Brexit's Challenge to Globalization and Implications for Asia: A Chinese Perspective

Abstract

Brexit represents a backlash against globalization and runs in parallel with Donald Trump’s presidential election. Both these also signal the rise of the nation-state and the rejection of the neoliberal vision of globalization in which national sovereignty has increasingly been dissolved. The article argues that it also has fundamental implications for Asia, in particular now that China as the world’s second largest economy is playing a bigger role in the region. Furthermore, with the rise of China, Asia’s global order has become relatively fragile and multilayered in the sense that all big powers, such as the US and Japan, have their relative positions in the region simultaneously. In this regard, it would be more realistic for Asian countries to base their integration on their national sovereignty in a pragmatic way, i.e. in a way that they can maintain flexibility to the changing order of the world.

Keywords: Brexit; globalization; Asia; rise of China; national sovereignty