Revisiting the modes of China's revisionism: a comment on Natalizia and Termine

Abstract

Gabriele Natalizia and Lorenzo Termine lay out an innovative framework to analyze the trajectory of the current foreign policy of the People's Republic of China. As it stands, it suffers from serious conceptual ambiguities and generates a set of categories that is too large to guide empirical research. After revision, however, the framework that Natalizia and Termine propose can be deployed to elucidate Beijing's behavior in various parts of the world, most notably the Persian Gulf.

Building a more robust framework on revisionism: a reply to Lawson and Legrenzi

“…We absolutely agree with them on the fact that between conservative and revisionist states occur frequent forms of partnership on specific issues (Lawson and Legrenzi, 2022). In another article based on the same research, we argued that moderate revisionist states may opt for a swaying alliance politics, oscillating between one camp and the other (Termine and Natalizia, 2020).…”

“…After a first overview, we found few cases of transregional revisionists (the Second and Third Reich and the USSR), several cases of regional revisionists (for example the US in the half of the XIX Century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908-1918, Italy in the Interwar period, the PRC in 1950s and 1960s, the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979) and only sporadic cases of states for mostly engaged with reviewing orders outside their home region (such as France in 1875-1904 and, arguably and paradoxically, the US in the Middle East after the 9/11 attacks). In the light of this, we tend to not agree with Lawson and Legrenzi (2022) when they suggest that for illuminating ambitions and priorities of a revisionist power we should look at 'the ways it interacts with states and multilateral institutions located at distance'. Indeed, if we cannot exclude that states may implement revisionist policies outside their home region, we regard this as an exception rather than a recurring pattern of action.…”

“…We would like to express our gratitude to Fred Lawson and Matteo Legrenzi for the accurate discussion to our work on the modes of post-Cold War Chinese revisionism (Lawson and Legrenzi, 2022), published by Italian Political Science Review (Natalizia and Termine, 2021). Their constructive critique allowed us to reconsider not only some aspects of the article but has also given insightful suggestions for our broader research program on the struggle between conservative and revisionist powers (Termine and Natalizia, 2020;Natalizia, 2021;Termine, 2021;Natalizia and Carteny, 2022), whose middle-term purpose is to provide a more detailed typology of revisionism and to bring out the different modes of pursuing international change.…”

“…To avoid this fatal mistake, our RISP/IPSR article refers to Robert Gilpin's seminal distinction between 'revolutionary' and 'incremental' revisionists (Gilpin, 1981), However, also this original distinction still risks being fuzzy. In the light of this we fully understand Lawson and Legrenzi's (2022) doubts and motivated by the same goal of refining the notion, we are working on a more nuanced subcategory of 'moderate' revisionists.…”

“…Coming to the first major observation by Lawson and Legrenzi (2022), we have the chance to spend some more words about the perimeter of action of revisionist challenges. It remained in a shadow within the article because its purpose was to trace the modes of China's revisionism rather than its objectives .…”