Any reassurance the world may have derived from Beijing’s repeated emphasis on China’s “peaceful rise” has long since been swept away by increasingly threatening rhetoric, most notably towards Japan over the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu islands. Indeed, the Pacific region looks set to become the testing ground for an old theory that has enjoyed a striking comeback thanks to globalisation: the notion that economic interdependence is conducive to peace.
Historically, the idea is associated with Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment thinker who believed moralistic philosophy and religious precept had failed to restrain man’s destructive passions, but that these passions could be harnessed by the pursuit of material self-interest. In De l’esprit des lois, he declared that “the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace”.
In the 19th century, the economic liberal Richard Cobden extended the argument, saying that the principle of free trade would not only remove the desire to build empires, armies and navies but lead to benign global government. Such thinking was dealt a devastating blow by the outbreak of the first world war.