The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: another wakeup call for the EU?

Abstract

This article explores and explains the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that China launched in 2014, which together with other initiatives including the New Development Bank, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement and the SCO Development Bank, can be seen as another attempt to counterbalance what it perceives as the “unjust” western-dominated world order. China's actions mirror to a substantial degree its own preferences for world order, its views on multilateralism and development as well as its ambitions of larger international institutional influence in multilateral organizations. It is another indication for the West that it has to accept the new reality of the twenty-first century that it not longer solely owns the future and it can be seen as yet another wakeup call for the European Union. Despite several indications the EU still does not seem to get how irrelevant it is becoming to the rest of the world and how relevant the rest of the world is becoming to the EU's future, making this article relevant for both academics and practitioners.

Keywords:

• AIIB
• Asia
• China
• EUFP
• multilateralism
• new world order

Funding

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council [grant number 2013GXZA37].

Notes on contributor

Bas Hooijmaaijers is a PhD researcher at the School of International and Public Affairs (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) and a Free Research Associate at the LINES Institute (KU Leuven, Belgium). His research mainly focuses on EU foreign policy, China, the BRICS countries and other constellations of emerging powers. His publications include co-authored work on “The BRICS and other emerging power alliances and multilateral organisations in the Asia-Pacific and the global South: Challenges for the European Union and its view on multilateralism” in the Journal of Common Market Studies; and “EU foreign policy towards the BRICS and other emerging powers: Objectives and strategies” (Ad Hoc Study for the European Parliament, DG for External Policies). He holds master degrees in Administrative Law and Public Administration obtained at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and in European Studies obtained at the KU Leuven (Belgium). Before starting at Shanghai Jiao Tong University he did an internship at Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels (Belgium) and worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for International and European Policy and as a Teaching Assistant at the Centre for European Studies, both at the KU Leuven.

Notes

1. Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

2. Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.