The Belt and Road Initiative

Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Aspects

Faisal Ahmed, Alexandre Lambert

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000488005
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Relaciones internacionales

This book studies the geopolitical and geoeconomic aspects of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It argues that the BRI has the potential to redesign the spatial and territorial dimensions of governance and effectively counterbalance the hitherto predominant hegemonies of the Anglo-American sea power.

The volume:

• Highlights the main geopolitical patterns, including geographical, economic, financial, technological, and strategic factors guiding the BRI on a global scale
• Presents a historical account of the development of the Silk Road and underlines its contemporary relevance
• Traces China's growing inf luence from Eurasia to America
• Discusses how the Initiative is likely to transform international relations by the middle of the 21st century.

A comprehensive guide to China's rise as the new centre of gravity in global geopolitics, the book will be indispensable for students of political studies, geopolitics, international relations, and foreign policy. It will also be useful for policymakers, strategic investors, think tanks, and government officials.

1
THE ANCIENT SILK ROADS

Historical perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781003244219-1

The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) navigated from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean herewith realising the effective circumnavigation of the Earth. His expedition of 1518-1522 would be called the “Eastern Indies”. Within the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Western civilisation, if people say that they “orient” themselves, it effectively resonates thousands of years of “looking-to-the-East”. This implies that before Columbus and Magellan, nobody in Europe would look to its West, as the Atlantic Ocean would be considered the utmost edge of the old world and within pre-modern world maps, respectively. Thus, before the discovery of the Americas and therewith along much of civilisational evolution, Eurasia kept being the core of both world politics and economic globalisation. And within the continental complex of the so-called World Island encompassing Eurasia and Africa, the Ancient Silk Roads and Routes (ASRs) would serve as the commercial connectivity grid and also “super-highway” of communication and cultural exchanges, along which the foundations of modernity would be developed. For the past two centuries, North Atlantic has been the centre of the world. It has shaped the first two global sea superpowers, the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the United States. It seems as if the 21st century will be shaped again from within Asia with the two giants, China and India, rejuvenating to lead the world. And since this will also coincide with the return of “Asian values”, a new generation of global leadership is emerging, built on an Asian variation of economic statecraft shaped by both responsibility and solidarity. In the words of Khanna:

The Asian way of doing things is spreading (again) … (as) … governments are taking a stronger hand in steering economic priorities. Democratic impulses are being balanced with technocratic guidance. Social discourse in the West not only boasts of rights but speaks of responsibility. Western officials, businesspeople, journalists, scholars, and students are touring Asia to observe how to build large-scale, world-class infrastructure and futuristic cities, study how governments use scenarios and data to align industries and universities and examine social policies that promote national solidarity.¹

1.1 Caravans and the “Roman Streets” metaphor: infrastructure is key to political and economic spatial control

There is no exaggeration when historians, explorers, archaeologists, and anthropologists alike occasionally refer to the “Great Silk Road” when elaborating on the heritage of the ASRs. Notably, this “transcontinental road” represented not only the commercial engine of pre-modern times, but also the main vehicle of cultural and even spiritual exchanges and enrichment between Asia, Europe, and Africa. In particular, the ASRs enabled a better connection and “organic inclusion” of China into Eurasia’s “economic and cultural structure”.² Today, with the launch of the New Silk Roads or Routes (NSRs), and with the more official term of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China effectively builds on its 5,000 years of civilisational heritage as well as economic and cultural leadership. With regard to the ASRs heritage, in particular, this means that UNESCO would label it as a world heritage of “exceptional universal value”:

The (Ancient) Silk Roads were an interconnected web of routes linking the ancient societies of Asia, the (Indian) Subcontinent, Central Asia, Western Asia and the Near East, and contributed to the development of many of the world’s great civilizations. They represent one of the world’s preeminent long-distance communication networks stretching as the crow flies to around 7,500 km but extending to in excess of 35,000 km along specific routes. While some of these routes had been in use for millennia, by the 2nd century BC the volume of exchange had increased substantially, as had the long-distance trade between east and west in high value goods, and the political, social and cultural impacts of these movements had far-reaching consequences upon all the societies that encountered them.³

