Explaining the dynamics of the ever-changing world order is the daily business of International Relations theorists – but it is also an important element of the political discourse which enables and shapes foreign policy decisions. Politics need to be legitimised, and legitimisations rely on causal narratives that explain why the world is as it is and what can be done about it. In comparison to justifications that rely on justice claims or narratives of good and evil, causal narratives – which have thus far received less scholarly attention – represent a more subtle form of legitimisation that is at the same time harder to contest, since it links political decision to “neutral” analyses of unchangeable “political realities”. Such seemingly neutral grand or meta-narratives might correspond with the explanations given by IR theories. But how do Americans and Europeans explain what motivates the waking “Panda” China and how its increasing political and economic power is affecting the established world order? Our paper seeks to draw attention to the important role of causal narratives by studying US and European public discourses about the “rise of China”. The rise of new powers, foremost among them China, is a challenge to the established world order, dominated by the US and its European allies. Both Western partners have been said to approach contemporary global problems from sometimes very different angles – from “Mars and from Venus”. So, is this difference rooted in different causal narratives of a rising China? In the paper, we reconstruct the causal narratives that are prevalent in US and European public discourse, exemplified in our case by reports about state visits to and from China. Narratives we analyse can be found, for instance, in official newspaper reporting or online discussion forums and other media. In particular, we render visible broad patterns of explanation that also underlie mainstream theories of International Relations, e.g. diagnoses of “power balancing” dynamics between the old and the rising powers or competing claims about the role of multilateral institutions in “taming” the Chinese challenger. Our narrative analysis thus serves a double purpose: to provide an analytical basis for understanding European and American political responses to the rising China and, at the same time, to highlight how IR theorizing itself both feeds into and draws on popular discourses about world order.
