US Hegemony and the Americas

Power and Economic Statecraft in International Relations

Arturo Santa-Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351211208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

In this book, Arturo Santa-Cruz advances an understanding of power as a social relationship and applies it consistently to the economic realm in United States relations with other countries of the Western Hemisphere. Following the academic and popular debate on the ebb and flow of US hegemony, this work centers the analysis in a critical case for the exercise of US power through its economic statecraft: the Americas—its historical zone of influence. The rationale for the regional focus is methodological: if it can be shown that Washington's sway has decreased in the area since the early 1970s, when the discussion about this matter started, it can be safely assumed that the same has occurred in other latitudes. The analysis focuses on three regions: North America, Central America and South America. Since each region contains countries that have at times maintained very different relationships with the United States, the findings contribute to a better understanding of the practice of US power in the sub-region in question, adding greater variability to the overall results.

US Hegemony and the Americas: Power and Economic Statecraft in International Relations is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in Latin American History and Politics, North American Regional Integration, International Relations, Economic Statecraft, Political Economy and Comparative Politics.

Chapter 1

Five Decades and Still Going

The Debate on the Decline of US Hegemony

Politics is politics is politics—be it domestic or international. The alleged demarcation principle of the latter—anarchy—is not, in fact, its most significant feature. Instead, hierarchy figures prominently in both the domestic and international realms;¹ it is, as it were, the “General Theory” (per Keynes) of politics, with anarchy being a special case. Hierarchical orders can of course take many forms, and their metrics vary, but all of them imply stratification as the milieu in which power relations take place. Thus, in an analogous fashion to the post-war II dominant party systems that emerged in countries such as Italy, Japan and Sweden, where one political faction became hegemonic, the post-war international system exhibited a particular feature: United States’ hegemony.² After all, as Helen Milner noted right when the Cold War had finished and the “unipolar moment” emerged: “The essence of international politics is identical with its domestic counterpart.”³

If the two compartmentalized realms of politics are, at bottom, so similar, it should come as no surprise that the intellectual puzzles they generate are also alike; one of them has to do with the sustainability and eventual decline of an established (hierarchical) order. Thus, just as in dominant party systems, in the post-war international system the question of the durability of the political faction in power became an issue from the get-go. Not long after Washington’s hegemony had been established as a social fact, debate started about its eventual demise; over time, the topic would become a veritable cottage industry in the International Relations (IR) literature. This chapter presents a brief overview of the wax and wane of the debate on US hegemonic decline, and argues that part of the reason for its recursiveness has to do with the different referents and standards used in the discussion; this account serves to lay the way for delineating the framework I will be using in this work, as well as to focus the debate on the concepts that will be discussed and made operational in the empirical section of the book.

This chapter is divided into six further sections: the first one sketches the debate on the decline of the United States as a world hegemonic power; the second takes a step back and looks at the initial conditions around which the debate revolved. The third section considers the means through which Washington achieved hegemonic status in the aftermath of World War II, and was able to sustain it during the Cold War, according to different approaches. This account in turn serves to re-examine, in the fourth section, the phases the debate in question has gone through since it became salient, in the 1970s; here the discussion focuses on the Western Hemisphere, and particularly on Latin America, in order to introduce the theoretical debate to the region this work is concerned with. Section five frames the discussion in terms of anarchy versus hierarchy, as it argues that the underlying theme in the various stages of the debate is the type of order that exists in international politics. In the last section I briefly recap the discussion presented.

1 ) The United States as Hegemon

With little hyperbole, it could be said that the decline of US hegemony in world politics has been a matter for consideration from the moment it was established. The 1949 Soviet nuclear test made analysts—as well as Washington’s leadership—ponder the endurance of the still novel US privileged position in world politics. After all, as Stephen Walt has noted, “When a state stands alone at the pinnacle of power (…) there is nowhere to go but down.”⁴ On a rather intermittent fashion, the issue never left the public and scholarly debate, with developments such as Soviet ventures beyond Eurasia in the 1960s, or United States economic (e.g., trade deficit, end of Gold Standard) and military troubles (Vietnam) the following decade infusing it with renewed relevance. But the topic became established in the IR literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since that time, as Adam Quinn has written, debate about US decline “has been through enough iterations for articles noting that the debate is cyclical to be themselves a feature of the cycle.”⁵

For all the valuable insights that greatly influential works such as Richard Rosecrance’s edited volume America as an Ordinary Country (1976), Robert Cox’s “Social Forces, States and World Orders” (1981), Robert Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (1981), Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984), and Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), contributed to the debate, more often than not their authors were talking past each other. This was of course something to be expected, as the “debate” was in part something of a misnomer—as many of its contributors were not really speaking to each other—reminiscent of the “first” Idealism–Realism debate in the discipline.⁶ That is, the writers were not necessarily addressing the exact same questions; for instance, while Keohane was concerned with the resilience of international regimes after the eventual demise of US hegemony, Kennedy centered on imperial overstretch over a 500-year-long historical period. Furthermore, although the position that during the first decade or two of the academic discussion seemed to prevail was the obsolescence of US hegemony, the verdict was reached, as Ian Clark has observed “on a number of quite disparate grounds.”⁷

These discrepancies have to do in part with the indicators used to estimate the hegemony Washington has exercised at different times since the end of World War II. Thus, for instance, whereas for some it was material resources that mattered, for others it was structural power or leadership.⁸ The differences of opinion also had to do with the degree or quantity of attributes the United States had to evince in order to qualify as hegemonic. However, the dissonant character of the exchange that has been taking place in the academic literature for six decades now has a more fundamental reason: there are multiple understandings of hegemony itself.⁹ Looking first at the way the different perspectives claim Washington achieved hegemonic status might shed some light in this regard.

2 ) Initial Conditions around which the Debate Revolved

The question is then: what made it possible for Washington to become an hegemonic power in the aftermath of World War II? For some, the answer lies in the accumulation of material resources, particularly economic ones. Thus, for instance, William Zartman states that “The United States arrived at a hegemonic position through the exercise of its enormous economic power.”¹⁰ Similarly, for Guy Poitras, US hegemony was “derived from economic and military resources,”¹¹ whereas for Quinn overall US power is explained by its “possession of a preponderance of material resources.”¹² For others, the conditions of possibility are more diffuse. Susan Strange, for example, argued that US hegemony had to do with its “structural power,” that is, “the power to choose and to shape the structures of the global political economy within which others states, their p...