Why Asia? Why not Africa, with its youthful demographic profile and geology studded with mineral and energy wealth? Or Europe, with its prosperous, educated and peaceful population, its temperate climate and sophisticated governance and social infrastructures? Or the Anglosphere, responsible for the global currency, the world’s lingua franca, its highest ideals of rights and limitations on power? Or the coming great powers, be they BRICS or some other combination, that will arrange the world between them? Why concentrate on the power dynamics across the continent of Asia as a meditation on what will shape the world we and our children will live in for the next century and beyond?
There are four compelling reasons why Asia and not Africa, Europe, the Anglosphere or a scattered collection of great powers will be the major shaper of the world for the foreseeable future. The first is simply scale. Interlinked revolutions in connectivity – of communications, technologies, industrial organisation, knowledge and culture creation – have reinserted population back into the productivity equation, delivering major advantages to poorer but stable societies. In no geographic location has this been more pronounced than on the continent of Asia. Both of the world’s billion-plus societies, each encompassing one-fifth of humanity, nestle among a dozen other heavily populated countries. In their bustling cities, industrial parks and special economic zones the invisible hand of economic distribution – with some gentle guidance from Asian governments – has chosen to site an increasing proportion of global economic activity. The result: the fastest, largest and most sustained growth in income in human history, which continues to spread to countries across the continent. Economic geographers, who plot the concentration of economic activity across the earth’s surface, have been tracking the centre of gravity of the global economy as it moves steadily in a southeastern direction from the point where it began the twentieth century in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. By the middle of the twenty-first century, they predict it will hover somewhere above the disputed border between India and China.1
Reason two is muscle memory. The sheer persistence of government in Asian societies, through cycles of expansion, decline and conquest, is a major reason for their historical glory and sustained development today. Asian societies seem to possess a governance DNA that ensures the formation and reformation of the state form over many centuries. It is no accident that in Asia the sovereign state form – a technology of governance developed in Europe – has been most successfully adopted and adapted to accommodate pre-colonial understandings of power and authority. Indeed, as state power has been tamed and bounded in Europe and its settler offshoots by democratic and legal institutions, it is in Asia where the command power of the state endures – and would be much more recognisable to Louis XIV than the workings of today’s Fifth Republic in France. Long tradition has meant that Asian societies tend to invest both authority and hope in the command power of the state to deliver outcomes from development to security.2 The state in Asia has willingly accepted this role, promising stability and prosperity in return for the confidence of its citizens – and not too great an insistence on regular changes of government or transparency in its workings. Asia’s powerful states, unfettered by the need for compromise, will increasingly be determined players on the world stage.
The third reason is pride, a sense among Asian states of the importance of their culture and civilisation that drives an assertiveness and prickliness not displayed by most non-Asian states. The process of nation-building that followed decolonisation in Asia has led to deep investments in history and great attention being paid to periods of historical greatness. There are two contexts in which civilisational pride affects Asian states’ international behaviour. The first is when their interactions with western states recall in some way the colonial domination of Asia, implying as it did the superiority of western countries in knowledge, technology, learning and organisation. The need to reassert a sense of self-worth after the experience of domination seems not to have waned much even as the ranks of those who actually experienced colonial rule become thinner and thinner.3 The other context that awakens feelings of cultural chauvinism is when Asian states’ neighbours make claims to historical greatness. A competitive cultural dynamic is deeply ingrained across Asia: as each society is determined to regain a sense of pride by investing in a sense of its historical greatness, it touches off a jealous response from its neighbours.4 Before the arrival of European imperialism, most great kingdoms could be pre-eminent in their own semi-isolated geographic realms, but with their incorporation into a global system, the struggle for respect has and will continue to be constant and a significant driver of Asian powers’ international behaviour.
The fourth and final reason is location. Just as proximity led European states’ economic dynamism and military rivalry to spread across the continent and then burst forth from the continent to reorder the world, so the adjacency of Asian powers’ dynamic development, growing power and ambition and deepening rivalries is driving a domino effect of prosperity and rivalry across the continent – and ultimately beyond. The logics of industrial integration, energy demand and investment are forging a coherent strategic and geoeconomic realm across Asia, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The prosperity and power of Asian states are constituting a larger and larger proportion of global balances with each passing year, and whether as security providers, or investors or commodity customers or tourists, the concentric rings of Asian states’ influences will radiate ever further, becoming increasingly important influences on the fates of societies in other continents. Meanwhile, Asia’s strategic geographies mean that rivalries and alignments will concentrate around particular physical features, such as bays and peninsulas, or political features, such as chains of buffer states. The contests around these features will be increasingly consequential for states across Asia, as well as for those on other continents.
