Economic Competitiveness Kritik - Michigan 2024 BDKLS

Competitiveness K
This argument says that the affirmative’s frame of economic competitiveness and description of international relations as a tech race creates harmful policy that locks in conflict with geopolitical rivals. This file can either be read as an independent critique of the affirmative representations, or as part of a larger capitalism K. There are a wide variety of link and impact cards that you should select depending on the affirmative you are debating. If you want to read this as a slimmer critique of competitiveness/competition, further research on the alternative would be ideal.
Thanks to the absolute goats Aayush, Abel, Alex, Alvin, Eric, Genny, Hermes, Julia and Vikrant for their work on this file.
Link --- China Revisionism
The consensus of academic literature agrees that China is a status quo power---the frame of revisionism is hypocritically deployed against non-Western states despite a lack of evidence
Turner and Nymalm 19 , Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh AND Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Oliver and Nicola, 2019, “Morality and progress: IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623173 Date Accessed: 8/10/2023)
‘Rising’ China attracts notable attention within the relevant international relations (IR) literature today, and among those who directly examine whether it is a revisionist or status quo actor, most agree that it more closely resembles the latter (for example, Johnston 2003; Davidson 2006; Ding 2010; Ikenberry 2011; Xiao 2015; Wilson 2017). Zhao (2018, 2) rejects the ‘status quo’ designation, but still argues that ‘it is not a revolutionary power discontented with and ready to replace the order’. Some scholars also critique IR theory for being overly deterministic and materialistic, taking for granted that rising powers will challenge the status quo (Thies and Nieman 2017, 2; Ward 2017, 281; Gries and Jing 2019). Often overlooked, they argue, is how ‘ideational factors’, such as socialization (Thies and Nieman 2017, 3, 15) and perceptions of status (Ward 2017) affect behaviour. Despite this emerging critique, however, the spotlight of scholarly and popular attention continues to fall upon China—and other ‘rising powers’— as a real or potential source of international revisionism. China, in short, is regarded as guilty until proven innocent (Turner 2014, 154) regardless of stated evidence to the contrary by scholars such as those identified above. Meanwhile, attention to Western revisionism in particular remains more limited, despite scholars of the US and Europe outlining the actions and ambitions of these actors towards revising and reshaping the structures of global affairs. Consider for example the European Union (EU), a core strength of which is said to lie in its designs ‘to reshape the contours of the international system’ (Rosecrance 1998, 15). Ian Manners (2002, 239) notes Brussels’s ‘willingness to disregard Westphalian conventions’ in its efforts ‘to shape conceptions of “normal” in international relations’. Indeed, the EU fulfils most of the criteria for revisionism suggested by Davidson (2006), for example by significantly expanding its territorial reach from six member states in 1951 to 28 today;1 transforming Europe’s markets and acting as a global ‘market power’ that ‘actively and consequentially influences today’s international system’ (Damro 2012, 697); and exporting its ideology via particular understandings of democracy, human rights and so on, acting as a ‘normative power’ (Merlingen 2007) or a ‘norm entrepreneur’ (Vadura 2015). In line with earlier definitions of revisionist powers, which centred around power accumulation, the EU has also elevated itself to ‘the status of emerging global power’ (Piening 1997) or even ‘superpower’ (Moravcsik 2014). Despite all this the EU has rarely, if ever, been labelled revisionist. The US today is deemed revisionist by some, though primarily as resulting from the policies and worldviews of the administration of Donald Trump (for example, Ikenberry 2017). The same has been argued of the US under the administration of George W. Bush (see Xiang 2001; Hurd 2007). Such allowances for the role of isolated, ‘rogue’ administrations or individuals, as deviations from imagined national norms, are rarely, if ever, extended to China and other ‘rising powers’. The notion of a hegemon or ‘established power’ on its own terms representing a primary disruptive force within the system it dominates is far less frequently considered (for example, Bukovansky 2016; Schweller 2015; Chan et al. 2018).
The narrative of “revisionism” assumes a moral and progressive international order for the dissatisfied power to challenge
Turner and Nymalm 19 , Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh AND Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Oliver and Nicola, 2019, “Morality and progress: IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623173 Date Accessed: 8/10/2023)
As examined throughout the remainder of the article, the dominant story of a historically Western-centric IR has been that of an essentially moral and progressive world order formulated and sustained by the West (or, before then, an Anglo-American world), on the one hand, and that of a non-West that jeopardizes the stability and advancements the West has enabled, on the other. These ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress are forms of metanarratives which encompass social actors including IR scholars, having become ‘lodged in the theoretical core of social theory’ (Somers and Gibson 1994, 63). Ingrained and largely unchallenged, they offer a story of international revisionism and the status quo which comes with a dual logic. Like all narratives, they bring order by steering and regulating debate around the rise and fall of great powers. However, as metanarratives, they also establish truths about international order itself—about what it is, how it came about, the condition it is in and where it is going. Notions of international order bind and give meaning to the concepts of revisionism and the status quo and, as shown in due course, must be central to the process of extricating those concepts from the narrative constraints that have been imposed. By reinterpreting the concepts of revisionism and the status quo as narratives, we show how they bring a particular way of sense making, with inherently performative, rather than merely descriptive, functions. The power of narratives lies in their effects, and the aim here is to reveal the formations and consequences of the narratives we explore. We examine the scholar as narrator operating through the creation and deployment of powerful conceptual IR narratives that not only represent, but also select and restrain, our knowledges of the world and the identities and motivations of the actors within it. We further show how these narratives transcend the discipline, connecting to and permeating political practice (see Winkler 2019; Gustafsson et al. 2019). The following section details how scholarly debate on revisionism and the status quo has been historically organized by conceptual narratives, enabling IR theorists to advance and sustain stories of international revisionism principally as a form of non-Western disruption of a Western status quo that has benevolent and moral foundations and represents civilizational progress.
