Hcss report

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HCSS REPORT
45
ASSESSING 
ASSERTIONS OF 
ASSERTIVENESS:
THE CHINESE AND 
RUSSIAN CASES
2.1 Preface 
47
2.2 Why Great Powers Matter More 
49
2.3 What is Assertiveness? 
53
2.4 Research Design 
56
2.5 Main Findings 
59
2.6 Conclusions & Security Implications 
89

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HCSS REPORT
5
ASSESSING ASSERTIONS 
OF ASSERTIVENESS: THE 
CHINESE AND RUSSIAN 
CASES

 
Stephan De Spiegeleire, Eline Chivot, João Silveira, Michelle Yuemin Yang, and 
Olga Zelinska
2.1 Preface
The events – still unfolding as these words are written – that shook up Ukraine, Europe 
and the world in the first months of 2014, came as a shock to most Western 
policymakers. They were not exactly a bolt out of the blue. Russia’s relationship with 
the West had been deteriorating for quite some time. But the 2014 Crimean 
Blitzanschluss suggests a readiness by one of the nuclear great powers to take risks 
that many in the West would have thought implausible just a short while ago. Similar 
surprise is also often voiced over China’s increased willingness to assert its interests 
in the international arena. International relations experts often use the term 
‘brinkmanship’ for this type of behavior: the practice of pushing dangerous events to 
the brink
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(hence the name) of disaster in order to achieve the most advantageous 
outcome. 
This study sets out to take a closer and more systematic look at the phenomenon of 
great power assertiveness. It starts out by exploring why great powers matter so 
much in international relations and what assertiveness actually is. It then goes on to 
examine the available evidence for two great powers that have been making headlines 
with what some see as unprecedented assertiveness: China and Russia (see Box – 
Why only China and Russia?). All too often, such claims remain restricted to anecdotal 
skirmishes. Scholars who claim that a certain country has become more assertive will 
adduce a number of events that they claim support their case. Scholars who disagree 
with the claim will then counter by offering different hand-picked events or alternative 
explanations for the mentioned ones. But all of this evidence is typically limited in 
time (which makes it hard to assess whether alleged ‘new’ trends are genuinely new 
or just a return to a historical norm) and scope (e.g., it often only includes confirming 

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STRATEGIC MONITOR 2014
evidence, and excludes disconfirming evidence like non-assertive evidence that may 
balance out the assertive evidence, or the ‘counter-evidence’ of facts that one might 
have expected to happen if countries were really assertive, but that did not
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). We 
therefore made an – to the best of our knowledge unprecedented – effort to draw 
upon a larger and more diverse evidence-base in order to ascertain whether China and 
Russia have in fact become more assertive. The greater part of this paper will be 
devoted to the factual and rhetorical evidence. The paper will conclude with some 
security implications.