Each of these is a strong reason for taking seriously Asia’s impact on the world of the twenty-first century; taken together, each inflating the consequences of the other, these reasons present a compelling case. Two questions remain: how will the international relations of Asia develop in the decades ahead, and how will these continental dynamics in turn affect the world?
There are two predominant and opposed narratives concerning the rapid enrichment and empowerment of Asia’s largest societies. One is that all will be well and that, by mid-century, Asia will be a prosperous and peaceful continent; the other is that wealth and power will lead to competition and war, both hot and cold.5 But there are strong signs that the actual consequences of rapid empowerment and enrichment in Asia will be much more complex. There are three compelling reasons why the sustained surge in wealth and power in Asia will cause turbulence, but not necessarily lead to sustained conflict.
First, the overwhelming weight of history shows that economic growth is not secular, if secular means that growth can occur without affecting a society’s perceptions and beliefs. Wealth and power are two fundamental locators of a state’s sense of itself in the world; those with more wealth and power invariably have a more expansive sense of their rights and prerogatives than those with less. History shows that larger societies tend to be more moralistic in their interpretations of international affairs: wealth and power require a sense of moral rectitude both to be amassed and used and to justify the actions of the wealthy and powerful. Smaller and poorer societies, of necessity, view international affairs more pragmatically and more often than not do not share powerful and wealthy states’ virtuous self-perceptions. Hence sudden shifts in wealth or power cannot but alter societies’ perceptions, expectations and beliefs. Asian societies’ recent histories of colonialism and domination, along with the deeply hierarchic social relations and worldviews, mean that relatively sudden adjustments in wealth and power will acquire great significance when it comes to rights, prerogatives and perceptions of justice. Asia’s two largest societies have a long tradition of looking at international affairs through a moralistic lens; it would be odd indeed if their sudden rise has not been interpreted in terms of virtue and prerogative. Meanwhile, the sense of self of most of their smaller but still substantial neighbours has been heightened by their growth in wealth and power, as well as by the growing pretensions of their giant neighbours.
Second, as they become more wealthy and powerful, Asian states are becoming progressively less self-sufficient. The prerogatives of economic growth, themselves compelling for governments keen to shore up their legitimacy, mean that their economies increasingly require what cannot be found within their borders – be they deep wells of low-cost energy, or millions of cashed-up customers, or high-quality low-cost component parts, or technology, or education. With each growing external dependency, the network of external commitments grows thicker and more comprehensive, and the sense that these must be carefully nurtured more compelling. Taiwan and South Korea are cases in point. Both countries have a remarkably similar economic profile, being world leaders in the manufacture of electronic component parts, particularly microprocessors and computer chips. When the government in Seoul began negotiating a trade agreement with China, the world’s largest importer of these components, Taipei became worried. If South Korea gained preferential access to China’s market, it would reap not only trade gains but also billions of dollars of investment as microprocessor manufacturers relocated their production to South Korea. Taipei, despite the shadow of hundreds of Chinese missiles pointing its way, began pushing for a trade agreement with China too.6
Third, the enrichment and empowerment of Asia’s states has led to deepening rivalries among them. An enduring feature of Asia’s international relations, originating in pre-colonial times and persisting to the present, has been overlapping mandalas of suspicion and mistrust. It is hard to look at the political map of Asia and find two countries next to each other that enjoy substantial trust and alignment, as one finds between the United States and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand, or among various European states. Where alignments do exist in Asia, they are more often than not generated by shared antipathy for a third country. Needless to say, any genuine black-letter alliances in Asia are with non-Asian powers such as the United States.
