Order Transition, Systemic Legitimacy and Institutionalization

The structure of this chapter is as follows. The first section shows why existing theories have failed to account for both China’s nonsocialization and the United States’ (and China’s) evasion of enmeshment in global governance structures. The second section looks into the consequences of these failures, that is, the deadlocks prevailing on the global plane. It starts by offering a new theoretical interpretation of the recent financial crisis. It is suggested that, since China substituted for the United States, if temporarily, as the provider of global economic goods in late 2008, the maintaining of the system by an actor other than the incumbent hegemon needs to be viewed as a “turning point” or the functional equivalent to the end of a major war. The lack of effective voice opportunities, traditionally provided at peace conferences, has since led to China’s new assertiveness and, in turn, further strengthened by US revisionism, to various US-China deadlocks. Liberal rationalist accounts readily admit their explanatory limits and refer back to the contested power structures. However, without adducing notions of world order, the current deadlocks cannot be explained. At the same time, this development highlights the United States’ and China’s exceptionalist worldviews during a period of order transition entailing considerable antagonistic potential.