Hegemony and World Order

Reimagining Power in Global Politics

Piotr Dutkiewicz, Tom Casier, Jan Aart Scholte, Piotr Dutkiewicz, Tom Casier, Jan Aart Scholte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000191455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Hegemony and World Order explores a key question for our tumultuous times of multiple global crises. Does hegemony – that is, legitimated rule by dominant power – have a role in ordering world politics of the twenty-first century? If so, what form does that hegemony take: does it lie with a leading state or with some other force? How does contemporary world hegemony operate: what tools does it use and what outcomes does it bring?

This volume addresses these questions by assembling perspectives from various regions across the world, including Canada, Central Asia, China, Europe, India, Russia and the USA. The contributions in this book span diverse theoretical perspectives from realism to postcolonialism, as well as multiple issue areas such as finance, the Internet, migration and warfare. By exploring the role of non-state actors, transnational networks, and norms, this collection covers various standpoints and moves beyond traditional concepts of state-based hierarches centred on material power. The result is a wealth of novel insights on today's changing dynamics of world politics.

Hegemony and World Order is critical reading for policymakers and advanced students of International Relations, Global Governance, Development, and International Political Economy.

PART 1

Hegemony as conceptual map

1

Crises of world hegemony and the speeding up of social history

Beverly J. Silver and Corey R. Payne

A new period of global systemic chaos?

Escalating geopolitical tensions and deep internal divisions within the United States, culminating in the election of Donald Trump, are among the indicators that we are living through the terminal crisis of United States world hegemony – a crisis that began with the bursting of the New Economy stock market bubble in 2000–1 and that deepened with the ongoing blowback from the Bush Administration’s failed Project for a New American Century and 2003 invasion of Iraq. Whereas in the 1990s, the United States was almost universally viewed as the world’s sole and unshakable superpower, by the time of the 2008 financial meltdown, the notion that US hegemony was in a deep and potentially terminal crisis moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Since 2016, the view that we are in the midst of an irremediable breakdown of US hegemony has gained even wider adherence with the intended and unintended consequences of Trump’s movement to ‘Make America Great Again’.

The current moment is now widely perceived both as a crisis of US hegemony and a deep crisis for global capitalism on a scale not witnessed since the 1930s. When historians look back on 2019–2020, two major signs of deep systemic crisis will stand out. First, the worldwide wave of social protest that swept the globe following the 2008 financial meltdown, reaching a first peak around 2011 and then escalating toward a crescendo in 2019. Second, the failure of Western states to respond in a competent manner to the COVID-19 global pandemic, undermining the credibility of the West (and especially the United States) in the eyes of both their own citizens and citizens of the world.

Toward the end of 2019 – before the scale of the COVID-19 crisis was apparent – it looked like the rising wave of global social protest would turn out to be the story of the decade, given the ‘tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies’ (Wright 2019). As unrest inundated cities from Paris and La Paz to Hong Kong and Santiago, declarations of ‘a global year of protest’ or ‘the year of the street protester’ lined the pages of newsstands worldwide (e.g. Diehl 2019; Johnson 2019; Rachman 2019; Walsh and Fisher 2019). Mass protest waves came to define the entire decade. Already in 2011, Time magazine had declared ‘The Protester’ to be their ‘Person of the Year’ (Andersen 2011) as popular unrest spread across the globe from Occupy Wall Street and anti-austerity movements in Europe to the Arab Spring and waves of workers’ strikes in China. Two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become clear that popular discontent with the current social setup is both wide and deep.

This explosion of social protest around the world is a clear sign that the social foundations of the global order are crumbling. If we conceptualise hegemony as ‘legitimated rule by dominant power’ (following the introduction to this volume), then the breadth and depth of social protest is a clear sign that the legitimacy of dominant power(s) has been badly shaken. These twin processes – global protest and global pandemic – were laying bare a stunning incapacity of the world’s ruling groups to envision, much less implement, changes that could adequately address the grievances from below or satisfy the growing demands for safety and security.

The major waves of global social protest and the incapacity of the declining hegemonic power to satisfy demands from below are clear signs that we are in the midst of a period of world-hegemonic breakdown. Indeed, as argued elsewhere (Arrighi and Silver 1999, chapter 3), past periods of world-hegemonic breakdown – that is, the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century transition from Dutch to British hegemony and the early twentieth century transition from British to US hegemony – were also characterised by both mass protest from below in the form of strikes, revolts, rebellions and revolutions and by a failure of leadership on the part of the declining hegemonic power.

A new world hegemony – if one is to emerge – would require two conditions. First, it would require that a new power bloc ‘collectively rise up to the task of providing system-level solutions to the system-level problems left behind by U.S. hegemony’, Second, if a new world hegemony is to emerge in a non-catastrophic fashion, it would require that ‘the main centers of Western civilization [especially the United States] adjust to a less exalted status’ as the balance of power on a world-scale shifts away from the United States and the West (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 286).

Seen from 2020, it would appear that the second condition – the graceful adjustment by the United States (specifically) and Western powers (more generally) to a more equal distribution of power among states – has failed to materialise in a spectacular fashion. If the second condition depends mainly on the behaviour of the declining hegemonic power, the first condition – the development of system-level solutions to system-level problems – depends on the capacity of a new power bloc to meet the demands emerging from below.

In the past, a new hegemonic power could lead the system away from chaos only by fundamentally reorganising the world system in ways that at least partially met the demands for livelihood and protection emanating from mass movements. Put differently, they could become hegemonic only by providing reformist solutions to the revolutionary challenges from below. In this sense, world hegemony requires the capacity (and vision) to provide system-level solutions.

