‘Rise of the rest’: As hype and reality

Constructing ‘rising powers’

Twenty-first century discourse in the Western policy circles about the ‘Rise of the Rest’ has been prone to extremes, especially in the United States, ¹⁴ swinging from wild optimism to pessimism and from dismissal to resignation. At one moment, the ‘Rise of the Rest’ is taken for granted and yet in the next moment it is nearly forgotten. More troublingly, as this section will demonstrate, the ebb and flow of Western interest in ‘the Rest’ seems to be less correlated with what is happening in ‘the Rest’ than one would expect. Interest in ‘rising powers’ peaked in Western policy circles for a 5-year period following the housing crash and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Before 2007, almost no US government agency or private think-tank published reports about ‘rising powers’; after 2010, almost all of them issued such analyses, including those in the security sector. ¹⁵ Comparing the ratio of relevant reports ¹⁶ with the entire volume of policy output indicates a clear pattern: policy circles in Washington, D.C., went from not being concerned with ‘rising powers’ at all to becoming nearly obsessed with the topic after 2008, and now have cooled off on this subject once again.

At the mythical origins of this policy preoccupation was a 2001 financial paper entitled ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’ by the Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill. ¹⁷ The report was about ‘emerging market economies’ and argued that ‘Over the next 10 years, the weight of the BRICs and especially China in world GDP will grow, raising important issues about the global economic impact of fiscal and monetary policy in the BRICs’ and thus ‘world policymaking forums should be re-organised and in particular, the G7 should be adjusted to incorporate BRIC representatives’. ¹⁸ This was the first time the term BRICs was used to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China as a group. The term BRIC caught on partly because these countries were displaying signs ¹⁹ of high-levels of economic growth at the time but also because as a catchy acronym, BRIC functioned well as a brand. ²⁰ The next report by Goldman Sachs in 2003, ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’, was even bolder in its claims: ‘We map out GDP growth, income per capita and currency movements in the BRICs economies until 2050. The results are startling. If things go right, in less than 40years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms’. ²¹ Similar other reports followed in 2004 and 2007. ²²

The intended target for the initial reports were investors, and their argument found a receptive audience. ²³ In 2006, Goldman Sachs launched an official BRIC fund. By this time countries so designated had also become aware of the value of this ‘brand’. ²⁴ The foreign ministers of the BRIC states came together in New York to discuss the potential of this designation. This was followed up first with another meeting (2008), then an official summit (2009), both hosted by Russia. In 2010, South Africa was also admitted to the organisation, and the designation was officially changed to BRICS. Incidentally, this was the same year the Goldman BRICS fund peaked. ²⁵ The fund would be shuttered in 2015, having lost 88 per cent of its assets after 2010. ²⁶ However, the BRICs organisation is still around and in fact further institutionalised: the BRICS summit in 2014, held in Brazil, inaugurated the New Development Bank. The term BRICS has also entered everyday language and academic jargon; it is not unusual to see it crop up in academic papers in not just IPE but also IR, and Google Trends shows it to be a common search term between 2004 ²⁷ and the present, with the popularity of the term peaking in 2010.

It could thus be argued that as the term became more prominent, the designation started influencing audiences beyond investors and increasingly became synonymous in the minds of some with the label ‘rising powers’, at least for a while. The fate of the term ‘emerging markets’ was similar. At the height of the hype around BRICS/rising powers/emerging markets, these terms were used interchangeably and everyone was on the lookout for a new ‘BRIC’. Because the BRIC designation had been so successful, there was a desire to find the next group of economic winners – this is how some acronyms such as MIST were coined. ²⁸ Even a cursory glance at the analyses from this period reveals a lot of confusion; acronyms floated to describe ‘rising powers’ included: G-2 (for those who believed that only China is rising to join the rank of the United States); BRIMCS (for those who believed Mexico was unfairly excluded from BRICS); BIC (for those who disputed that Russia is a rising power); IBSA, TIMBI or IBSATI (for those who believed that China and Russia need to be excluded from any positive prognosis and focus must lie instead with US allies at the time, grouped as India, Brazil and South Africa or Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia or yet another combination thereof); MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey, for those who moved onto the ‘next big thing’). There were also acronyms standing for even more inclusive groupings, such as G-20 or Next Eleven. ²⁹ In sum, this period was characterised by a ‘rising powers’ hype, which may be thought of as akin to a speculative financial bubble.

