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The IR Colloquium hosts Dr. Kristen Hopew ell for a talk titled\, "Balancing\, Threats & Wedges in International Poli tical Economy: The Origins and Impact of the Sino-Indian Alliance at the WT O."
This article draws on balance of power theory to analyze contemporary China-India relations in the multilateral trading sys tem. Although balance of power theory has rarely been applied to the econo mic realm\, global economic institutions are an important site of power pol itics\, including dynamics of balancing and alliances among states. Analys is of power struggles within such institutions can therefore offer importan t insights for our understanding of institutional soft balancing. In preva iling accounts of institutional soft balancing\, there has been a tendency to see international institutions as providing a set of pre-existing rules and norms that can be used to constrain the threatening or aggressive behav ior of powerful states\, by delegitimizing and sanctioning violations of th e established rules of the game. Yet states do not simply use the rules of international institutions\; they are also engaged in an ongoing struggle to set those rules. Despite bilateral tensions\, I show that China and Ind ia formed a surprising alliance at the WTO to counterbalance the US and oth er traditional powers. Their alliance proved highly successful\, bringing an end to American dominance and sharply curtailing the ability of the US t o set the rules of global trade. However\, I argue\, a key risk of soft ba lancing to counter the influence of a dominant power within an internationa l institution is that\, if successful\, it may ultimately cause that state to abandon the institution altogether. The US responded to China and India ’s soft balancing by turning away from the WTO\, actively undermining its r ules and enforcement mechanism\, and instead pursuing its interests through bilateral channels. The article thus identifies a distinct and previously unrecognized wedge strategy – vertical forum-shifting\, or moving the acti on from international institutions to bilateral negotiations\, to split an adversary coalition.
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Kristen Hopewell is the Canada Research Chair in Global Policy in the School of Pub lic Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. Her r esearch specializes in international trade\, global governance\, and develo pment\, with a focus on emerging powers such as China\, India and Brazil. She is the author of Clash of Powers: US-China Riv alry in Global Trade Governance (Cambridge University Press\, 2020 ) and Breaking the WTO (Stanford University Press\, 2016). Her po licy analysis has appeared in venues such as The Washington Post\, Foreign Affairs\, The South China Morning Post\, The Globe and Mail and the BBC. She has held visiting fellowships at Pek ing University in Beijing\, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne\, Germany\, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Gen eva. Her research has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as a number of other major international funding agencies. She is currently a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Ce nter in Washington\, DC.
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