Abstract
Sino-Russian security and economic cooperation has broadened and deepened in nonlinear but progressive fashion since the late 1990s. Contra realism, it is not simply American material power that drives this increasing cooperation; US power has at best remained constant. Instead, two conditions combine to deepen Sino-Russian cooperation. First, enduring liberal hegemony, or a combination of material power, prestige, and the ability to set and enforce rules, makes America threatening, under broad conditions, to any authoritarian regime’s domestic power and foreign influence. Hegemony is an interaction of material power and ideas; each augments the other. Second is the steady 20-year movement of Russia’s regime under Vladimir Putin away from liberal democracy. These two conditions make cooperation on either side of the liberal–nonliberal ideological divide increasingly easier than cooperation across it. Several types of qualitative evidence support these claims, including: (1) private and public statements from both Beijing and Moscow on the liberal-democratic threat; (2) specific deepening of bilateral cooperation after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014; (3) efforts by Moscow and Beijing to counter liberal hegemony’s spread in their regions; (4) the tendency for anti-liberal elites in neighboring states to cooperate more with China or Russia. I address realist counter-arguments skeptical of any systematic causal role for ideology. Insofar as America tires of its role as liberal hegemon, or the “China Model” becomes so prestigious as to threaten the Putin regime, the impetus to Sino-Russian cooperation identified here will fade.
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Notes
For an innovative set of measures of international cooperation, leading to the conclusion that Russia and China are moving closer to an alliance, see Alexander Korolev’s article in this special issue. For corroboration of improving Sino-Russian relations, see Larson, this issue, and Yoder, this issue.
Walt’s concept of threat also includes geographic proximity and offensive military capabilities. Andrew Kydd (this issue) argues that advances in American nuclear technology have increased its relative offensive capabilities and can explain the cooperative trend in Sino-Russian relations. I address this argument below.
I thank Brandon Yoder for helping me think through these conditions.
Haas (2014) calls this situation “ideological multipolarity.” My argument differs from his in at least two related ways: for Haas, material power and ideological do not interact, and how threatening one ideology is to another is a function of how different the ideologies are (“ideological distance”). In my argument, an ideology appears different to the degree that it is a threat, and threat is a function of, among other things, material success.
It was not so during the Cold War, in what was called the Third World. See Owen and Poznansky (2014).
Lithuania and Poland border Kaliningrad Oblast, a small slice of Russia on the Baltic Sea separated from the rest of the country. Ironically, Kaliningrad (under its German name Königsberg) was home to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose thought remains so influential to liberal internationalism.
Here is where my argument parts company with Mark Haas’s “ideological distance” (Haas 2005, 35–38). For Haas, ideological distance is objective and self-evident; for me, it is subjective and depends on the level of ideological-material threat from third countries.
I set aside any indirect or unintended diffusion from China to its neighbors, such as in the intriguing observation of Benjamin Reilly that island states of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and the Philippines) are more democratic than those of the mainland (Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia). Reilly attributes this finding to variation in the historical strength of Chinese influence, which in turn has been influenced by geography (Reilly 2015). I also set aside any covert action by the Chinese, which of course I am unable to uncover or document.
Indeed, Right-populist politicians in liberal democracies such as France (Marine le Pen), Britain (Nigel Farage), and the USA (Donald Trump) openly admire Putin. Of these, only Trump holds office. Much of his rhetoric and many of his policies are illiberal, but thus far he has done little to alter the US liberal-democratic regime itself.
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The author hereby states that there are no conflicts of interest. He thanks Brandon Yoder, Ted Hopf, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any errors of fact or reasoning are the author’s sole responsibility.
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Owen, J.M. Sino-Russian cooperation against liberal hegemony. Int Polit 57, 809–833 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00213-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00213-z