Well before the official launch of the ASRs by the Chinese Han Dynasty during the 2nd century BC, connectivity infrastructure was developed at the heart of Eurasia. Even by the time of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Elam, and Assyria in contemporary Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and the corresponding dawn of the first historical scripts, major rulers, such as Babylonian Hammurabi, would be world renowned. They would be known not only as “law-givers” (as the term “Hammurabi” states) but also as promoters of large-scale infrastructure development. Together with the harmonisation of norms, standards, and regulations that were reflected with the famous “Hammurabi Code”, important investments in connectivity and logistics facilitated the integration of the Babylonian Empire.⁴ Emerging along the fertile river basins of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, Mesopotamia was geographically well positioned, also at the shores of the Persian Gulf, to connect the Mediterranean with West and South Asia. Since most of the transportation of goods during Antiquity and up to the Middle Ages took place on land, along major rivers and sea coasts, large connectivity infrastructure projects typically focused on land roads and shipping canals. Such projects aimed at connecting either rivers or rivers with strategic ports at sea coasts, like those that would connect the Nile River with the Red Sea.

Since the 7th century BC, the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, upon its conquest of Babylon, further expanded the already impressive infrastructure complex of the Ancient Mesopotamian civilisations. It expanded to Egypt and Asia Minor (Turkey) in the West, deep into Central Asia, and down to the Indus Valley in the East.⁵ Since the Persian Empire would emerge as the largest territorial empire of the ancient world, it would herewith provide for the prerequisites of the first Pan-Eurasian integration process in history. It would also provide for a key prerequisite for the actual realisation, let alone full “operationalisation” of the ASRs.

Elaborating on the Babylonian Empire’s heritage, Persians put in place a most efficient administrative and infrastructural system that extended over the world’s first “superpower”, which connected Asia with Europe and Africa ever more effectively.⁶ And again, Ancient Persia was not only run by a cutting-edge administrative and communication system led by highly educated bureaucrats; as Frankopan points out, it was also integrated by a vast road system “criss-crossing” the Achaemenid Empire that was the “envy of the ancient world”. The Persian state system, including its pan-imperial communication system, including the world’s first postal system, became so much renowned across the world that the famous Greek historian Herodotus would “view (it) with wonder”, noting that “neither snow, rain, heat nor darkness could slow the speedy transmission of messages”⁷ – and herewith also goods.

While the Persian Empire represented the largest continental power of the ancient world, interestingly, it would also develop the largest naval fleet that the ancient world would ever have seen. Although defeated by the Greek Navy at the famous battle of Salamis during the second Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, with over 1,200 standard oared warships (triremes) vs. some 380 on the Greek side, it was more than three times larger than the Greek fleet.⁸ While the Persian Empire aimed at extending further to the Mediterranean region, it was traditionally more oriented to the East, and especially South Asia. Notably, its administrative core in southern Iran, with its capital city Persepolis, would be located on the northern shelf of the Persian Gulf region, which occupied the core of the busiest and fastest land and sea routes from the Middle East to South Asia. It was also here, at the deltas of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, that the first Mesopotamian civilisation had been created.

In fact, by around 6000 BC, when there was a particularly warm period, the water level of the Persian Gulf had reached an intermediary top level, to the extent that the sea coast would almost border the very first Sumerian city-states that emerged there later on. While on the Iraqi side of the Gulf, these included Ur, Uruk, and Kish, on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf’s bay, it included Susa, the historical capital city of the Elamite Empire and civilisation. Archaeological excavations show that these earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia had maintained regular commercial exchange with the Indus Valley civilisation and even South India since at least the 3rd millennium BC (see also Section 1.3). For instance, precious tropical woods, spices, and elephants would reach the Middle East from India, while horses constituted one of the most important businesses of the Middle East with West and South Asia, while it would also become a key commerce of Central Asia with China along the ASRs.