Hegemony and world-systems analysis

This chapter takes a world-systems approach to ‘hegemony’, as we focus on the interrelationship between historical capitalism and successive world hegemonies. Moreover, we argue that world hegemonies cannot be understood without examining their evolving social and political foundations. As such, our work is part of a tradition within the world-systems school that builds out from Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony (see especially Arrighi 1994 [2010], chapter 1).

A series of what might be called non-debates (or talking at cross-purposes) has emerged in the literature on hegemony as a result of the divergent ways in which the term is understood.¹ Different definitional starting points exist even within schools of thought, including within the world-systems perspective. Thus, Immanuel Wallerstein (1984: 38–9) defined hegemony as synonymous with domination or supremacy – that is, as a ‘situation in which the ongoing rivalry between the so-called “great powers” is so unbalanced that one power is truly primus inter pares; that is, one power can largely impose its rules and its wishes … in the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas’. Economic supremacy provided the material basis for a series of hegemonic states – the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, the United States in the twentieth century – to ‘impose its rules and its wishes’ in all spheres.

Instead, we start from the work of Giovanni Arrighi (1982, 1994 [2010]: 28–9) – exponent of another major theoretical strand within the world-systems literature – who defines world hegemony as ‘leadership or governance over a system of sovereign states’, Building on Gramsci’s writings, Arrighi conceptualises world hegemony as something ‘more and different from “domination” pure-and-simple’. It is rather ‘the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”’. Whereas dominance rests primarily on coercion, hegemony is ‘the additional power that accrues to a dominant group by virtue of its capacity to place all issues around which conflicts rage on a “universal” plane’,²

Hegemonic rule, in practice, combines two elements: consent (leadership) and coercion (domination). However, the targets of consent and coercion are different. As Gramsci put it:

the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as intellectual and moral leadership’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’ or to subjugate perhaps by armed force; it leads kindred or allied groups (Gramsci 1971: 57).

In situations of stable world hegemony, the element of consent is strong – its reach is relatively wide (geographically) and deep (socially). Social protest is relatively infrequent and tends to be normative in nature (for example, legal strikes within the confines of institutionalised collective bargaining). In situations of world-hegemonic crisis or breakdown (like the present period), the overall balance between consent and coercion tilts increasingly toward the latter. Social protest tends to escalate and take on increasingly non-normative forms, while the response from above takes on increasingly coercive forms (Arrighi and Silver 1999, chapter 3; Silver 2003, chapter 4).

Periods of stable world hegemony are characterised by a situation in which the dominant power makes a credible claim to be leading the world system in a direction that not only serves the dominant group’s interests but is also perceived as serving a more general interest, thereby fostering consent (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 26–8). As Gramsci put it, with reference to hegemony at the national level:

It is true that the [hegemon] is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favorable conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion … (Gramsci 1971: 181–2, emphasis added).

To be sure, the claim of the dominant power to represent the general interest is always more or less fraudulent. Even in situations of stable hegemony, those excluded from the hegemonic bloc – Gramsci’s ‘antagonistic groups’ – are predominately ruled by force. However, in periods of hegemonic breakdown, like the present, claims by the dominant power to be acting in the general interest look increasingly hollow and self-serving, even in the eyes of the ‘kindred or allied groups’. Such claims lose their credibility and/or are abandoned entirely from above.

Nevertheless, in situations of world hegemony, the claim of the dominant power to represent the general interest must have a significant degree of credibility in the eyes of allied groups. Thus, for example, in the high period of global Keynesianism and Developmentalism,³ the United States was able to credibly claim that an expansion of US world power was in a broader (if not universal) interest, by establishing global institutional arrangements that fostered employment and welfare (immediately in the case of the First World; and as the promised fruit of ‘development’ in the case of the Third World); thus, addressing the demands coming from the mass labour, socialist and national liberation mobilisations of the early and mid-twentieth century.

Arrighi argues that the willingness of subordinate groups and states to accept a new hegemon (or even purely dominant power) becomes especially widespread and strong in periods of ‘systemic chaos’ – that is, in ‘situations of total and apparently irremediable lack of organization’.

As systemic chaos increases, the demand for ‘order’ - the old order, a new order, any order! - tends to become more and more general among rulers, or among subjects, or both. Whichever state or group of states is in a position to satisfy this system-wide demand for order is thus presented with the opportunity of becoming world hegemonic (Arrighi 1994 [2010], 31).⁴

As the early twenty-first century progresses, there is mounting evidence that the world has entered into another ‘period of systemic chaos - analogous but not identical to the systemic chaos of the first half of the twentieth century’ (Silver and Arrighi 2011, 68). Moreover, there is mounting evidence of increasingly coercive responses from above (cf. Robinson 2014). On both theoretical and historical grounds, however, there is every reason to expect that power exercised through increasingly coercive means will only succeed in deepening the systemic chaos.

Instead, a move toward world hegemony and away from systemic chaos would require an aspiring hegemonic power to be able to, one, recognise the grievances of classes and status groups beyond the dominant group/state and, two, be able to lead the world system through a set of transformative actions that (at least in part) successfully address those grievances. Transformative actions that succeed in widening and deepening consent transform ‘domination pure-and-simple’ into hegemony.⁵

Put differently, the establishment of a new world-hegemonic order has both a ‘supply’ side and a ‘demand’ side. The supply side of the problem refers to the capacity of the would-be hegemonic power to implement system-level solutions to system-level problems. In other words, hegemony is not strictly a matter of ideology; it has a material base. The final section of this chapter will return to the ‘supply’ side of the problem. The next section will focus on elucidating the ‘demand side’ of world hegemony in the early twenty-first century.

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