Quest for status: Chinese and Russian foreign policy

Abstract

The complex relationship of rising powers with the western-led liberal international order is one of the most hotly debated issues in International Relations (IR). This book by Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko offers a relevant contribution to this discussion from the perspective of status-seeking policies. The authors set themselves the ambitious task of explaining Russia's and China's uneasy relations with the West for the last several centuries. For this purpose, they deploy social identity theory (SIT), which they borrow from social psychology and adapt for the discipline of IR. The book's first chapter introduces key assumptions behind SIT and offers a theoretical framework that helps to explain choices made by Russia and China in their foreign policies in the imperial, communist and contemporary eras. The basic premise of SIT is that social groups—in this case aggregated to the level of states—strive to maintain their distinct identity and elevate their status vis-à-vis other groups. The authors identify three identity management strategies: social mobility, social creativity and social competition (p. 2). Social mobility means the acceptance of rules established by those higher up in the hierarchy in order to be recognized as belonging to the club. Social competition denotes an approach which may be summarized as an attempt to beat them at their own game, usually in terms of material power. Social creativity, the third identity management strategy, describes policies that stress a state's achievements in domains other than military and political power.