US-China relations and the liberal world order:Contending elites, colliding visions?

The future of liberal internationalism will be influenced increasingly by the re-emergence of China as a major power on the world stage and by the way the United States is reacting to China's growing influence. In this article, we discern three possible scenarios: one of inevitable conflict, one of gradual co-optation and a hybrid scenario of coexistence. We argue that in order to understand the development of the Sino-US relationship and the sometimes-contradictory outcomes and dilemmas this generates, we need to take into account the social and domestic sources of foreign policy within these two major powers, and the distinctive state–society models that they represent. Crucially, this includes how the domestic political economy is dynamically interrelated with the global political economic context. In our approach, foreign policy elites form a key nexus here and a vital prism through which to analyse foreign policy strategies. From this critical political economy perspective, we will describe how China's re-emergence as a world power is partly shaped by its distinctive ‘statist’ state–society model, to then analyse US strategy towards rising China through the lens of the close nexus between America's corporate elite and the state. In our concluding section we will return to the three scenarios. Based on the findings presented, and in light of the radical shift that seems to be occurring due to the Trump presidency, we will reflect on the likelihood of these scenarios, the future of the liberal world order and conclude with a research agenda

Obama’s economic recovery strategy open markets and elite power: business as usual?

Campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s economic recovery strategy pursued in the wake of the global financial crisis turned out to be aimed above all to restoring the confidence in financial markets and, in line with a long-standing drive to create a global Open Door for American capital, a renewed effort at opening yet more foreign markets. This article sets out to explain this continuity, in terms of a strong nexus between US policy-makers and America’s corporate elite substantially linked to US transnational capital. Our Social Network Analysis shows that the (wo)men who made Obama’s (foreign) economic strategy had close ties to the business community in general and Wall Street in particular, while many of them were previously also active in elite think tanks in which they planned for a strategy that implied a continuing commitment to neoliberal globalization

The state in global capitalism before and after the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 crisis has once again brought the role of the state in the capitalist economy to the fore. Rather than viewing this as a ‘return of the state’, this article conceptualises the current dynamic in terms of a reconfiguration of the roles the state plays, distinguishing between a market-creating, a market-correcting, a market-intervening, and a market-directing role, with each role having both an internal and an external dimension. This conceptual mapping of the diversity of state-capital configurations is then applied to offer a novel reading of the recent capitalist state trajectories of the US and of China. We conclude that there is–notwithstanding persistent differences–a relative convergence inasmuch as the still strongly market-directing Chinese state also has at the same come to embrace a global market-creating role, while the US is now also showing signs of a stronger emphasis on market-direction

US elite power and the rise of ‘statist’ Chinese elites in global markets

The rise of Chinese ‘state capitalism’ such as expressed by the global expansion of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been met with substantial suspicion on the part of the Western corporate and political establishment—including among Washington’s policy-making elite. The underpinning claim that the rise of SOEs would impair market mechanisms, we argue, is, however, theoretically problematic and empirically incorrect. Taking the example of the global oil and gas sector, the article illustrates that at firm level major corporations from rising powers, such as China, increasingly cooperate with Western firms, including with American oil majors. In that sense, Chinese firms participate in capitalist competition just as any Western firm. The roots of the assumed threat posed by China’s rise, we argue, must rather be situated in the distinctive nature of the state-capital nexus in the USA and China, respectively, and the configuration of elite networks underpinning this nexus. We will illustrate this by analysing the social networks in which directors of major Chinese and US oil firms are embedded, including the networks of corporate ties, affiliations with (transnational) policy planning bodies and state-business ties

Trump and the foreign policy elite think tank networks

As established by long-standing literature, America’s foreign policymaking elite has, in the past decades, been closely interconnected to foreign policy think tanks and corporate elite networks. This chapter analyzes to what extent Donald Trump’s presidency represents a break with these extant power structures in the American political system and its foreign policy establishment. It presents a systematic mapping and social network analysis of Trump and his Cabinet and White House advisors (based on a novel biographical data set) and compares the findings with earlier research on the elite networks of the post-Cold War Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. Whilst finding some strong continuities, the Trumpian foreign policy elite is shown to indeed display some very distinct characteristics, particularly with regard to the different kind of corporate elite ties and the disconnect with the policy-planning networks that have been so central to previous administrations