What drove this bubble was a convergence of interests between analysts, investment bankers and countries aiming to attract investment. Analysts and bankers were looking for new BRIC-type opportunities to recommend to their clients. The designated countries (or candidates for such designations) played up the ‘rising powers’ angle because it became evident relatively quickly that being branded as ‘rising’ or ‘emerging’ – but especially as part of a catchy acronym such as BRICs – could improve one’s chances of attracting foreign direct investment considerably. Such brands not only help attract foreign investment but also made it easier for BRIC and second-tier BRIC-like states to borrow money (usually for infrastructure), which was then invested into domestic and foreign spending in ways that would enhance the country’s ‘rising’ image, attracting even more investment. These labels thus created their own feedback loop, at least for a while. Had this been the extent of it, it would hardly be more than business as usual in late-stage capitalism. However, ‘rising power’ designations (‘brands’) started also bleeding into other realms, such as governance, foreign policy and international security.

A good example is Turkey’s international trajectory in this period, as led by the governing Justice and Development Party (the AKP in Turkish). During the hype, Turkey was in the second-tier of countries designated as potential ‘rising powers’. Prior to 2002 when the AKP came to power, Turkey had generally struggled with its image in the West, trying very hard to achieve equal recognition from the West (and especially Europe) but never quite managing it. ³⁰ Among other things, the Turkish state was frequently criticised by Western observers for the quality of its democracy (given frequent interventions by the Turkish military into civilian politics), its human rights record (given its treatment of the Kurdish population especially) and its economic issues (given high rates of inflation and unemployment). In the twenty-first century, however, the tide seemed to turn: a belief emerged in Western policy circles that under the AKP’s leadership the country was poised to fix its long-standing economic, political and social problems. We now know that none of the problems were actually fixed in that period: at the time of writing, the domestic regime in Turkey (with Erdoğan and the AKP still at the helm) is more authoritarian than it ever was, ³¹ the Kurdish citizens of Turkey are as unhappy than they have ever been ³² and the Turkish economy is once more on the edge of collapse. ³³ Given this outcome, how should we make sense of the decade before 2013, when an entirely different image of Turkey held sway and the country enjoyed more support from the West than any other previous period in its history? That trajectory makes sense only in the context of the ‘rising powers’ bubble.

As documented by Rumelili and Süleymanoğlu-Kurum, ‘the AKP governments differed from their predecessors in adopting and promoting a brand approach in Turkish politics, stressing the importance of maintaining a favourable image as a stable investment destination’. ³⁴ This approach was especially successful in attracting foreign investment and credit to Turkey. Most of the AKP’s much touted economic success (at the time) rested on a domestic infrastructure and housing boom, almost all of it made possible by foreign investment and borrowing. ³⁵ This was not an image manipulation with purely economic consequences either. The AKP’s branding efforts were even more richly rewarded when – for the first time in the history of the republic – Turkey acquired an overwhelmingly positive image internationally, and was touted by the United States – for a brief while – as a successful experiment reconciling democracy, capitalism and Islam, and even as a potential model for the Middle East. ³⁶ For a brief period, which coincided exactly with the aforementioned ‘rising powers’ bubble in the United States, Turkey came to be seen as one of the closest US allies, ³⁷ and as a country with a real chance of EU accession, a feat the previous Kemalist regime had never been able to achieve, despite the lengths they went to in order to produce their modernising vision. ³⁸ The success of the ‘rising (regional) power’ brand for Turkey was not long-lived, but its consequences are still felt both in Turkey and in the broader region today. ³⁹

