Good-Bye Hegemony!

Power and Influence in the Global System

Simon Reich, Richard Ned Lebow

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691160436, 9780691160429
• eBook ISBN: 9781400850426
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many policymakers, journalists, and scholars insist that U.S. hegemony is essential for warding off global chaos. Good-Bye Hegemony! argues that hegemony is a fiction propagated to support a large defense establishment, justify American claims to world leadership, and buttress the self-esteem of voters. It is also contrary to American interests and the global order. Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow argue that hegemony should instead find expression in agenda setting, economic custodianship, and the sponsorship of global initiatives. Today, these functions are diffused through the system, with European countries, China, and lesser powers making important contributions. In contrast, the United States has often been a source of political and economic instability.

Rejecting the focus on power common to American realists and liberals, the authors offer a novel analysis of influence. In the process, they differentiate influence from power and power from material resources. Their analysis shows why the United States, the greatest power the world has ever seen, is increasingly incapable of translating its power into influence. Reich and Lebow use their analysis to formulate a more realistic place for America in world affairs.

Chapter 1

The Wall Has Fallen

In the film Good Bye Lenin!, an East Berlin mother has a heart attack and falls into a coma. When she revives, many months later, the Berlin Wall has fallen and East Germany is history. The children want to bring her back to their apartment but the doctors are reluctant to let her leave the hospital, as any shock could trigger another infarction. The children promise to provide as unthreatening an environment as possible; they conspire to prevent their mother, who was content under the communist regime, from learning about its demise. They go to increasing lengths to establish and maintain this conceit; they remove their new furniture and return their apartment to the way it once was, scour the city for the old brand of pickles she loved and have a friend produce news programs that purport to be from the now defunct German Democratic Republic. Once, by mistake, real television news fills the screen and the mother watches old clips of the Berlin Wall being breached. She becomes agitated, but is reassured by her children that while this is true, it is Westerners who have broken through the Wall to seek asylum in the East. Suitably reassured, the mother insists that it is their patriotic duty to take in some Western refugees. Word about the make-believe apartment gets around, and elderly people, unable to adapt to change, come around to enjoy its anachronistic ambience and reinforce one another’s nostalgia for the old life. Their rosy reminiscences bear little relationship to former realities.

International relations scholars responsible for the burgeoning literature on hegemonic decline are like the elderly visitors in Good Bye Lenin!. They are unreconciled to change and nostalgic for a world that is long since gone. Their memories of its glories are just as distorted. More troubling still, some scholars and many policy makers and their advisers more closely resemble the poor mother. They believe they live in a world in which America is still the hegemon and are convinced of its manifold advantages to themselves and everyone else. Analogous to the mother, they engage in sterile debates among themselves about what can be done to preserve American dominance.

What is hegemony? The definition and consequence is a source of great debate among liberals and realists. Michael Doyle understands it to mean “controlling leadership of the international system as a whole.”¹ Michael Mastanduno contends that hegemony exists when one political unit has the “power to shape the rules of international politics according to its own interests.”² Stuart Kaufman, Richard Little, and William Wohlforth describe hierarchy, which they all but equate with hegemony, as the political-military “domination” of a single unit “over most of the international system.”³ John Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan insist that such influence ultimately rests on material power, and “it is most effectively exercised when a hegemon is able to establish a set of norms that others willingly embrace.”⁴

In reality, American hegemony was short-lived and a feature of the country’s extraordinary economic primacy in the mid-twentieth century in a world devastated by history’s costliest and most destructive war. At the time, relatively few welcomed American hegemony as a source of political stability and economic reconstruction. Certainly, the rapid comeback of Western Europe and Japan, and later the economic development of the Pacific Rim, were greatly assisted by American aid, loans, and markets. Yet, success made hegemony superfluous and Charles Kindleberger posited that hegemony had run its course by 1963, and was certainly history by the 1970s.⁵ Americans nevertheless convinced themselves that their hegemony was alive and well—and benign. Given the Soviet threat, which policy makers, think tank analysts, and scholars grossly exaggerated, American hegemony was also described as in the common Western interest. Following the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States remained “the indispensable nation,” in the words of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.⁶ President Barack Obama would say something similar in a presidential debate prior to his reelection.⁷

POWER VERSUS INFLUENCE

American hegemony eroded during the postwar decades as other nations regained their economic strength and political stability. Of equal importance, the postwar world witnessed movements and developments over which the United States could exert little to no control, such as Third World nationalism and the rise of China. Efforts by Washington to maintain a puppet regime in South Vietnam and futile efforts to block Beijing from taking China’s seat in the UN Security Council darkened America’s image and publicized its impotence. The decline of the dollar accelerated this trend. Yet American foreign policy still embraces hegemony and has not effectively adjusted to the reality. It is an unrealistic and counterproductive aspiration. The glaring discrepancy between America’s self-image and goals on the one hand, and others’ perception of them, may explain one of the principal anomalies of contemporary international relations (IR): the extraordinary military and economic power of the United States and its increasing inability to get other states to do what it wants. Examples of this phenomenon abound. In Iraq, the administration of President George W. Bush claimed to have created “a coalition of the willing,” but in practice, the intervention was opposed by some of America’s closest allies and the support of lesser states had to be purchased. In trade, the United States sought a critical Group of Twenty (G20) consensus on how to manage the Great Recession of 2008, only to be rebuffed by Asians and Europeans alike. In this book we will show how American attempts to shape and manage globalization, the principal economic development of the current age, have also failed.

