the prospect of change in the global system of
international relations, since American geopolitical dominance has been
greatly enhanced by the historic fragmentation of the continent. This
chapter reviews the essential features of the existing liberal
international system, dominated by the United States, which has persisted
in large measure since the end of World War II. It then considers what
might potentially replace this US-centric order, giving particular
attention to multilateral arrangements giving greater prominence to
Eurasia, and to Chinese conceptions of international organization. The
chapter suggests that a new paradigm of international relations, which
might be characterized as "distributive globalism" and markedly less
legalistic than Western liberal internationalism, is emerging with minimal
global opposition and will become increasingly prominent in years to come.
In conclusion the chapter outlines what such a system might look like.
11Prospects and Policy Implications
chapter abstract
This concluding chapter begins by reviewing key findings of the volume,
stressing the importance of a broad Eurasian analytical lens that captures
dynamic changes across the continent, especially Chinese interaction with
Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis then moves to policy implications,
especially for the United States, of a potential emerging Super Continent
in Eurasia. It stresses the strategic importance for the US of the Indian
Ocean, and of relations with maritime nations such as Japan, India, and
Australia as well as a revived dialogue with Russia, together with
increased attention to cooperative energy and food security initiatives
that could also help stabilize potentially conflictual relations with a
rising China.