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"Introduction" [2012] ELECD 907; in Wouters, Jan; de Wilde, Tanguy; Defraigne, Pierre; Defraigne, Jean-Christophe (eds), "China, the European Union and Global Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: China, the European Union and Global Governance

Editor(s): Wouters, Jan; de Wilde, Tanguy; Defraigne, Pierre; Defraigne, Jean-Christophe

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781004265

Section Title: Introduction

Number of pages: 10

Extract:

Introduction: China's rise as a global
actor, its consequences for global
governance and how Europe copes
with it
Jean-Christophe Defraigne, Jan Wouters,
Tanguy de Wilde d'Estmael and
Pierre Defraigne

After four centuries of isolation, followed by one century of colonisation
and three decades of inward-looking industrialisation after its return to
unity, China has now fully reinserted itself into the world economy as a
sovereign power. The Chinese empire had been the largest economy in the
world until the early nineteenth century when capitalist industrialisation
allowed the Western powers to overtake the Middle Kingdom. However,
in the pre-modern world China's hugeness was not appreciated as the
global economy was fragmented into highly insulated and inward-looking
economic blocs within which international trade was quite marginal
compared to local trade. Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries,
European powers, driven by capitalism, made the world economy less
fragmented through economic and colonial expansion. At a daunting
human cost, they built a globalised economy by the early twentieth
century. During that century the Western powers ­ Europe and
successively the US ­ naturally shaped the governance structure of the
global system that they had dominated for centuries.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the US and Western Europe
(except for defeated Germany) set up the multilateral institutions in charge
of global governance. The trading system was progressively liberalised
within the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). The new monetary system designed at Bretton Woods ...