Who or what is a normative power? In response to this query the article suggests that normative powers are those actors that are recognized as such by others. This qualifies Ian Manners's oft-quoted proposition that normative powers are only those actors that have the ability to 'shape what can be "normal" in international life'. The proposition is that the definitions of the 'normal' are not merely undertaken by normative power, but they emerge in the context of its interaction with others. Recognition, in this setting, is indicated by the specific reactions of target states. In this respect, the issue is not merely about being and becoming a normative power, but also about being recognized as one by others. The article details this proposition through a parallel assessment of normative power Europe and normative power China. The intention of such comparison is to elicit the key elements of normative power in global life.
Keywords normative power China, normative power Europe, struggle for recognition
A rise of normative powers?Despite its centrality to European international relations theory, the notion of normative power has had surprisingly little traction in the analysis of the nascent agency of other international actors-especially, the growing prominence of Asian actors such as China and India. Instead, the concept of soft power remains the dominant framework for those seeking explanation of their increasing influence. There are several reasons for this development. On the one hand, owing to the perceived complexity of the European Union (EU), Asian scholars have been disinterested in engaging with the propositions and concepts of European international relations. On the other hand, European international relations
The climate of post-Cold-War interactions remains uncertain. Rather than a transitory stage, the resilience of the pervasive randomness of international life has challenged the dominant frameworks for the study of world politics. Some commentators have therefore advocated the infusion of international relations theory with the conjectures of complexity theory. This article brings together the claims of the different proponents of such intersection and suggests the emergence of complex international relations theory. Although it requires further critical elaboration, the claim here is that this theory outlines the fifth debate in the study of international life and proffers intriguing heuristic devices that both challenge conventional wisdom and provoke analytical imaginations.It is also possible that hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with the expansion and complication of human societies and organisations. That is the darkest shadow upon the hopes of mankind.HG Wells (1945, 34)
China's rise, like the demise of the Soviet Union, is one of the defining events in the contemporary world. Yet, while the unexpected Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War sparked the ‘Third Debate’ in International Relations (IR) theory, it is puzzling that the rise of China has yet to generate a comparable process of shell-shock and soul-searching among IR theorists. Just as the end of the Cold War is more than simply the end of a bipolar power struggle per se, so too China's rise is much more than the familiar ascendancy of another great power. Rather, it is also a complex, evolving and possibly border-traversing and paradigm-shattering phenomenon in global life that, on the one hand, requires fresh and innovative theorizing in and beyond IR and, on the other hand, potentially offers new insights for us to rethink world politics more broadly. This article introduces this Special Issue that seeks to tentatively respond to this theoretical, epistemological and ontological challenge. It draws attention to the blind spot in IR theorizing on China, and calls for deeper engagement between IR theory and China's rise that goes beyond mere ‘theory-testing’ within the existing perimeters of mainstream IR.
The phenomenon of China's rise has urged some to look for International Relations (IR) theories with 'Chinese characteristics'. A number of these have been associated with the 'relational turn'. Yet, attempts to bring the Anglophone and the Sinophone strands of the relational turn have failed to transcend the bifurcating metanarrative of the mainstream. To rectify this trend, the analysis engages the literatures on guanxi, the relational turn, and Chinese IR and develops a normative claim about the underlying relationality of knowledge production in post-Western IR. The contention is: (i) that the criticism of substantialism offered by the Anglophone literature on the relational turn fails to overcome its Eurocentrism; (ii) that by subscribing to the epistemic duality of the West vs. the non-West, the Sinophone literature has aborted the political promise of the concept of guanxi. The study deploys guanxi to amplify the intrinsic relationality both of global life and the realms of IR.
The 2016 Mandopop hit ‘Prague square’ ushered in a new romance for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in China. Such infatuation has resonated not only in popular culture, but was mirrored in China’s newfound boldness on the international stage. Drawing on CEE media accounts, the article demonstrates that China’s romance with the CEE countries was never reciprocated. In fact, the CEE region might present a significant outlier in that media accounts of China have been consistently negative in the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, the pandemic merely accelerated trends that were already set in motion prior to 2020. In this respect, CEE media accounts of both China and the Covid-19 pandemic reveal an interesting ‘localization of the other’. As such, China has been used to validate specific domestic positions of different political formations. Perceptions of China (what it is assumed to stands for) have been deployed domestically in the CEE region to justify particular visions of the state and its international identity.
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