Carol Wise

Since the launching of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Chinese leaders have sought to diffuse this ambitious overseas infrastructure drive into the Central and Eastern European bloc. From the literature on policy diffusion, we refer here to a process whereby a dominant actor (China) has vigorously promoted a particular strand of its own domestic development policy in other emerging economies. Our focus is on the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, all EU members since 2004. We draw on Etel Solingen's (2012. Of dominoes and firewalls: the domestic, regional, and global politics of international diffusion. International Studies Quarterly, 56 (4), 631–644) seminal framework on policy diffusion, which considers the stimulus, the medium, political agents, and outcomes. It is the dearth of BRI loans and China-backed infrastructure projects in this sub-region that we seek to explain. Our main finding is that China has been its own biggest firewall in the diffusion of BRI into Central Europe. China needs to formulate policies that surpass the pursuit of its own economic interests and devise approaches that resonate with the more developed status of these three Central European countries.

Simultaneous with the rise of trade protectionism in the twenty-first century has been a resurgence in nationalist politics, most notably in the USA, the UK, and parts of the EU. These developments in international and US trade policy, including Washington’s launch of a full-fledged trade war against China in March 2018, have converged disastrously with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in November 2019 and the onset of a worldwide pandemic. Given the status of the USA as the world’s hegemon since 1945, what is new here is the effort of the Trump administration to abdicate US leadership, jettison longstanding alliances, and turn back the clock on the country’s close integration with the world economy. Already, greatly reduced flows of goods, services, and people have translated into radically reduced global growth, widespread business disruptions, and high unemployment. Remarkably, the White House has refused to recognize the severity of the pandemic and has undermined the precautions of the US science community. We argue that these multiple shocks constitute a major critical juncture on par with what the world community faced in 1945. However, in the twenty-first century we have seen that high levels of economic uncertainty and political instability have superseded the long-held notion that international interdependence would pull the world community through tough times such as these. Could the triple whammy of a destructive trade war, deadly pandemic, and secular decline of US leadership trigger a new generation of policy innovation and institution building on par with the post-1945 era? In terms of the global trade regime, it would be difficult to imagine a buoyant recovery of the world economy in the absence of a serious reckoning with the pattern of norm erosion that we identify here.

The political economic history of Latin America in the post-World War II era has largely been one of underachievement and opportunities lost. This all changed with the wave of market reforms that were implemented in the 1990s. The precise role of these reforms as an agent of change, however, is...