In Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration, Kent E. Calder explores how historic frameworks of interconnection and current processes of globalization relate through distinctive historical points of departure and techno-political contexts in order to assess recent political-economic transitions unfolding in Eurasia and challenges to the liberal international order (LIO). By examining recent regional and international rises in economic inequality, technological innovations (including artificial intelligence), and intensified trade partnerships throughout Eurasia, Calder asks what these changes concretely signify for the world in broader terms, and what a more interactive Eurasia means for the profile of world affairs. Calder draws on theoretical frameworks and empirically grounded research on economic development to analyze four key interrelated concepts: geographic location, critical junctures, crossover points, and distributive globalism. The critical junctures observed are periods of critical change that provide microlevel insights into the timing, sequence, and causality through which political systems and constituent institutions change, including the entrance of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and 2008 global financial crisis. Calder relies on these junctures to make sense of recent Eurasian interconnectivity, with a special emphasis on Chinese examples, like the Four Modernizations, the Reform Era and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—here, calling into question the sustainability of the Chinese model of governance.
Recognizing various critical uncertainties in moving toward a New World Order, Calder presents a bold claim that as Eurasia grows it is fated to loom large, in the aggregate, on the global economic stage and in the global quest for food and resources, meaning that enhanced connectivity initiatives with neighboring Asian countries and Central Europe will have a synergistic effect on China's power and influence. Ultimately, Calder argues that deepening Eurasian interdependence magnifies the systemic impact of classical globalism's erosion, and that through distributive globalism, Eurasia is being reconnected and a Super Continent is arising. Calder views new Chinese institutions as an essential component of distributive globalism's reinterpretation of the LIO to best suit Chinese needs and appeal to recipient nations – ultimately posing a significant challenge for American policy and the international community's ability to counter potential Chinese-led Eurasian expansion.
To support his claims, Calder draws on research on human and economic development statistics from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and various Asia-Pacific focused think tanks, simultaneously enriching his analysis with detailed qualitative historical and theoretical research on economic trends and transformations under the China Model. Calder's research informs his conclusions that Chinese President Xi Jinping's distributive globalism—a cosmopolitan orientation toward providing incentives that concentrate divisible benefits and diffuse prospective costs—is key in Chinese-led creation of a Eurasian super continent. Super Continent includes case studies in which political-economic experiments with integration, innovation, and interconnection took place, including The Silk Road, the Renaissance, the Quiet Revolution in China, economic developments in the 1980s in Southeast Asia, the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and the creation of the WTO and the European Union (EU). Calder also presents valuable insight on connections between these case studies and contemporary Chinese globalization initiatives, such as the Digital Silk Road and the China Railway Corporation (CR), both of which increase material and cyber interconnections. Such interconnections and the BRI build on China's existing strengths in maritime trade, and further extend China's economic agenda by financially supporting industrialization in key Central European states, and easing the transfer of goods, services, and people.
Calder's rich historical analyses are best displayed through his chronicles of critical junctures, including the logistics revolution, improvements in infrastructure, innovations in transport trade and finance that were used to overcome previous challenges of communication, and economic transactions across both cultures and formidable distance between Central Europe, Russia, and Asia. His concise analyses of these critical junctures help explain why catalysts of transcontinental transit trade, like increasingly efficient border clearance procedures (thanks to AI), transcontinental manufacturing supply chains, and multilateral institutions like the Asian Development Bank, have improved administrative and transport efficiency across Eurasia. The extensive discussion of distributive globalism suggests a strong emphasis on tailored multilateralism in the near future, during a shift away from the LIO to a New World Order, potentially led by China, or, as Calder boldly argues, by a resource-rich, technologically interconnected Eurasian super continent.
Super Continent could be strengthened by providing a metric to evaluate complex qualitative factors contributing to the decline of American economic and institutional dominance through the LIO. Furthermore, in presenting China's rise, Calder does not engage directly with significant external factors, including ideological changes (like American protectionism) recent challenges to democracy, populist uprisings, and economic instability throughout the developed Western world. Calder's work presents a primarily system-level analysis, with a few important regional case studies, raising questions of why a discussion of local-level Chinese policy experimentation (an important plan in the China Model relating to Western-style democracy) is absent. However, these questions do not detract from or diminish Calder's contributions to the current discourse regarding the successes of and challenges to the China Model, the conditions for its future sustainability through distributive globalism for Chinese prosperity, and new, strong institutions for Chinese regional hegemony.
Calder advances a bold claim that enhanced continental collaboration is now impending, with synergistic post post-Cold War transformations in China and Central Europe lying at the core of the creation of a new paradigm. This is a strong conclusion that is compatible with claims from International Political Economy (IPE) scholars regarding an impending shift to a multiplex, or hybrid, New World Order. Amitav Acharya predicts a gradual shift to a multiplex world, while Yves Tiberghien outlines pathways to a hybrid world order and argues for a framework of mediated strategic interactions, rather than general systemic explanations to understand the impact of the rise of China on the global liberal order. Furthermore, Calder views China as creating a new interdependence paradigm from the ground up, through infrastructural largesse and personal networks that do not directly contravene the Bretton Woods system. These claims are further supported by Tiberghien, who argues that China has pursued an approach of tailored multilateralism, an approach that is flexible, constantly adaptive, and varied; but ultimately an approach that does not challenge well-established international institutions and norms.