Although the Turkish case is a particularly egregious example of the ‘rising powers’ bubble of 2007–2012, this type of hype was not unique to Turkey or driven by the actions of the Turkish government alone. It was very much the flavour of the moment in US policy circles. Even government agencies such as the National Intelligence Council noted that the world was changing and the international order in the twenty-first century would be shaped, at least partly, by a new crop of ‘rising powers’ hailing from outside of the Western core of the modern states’ system. ⁴⁰ Tellingly, the majority of these analyses were overly optimistic about the implications of these developments for the United States. Think-tank papers gave such projections a positive spin: ‘rising powers’ were frequently presented as potential global governance partners of the United States (the next section will discuss reasons why). It was against this backdrop that the Obama Administration announced their ‘Pivot to East Asia’ regional strategy, which had as its key areas of action: ‘strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening our working relationships with emerging powers, including with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based military presence; and advancing democracy and human rights’ (emphasis added).

Soon after, however, doubt started to set in the United States about ‘rising powers’. This scepticism, like the optimism before it, was seemingly responding to economic indicators. Ruchir Sharma, another investment analyst, penned an article in 2012 in Foreign Affairs with the title ‘Broken BRICs: Why the Rest Stopped Rising’. ⁴¹ Noting that ‘the last decade was unusual in terms of the wide scope and rapid pace of global growth’, Sharma concluded that the new international economic order was likely to very much resemble the old one, with essentially the same cast of leading economies. Developments after 2012 seemed to confirm his argument: many of the countries designated ‘rising powers’ from 2007 onwards by this time started to run into considerable economic, social and/or political turmoil. Especially from 2013 onwards, Brazil was rocked by protests, corruption scandals and other economic problems; even China experienced stock market troubles and slowed expansion. Among the second tier, Turkey went off the rails in 2013, and ‘the Turkish model’ came down crashing and burning after country’s authoritarian turn, as discussed above, but others did not fare much better.

All of this added to the general cooling off of the levels of interest in ‘rising powers’; even Goldman Sachs dismantled its BRICS fund in 2015. Policy circles in the United States moved on from considering the security implications of ‘rising powers’ to other matters. Especially after 2012, Russia embarked on a course of foreign policy that drew most of the West’s attention to itself and away from other powers–arguably in direct response to the ‘Pivot to East Asia’ by the United States. At the peak of the ‘rising powers’ hype in Washington D.C., Russia had gotten the least amount of positive policy attention both because it was not clear whether it was a ‘rising’ or ‘declining’ power and because the alliance potential for the United States seemed more limited compared with countries such as Brazil, India or Turkey. ⁴² In 2012, US policy intelligentsia tended to view Russia as a ‘has-been’; Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican rival for the 2012 US Presidential election was openly mocked for suggesting that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States. The intervening years by contrast have been marked by Russia’s interventions in Ukraine and Syria, as well as accusations of Russian meddling and US and European elections. The oversize room Russia occupies in the Western imagination currently crowds out most other countries once deemed ‘rising powers’, arguably including even China (at least as far domestic US politics are concerned). In the aftermath of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the attention of the West has turned inward, preoccupied by its own problems. Of the BRICs bubble and the optimism that accompanied it in the Western imagination, only Russia and China remain standing, but now they are cast in a darker light, seen more as saboteurs, meddlers and/or trade rivals.