With Asia’s growing wealth, the rivalries among Asian societies are increasingly reminiscent of genuine power competition. A ‘normalisation’ of Asian security is occurring. On gaining independence, most Asian states inherited colonial boundaries that included a great deal of diversity and rivalry, and many soon acquired communist insurgencies also. The result was ethnic and political instability and a consequent preoccupation with domestic security in a way that crowded out serious external security preparation or competition. Security spending in Asia has shifted decisively in favour of external security over the past decade. While few of those countries that, in the past, were preoccupied with internal security would admit that their domestic concerns have been completely resolved, the shift in favour of external security reflects intensified strategic competition in the region. Thus, despite its internal security budget being larger than its military budget, China’s arms spending continues to grow strongly.7 As a result, Asian countries on the whole are becoming more able to prosecute their own external security interests – and as ability grows, willingness follows closely. Asia is becoming a more militarised realm, with a greater number of consequential actors. The options for both rivalries and coalitions have expanded, as have the chances of conflict occurring between militaries whose capabilities exceed their doctrine or maturity.
In combination, these three trends – entitlement, interdependence and rivalry – suggest that Asia’s international relations will neither be entirely peaceful nor destined for incessant warfare. In the world of the past, rapid enrichment and empowerment, and resulting entitlement and rivalry, would be resolved by a general war. Such wars – among European kingdoms for instance – would clear the international air of brooding jealousies, imagined slights and secret pacts. General wars among great powers in the past resulted in what one international relations writer has called ‘strategic resets’ – unambiguous understandings of which states were powerful and which had lost power, and therefore which states had the right to make the new rules and the capacity to enforce them.8 But in twenty-first century Asia, an air-clearing war is no longer an option. The vital economic connections among Asian societies, not to mention the nuclear arsenals of some, make the prospect of war utterly self-defeating. Apart from anything else, no major Asian power has the energy self-sufficiency required to fuel a major war – since one of the first connections targeted in such a war would be energy supply lines. The same can be said for self-sufficiency in weapons systems; even though China and India are investing heavily in their weapons industries, they still have major gaps. Asia’s pre-eminent power, China, for example, is still unable to make advanced jet-fighter engines.9 Unable to give war a chance, Asia’s international relations will most likely continue to be animated by unrequited rivalries.
Just as eighteenth-century Europe is an unlikely template for twenty-first century Asia, so is twentieth-century Europe. After the Second World War, rival states in Europe, fearing another destructive general war, built on their economic interdependences to forge a regional compact of mutual trust and deepening political integration. But the prospects of the states of Asia launching a project to develop their economic interdependencies into a continent-wide system of political integration are vanishingly small. The rivalries are substantial and getting larger; the mistrust is deepening. Even at the subregional level, such as in Southeast Asia, over half a century of regional association has brought no meaningful political integration or noticeably reduced intermural mistrust. In recent years, two ASEAN members, Thailand and Cambodia, have exchanged fire in a dispute over a temple located on their border, while the territorial dispute between the Philippines and Malaysia has been aggravated by the arbitrary actions of a self-appointed sultan. Meanwhile, Indonesia, the region’s erstwhile primus inter pares, continues to drag its feet over meaningful regional economic integration out of fear that this will lead to its own economic disintegration.
Without recourse to decisive war or transforming political integration, Asia’s international relations will settle into a pattern of rivalrous interdependence. Asia’s states will grow ever more important to each other’s growing prosperity and continued development, while, at the same time, their strategic mistrust and power competition will grow. The structure of latent force underpinning rules and institutions in Asia will continue to shift, while tentative measures deliberately short of escalation and war will test how far common understandings of what is permissible can be shifted. It will be an era in which transnational forms of influence, such as investment, infrastructure or diasporas, will become the levers for pursuing rivalries and gaining key advantages in the form of alignments and agreements. It will be a world in which rising powers will try to use regional bodies and trade agreements as mechanisms to build spheres of influence and limit the alignment of smaller states with their rivals. Asia will be the first continent to emerge from under the umbrella of American strategic dominance, which has muted the latent power rivalries of most countries for seven decades. Left to their own devices and suspended uncertainly between war and integration, Asia’s jostling powers will develop their own logics and mutual understandings of international relations.
Competition is already well underway in the South China Sea and Bay of Bengal, as well as on the South Asian and West Pacific peninsulas. These are the foundational struggles of Asia’s two giants, so fixated on their own geopolitical limitations and the strategic designs of the other. While India has long resented and feared China’s support for Pakistan, Beijing itself has begun to take very seriously India’s capacity to use its growing naval power to threaten China’s energy lifelines through the Indian Ocean. The two latent spheres of competition lie at either end of Asia: in the Indo-Pacific peninsula and the Arabian Sea. As the Indian and Pacific oceans become more entwined as economic and strategic domains, the benefits that will accrue to a power able to dominate the Indo-Pacific peninsula will be enormous. Allies and bases in the peninsula will allow a power to project its will into both oceans, while threatening its rivals’ capacities to freely traverse them.
