Connectivity and Order: an Analytical Framework

Abstract

IR literature has become inundated with different descriptions for the future of international order. The coming age is purportedly marked by China’s ascendancy, American decline, a leaderless “no-one’s world”, or multiple competing modernities. Yet the global fight against climate change or shared COVID-19 strategies convey a different image of the world’s predicament. The situation appears paradoxical: increasingly tense great-power relations are mixed with ever-strengthening interdependencies. This article contributes to these debates by exploring how global orders as well as regionalism today are increasingly defined by various types of connective functional links between intentional actors at various levels of social organisation. To enable a nuanced analysis, the article introduces an analytical framework composed of six connectivity logics, namely cooperation, copying, cushioning, contestation, containment, and coercion. These play out differently within material, economic, institutional, knowledge, people-to-people, and security spheres. The utility of this article’s approach is demonstrated through empirical examples related to the policies of key actors in the Indo-Pacific region.

European Norms Trap? EU Connectivity Policies and the Case of the Global Gateway

“…Despite being a relatively new notion, often ill-defined, connectivity constitutes a popular theoretical notion-according to some scholars, even a central "paradigm of global organisation" today [54:216, 215]. The theory article by Gaens, Sinkkonen and Vogt in this special issue provides one theoretical conceptualization for the notion [55]. Roots of the concept lie in the arena of international relations and foreign policy: most research still refers to the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) 2017 summit definition, approved by more than 50 governments in Asia and Europe.…”

“…To support the analysis on the developing notion of connectivity, the article also refers to literature on more developed concepts, including regionalism and normative power. In literature, the notion of regionalism goes hand in hand with connectivity [55], and some consider connectivity to equate with regional integration [53:23]. While scholars disagree on how to define regionalism, this paper refers to it rather loosely as a political process and efforts linked to regional integration and cooperation, including economic means and institution creation.…”

“…Already when the first EU connectivity strategy "Connecting Europe and Asia -building blocks for an EU strategy" [27] was adopted in 2018, it was as regarded as offering an alternative to China's BRI [53:22]. The 2018 strategy is considered as a pioneering communication that placed connectivity at the core of the EU's Asia politics [54], even though the 2016 EU Global Strategy had already lumped China and connectivity together in EU's foreign political thinking [23:37-38], further following policies from the 1990s when the "Europe-Caucasus-Asia Transport Corridor" was established to connect Europe with China [54:219].…”

“…Aggarwal and Fogarty have suggested that if globalization reflects an American view for organizing the world, interregionalism could be the European Union's (EU) version of it, "projecting the EU's success in creating a region and seeking to externalize the forms that have worked in Europe" abroad [1:16, 9:49]. Despite the success of the mission back home, the EU being read as the model example for regional integration in the world [55], the block's regionalism promotion has had more dubious effects abroad, for example, the postcolonial scholarship reporting on an undermining effect on partners in Africa [82]. This article focuses on a recent expression of the EU's interregionalism, the connectivity initiative "Global Gateway," from the point of view of whether it makes a case for coercive policy.…”

“…Competing connectivity initiatives have been argued to serve as a means of geopolitics today [75]. Connectivity policies translate foreign policy and economic strategies of competing international actors into the practical construction of airports, fiber-optic cables, or railways, attaching political and security implications to infrastructure investments [55]. In the twentyfirst century, using economic means for power politics has in general been argued to be a growing trend [78].…”