To sum up, ‘the Rise of the Rest’ discourse peaked in US policy circles between 2007 and 2012, having seeped into the policy realm from finance. The hype was driven more by what was going on in the West (i.e. the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis) than what was happening in ‘the Rest’. Neither the period of wild optimism nor the growing disillusionment after 2013 was fully warranted, with the former contributing significantly to developments underwriting the latter. This period is thus better understood as a ‘rising powers’ bubble, with some facts at its core (e.g. China’s growth ⁴³ ), but with speculation and the desire to find even more ‘rising powers’ who could help the United States in global governance and security policy essentially driving the expansion of the said bubble (e.g. the idea of Turkey as a rising regional power that would take the burden of the Middle East from the United States) and eventually causing the bubble to burst. In other words, the volumes of policy-papers produced about the ‘rise of the Rest’ tell us much more about the anxieties within the West in this period than they illuminate actual dynamics over ‘there’ (as has always been the case in IR’s treatment of the non-West).

‘The rise of the rest’ as a version of ‘declinism’

The policy hype around ‘the Rise of the Rest’ may have died down in the United States for the moment, but it lasted long enough for an academic ‘cottage industry’ of sorts to emerge around it. ⁴⁴ This section will demonstrate that the ‘rising powers’ cottage industry of the post-Global Financial Crisis was in fact yet another reiteration of a very old debate about US decline. For our purposes, it is significant, however, that the ‘decline’ argument took the form of a positive projection about ‘rising powers’ in its most recent iteration.

Various groups in the United States have been worried about US decline as long as the United States has had ‘great power’ status. Within scholarly circles, interest in the decline of the United States and/or the rise of rival powers has periodically flowed and ebbed as well. While the notions of an ‘American century’ (as first coined by Henry Luce) ⁴⁵ became popular in the immediate aftermath of World War II, at some point in the 1960s the shine had come off this notion, despite the fact that, according to Michael Cox, ‘the USA was far more powerful by the end of the 1960s than it had been at the beginning of the decade’. ⁴⁶ Cox suggests that the internal cultural turmoil of the 1960s was to blame for the growing pessimism about US power. This then was followed by the economic downturn and the political legitimacy crises of the 1970s, and the fallout from the Vietnam War. The feeling at the time, in both academic and policy circles in the United States, was that ‘at best the United States was becoming what Richard Rosecrance termed an “ordinary country” with its wings “entangled” like the metaphorical “eagle”; at worst, an indebted, has-been superpower, with a declining capacity to shape the world around it’. ⁴⁷ It was this resentment about decline that Reagan rode to a position of political strength in the 1980s, using the slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ during his presidential campaign.

It was precisely in this environment that Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers ⁴⁸ became the academic hit that it did; it was embraced by Reagan’s critics who did not buy into his expansionist US exceptionalism agenda. Kennedy’s book was popular with such critics because it argued that all great powers follow a similar trajectory of economic prowess, expansionism and eventual decline caused by imperial overstretch. ⁴⁹ The furore created by Kennedy’s book in turn facilitated the emergence of a literature which started challenging ‘the very notion that the USA was, or ever had been, in decline’. ⁵⁰ Although the anti-declinists ⁵¹ were a heterogeneous group – ideologically and epistemologically – together they did enough damage to the declinist paradigm to ensure that the revivalist camp got the upper hand, who were then helped, of course, by the turn of events at the end of the century: the collapse of the Soviet model, ⁵² the growth of the US economy in the 1990s, ⁵³ and ‘the disintegration of the once popular (or unpopular) view that Japan represented a serious threat to US economic hegemony’. ⁵⁴ Cox wondered out loud in 2001 ‘Whatever Happened to American Decline?’, observing that the debate about the ‘American century’ had come full circle from the time of Henry Luce. ⁵⁵

