None of these scenarios seems particularly imminent. For the foreseeable future the most likely outcome is a continuation of the process of reform already under way, notwithstanding the growing problems of governance consequent upon social unrest and chronic corruption. [694] The worst-case scenario for both China and the world would be the collapse and demise of the Communist Party in the manner of the Soviet Union, [695] which had a disastrous effect on Russian living standards for over a decade. The ramifications, nationally and globally, of a similar implosion in China, which has a far bigger population, a much larger economy and is far more integrated with the outside world, would be vastly greater. A period of chaos would threaten the country’s stability, usher in a phase of uncertainty and conflict, threaten a premature end to its modernization, and potentially culminate in a return to one of China ’s periodic phases of introspection and division. The best prospect for China, and the world, is if the present regime continues to direct the country’s transformation on a similar basis of reform and mutation until such time as there can be a relatively benign transition to a different kind of era. Given China ’s huge success over the last thirty years, this remains by far the most likely scenario.

CHINA AS A DIFFERENT KIND OF STATE

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which marked the end of the Thirty Years War and initiated a new order in Central Europe based on state sovereignty), the European nation-state slowly emerged as the dominant unit in the international system. The rise of China poses an implicit challenge to this idea. For the West the key operational concept is the nation-state, but for the Chinese it is the civilization-state. At a minimum this will present the world with formidable problems of mutual understanding. This can be illustrated by the linguistic differences: whereas in English there are different words for nation, country, state and government, these are not only relatively recent in Chinese, but the Chinese still largely use the same character for ‘country’ and ‘state’. [696] The real difficulty, of course, lies not in linguistic differences but in the different cultural assumptions and meanings that are attached to those words in the two languages. The same word can have a very different meaning for an American or a French person in contrast to a Chinese, even though they might appear to be singing from the same sheet. Huang Ping believes that this cultural difference ‘is going to be a huge problem’. [697] In a world hitherto dominated by Western concepts, values, institutions and propositions, to which China has been obliged to adapt, this has been a far bigger problem for China than for the West. But fast-forward to the future and it becomes clear that, as China ’s power and influence grow apace, it will become the West’s problem more than China ’s. [698]

In such circumstances it is pointless to think that China is going to change and adopt Western cultural norms: the practices and ways of thinking are simply too old and too deeply rooted for that to happen. Far from China converging on the Western model and thereby conforming to the established patterns of the nation-state, there is likely to be a rather different scenario. This is not necessarily because China will want to change things: on the contrary, it has been at pains to assure the global community that it certainly does not see itself as an agent of change anxious to overthrow the established international order. But countries naturally and inevitably see the world according to their own history and experiences, an outlook that is tempered only by the constraints of geopolitics and realpolitik. The European powers, the major architects of the international system as we know it today, brought their own traditions and history to bear on the shaping and design of that system, at the core of which lay the nation-state, a European invention. The way in which the United States sees the world reflects both its European ancestry and the specific characteristics of its own formation and growth. The fact that it expanded by a continuous process of conquest and that, as a settler-nation, it had to invent itself from scratch has imbued the country with a universalizing and missionary conception of its role. [699] The rules that govern the international system may be universal in application, but that does not mean that they were universal in creation, that they emerged magically out of the international ether: on the contrary, they were the invention of those nations that were strong and dominant enough to enforce their will and to ensure that their interests were those that triumphed. As China becomes a global power, and ultimately a superpower, probably in time the dominant superpower, then it, like every other previous major power, will view the world through the prism of its own history and will seek, subject to the prevailing constraints, to reshape that world in its own image. Above all, that means that China will see the world in terms of its identity and experience as a civilization-state, with its attendant characteristics and assumptions, rather than primarily as a nation-state.

There is another related sense in which China’s emergence is bound to change the international system as we know it. The European nation-states that constituted the original founding core of the international system were all, roughly speaking, of a similar kind: namely, in global terms, small to medium sized. Following the Second World War, the number and diversity of nation-states was dramatically transformed as a result of decolonization (and then again after 1989 with the break-up of the USSR). The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the US and the USSR, which were both far larger than even the biggest European nation-states. Partly as a result, the West European states were encouraged to combine their power in what we now know as the European Union, a grouping of nation-states. It has become common to see such unions of nation-states as the way forward, ASEAN and Mercosur (a regional trade agreement between four South American countries) being further examples, though neither as yet involves any pooling of sovereignty. The American perspective, for obvious reasons, has invariably placed the major emphasis on the nation-state. But the rise of China and India threatens to transform the picture again. In one sense, of course, it marks the reassertion of the nation-state. These are no ordinary nation-states, however, but states on a gargantuan scale. If this century will increasingly belong to China and India, in conjunction with the United States, then it should also be seen as the Age of the Megastate. [700] This does not mean that unions of nation-states will go out of fashion, but their primary raison d’être is likely to be as a counterweight to the megastate, both the old (the United States) and especially the new (China and India).

Quite where this will leave the old Westphalian system is difficult to say. States of the scale, size and potential power of China and India will dwarf the vast majority of other countries. This will not be an entirely new phenomenon. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both established unequal relations with their subordinate allies to an extent which frequently undermined or greatly detracted from the sovereignty of the latter. This is the case, in varying degrees, of the US ’s present relationship with many countries. But China and India are on a different scale even to the United States: China has more than three times the population and between them India and China comprise around 38 per cent of the world’s population. As both are still only at the earliest stages of their transformation, it is impossible at present to conceive what this might mean in terms of their relationship with other states. The Westphalian system may well survive the emergence of China and India as global powers, but it will certainly look very different from any previous stage in its history.