Hegemony and Democracy

Bruce Russett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415575713
• eBook ISBN: 9781136818868
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Hegemony and Democracy is constructed around the question of whether hegemony is sustainable, especially when the hegemon is a democratic state. The book draws on earlier publications over Bruce Russett's long career and features new chapters that show the continuing relevance of his scholarship. In examining hegemony during and after the Cold War, it addresses:

• The importance of domestic politics in the formulation of foreign policy;
• The benefits and costs of seeking security through military power at the expense of expanding networks of shared national and transnational institutions;
• The incentives of other states to bandwagon with a strong but unthreatening hegemon and 'free-ride' on benefits it may provide rather than to balance against a powerful hegemon.
• The degree to which hegemony and democracy undermine or support each other.

By applying theories of collective action and foreign policy, Russett explores the development of American hegemony and the prospects for a democratic hegemon to retain its influence during the coming decades. This collection is an essential volume for students and scholars of International Relations, American Politics, and US Foreign Policy.

1

A DEMOCRATIC HEGEMON?

The age of American hegemony

Dominance is a condition never reached without effort. Achieving superiority over others requires strength, skill, determination, and luck. Even if it comes when a primary opponent collapses, it can be retained only by repeated acts of will—in sport or in the supreme contest of international politics. A hegemon may be honored, respected, feared, perhaps even loved, but its victory must be reconfirmed each day. And, like all other achievements, it will ultimately pass away.

The English word hegemony comes from the ancient Greek term hegemonia, meaning leadership or supremacy. The Greeks applied it to their interstate system as the exercise of predominant influence by one state over others. In contemporary discourse hegemony typically implies something tougher than the benign term “leadership,” instead conveying a dominance in part exercised as overt or at least implicit coercion.

Those under hegemony may welcome its leadership or protection, or may chafe under it, or both. In international politics it is not too far in meaning from the more pejorative empire, but without that term’s connotations of a formal emperor or sovereign rule over far-flung territory. As a descriptor of an international system, hegemony lies somewhere between empire and unipolarity, with the latter more a characterization of a distribution of power rather than behavior, in which one state greatly surpasses any other state. Unipolar dominance is typically measured by material resources, but may also be based on cultural or ideological sources of influence. Empires are usually imposed by overt force on at least some parts of the territory and population, though peace may be the outcome, as in Pax Romana or Pax Britannica. Unipolarity does not carry quite the same implication about its founding, but advocates of preserving it often justify it as promoting peace, largely because the power disparity is so big that potential challengers will be deterred from provocation.

All three terms represent an emphasis on some kind of strong hierarchy in the international system, modifying the common assumption that the international system is anarchic (“without a ruler”). Unipolarity implies equal sovereignty with shared benefits though not equal power; empire implies no real independence and exploitation of the imperial periphery by its center (Jervis 2009: 190–191). Hegemony retains sovereignty and is noncommittal about the distribution of benefits. In this book I mostly use hegemony in the in-between sense of something less formal and perhaps less oppressive than empire, but with more emphasis on expecting cooperative behavior than the mere distribution of unipolar power may carry.

Some observers call the period from the end of the cold war (datable roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) the American hegemonic age. Others more skeptically talk about a hegemonic or unipolar moment (Layne 2006). Indeed, the high point may well have been the George W. Bush administration’s confident attack on Iraq in 2003, expecting that it could move immediately from the demise of Saddam Hussein’s rule to a similar thrust against Iran. That never happened, as US military forces became stuck in Iraq and the Iranian target was manifestly bigger and tougher. Events showed that regime change was harder than the Bush administration believed, and it could be even harder to provide security and control politics once a regime had been changed.

Yet the United States remains by any criterion the strongest military power in the world, in 2008 accounting for about 43 percent of all global military expenditures (Perlo-Freeman et al. 2010: 203). The margin over any of the others is truly overwhelming: China is second, with an estimated 6.6 percent. This degree of dominance is unmatched in any period of the Westphalian state system. It is not extreme to say that, with its spending and technological superiority, the United States largely controls the global commons, meaning the sea, air, and space.² It has global reach in unprecedented ways, and this is accepted willingly by the American population and, with less enthusiasm, by other nations. Control of the commons, however, does not necessarily imply an ability to dominate the world’s land masses, where political rule requires boots on the ground and where asymmetric warfare skills can empower quite small insurgent or terrorist groups. The global economic downturn weakened most of the large powers, though China and India lost the least. American relative strength against most rival powers has not suffered much, but its absolute strength to conduct expensive and prolonged land interventions has dropped, while many of the nonstate actors with which it contends may even have been strengthened by economic desperation in the groups they wish to recruit.

