Volume 17, Issue 3

It has been argued that social thought is Western-centric or Euro-centric. This essay argues that there are alternatives that have been put forward from the Global South, though they have been overlooked. Examples can be found in the different schools of thought about development that have emerged in India and China. Non-Western social thought in these two countries borrows from – but also departs from – that in the West, and includes versions of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. These schools of thought also blur, as do Western ones, academic theories, political ideologies, and models of societal development. This essay will briefly present these schools, but the aim is not to detail them but rather to spell out their implications. These implications include that they do not map easily onto the Western left-right divide. Further, these schools illuminate how forms of inclusion and exclusion have been shaped by the state’s responses to distinctive pressures “from below.” In the conclusion, the essay discusses how these schools offer models for other parts of the Global South and hold a mirror up to the West.

Globalization has run into two intersected momentous shifts over the past decade. One is an accelerating retreat in the Western-led economic globalization. The other is the continued surge of China as a leader of alternative economic globalization, via the Belt and Road Initiative. These two powerful trends are complicated by COVID-19 and the Ukraine war with their disruptions of global geopolitics, plus a potential technological decoupling between China and the United States as great-power rivals. This unprecedented combination of challenges and crises occasions a fresh analysis of the roles of the West versus China in shaping economic globalization past and present. Against the state-centric approach to globalization, I develop a historically-informed framework to couple spatial and sectoral analyses of the trajectories of economic globalization shaped by the West and China. I first examine the cross-regional dimensions of economic globalization across Eurasia featuring China’s primary role in driving the China-Europe Freight Train. I then explore China’s exceptional strength in delivering overseas infrastructure projects, as embodied by the China-Laos Railway, relative to the West’s sectoral advantages bearing on economic globalization. Lastly, I summarily discuss the past and present roles of the West versus China in producing new divergence in future economic globalization.

Previous articles have analyzed the relationships between standardized measures of corruption and mean perceptions of corruption in various nations (Rusciano, F. L. 2013. “International’s Index of Corruption and Global Survey Results.” Studies of Changing Societies: Corruption Studies 2 (8): 4–12.; Rusciano, F. L. 2014. “Corruption in World Opinion.” In Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots , edited by J. Mendilow, and I. Pelig. Lanham: Lexington Books; Rusciano, F. L. 2016. “Are Democracies Less Corrupt than Other Systems?” In Corruption & Governmental Legitimacy: A Twentieth-First Perspective , edited by J. Mendilow, and I. Pelig. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). It was discovered that relationships exist between two indices of global corruption that Transparency International creates annually: the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB). The former bases its ratings of corruption in various nations upon surveys primarily of elites and includes a score and an international ranking. The latter is an international survey of citizens’ perceptions of corruption in their own countries. This article explores the relationships between these two indices over time, asking the following questions: (1) Are there factors that explain the changes in a nation’s ranking on the CPI over time? (2) Are there factors that explain the changes in mean citizen perceptions in the GCB over time? (3) Are there relationships between the changes in the CPI and the GCB over time? (4) If a relationship does exist between changes in the two measures over time, are their factors which explain why the two indices covary? This article will address these questions methodologically, and then discuss the implications for international corruption studies and more generally, global opinion theory.