Indeed, by 1999, even Paul Kennedy was arguing that “in virtually all dimensions of power, whether it be the ‘soft power” of youth culture or the “hard power” of military hardware, in all areas from finance to scholarship, the United States seems at present in a relatively more favorable position in the world than at any time since the 1940s’. ⁵⁶ Admittedly, he did end his article on a more sombre note, recalling Voltaire: ““If Rome and Carthage fell, which Power is then immortal? His answer was “None””. ⁵⁷ Yet, Kennedy’s note of caution rang timid in a decade much more strongly imprinted (at least as far as the general public’s interaction with such theses are concerned) by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man ⁵⁸ and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, ⁵⁹ that is, books that only differed on their estimation of the likelihood of future conflict and saw more or less eye-to-eye when it came to the fact of US supremacy and Western superiority. Another popular piece from the decade, Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” ⁶⁰ had a much more alarmist view of the future, evident even from its subheading: “How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric”. Nevertheless, Kaplan’s article still was a product of its time in that it did not so much imagine the decline of the United States (or the West) but the spillover/contagion effects of problems elsewhere, that is, in the non-West. However, even Kaplan’s limited global pessimism had been overwritten by optimistic projections of a “New American Century” by the end of the decade. ⁶¹

US discourse about decline would take yet another turn in the twenty-first century, soon after 9/11. For example, in a 2002 article in Foreign Policy, Immanuel Wallerstein declared that ‘The Eagle Has Crash Landed’, and argued that ‘The economic, political, and military factors that contributed to U.S. hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming U.S. decline’. ⁶² Wallerstein has been advancing a version of this argument throughout much of his career, but the placement of the article in the relatively mainstream (and general audience) Foreign Policy journal suggests that by 2002, there had (re-)emerged a certain receptivity in US policy circles for this view. The next wave of declinism properly arrived several years later, however, after the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis, when critical scholars were joined by scholars and policy-makers from other, more conservative schools of thought. Cox also revisited the issue in 2007, and noted that the declinists were back. ⁶³

It is telling that it was around this time that many neoliberal institutionalists started coming around to the ‘fact’ of ‘rising powers’. After 2007, the discipline of IR saw a proliferation of articles, books and special issues about ‘rising powers’, ⁶⁴ the majority of which could be categorised as neoliberal institutionalist ⁶⁵ and a small minority of which had a critical or Marxist bent. ⁶⁶ The main neoliberal institutionalist argument on ‘rising powers’ was that they would share burdens of global governance – thus ‘rising powers’ were cast as a solution to the problem of US/Western decline. As discussed in the previous section, it was this hope that was very much echoed in the policy world of Washington, D.C. Policy-makers were now tasked with dealing with the fallout of the Global Financial Crisis but could not generate far-reaching institutional solutions due to problems endemic to US domestic politics. The post-Global Financial Crisis hype around ‘rising powers’ thus allowed (many) policy-makers and scholars of the neoliberal persuasion to do thought experiments for a few years about a future where the (relative) international decline of the United States would be cushioned by a relatively benign multi-polarity where rising powers would buy into existing institutions of the liberal (US) order, and thus rescue both the system and the United States. For example, John G. Ikenberry argued in 2008 that ‘China has already discovered the massive economic returns that are possible by operating within this open-market system’ ⁶⁷ and that ‘The most farsighted Chinese leaders understand that globalization has changed the game and that China accordingly needs strong, prosperous partners around the world’. ⁶⁸ I do not mean to imply here that this was a new argument advanced only after the Global Financial Crisis – the importance of institutions in peaceful power transition is a long running thread in liberal thought in IR, including in Ikenberry’s own works. ⁶⁹ Even before the Global Financial Crisis, David Lake, among others, was criticising George W. Bush’s ‘assertive unilateralism’ and arguing that ‘greater Chinese power need not imply greater conflict with the United States if the latter uses its authority wisely’. ⁷⁰ What the Global Financial Crisis achieved was to bring up that future date of Chinese power forward, which made such arguments resonate more in Washington D.C. policy circles as discussed in the previous section (of course, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 also helped considerably in that regard). The BRICS/MIST narrative of post-2008 (as summarised the previous section) also helped the liberal-institutionalist argument along by making possible the discussion of a truly multi-lateral order instead of a binary power transition between the United States and China.

