How did the US and China work together to shape the post-WWII international economic order?
Credit: Amy King
In a new article in the European Journal of International Relations, “Power, shared ideas and order transition: China, the United States, and the creation of the Bretton Woods order”, I focus on how weak and powerful states work together to shape an order’s shared ideas.
We know that international order transitions are the product of transitions in power and transitions in shared ideas. However, the IR literature remains relatively silent on how ideas are shared, and the role played by weaker, subordinate states in this idea-sharing process.
I show that because of their unequal power, subordinate states need to work in conjunction with superordinate states to shape an order’s shared ideas. But this poses an empirical challenge: how should we study subordinate states’ order-shaping role, particularly when their ideas converge with the superordinate state?
I offer a solution to this challenge, examining how a pair of superordinate and subordinate states – the US and the Republic of China – worked together to shape the transition to a post-WWII international economic order at Bretton Woods.
Using new Chinese, Taiwanese and US archival materials, I explore the creative ways that wartime Chinese officials worked with the US to shape the post-WWII economic order, and their strategies of (1) amplifying, (2) grafting, and (3) resistance by appropriation.
I show that when US and Chinese ideas diverged, Chinese officials grafted their ideas onto US ones, or appropriated other US ideas as a way to delegitimise and resist US ones. This allowed China to inject a focus on the economic needs and status of war-torn, post-colonial and under-developed countries into the Bretton Woods order.
I also show that US and Chinese ideas converged on many issues. Sometimes this was because of conscious Chinese decisions to amplify US ideas for financial, military, or status reasons. But sometimes it was because Chinese ideas were unconsciously shaped by US power structures, such as its universities, ‘money doctors’, and gate-keeping role.
When studying international order transitions, we therefore need to think carefully about the complex entanglement between subordinate state ideas and superordinate state structural power and systems of knowledge. In other words, we can’t unproblematically refer to a “Chinese idea” (or an “Australian idea” or a “Korean idea”).
So, while subordinate states do have agency in shaping international order transitions – including the capacity to resist key ordering ideas – their agency is less straightforwardly linear than third-wave norm diffusion scholars have suggested.
A focus on the shared dynamics of international order transition allows us to capture the messy, interactive, and social ways in which weak and powerful states work together to shape international orders.
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