The Belt and Road Initiative: a Geopolitical Approach

Abstract

For millennia, ideas, goods and people traveled through the routes that linked ancient China and the Mediterranean Sea. These routes were know later as the Silk Road and were opened for adventurous and courageous people which initiative linked civilizations for centuries.Nowadays the concept of a New Silk Road has been picked up as China’s diplomatic cornerstone. China aims at building a new integrated Eurasia and Africa in which unimpeded trade, investment, people-to-people bonds, etc., are built in a global vision or pluralist order in which all nations will able to exercise their right to pursue their own path of development and governance.This thesis outlines the reasons and goals of China’s Initiative and its footprints in the global order. Therefore, it introduces the global framework in which this initiative was formulated and then discusses the economic alternative that the New Silk Road means to the economic global order and its geo-political implications.