The United States is a revisionist power. The aff’s narrative justification’s of a revisionist China
Turner and Nymalm 19 , Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh AND Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Oliver and Nicola, 2019, “Morality and progress: IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623173 Date Accessed: 8/10/2023)
Ultimately, the counter-narratives that exist have not yet significantly challenged the discipline’s dominant conceptual narratives. Ordering narratives of morality and progress have created a binary of positive/benevolent and negative/threatening, brands of international revisionist motivations and behaviours towards an imagined status quo. Positive and/or benevolent revisionism is within the rules, taken for granted and rarely labelled as such. It is typified by the ‘normative power’ of the EU and a similar (though, as indicated above, less extreme) comparative lack of interest in a revisionist US. As in-house revisionism by the principally Western architects of the system, such revisionism’s purpose is narrated as benign and aimed at fine-tuning an inherently progressive order from which, while not flawless, the world is understood to profit and advance. Negative/threatening revisionism is considered disruptive not merely to a stable system but to the progress and advancement that system is designed to bring. Negative revisionism means instability, regression and a real or potential reversal of gains. Attached to actors like China, it is deemed worthy of interrogation, generating the need for debate about world peace (Buzan 2010) and the survival of the international system (Ikenberry 2008). Neither has resistance prevented conceptual narratives of revisionism and the status quo from disseminating into wider public (especially governmental) narratives. The Trump administration labels China (and Russia) a ‘revisionist power’ in both its 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) (White House 2017a) and its 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) (Department of Defense 2018). This label is justified on the basis that China aims ‘to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests … displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region and reorder the region in its favour’ (White House 2017a, 25). When the NDS speaks of ‘a resilient, but weakening, post-WWII international order’ undermined by China and Russia, it points to potential global regression and a dismantling of ‘the longstanding rules-based international order’ (Department of Defense 2018, 1–2, emphasis in original; see Breuer and Johnston 2019). ‘In short, they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favour’ (White House 2017a, 27). To support its claims of China as nefariously revisionist with designs to reshape the global landscape, the NSS cites China’s attempts to export its state-centric economic model and enhance its military capabilities, and its use of data and surveillance. Yet, throughout the same document, comparably ‘revisionist’ motivations and behaviours are presented as essential elements of a benevolent US policy programme. The theme of ‘advancing American influence’ recurs. To do this, it is argued, the US should ‘play a catalytic role in promoting private-sector-led economic growth’, build and deploy ‘the most effective military in the world’ and ‘continuously pursue strategic intelligence’. The American aim of ‘advancing religious freedom’ is also promoted (White House 2017a, 4, 3, 32, 41). To reiterate an earlier point, narratives are prescriptive, bringing understandings of how the world should be as an inextricable component of the policy-making process, their ‘truths’ and logic enabling certain practices while precluding others. ‘Narratives do not cause action. Instead, they … authorize, enable, and justify specific practices and policies … Over time, the narratives and the practices they authorize come to be taken as natural, granted, and the only conceivable ones.’ Importantly, narratives also resonate more, with greater potential to become dominant or commonsensical, when they can latch on to pre-existing narratives (Autesserre 2012, 207). The aim here, then, is not to draw a causal link between conceptual or ordering narratives, on the one hand, and public/government narratives or foreign policy decisions on the other. It is to show where the narrativized worldviews of the Trump administration connect, or ‘latch on’, to those of the scholarly IR literature, and to examine the political practices they enable. In 2017, US National Security Advisor HR McMaster argued that revisionist powers like China seek to ‘subvert the global order that undergirds our common … economic prosperity’ (White House 2017b). At least in part on the basis of this type of understanding of negative revisionism, or subversion, towards a system that has brought wealth and prosperity, from July 2018 Washington began applying wide-ranging tariffs on Chinese imports (The Economist 2018). These public narratives worked also to preclude a continuation of what the NSS refers to as Washington’s post-Cold-War ‘strategic complacency’ in global affairs. ‘Given the new features of the geopolitical environment the United States must renew key capabilities to address the challenges we face’ (White House 2017a, 26, 28). In March 2018 the US Congress approved Trump’s military spending bill which proposed a US$61 billion increase to the national defense budget (Myre 2018). US Pacific Command was also rebranded the Indo-Pacific Command, to better encapsulate the view not only that China’s ‘rise’ brings the need for material support from key partners such as India, but also that the US–India partnership is one of ‘responsible stewards’ of international ‘peace and stability’ (Ministry of External Affairs 2017; see also Turner 2016). Whatever one’s normative position on US/Western liberalism versus Chinese state-centrism, the tensions within the 2017 NSS around China as an explicitly negatively revisionist actor and the US as implicitly positively revisionist demonstrate the ‘successful’ operations of public narratives. Comparable behaviours in one actor can be morally promoted in the name of upholding the status quo and ensuring global progress, while in others can be portrayed as immoral and regressive. These apparent contradictions are reconciled by the overarching power of largely unquestioned ordering, or meta-, narratives in which the sources of (Western) order and potential (non-Western) chaos are already ‘known’. China’s ambitions to expand its capabilities and influence, moreover, constitute negative revisionism not simply because they emanate from the non-West, but because China’s so-called state-driven project runs counter to beliefs in democratic-capitalist American ideals. China is thus not ‘converging’ as expected; the perceived threat from authoritarianism is referenced heavily throughout both the NSS and NDS. While the US is cast as a benevolent guide for China’s inclusion in the post-war liberal international order, it is China that is frustrating these attempts: ‘For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others’ (White House 2017a, 25).