Further west, the Arabian Sea washes against Asia’s great energy source, itself controlled by internally fragile and externally suspicious states. Here, the ebbing of American dominance will be most acutely felt. The United States has long been the weary titan in West Asia, realising that its forces are all that stand between stability and all-out power competition for the region’s crucial hydrocarbon reserves. But American dominance has been a self-wasting asset, provoking local reactions that make its commitments increasingly costly in terms of blood, dollars and public support at home. Now, West Asia is beset by a bipolar rivalry between the region’s two great powers Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, as well as a fundamentalist insurgency that threatens both. The demands on America’s pre-eminence are multiple and unrequited, even as the United States and its allies in Europe are less and less dependent on the region’s energy reserves. In the shortfall of American responses, its dissatisfied regional allies increasingly look to their own solutions while its regional enemies grow ever bolder. It is a chessboard that looks more and more open to the growing strategic purchase of Asia’s great powers, which are themselves more dependent on West Asian energy and likely worried by the region’s rising chaos. And what will alarm Asia’s great powers even more than the region’s own bipolar rivalry and rising insurgency is the sudden appearance of one of their Asian rivals as a security provider in the region.
It seems that Asia will have more than enough to occupy its energies within its own coastlines for the foreseeable future. Surely the rest of the world can simply go about its business while Asia’s powers are consumed by their rivalrous interdependence? As long as they keep supplying the rest of the world with high-quality manufacturing and low-cost services, and keep away from waging major war against each other, does it really matter to the rest of the world that Asian states don’t trust one another and are increasingly jealous of each other?
The prospect of the rest of the world being unaffected by Asia’s patterns of connections and rivalries is small. In our globalised world, where tightening connections mean that even remote events can have very big consequences, a continent with over 60 per cent of the world’s population and soon to produce over half of the world’s economic activity will have impacts far beyond its own shores. Even if Asia’s powers direct their jealousies and anxieties inwards to their own continent, the collateral impact of their competitions and collaborations will spread to other continents. Responsible for two-thirds of the global growth in energy demand until 2035, Asia’s developing economies will be the single biggest influence on the trajectory of the world’s energy markets in the decades ahead. Not to mention the impact of Asia’s carbon emissions on the planetary challenge of climate change. With two-thirds of the world’s middle classes and responsibility for 40 per cent of global consumption, by 2030 Asia’s economic fortunes will set the terms of the world’s economic health. It will be in Asia also that the future of nuclear non-proliferation is decided. If countries such as Iran, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia opt to develop nuclear deterrents, the world could be headed for a new precarious, multi-sided balance of terror.
These will be just some of Asia’s gravitational effects on the rest of the world even if the mobilising giants that occupy this continent remain quiescent and continentally focused. On current evidence, it could be argued that this is their stance. While China and India remain obsessed with the challenges bequeathed them by the geography of postwar territorial settlements, their neighbours seem increasingly fixated on the potential of these giants and the long-term prospects of stabilising American power in the region. Indeed, Asia’s powers, large and small, seem to have little vision beyond their immediate interests and little capacity or interest in prosecuting larger initiatives. Where they have been impactful in global affairs has been with their power to say no and to block others – on climate change, trade or financial regulation.10 A very substantial shadow falls between what is expected of Asia’s rising powers in global affairs and what they have been willing and able to deliver.
To take this as an enduring characteristic rather than a passing phase would be a heroic assumption. It is hard to think of a major power in world history that has not been tentative and near-sighted in its approach to international affairs during the early stages of its power and wealth. As power grows, so does impatience with aspects of the world they grudgingly accepted when they were poor and weak. Great powers are narcissistic creatures, given to believing their wealth and strength derive from superior ways of organising the world within their borders – and inevitably they begin to think that this is how the world should be ordered beyond their borders also. It is not long before they come to believe that the world should be organised to accommodate the needs and rhythms of their society and economy.
