Introduction

The following will introduce the main themes and objectives of the research at hand, outlining the issue of the local-global nexus of Western dominance after the Cold War and the special role of the democracy norm in this regard. On this basis, the core research questions of the book will be elaborated: has China, during the past decades, been deliberately promoting autocracy so as to weaken the prevalence of liberal norms on the local level and thus contribute to the normative diversification on the global level? If so, how? And what are the implications of such normative functioning for the Western and the non-Western world, as well as for the post-Cold War liberal, Western-dominated global order? The introduction will close with an overview of the structure of the book.