Simon F . Taeuber

This article analyses the European Union’s (EU) and its member-states’ responses to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and addresses norm contestation in Sino–European discourse regarding the primary institutions (PI) of sovereignty,  international law, and market economy. The article combines the toolset of the English School with norm contestation theory. The findings show evidence for norm contestation and increasing tension in Sino–European discourse and relations since the beginning of Xi Jinping’s presidency. Moreover, the article illustrates that the BRI, while at first a projection screen for norm contestation, eventually became subject to contestation itself. The article argues that the identified norm contestation is rooted in a clash between liberal-solidarist interpretations of PIs and Chinese pluralist interpretations and that the variegated European responses to the BRI demonstrate the challenges the initiative presents to cohesion in EU foreign policy. Lastly, the article demonstrates that in contesting liberalsolidarist interpretations of PIs, China is resisting European solidarization and arguably proposing a pluralist alternative to a liberal-solidarist order.

This paper analyses EU and member-state responses to the Belt and Road Initiative and addresses norm contestation in Sino-European discourse regarding the primary institutions of Sovereignty, International Law, and Market Economy. The paper combines the toolset of the English School with norm contestation theory in its discourse analysis. The findings show evidence for contestation and increasing tension in Sino-European discourse and relations since the beginning of Xi’s presidency. Moreover, that the BRI, while at first a projection screen for substantive disagreements and contestation, eventually became subject to contestation itself. Based on these findings, the paper advances three arguments. First, that the BRI increasingly presented a challenge to EU cohesion and unity, especially in member states’ foreign policy vis-à-vis China. Second, that substantive disagreements between China and the EU, Germany, and Italy were based in a clash of pluralist and liberal-solidarist interpretations of Sovereignty, International Law, and the Market Economy. Third, that in contesting liberal-solidarist interpretations of PIs, China is resisting European solidarisation and arguably proposing a pluralist alternative to a liberal-solidarist order.

In this article, we aim to contribute to two contemporary debates within the English School. The debate about how to observe primary institutions and the debate concerning hierarchy between primary institutions. Specifically, we analyse references to primary institutions in United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions in the decade 1989–1998 and their distribution using descriptive statistics. In this way, the article offers a novel approach to identifying primary institutions empirically, and provides some insight into the hierarchy-question in the sense of documenting the relative numerical presence of references to different primary institutions in a specific issue area and temporal context. With respect to the latter, the key finding is that great power management, diplomacy and international law are by far the most prominent primary institutions in the analysed material. This is an intriguing finding, not least given the importance attached to them by Hedley Bull in his classic work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. The main contribution of the article is thus to spell out a new approach to how the aforementioned debates might proceed empirically.