| Publication |
2014.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Today, as throughout history, a 'single dynamic' of structural change is shaping the power cycles of all of the great powers - and the expectations that each state has about its future security and foreign policy role.1 Across the six centuries of the emerging modern state system, states have competed for relative power share, attempted to advance foreign policy roles, and struggled against the 'bounds of the system' (finiteness of share) that limits and contours each state's cycle of relative power and its possibilities for role gratification. Projections of future power, role and security are embedded at each historical point on the coevolving power cycles, reflecting the emergent 'trends of history' and 'shifting balance of world forces' experienced by statesmen and assessed in economic and diplomatic history. Implicit in the expression 'peaceful rise' that permeates discussion of the rise of China today is the coded question: Will the world this century repeat the mistakes of the early twentieth century, mistakes that fueled the spiral into World War I (WWI)? For founders of the field of international relations (IR) and world statesmen
negotiating international regimes, witnesses to that catastrophe, the quintessential problem confronting statecraft was how to integrate an increasingly powerful great state into the existing global balance of power and community of nations itself experiencing the challenges and uncertainties of structural change - the so-called dilemma of peaceful change.
|