【外交事务书评】

The years ahead will be shaped by China’s ambitions, the continuing struggles of liberal democracy, and the climate crisis. The rise of China might well be a defining feature of the twenty-first century. If so, it is a drama that the world has seen before. The rise and decline of great powers and the struggles over international order have marked world politics since the age of Thucydides. No modern book of international relations theory offers a more sweeping, elegant, and influential account of these global power transitions than Gilpin’s 1981 classic. Gilpin saw world politics as a succession of ordered systems created by leading (or hegemonic) states that emerge after war with the opportunity and capabilities to organize the rules and arrangements of interstate relations. Order is built not on the balance of power but on a structured asymmetry of power. These hierarchical orders can persist for decades and even centuries, but eventually the underlying material conditions of power shift, and the ordered relations of states break apart, sometimes violently. Gilpin’s book encourages the reader to place upheavals in contemporary world politics in a deeper historical perspective. Change is inevitable, and no order lasts forever. The question Gilpin leaves the reader with is the most profound: “Is there any reason to hope that political change may be more benign in the future than it has been in the past?”