Press Release
The Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship (PETR) and the Asia Center will be hosting a new event series over the course of the Fall and Spring semesters of the 2019-2020 academic year, focusing on China's rise and its implications on the transatlantic relationship.
In recent years the crisis of the transatlantic relationship and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become a common theme in media, and various scholars have frequently questioned the futures of both entities. Today, the ‘transatlanticism’ that resulted from the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the unity of the West against the Soviet Union through common trade, investments, and liberal values that characterized the period after the Second World War is being challenged. Not only are the new sovereigntist and populist trends within the NATO members calling the relevance of the transatlantic relationship into question, but some have found reason to identify a crisis in the transatlantic relationship from the rise of global actors and the emergence of China as a great power in particular. China’s economic recovery after its ‘century of humiliation’ is reshaping the international geopolitics and shifting the economic epicenter of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With China’s colossal Belt and Road Initiative spurring Eurasian connectivity, Eurasian economic bonds will soon surpass transatlantic economic bonds by orders of magnitude. Europe is trading more with Asia than with the United States, and China remains the most important trading partner of Germany, the pivotal state in Western Europe.
Given the new geopolitical scenario that some have already characterized as bipolar — with China now confronting the hegemony that the US has enjoyed for the past decade — how will the transatlantic alliance evolve in an increasingly “non-Atlantic” World? How will China’s illiberal political systems and state-led economy affect the transatlantic relationship? How will China’s technological advancement and emerging developmental paradigm contribute to reshaping the US-EU relationship?
The Series ‘China’s Rise and the Future of the Transatlantic Relations’ aims to address these questions and others related to the future of the transatlantic relationship confronted with China’s emergence as a great power. The series aims at bringing together Ph.D. students in their final years, postdocs, faculty, and visiting scholars from different centers and departments at Harvard University in an inter-generational and inter-disciplinary way. The themes that will be addressed in a series of meetings the Fall and Spring include:
- Transatlantic Values and the Rise of Authoritarianism
- Technology, Data and Cybersecurity
- Economic Relations
- Infrastructure Connectivity
- China’s New Developmental Paradigm (in Africa) and its Impact on the Transatlantic Relationship
- Climate change and leadership in influencing the global environmental protection scene
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Organizers: Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Maria Adele Carrai, Carole Lecomte, Winston Ellington Michalak (overall series organizers), Meicen Sun (organizer of the Technology, Data and Cybersecurity panel).