Against this historical background, Khanna makes a significant point while comparing the NSRs with the ASRs, in that they would both essentially “connect the world’s largest population centres in a constellation of commerce and cultural exchange … (and that the NSRs herewith open) … a new Silk Road era”.⁹ In other words, the ASRs, while not engaging themselves in long-range trade and cultural exchange, would nevertheless boost the logistical interconnection and eventually fuel the first economic globalisation process in history. The epicentres of this process would coincide with the so-called “4 early River Valley civilisations” viz. Sumerian Civilisation – Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates Rivers); Egyptian Civilisation (Nile River), Harappan Civilisation (Indus River); and Ancient China (Huang Ho/Yellow River).¹⁰ These four ancient civilisational cradles lay in the trajectory of East, South, and West Asia. Thus, Asia was not only the centre piece of globalisation for much of civilisational history but also invented there. Against this background, the NSRs is likely to fuel another cycle of Asian globalisation or global “Asianisation”,¹¹ reflecting the (re)emerging paradigm of “Global-is-Asian”.¹² This is because globalisation, as indicated, was actually invented already in pre-modern times.

As stated earlier, the Persian Empire provided for a crucial transcontinental connectivity link to interconnect South, Central, and West Asia with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. Building on this administrative and logistical core, the ASRs could then be fully established around 100 BC-AD 100. This was when Ancient Rome expanded its Mediterranean connectivity grid, e.g., via its famous “Roman streets”, to the near Middle East. Also, Imperial China simultaneously extended its own infrastructure to the “Western lands” into Central Asia, completing the continental road that would connect the Chinese imperial city of Xi’an with the Mediterranean and thus the Roman Empire. For over 1,500 years, the ASRs fuelled sustainable economic growth as well as cultural and technological developments within much of the ancient world and until the early modern times. Compared to this, Western Europe and the Atlantic remained comparatively marginal and peripheral in world affairs until the 18th century. Even during the 17th century, historical Iranian cities like Isfahan, as they had been located at the heart of the ASRs, were more cosmopolitan than Paris and larger than London. Isfahan’s almost 1,000 feet long and 45 feet wide legendary “bridge of 33 Arches” (Si-o She Pol) represented a technological masterpiece of early modern architecture, while the city’s wealth and grandeur spread its reputation as “Isfahan is half the world” (Isfahan nesf-e jahan).¹³

In fact, in Ancient China, the Roman Empire was not even known until at least the 1st century AD. Rather, from the late Han (AD 22) to the Sui Dynasty (AD 618), Chinese scripts vaguely refer to a “Great State in the West” (Ta-Chi’in). Under the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), sources then refer to a new Fu-Lin, looking like the same state entity, but which eventually crystallises as the Seleucid Empire with its capital city of Antioch in Syria near the northeastern coast of the Eastern Mediterranean.¹⁴ Thus, in 200 BC, by about the time when China was unified and passed to its imperial history, initiated by the Qin Dynasty (221-202 BC), and succeeded by the Han Dynasty, it was indeed the Seleucid Empire occupying the Southern core of the Eurasian land bridge that early Chinese sources make reference to.¹⁵

Also, even as far back as 150-129 BC, other Chinese sources would report that this very same empire was eventually defeated and conquered by the An-Hsi, which refers to the Parthian Empire. Since the Parthians, who themselves conquered the Seleucid Empire, reigned from 247 BC to AD 224, this time coincides with the period when the Ancient Roman Empire extended and reached its vastest territorial extent. Also, it neatly coincides with the period of the Chinese Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220) and thus, the Han’s official launch of the ASRs. The political geography of Eurasia in the 1st century AD reveals that the Parthian Empire, which occupied the territorial core of the former Persian Achaemenid Empire as well as the empire of Alexander the Great and who conquered Persia, effectively established a crucial connectivity and logistical link between Asia, Africa, and Europe, and without which the ASRs could arguably never be operationalised.¹⁶ In geographic terms, the heritage of subsequent Persian Empires territorially concentrated on West Asia, which, along the ancient empires and civilisations of Central Asia, emerged as the central cornerstone of ASRs.

In fact, these regions and countries in Central and West Asia, spanned from Turkey and the Black Sea through the Caucasus, across Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and down to Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were largely omitted and i...