In its land-power overreach the United States bumps up against the same imperatives that hobbled previous aspirants to empire. Napoleon certainly had greater ambitions—to absorb the territory, change the domestic political institutions, or extinguish the sovereignty of rival states. So did Germany’s leaders in what has been called “the thirty-year (1914–1945) war for German hegemony.” The strategic threat they posed from and to the European heartland virtually compelled the emergence of “balancing” coalitions against them, despite all the problems of coordinating such large and diverse alliances. That was expected in traditional realist balance-of-power analysis. By contrast, imperial Britain was not so threatening. As an island state offshore Europe, building a global empire dependent on sea power, it had limited ability to engage great continental land armies by itself. It was a case of a whale against an elephant, with neither able to inflict much damage on the other. Britain was at best a quasi-hegemon, maybe the biggest economic and industrial power but not in a position to dominate. As such it seemed to its European rivals less dangerous than Germany, Russia, or France were to each other. Consequently British quasi-hegemony lasted longer, and its eventual decline was due less to an emerging coalition than to the loss of its economic dynamism to Germany. The United States, not primarily a land power and without imperial claims to territory or formal sovereignty over others, can also try to be a relatively nonthreatening hegemon. Historically, great sea powers have been less likely than land powers to provoke other states into balancing against them, and their interests in promoting commerce may benefit from a liberal economic and political ideology (Levy and Thompson 2010).

For a hegemon, bilateral diplomacy may seem the easiest road to influence by providing an opportunity to do deals cheaply with weaker states. The larger and most relevant actors can often be bought off, and the rest pushed around or ignored. American hegemony, however, lacks that kind of raw dominance and commonly needs a multilateral structure of bargaining and negotiation. That requires it to rely more on international institutions that constrain itself as well as others, and on the legitimacy derived from the “soft power” of its economic, political, and social culture. Soft power is the ability to get others to do what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment (Nye 2003). Themes of influence and persuasion are common to theories about when states may “bandwagon” with a potential or actual hegemon rather than balance against it. Even the balancing against may be “soft,” with no threat or intention of using military force against the hegemon. The goal of soft balancing is to create space for the balancing states to pursue some interests that may diverge from the hegemon’s, and to distance themselves from hegemonic military actions that might entangle them in conflicts for which they have neither the capability nor the will.

Balancing, whether hard or soft, is hobbled by the problems of coordinating collective action, especially by large groups. Some analysts (e.g., Posen 2006) see the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) as a soft balancer, but it is difficult to find any widespread intention to undertake military actions that would be opposed to US interests. Even if there were, ESDP can act only by unanimity, a tough feat for an organization of twenty-seven countries with no clear leader or institutional structure to coordinate policy (Howorth and Menon 2009).³ The problem of collective action to provide public goods is well recognized in economics and political science, and it will appear frequently in this book.

Realist analysis of states’ behavior has tried to establish principles for predicting when states will balance against a threat, but bandwagon with a relatively nonthreatening power. Part of the answer is that military power (the ability to control by threat or use of force) declines with the increasing costs of exercising power over great distance; hence in the cold war Western Europe supposedly felt less threatened by the United States than by the nearer and greater land power of the Soviet Union (Walt 1987). Yet that answer is incomplete without considering also the much greater threat to European political and economic values posed by Soviet military power as commanded by communist rule and ideology. The prospect of Nazi rule made German hegemony especially unattractive during World War II. So a purely material understanding of power cannot give strong predictions without taking into account the diverse cultures and institutions within and between the states that make up the international system. That “liberal” theme—the importance especially of democratic and capitalist institutions—drives much of the analysis of this book, and is highly important to understanding the prospects for continuing any kind of global hegemony. A central issue concerns the degree to which democracy and free markets empower or hamper a hegemon.

The structure of the book

The book is constructed around the question of whether hegemony is sustainable, especially when the hegemon is a democratic state. Various propositions about the causal relationship between hegemony and democracy find some theoretical and empirical support, with possible causation going both ways. For example:

• Democracy can hold leaders responsible when they begin costly, unnecessary, and unsuccessful hegemonic wars. Leaders can anticipate being held responsible. But wartime leaders may constrain democratic liberties.
• Democracy may help or hinder the financing of wars. If hegemonic wars benefit the broad populace democracy may not restrain leaders, and may increase warfighting effectiveness.
• A relatively nonthreatening democratic hegemon may find it easier to sustain an international coalition, but harder to get wartime allies to bear significant costs.
• The net effect of these and other propositions is unpredictable, inhibiting confident generalizations.

This introduction, and the conclusion, are new. Of the chapters in between, five were originally journal articles and five were in edited books that are not as readily available as most journal articles. (One chapter comprises the prefaces to two editions of a book by me.) I have not previously reprinted any of them. The selections are republished largely in their original form, save for updating some references, correcting printing errors, and providing a common formatting. There is some duplication of passages from one chapter to another, but in the interest of maintaining the integrity of each selection I have not eliminated it. The substance remains unchanged. Principal topics include the relative influence of domestic politics as contrasted with an alleged national interest in the formulation of foreign policy; the benefits and costs of seeking security through military power at the expense of expanding networks of shared national and international institutions; and the incentives of other states to balance against a potential hegemon rather than to “free-ride” on the benefits it may provide. Here is an outline of the subsequent chapters, with commentary on each item considering both circum stances at the time of its original publication and its claim to continued interest.