As we have seen, the circumstances of their rise have imbued Asia’s powers with four overriding preoccupations concerning the rest of the world. The first is access. Asia’s great era of economic development occurred decades or even centuries after the societies of North America and Europe developed, prevailed in imperialism and war, and explored, acquired and ordered the rest of the world according to their preferences. So concentrated are the world’s assets in the hands of a few societies that many policymakers in Asia are sceptical that these societies will voluntarily allow additional countries to enjoy the benefits of development and wealth – particularly since the populations of Asia’s rising powers by far outnumber those of the already developed countries. It is ironic, one hears in some Asian capitals, that concerns about resource depletion, agricultural overexploitation, waste build-up and carbon pollution have arisen after western countries have successfully developed. And so a strategic claustrophobia has developed among Asia’s rising powers: a feeling that with each success they confront new limits and jealousies, and a fear that those who have stitched up the global economy could one day simply decide to cut the rising powers off from what they need to succeed.
Second, Asian countries are increasingly preoccupied with being accorded respect for their status, achievements and opinions. Most have a sense of historical greatness that translates into a contemporary sense of importance. While this is most pronounced in China, India and Indonesia, their smaller neighbours have too strong a sense of cultural pride and historical greatness simply to accept a subordinate role in a hierarchical order in Asia. The demand for respect extends to relations with the west also, particularly in countries such as Malaysia and Myanmar where memories of colonial domination are strongest. Asian sensibilities particularly bristle at criticisms from the west or pressures to change the way Asians do things; in this sense the demand for respect translates into an injunction to be left alone to order their domestic affairs as they see fit.
Third, Asian states are increasingly demanding a voice in determining how institutions and rules work in the world. For much of the period in which their growth trajectories were taking off, Asia’s states were content with a relatively quiescent role in global forums. Even Japan, for four decades the world’s second-largest economy, accepted a less influential role in governing world financial affairs than America or Europe. As their gross domestic products have risen, the puny voting weights accorded to Asian powers in global institutions such as the IMF have started to look downright embarrassing, yet despite calls for reform and rebalancing of these institutions, including by the G20, it has proven difficult for the United States and European countries to cede any formal or informal power.11 Facing so little apparent fairness or goodwill within global councils, Asia’s largest states are often forced into simple obstruction to initiatives that they believe will threaten their development trajectories. The other strategy they have begun to adopt is to create alternative institutions to help compensate for what they fear will be unsympathetic responses from global institutions if things go wrong in Asia.
The fourth preoccupation of Asian states is assurance. Despite their rise, there is no shortage of paranoia in Asia’s capital cities – a nagging anxiety that all of their success could, through accident or design, be suddenly stripped away. On one view, Japan’s experience with sudden and rapid growth is a cautionary tale. In the 1980s, as Japan’s industrial growth outpaced that of the United States and European countries, it began to be seen as a threat. The United States – Japan’s treaty ally – banned the export of sensitive satellite technologies to Japan, while beefy American congressmen smashed piles of Japanese-made televisions with baseball bats. Washington used its leverage to force Tokyo to sign the 1985 Plaza Accord to weight the trading advantages in its favour.12 It was only when the Japanese economy began to flatline in the 1990s that Tokyo was welcomed back into the fold. Whether this is a fair reading of history or not, stories such as this play into fears that Asia’s developing powers will somehow be reined in before they can pose too great a threat to the west. Encirclement and containment anxieties are rarely far from the surface in Beijing and New Delhi, and a great deal of effort is spent trying to hedge against such occurrences. Finding a sense of existential security will be a preoccupation not just for China and India but for most of their neighbours too.
