Introduction

This chapter sets out from the observation that the apparent shift in balance of global economic power to Asia, most importantly to the People's Republic of China (PRC), has made the latter country appear as a contender in the battle for discursive hegemony. After the end of the Cold War, a universalist narrative prevailed in Western liberal democracies claiming the victory of their political, social and economic system based on values like human rights, democracy and free trade. Moreover, this universalist narrative also allowed no alternative to a gradual global ‘liberal democratization’, as understood under the Washington Consensus. A well-known example of the rash conclusion that there is no alternative to such a unipolar world is the work of Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

With the rise of China and the country's apparent unwillingness to fully integrate itself into the Western paradigm, this unipolar universalist narrative has been exposed as a fig leaf. China is no longer merely an economic competitor of the West; its growing political and military clout have given the country the tools to increasingly promote a different global narrative. In the famous phrase of the European Union (EU), China is considered to be a ‘systemic rival’. Hence, the re-emergence of the Cold War narrative in Western liberal democracies could be understood to result from the conflict between the two global narratives. This chapter focuses on this narrative divergence, which reflects deepening policy differences between actors in Europe and China and may become irreconcilable.