Fateful Transitions: How Democracies Manage Rising Powers, from the Eve of World War I to China's Ascendance (Haney Foundation Series) - Hardcover

Kliman, Daniel M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812246535 ISBN 13: 9780812246537

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014

Synopsis

As China emerges as a global force in the twenty-first century, questions of how existing great powers will navigate the geopolitical transition loom large. In Fateful Transitions, Daniel M. Kliman revisits historic power shifts to shed light on enduring patterns in international relations, demonstrating that the regime type of ascendant powers greatly influences global interactions.

Since the late nineteenth century, the world's major democracies have tended to accommodate or conciliate ascendant democratic states. Certain attributes of democracy, such as a free press and domestic checks and balances, encourage trust during power shifts, whereas closed and autocratic regimes on the ascent tend to produce a cycle of suspicion, competition, and confrontation. Drawing on democratic peace theory and power transition theory, Kliman compares Great Britain's embrace of U.S. ascendancy in the early twentieth century to its confrontational stance toward autocratic Germany and later U.S. mistrust of the Soviet Union. Within this geopolitical context, he evaluates the interactions between China and current great powers, the United States and Japan. Building on this analysis, Kliman offers new insights into the dynamics of power shifts and explores their implications for how today's established and emerging powers can successfully navigate fateful transitions.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel M. Kliman is Senior Adviser for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812246535
• ISBN 13: 9780812246537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248