ABSTRACT

Global politics are said to be changing fundamentally. After the end of the Cold War and a brief subsequent period of United States (US) unilateralism, a multipolar world order in the (re)making is being imagined – in particular since the rise in the real, or perceived, importance of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRICs), and that of other so-called emerging countries. Part of the hype is actually discursive rather than substantive, yet, it is clear that world power balances are also ‘really’ changing, as can be seen for the past several years in the South China Sea and in Syria. Accordingly, the ‘American century’ has come to end, being replaced by an ‘Asian century’ (Acharya 2014) dominated by populous China and India – which some scholars view as a déjà vu of worldwide power distributions and relative economic strength dating back to the fifteenth century (on the ‘Great Divergence’, see Chapter 24 by Rössner).