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In June 2015, China and Hungary concluded an agreement for Hungary to become a partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also referred to as “One Belt, One Road”. The BRI was launched by the Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 presenting Beijing’s ambitious strategy of connecting China to Eurasia and beyond through a network over land and maritime routes and rail lines. The BRI partnership ties in with Hungary adding a new foreign policy dimension to its integration into Western politico-economic structures. Hungary’s new foreign policy orientation, referred to as “Eastern Opening”, is accommodating to upcoming geopolitical and financial-economic powers in Asia. In this chapter, Chinese and Hungarian financial-economic relations are studied within the theory of critical geopolitics. A three-layered toolkit provides a framework for in-depth analysis of developing financial-economic relations. It is demonstrated that bilateral financial-economic cooperation and mutual domestic investments are modest, although China has benefited most from expanding trade relations and investments in Hungary. The biggest advancement in Chinese-Hungarian cooperation has been made on the regional/global level. Between China and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs), a so-called “17+1 cooperation” has been established which assigns Hungary a strategic position to facilitate infrastructural and transport connectivity within the BRI. The plan to construct the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed rail line connecting Central Europe and the Balkans has been heavily criticized by the EU, however. The chapter concludes that such hard connections lay a solid foundation for long-term cooperation between China and Hungary in the framework of the BRI.

This chapter studies the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in three selected countries in the Middle East and Central Asia (MECA), namely Kazakhstan, Iran, and Turkey (KIT). These three countries should be considered as laboratories for the BRI at the regional level. Each of them has a substantial population and/or considerable territory. Iran and Kazakhstan belong to the world’s key hydrocarbon-rich countries. Turkey and Iran have relatively diversified industries and are militarily active beyond their state borders. The diverse societies and economies as well as the external relations of Kazakhstan, Iran, and Turkey (among other countries involved in the BRI) have forced China to establish a regional network for cooperation on the BRI.

The decline of American hegemony and the post-Cold War world order has accelerated, mainly due to the rise of the People’s Republic of China. China’s successful and unprecedented state-led industrialization and its integration into the global political economy were followed by the creation of multilateral institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and ultimately the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This unanticipated development raises two interconnected key questions: (i) Does China meet the requirements to create an alternative hegemonic world order; and (ii) Does it have sufficient capabilities to restructure and reform the existing liberal world order set by the United States after World War II?The common starting point for the majority of scholars of both (neo-)realist and (neo-)liberal schools of thought in International Relations (IR) and Global Political Economy (GPE) is the undeniable decline of the material and ideological foundation of the US-made world order. This study tries to find an answer to the aforementioned questions by exploring Robert W. Cox’s notion of hegemony and the method of “historical structures”. Historical structures refer to a set of three interconnected social forces, namely ideas, institutions, and material capabilities. Hegemony implies that the outcome of the interaction between ideas, institutions, and material capabilities in a particular historical time and space is an arrangement of power and authority considered to be natural and legitimate. Hegemony arises or expands when other (subordinated) social forces come to accept those conditions as natural. Hegemony is weakened and eroded when the legitimacy of the power structure is called into question and an alternative order seems acceptable and desirable.In this study, we argue that China is underway to meet two of these dimensions of hegemony. However, regarding the third dimension, Chinese leadership lags behind in the creation of ideas to socialize other states and social forces into accepting China’s role in reforming or restructuring the world order.

In this study, we introduce our conceptual framework to study the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The objective is to bring together a series of interrelated theoretical concepts to study the totality of the BRI. The objective is to find answers to the following two questions: (i) Why did the Chinese leadership set up the BRI? (ii) What are the impacts of the BRI on participating countries and regions, and on the global political economy and its governance?Scholarly literature on the BRI is growing fast and uses mainly either “realist” or “liberal” frameworks. Describing and conceptualizing the BRI project requires a conceptual foundation that supersedes the traditional divide between political power, society, and markets. The conceptual tools of this article aim to relate the national, regional, and system-level global political economy. State, society, and market actors are decision makers, while the system level refers to structures and outcomes. The national-level policies are inputs into the global system and transform the structural features of the system. We, therefore, speak of ”state, society, and market complexes”, “state-led capitalist industrial development” and its challenges, and “geopolitical economy” to better understand the logic and forces behind the creation of BRI and its impact on the member countries and regions as well as global politics.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the rise of China and the logic behind the creation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including its impacts and interlinks with the Global Political Economy. It argues that China is underway to meet the first two of these dimensions of hegemony. The book focuses on China's industrialization and its impact on the emergence of the BRI in 2013. It investigates China's BRI investments in Ethiopia and their impact on the national economy. The book argues that China's investment and China-financed infrastructure projects play a positive role in pushing West Balkans to join the EU, Chinese funds and technologies not only promote the livelihood of the people in the region but help integrate the region's transport and energy networks into the existing Trans-European Networks and Pan-European Corridors.

While intensive cooperation between China and the EU in the fields of energy use, environmental protection and sustainability is highly needed the question remains unanswered how this cooperation could be organized. This volume puts the geopolitical implementation of China's and the EU's energy security into the context of geo-economic systems in a global scale, and the emergence of a geo-economic energy network spreading from China to Western Europe.

China hat vor kurzem Japan im Bereich des Öl- und Gasverbrauchs überholt und steht damit weltweit an zweiter Stelle. Es ist nur noch eine Frage der Zeit, wann der Ölverbrauch den der Vereinigten Staaten übersteigen wird, da Prognosen davon ausgehen, dass Chinas Bruttoinlandsprodukt (GDP) zwischen 2002 und 2025 jährlich um 6,2 Prozent ansteigen wird. Damit würde China zur weltweit größten Wirtschaftsmacht, wenn man das Bruttoinlandsprodukt zu Grunde legt. Diese Entwicklung wird nicht nur die Strategie und die Politik Chinas zur Sicherung der Ölversorgung für den eigenen Bedarf bestimmen, sondern auch einen beträchtlichen Einfluss auf die geopolitischen Beziehungen ausüben.

In this article we argue that Islam as a political ideology is not a new phenomenon, but the result of a long, complex historical process. It was a response to the expansion of Europe and the decline of the great Islamic empires in the 19th century, on the one hand, and failed modernization in the post-colonial societies in vast parts of the Islamic world, on the other. Attempts at an endogenous modernization of society, economies, politics and culture from above to counter marginalization and peripheralization in the world economy have taken place intermittently from the mid-19th century, first of all in the Islamic empires and, after the break-up of these empires into smaller states and regions and after decolonization, in the secular-authoritarian states in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.