Access, respect, voice and assurance will be the underlying drivers of Asia’s rising powers as they wield influence in the twenty-first century. The question often asked about China – whether it will become a power that defends the global status quo or seeks to overthrow that status quo – could also be asked of its fast-developing neighbours. Asian powers’ four preoccupations suggest the answer to this question is neither. Worries about access and respect suggest that there is much in the status quo that Asian states would like to see changed, but that the demands for voice and reassurance are strong enough to banish all thoughts of a revolutionary redesign of current rules and institutions. Rather than starting at the global level, there are strong indications that Asian powers are focusing their initial energies on ensuring that key relationships in the world close to their borders are consistent with their need for access, respect, voice and assurance. Whether it be President Xi Jinping’s statement that China will secure its growth by creating a ‘more enabling international environment’, or New Delhi’s long-held policy of excluding from its environs interests that could be inimical to India’s interests, or ASEAN’s proclamation of a ‘zone of peace, freedom and neutrality’ in Southeast Asia, there is a strong urge to reorder important dynamics within regions or subregions. We have also seen the need for access and reassurance prompt Asia’s state-owned energy and minerals companies to invest in other continents, while their foreign ministry colleagues build close relations with the governments in question.13 Those elements of the global order that seem particularly threatening are being quietly dismantled within some states: witness, for example, China’s slow strangling of western internet companies in Chinese cyberspace while allowing Chinese companies more aligned with Beijing’s political preferences to thrive.14
As their relative power and wealth grows, so Asian powers’ efforts to build spheres of influence and assurance will intensify. This will have major implications for the world we and our children will live in. Since the voyages of Columbus and da Gama in the late fifteenth century, humans have existed within a single global international order. The first phase of globalism can be called incorporation, because it involved the extension of Europe’s rivalries and industrial–commercial dynamics to all other inhabited continents. The imperial age, in effect, incorporated the rest of the world into Europe’s logics and dynamics, while stamping out the various regional power orders that had existed until that era. In the twentieth century came the age of emulation, whereby the colonisers were sent packing but their methods of organising societies, politics and economies were adopted by the newly independent states, as were their methods of dealing with other states. To deal with the sudden loss of direct political control over other societies, Europe and the United States instituted a system of stabilisation, a third form of globalism. Stabilisation manifested in an intensive period of forming collaborative institutions such as the United Nations and encoding certain liberal norms to stave off another destructive bout of global war and economic instability. The Bretton Woods institutions were formed to preserve the global reach of the postwar economy, despite the independence of former colonies, and to place a buffer of stabilising rules and institutions around the unpredictability of economic cycles.15 While many of the new states were not parties to these institutions, their architects were strong believers in the socialising powers of the institutions they were building.
With the rise of great powers in Asia – Japan, China, India, Russia and perhaps, in time, Indonesia – we need to question the longevity not only of the content of international order but also of its global extent. Their demand for access and respect, their frustration at the persisting lack of meaningful voice and their need for reassurance mean that, increasingly, Asia’s powers are looking past global institutions to construct alternatives that are more conducive to their interests and opinions. Already the Chinese president has started to talk of ‘Asian solutions to Asian problems’ and extol the virtues of a new ‘harmonious’ international order – harmonised to China’s preferences, of course.16 With the dysfunction of global institutions and the vanishing prospect they can be reformed to better reflect international power realities, this century’s international relations could see a gradual crumbling of the globalism that has prevailed for half a millennium. The next phase of world order could very well be one of disarticulation, whereby Europe, America and Asia’s great powers compete to build zones of influence and deference around their borders and with regions and countries of importance, such as resource suppliers. In between would be stretched an increasingly threadbare tissue of global rules and institutions.
Thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and Winston Churchill proposed during the last phases of the Second World War that spheres of influence policed by great powers would be a surer way to a stable world than globalism. Writing in defence of the American invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, Lippmann argued:
Recognition of spheres of influence is a true alternative to globalism. It is the alternative to communist globalism which proclaims a universal revolution. It is the alternative to anti-communist globalism that promises to fight anti-communist wars everywhere. The acceptance of spheres of influence has been the dominant foundation of the détente in Europe between the Soviet Union and the West. Eventually it will provide the formula of co-existence between Red China and the United States.17
But the world has avoided reverting to spheres of influence as the basis for international order for very good reasons. A disarticulated world would be one of separate trade and investment blocs, regional security alignments and different communications and information ecologies. It would be a world in which the easy globalism we enjoy would fade away into incompatibilities and incomprehension. It would most likely be a world less prosperous than we are used to and which would find global problems much harder to address.
The choice between globalism and disarticulation lies as much with smaller states as it does with the great powers. Spheres of influence require at least a measure of compliance from smaller countries if they are to be meaningful. And in the smaller Asian states’ need for access, respect, voice and assurance lies a scepticism, if not outright defiance, of their giant neighbours’ attempts to construct zones of compatibility around them. It is in a world of robust globalism – preferably modified to better reflect non-western preferences – that smaller states will best preserve their advantages and options for dealing on more equal terms with great powers. A new, more robust, more representative globalism would be a truly valuable contribution to world order from an increasingly restless continent.