China’s institutional statecraft within the liberal international order: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

Abstract

A key debate amongst international relations theorists is how China’s rise will affect the liberal international order (LIO). The launching of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) by Beijing, unsurprisingly, has generated much interest. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the claim that the AIIB constitutes a “counter-hegemonic initiative” (or “external innovation”, in liberal terminology). After showing the complexity of Chinese “institutional statecraft” (following the categorisation of Ikenberry and Lim) the study analyses mainstream international relations’ accounts of the significance of the AIIB. Both neorealism and neoliberalism, we hold, have contributed to a better understanding of the institution, but ontological and epistemological deficiencies prevent them from satisfactorily explaining the complex social processes underway. By contrast, the nuanced neo-Gramscian perspective forwarded here, understands the AIIB as an institutional manifestation of the on-going interaction between the social forces emergent out of China’s own state-society complex on one hand, and their global counterparts, on the other. For the short term, we conclude, that the AIIB is actually likely to reinforce the LIO. Over the medium to long term, however, this “internationalisation of the state” process, understood in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative, poses a serious challenge to the LIO and, as a result, to US hegemony itself.