Suchergebnisse

AbstractItaly's controversial decision to sign a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration on the Belt and Road Initiative with China in 2019 has been widely debated. This article seeks to break new ground by offering a theory-informed contribution investigating the rationale behind Beijing's own commitment in the negotiations leading to the signing of the BRI MoU. It argues that the Chinese government accepted the risks involved in the process for the sake of promoting an accelerated advancement in China's positioning in the international status hierarchy through negotiation of deference against agency with Italy. The article empirically probes the extent to which such a strategy of status enhancement on China's part is sustainable over time. Based on a content analysis of all China-related political stances expressed in ordinary non-legislative policy-setting acts tabled in both Houses of the 18th Italian Parliament, from March 2018 through to August 2021, the article suggests that China's strategy is hardly sustainable. In fact, the steady deterioration of China-related sentiment among Italian Members of Parliament as a consequence of Beijing's policies towards Hong Kong, the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak, and Xinjiang matches the expectations of previous scholarship on international status as it confirms that social closure mechanisms discussed in the literature prevail over foreign policy consistency when the status-seeking actor is perceived as crossing critical normative thresholds.

AbstractThe Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is mainly considered as a commercial connectivity and sustainability‐oriented infrastructure development bank, but there are also international security dimensions to the Bank. China's geostrategic and security motivations are said to be behind its spearheading of the AIIB. This essay highlights that China's national and international security calculations have evolved in the period after the Bank's opening. In the initial phase of the AIIB's formation, 2013–2017, the Bank's creation was part of Beijing's pursuit of a more outwardly ambitious and bold national/international security agenda of new institution‐building, looking to reshape the system of global governance. But since 2017, China's leadership has responded to sustained international pushback against its ambitious agenda, especially but not exclusively from the United States, and it has refocused its national security priorities onto protecting national economic growth, national sovereignty and regime preservation. Beijing has supported moves to put some distance between the AIIB and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Chinese strategists have shifted to seeing the AIIB as helpful for mitigating an economic downturn across Eurasia, and preserving China's continuing growth and regime survival in what they perceive as a period of external threat.

This essay analyzes Sino-Italian relations against the background of the increasing salience of the West Asia and North Africa region in Rome's and Beijing's strategic calculus. As China projects westward through its New Silk Road strategy, culminating at the intersection of the Mediterranean Sea and Europe's core, the spectrum of Italy's foreign policy options opens to innovative forms of cooperation with China to meet the challenges emanating from the European Union's southern and southeastern neighborhoods. An integrated study of the dynamics of Sino-Italian bilateral relations and of the mounting strategic exposure both countries have across West Asia and North Africa underscores the urgency of consolidating the societal foundations of the strategic partnership ten years after its launch.