| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using the 'achievement index', a country's relative size of gross domestic product divided by its relative size of population, I argue that the high-achieving position of the West, as a structural distortion, has been a principal source of instability in the modern international system. Rather than being just unsatisfied great powers, large high achievers and stagnant low achievers engage in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic warfare, respectively. Both hierarchy and balancing systems are structurally more stable if they are 'natural' and less stable if they are 'unnatural', with being natural defined as an achievement index of 1. The rise of the rest constitutes a long-term trend back to nature, beginning to flatten the heretofore skewed international structure, which lessens one source of modern system-level instability. With a much larger share of world population, China cannot rise to the same relative height as the West that rose with a much smaller share of the population. China's rise is thus unlikely to repeat the past experience of the rising West.
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