Not everyone was as optimistic about the implications of the coming world order for the United States. One such sceptic was Christopher Layne, who observed in 2012 that: ‘Before … the fall of 2007, most … believed that unipolarity – and perforce American hegemony – would be enduring features of international politics far into the future … many of them still do (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008; Zakaria 2008; Special Issue on Unipolarity 2009; Norrlof 2010).’ ⁷¹ but had a very different take himself. He argued that the system was no longer unipolar, and that the repercussions of the financial crisis had vindicated the declinists of previous eras. Layne was not alone in his characterisation of the system, even if his pessimism about international institutions’ ability to sustain Pax Americana was more pronounced than some. Other realists were neither buying into this vision of shared governance and a multi-centric world order, nor acknowledging the ‘fact’ of US decline. These sceptics formed the backbone of the new ‘anti-declinist’ literature of the twenty-first century. For instance, in The World America Made, Robert Kagan argued that ‘Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one recession, or even a severe economic crisis, need not mean the beginning of the end of a great power’ ⁷² and that ‘In economic terms, even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed’. ⁷³ But more importantly, US military capacity was still unmatched. ⁷⁴ Robert J. Lieber made similar arguments in Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline. Others questioned the assumption that BRICS were the phenomenon they were made out to be; Ruchir Sharma’s 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, ‘Broken BRICs: Why the Rest Stopped Rising’, discussed in the previous section, was for instance echoed by Josef Joffe’s The Myth of America’s Decline (2013). ⁷⁵

In sum, not only was the US/Western policy interest in the ‘Rise of the Rest’ in the first decade of the twentieth century was a ‘bubble’ as discussed in the previous section, the academic literature that grew around this ‘bubble’ moment itself is best characterised as an extension of a long-standing decline debate within the United States, organised around the usual (and mutually reinforcing) ideological cleavages of liberal institutionalism and realism. The liberal institutionalist argument found a receptive audience around the time of the ‘rising powers’ bubble because it promised a way of managing US/Western decline by incorporating ‘rising powers’ into global governance institutions. Working from essentially a similar set of observations, realists came to a very different conclusion. The debate was always more about differing perceptions of the United States and its role in the world than it was about analysing developments elsewhere.

‘Rising powers’: sorting hype from reality?

The previous two sections cast doubt on the analytical potential of the ‘rising powers’ policy and academic literature by arguing that this literature is better understood as texts demonstrating US/Western concerns and anxieties. This should not be understood as an argument that ‘the Rest’ is not rising, which is a separate empirical question.

Paradoxically, however, the Western discourse itself has some bearing on the ‘Rise of the Rest’, for two reasons. First, we are arguably living in a historical moment where it is difficult to separate ‘image’ from ‘reality’ and where images can pass as facts. ⁷⁶ Countries are now able to acquire ‘rising power’ status and/or credit worthiness (even if for brief periods) by changing their international image through public relations campaigns rather than through actual structural reforms. The recent trajectory of Saudi Arabia is illustrative in this regard: between 2017 and 2018 crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman was able to cast himself as a reformer against corruption and a liberalising influence thanks to an aggressive international PR campaign; ⁷⁷ the image worked until the public and brutal murder of a dissident Saudi journalist ⁷⁸ (and may even survive ⁷⁹ that scandal still). Thus, to the extent that there exists a ‘rising powers’ discourse, with accompanying ‘rising powers’ centres, journals, conferences, and so on, the question ‘does this narrative reflect objective reality’ is to some extent superfluous; the narrative itself moulds reality in that direction (though it might be productive to study to what extent and for how long).

The second reason why these narratives have an impact on ‘the Rise of the Rest’ is because of the way they influence non-Western views of non-Western agency. Because so much of our modern history has been characterised by social hierarchies and stigmatisation, the non-West is very much accustomed to seeing itself through the Western gaze, and finding itself coming up short. For a long time, this internalised sense of deficiency has been one of the main psycho-social obstacles in the way of non-Western agency. ⁸⁰ When (and if) that gaze sees non-Western states as ‘rising powers’ (for whatever reason), that obstacle is finally removed, for better or worse.