Abstract
Trump’s America is dismantling the global order the United States helped to create. Meanwhile, China is emerging as the leading economic power. To affirm itself, China will have to rely on international institutions that facilitate trade and exchange with the rest of the world. When it comes to extending its influence in the world, China is thinking big and its New Silk Road project shows it. But China also needs to put forward its own vision of global order as an alternative to the existing orthodox conception, which is quickly losing legitimacy due to America’s attitude towards international institutions. The stage is set for a confrontation between two conceptions of global order, and we cannot exclude that the one to prevail will ultimately be China’s vision. This paper contrasts those two conceptions of global order and reflects on the possible scenarios for an uncertain future.
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- 1.
Robert Kaplan suggested it over twenty years ago.
- 2.
Full text of the Vision for Maritime Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1249618.shtml.
- 3.
The very decision to admit China to the WTO was based on the false belief that such membership would have opened China as a market and it would have promoted democratisation at the political level. None of these two conditions materialised.
- 4.
Full text of the Vision for Maritime Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1249618.shtml.
- 5.
‘We welcome companies from all countries to invest in China, and encourage Chinese enterprises to participate in infrastructure construction in other countries along the Belt and Road, and make industrial investments there’.
- 6.
I say more about China’s constitutional amendment below, section ‘The Doubts and the Reality’.
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Acknowledgements
I greatly benefited from comments of the participants at the conference on Global Constitutionalism at IDC, Herzliya. I am particularly grateful to Adam Shinar, Michael Giudice, Federico Ortino for very helpful comments on the written text.
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Zucca, L. (2020). Two Conceptions of Global Order. In: Martinico, G., WU, X. (eds) A Legal Analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46000-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46000-6_3
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