Link --- China Rise
The aff’s narrative of a “rising” China rely on China occupying a position of otherness oppositional to the moral liberal order
Turner and Nymalm 19 , Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh AND Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Oliver and Nicola, 2019, “Morality and progress: IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623173 Date Accessed: 8/10/2023)
Narrating the modern-day ‘rise’ of China in IR and beyond A third wave of revisionist/status quo literature came with post-Cold-War debates over the US-led world order and emergence of ‘rising powers’. Authors in this wave utilize the logic of the PTT to interrogate the contemporary ‘rise’ of China in particular (see for example Lim 2015; Goldstein 2007). As Lemke (1997, 32) explains, threats to the post-war ‘Long Peace’ have now seemingly emerged, notably from ‘Chinese growth unaccompanied by a change in attitude toward the status quo’. To assuage these threats, ‘the United States and other leading satisfied Great Powers should continue patient cooperation with [China, and others such as Russia] … to encourage democratization and liberalization’. For Gerald Segal (1996, 108), ‘China is a powerful, unstable non-status quo power.’ China is also now argued to be demonstrating ‘significant revisionist objectives’ in the South China Sea (Lim et al. 2017) as well as by creating the AIIB (Wilson 2017, 150). Graham Allison writes that ‘war between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment’, as his interpretation of the historical record stipulates that, in the majority of cases ‘in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed’ (Allison 2015).5 Beyond the PTT, a significant subliterature explores whether rising powers in general, and especially a rapidly rising China, represent revisionist or status quo powers (see for example Ding 2010; Feng 2009; Kastner and Saunders 2012). We return to the role of these narratives in the policy realm in the next sub-section on public narratives. Third-wave IR debates around rising powers, then, quietly sustain the logics of the ordering narratives of morality and civilizational progress central to the first and second waves, perpetuating largely unquestioned understandings that international revisionism must inevitably emanate from beyond the Western core of international order. To begin with, the term ‘rising power’ is not neutral, bringing powerful connotations of instability and danger absent in such alternatives as ‘modernizing’ or ‘developing’. Crucially, the term ‘rising’, like ‘revisionist’, powers has most typically been used to refer only to nonWestern states (see Turner 2014, 152–154). As noted earlier, the EU is rarely labelled ‘revisionist’ despite revisionism forming part of its self-identity. Explorations of the US as revisionist are also relatively absent, though counternarratives exist, as examined shortly. The selective formations and constraining boundaries of mainstream conceptual IR narratives prevent the inclusion of the US and EU because the term does not logically fit the known character or plotline. The assumption here is not of an unproblematic separation between the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, or of timeless challenges the latter poses to the former. Fears over a ‘rising’ India, for instance, rarely enter US security discourse as do those of a ‘rising’ China, despite numerous material similarities and both typically being identified as residing beyond the West. Moreover, and as already shown, earlier waves of IR revisionism–status-quo debate interrogated the vulnerabilities of the Anglo-American/Western order to Imperial and Nazi Germany. That Germany is now routinely located within the West, alongside members of the ‘Anglo-American world’, demonstrates the fluidity of such imagined geographies. Indeed, India’s broad absence from US threat discourses is explained partly by its (re)construction as a pseudo-member of the Western world (Turner 2016). Similarly, while post-1945 Japan quickly became seen as part of the Western Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world, by the 1970s and 1980s it was ‘orientalized’ because its economic growth generated concerns of a challenge to US economic hegemony (Nymalm 2017). Today, it is those actors commonly labelled ‘nonWestern’, in particular China, that have in many ways been seamlessly maneuvered into spaces of IR debate once occupied by Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Members of ‘the West’ escape such interrogation, while Chin

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