Chapter 2, “Democracy, war, and expansion through historical lenses,” is a recent article that sets many of the themes for the whole book, notably many aspects of the democratic peace (what it is and what it isn’t); the more general Kantian peace; and how democratic politics may encourage or constrain expansionary foreign policies. I wrote it as an update of recent research and my own thinking, and directed it especially to a European audience. It takes off from my understanding of Thucydides and other writers on the ancient Greek city-state system, asking what aspects of that system offer evidence or at least ideas about contemporary international relations. It argues that the democratic peace proposition applies largely to relations between democracies, rather than to whether democracies are in general more or less war-prone than other states. In particular, it contends that great powers are more war-prone in general than are less powerful states. That leaves indeterminate the question of whether and how great power democracies may differ from their autocratic rivals in overall participation in war. In weaving between ancient and contemporary times it begins to ask questions about the relationship between democracy and hegemony. For example, are democracy and hegemony compatible? Does democracy promote or restrain hegemony? Does hegemony strengthen or weaken democracy in the hegemonic state?⁴

The next three chapters were originally published much earlier. They concentrate on issues of hegemony, largely from a realist perspective that considers the conditions of hegemony and the degree to which some of the basic underpinnings of US dominance in the international system were sustainable or declining.

Chapter 3, “Dimensions of resource dependence: some elements of rigor in concept and policy analysis,” is the first of three chapters written during the cold war, examining the role of ideas and theories in justifying an expansive foreign policy. It is an analytical essay on the United States’ dependence on “strategic” raw materials from abroad, and its implications for a national interest in an activist foreign policy to ensure access. I wrote it at a time when fears of a serious decline in US economic and military capabilities were common (but see the next chapter’s contrary view that the degree of US hegemony actually remained high, and secure). Following the oil shocks to the economy in the 1970s, these worries expanded to economically and militarily important metals. Such concerns frequently formed the basis for allegations that the US needed a Rapid Deployment Force to intervene if supplies to America from a key supplier country should be endangered by its political instability or hostility. To evaluate them this article proposes economic and political indicators for various dimensions of economic vulnerability or dependence, and shows those indicators for each of several allegedly vulnerable metals were considerably lower than for petroleum. Even petroleum did not score very high by most criteria. And better policy options for addressing most vulnerabilities that did exist would be increasing domestic production and stockpiling rather than resorting to military intervention. Of course, “strategic” arguments for intervention are still made whether or not such objective measures support them. They remain prominent, and not least for oil in the run-up to the two US wars against Iraq.⁵

Chapter 4, “US hegemony: gone or merely diminished, and how does it matter?” extends a previous and better-known analysis (Russett 1985) contending that American hegemony was alive and well throughout the cold war. This version gives special attention to Japan and its potential as a challenger, a supposed threat that received great attention in scholarly and popular writing at the time.⁶ The analysis addresses the military and economic components of relative Japanese and US power, but also gives special attention to ideological or cultural “soft” power as initially conceived of by Antonio Gramsci. In addition, it draws heavily on a theoretical model for the provision of collective goods by the hegemonic power, which will appear in some following chapters and will be developed further in the conclusion to this book. The debates from this earlier period have important implications for the more recent fears about the rise of Chinese economic and ultimately military power as a challenge to US hegemony.

Chapter 5, “The real decline in nuclear hegemony,” was written near the end of the cold war. Even then it was apparent that nuclear weapons had never been used since 1945, and that credible threats to use them had become rare. Over time, and now quite evidently so, threats to use them first, for offensive purposes, are not regarded as credible. Threats to use them for defense of the nuclear state’s homeland can be more credible, but only in response to a nuclear attack or, in extremis, by a state whose territory and sovereignty could not otherwise be preserved (Israel, Iran, North Korea?). During the cold war, implicit or explicit threats to use nuclear weapons to defend allies from conventional attack were common, but once both sides had developed secure second-strike capabilities the threat became one to commit suicide to defend the ally, with the paradox that a rational actor would not deliberately do that. So the threat effectively morphed into one that the defender’s escalation to using nuclear weapons might occur accidentally, or without authorization, in the fog of conventional war. Doing that, or preparing to do that, was not very credible either. Many serious analysts now contend that nuclear weapons are both useless and subject to a normative taboo (most importantly Schelling 2005; also Tannenwald 2008; Paul 2009) or simply useless, a waste of money and scientific talent (Mueller 2009).

In earlier decades nuclear weapons, and promises by powerful states to use them, helped reinforce hierarchies of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A democratic hegemon? The age of American hegemony
• 2. Democracy, war, and expansion through historical lenses
• 3. Dimensions of resource dependence: some elements of rigor in concept and policy analysis
• 4. US hegemony: gone or merely diminished, and how does it matter?
• 5. The real decline in nuclear hegemony
• 6. The future as arbiter of theoretical controversies: predictions, explanations, and the end of the cold war
• 7. Courting disaster: NATO vs. Russia and China
• 8. A neo-Kantian perspective: democracy, interdependence, and international organizations in building security communities
• 9. Democratic intergovernmental organizations promote peace
• 10. Security Council expansion: can’t, and shouldn’t
• 11. Liberalism
• 12. No clear and present danger: a skeptical view of the United States’ entry into World War II
• 13. Democracy, hegemony, and collective action
• References
• Index