Historical Background of INTA The New Silk Road: A pathway to development or a geopolitical threat? While China’s Belt and Road Initiative aims to connect and integrate Asian, African and European economies, critics perceive the move as a way to foster Chinese hegemony and irreversibly shift the balance of power. How can Europe seize the initiative’s benefits without sacrificing strategic interests, environmental sustainability and workers’ rights?
The Silk Road was the ancient trading route connecting East and West, primarily roads connecting East and Southeast Asia with East Africa and Southern Europe. Its name comes from the silk that was traded on its routes starting from around 200 BCE. It is thus an ancient connection for trade, but also culture, religion, philosophy, science, and technology, an ancient connection between civilisations allowing goods and ideas to travel.
With trade being so central to the economy, control of trade routes was always a highstakes political issue. From the capture of Gibraltar to the Anglo-Dutch conflicts over the Cape region to the US-supported Panama independence war, history is rife of struggles to control strategic gateways. One of the most recent example, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, led to a war between Egypt, France and the UK. The conflict resulted in a shift of global geopolitical influence towards The Silk Road routes were actively used for the US and the USSR, and triggered the end of centuries, but sensitive to politics, depend- European colonial power. ent on the political situations of the territories through which they pass, whether they were overseen in a unified way under an empire, or whether regions the routes pass through were at war with each other.