To quote Alice, our story becomes “curiouser and curiouser.” Although American hegemony has not existed for some time, prominent American IR scholars believe it does, but periodically worry that it is about to disappear. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Charles Krauthammer famously proclaimed that the long-awaited “unipolar moment” had arrived. Like-minded realists predicted that American hegemony would remain unchallenged for decades to come. Other realists began worrying about immediate threats. George Friedman, who runs Stratfor, a respected and widely read realist-oriented newsletter, predicated a war in the near future with Japan.⁸ Realists are still divided among themselves. Michael Mandelbaum, among others, thinks it essential that the United States cut back on its foreign policy commitments, but that this will result in greater disorder, leading other countries to look back with nostalgia on American hegemony. More optimistic realists like William Wohlforth contend that America can finesse this transition and remain dominant.⁹ For most realists, the key question is how the US will face the expected challenge from a rising China. Some believe that a power transition of this kind will almost certainly lead to war.¹⁰

Liberals come in as great a variety of hues as do realists. They share certain attributes with realists: a rationalist approach in which power and influence are conflated; a focus on states as key actors; a research program focused on American hegemony; and an analytic approach in which the functions of hegemony are conflated. There are important differences among liberals as to the form and longevity of American hegemony, which we will discuss in chapter 2. Liberals nevertheless share a fundamental optimism that American hegemony will survive in some form. Their greatest concern, pace realists, is that a global system without a hegemon would become unstable and more war prone.¹¹

Realists and liberals frame hegemony as a question of power. Realists in particular assume that material capabilities constitute power and that power confers influence. These categories are related in more indirect and problematic ways. Material capabilities are only one component of power. Power also depends on the nature of a state’s capabilities, how they developed, and how they are used. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of this political truth is offered by the US and Soviet (now Russian) nuclear arsenals. These weapons and their delivery systems were expensive and all but unusable in any scenario. The principal one they were designed for—all-out war—would have constituted mutual, if not global, suicide. Intended to deter the other superpower, these weapons became a cause of their conflict.¹² For the Soviet Union, its nuclear arsenal and conventional forces also became its principal claim to superpower status. Extravagant expenditure on the military in the context of a stagnating economy is generally understood to have been one of the causes of the Soviet collapse.

Nuclear weapons could rarely, if ever, be used to make credible threats. The utility of conventional forces has also become increasingly restricted. In an era of nationalism, people are less willing to be coerced by foreign powers. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan became competitions in suffering, which the foreign powers were bound to lose. The ability to inflict pain—the mechanism on which military power depends—can be offset by the ability of the weaker side to absorb it. The US-Mexican relationship offers a different window into this problem. Repeated efforts by successive American administrations to exploit its greater power to act unilaterally in violation of its agreements with Mexico led to Mexican resistance. America needs to renegotiate because new agreements gained less, not more, for Washington.¹³

Attempts to translate power directly into influence rest on carrots and sticks. Such exercises, even when successful, consume resources and work only so long as the requisite bribes and threats are available and effective. More often than not, they fail. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq offers a dramatic example. Raw power was ineffective when applied in a politically unsophisticated way and at odds with prevailing norms and practices. It eroded, not enhanced, American influence. Failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are anomalies for most realist and liberal understandings of power, but not for an approach that disaggregates influence from power and directs our attention to its social as well as material basis. Such a shift grounds the study of influence in the shared discourses that make it possible. It builds on Thomas Hobbes’s understanding in Behemoth that “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.”¹⁴

Effective influence rests on persuasion; it convinces others that it is their interest to do what you want. Persuasion depends on shared values and acceptable practices, and when it works, helps to build common identities that can make cooperation and persuasion more likely in the future. Influence of this kind also benefits from material capabilities but is not a function of them. It is restricted to common goals and requires considerable political skills. It depends on sophisticated leaders and diplomats, shared discourses with target states, advocacy of policies that build on precedent, and a willingness to let others help shape and implement initiatives. Suffice it to say here that power, by which we mean primarily economic and military capabilities, is a raw material that can be used to gain influence. By influence we mean the ability to persuade others to do what one wants, or refrain from doing what one does not want.

A POSTHEGEMONIC WORLD

The focus on power obscures the ways in which the international system has been evolving. Hegemony can nevertheless provide insight into these changes. In this section we will unpack the concept. By identifying the ways in which hegemony is thought to make global order possible, we can disaggregate these functions from the role and ask if it is possible to fill them in other ways. We believe this is eminently feasible—and more realistic in today’s world.

The first responsibility of hegemony is normative. Much of what liberals conceive as “leadership” is the capacity to shape the policy agenda of global institutions or ad-hoc coalitions.¹⁵ It requires knowledge and manipulation of appropriate discourses.¹⁶ It also requires insight into how other actors define their interests, what they identify as problems, and what responses they consider appropriate. In contrast to the realist emphasis on material power, constructivist scholars emphasize persuasion over coercion, and maintain that the former is most effectively achieved by shaping policy debates through agenda setting and an appeal to shared norms. Power is important, but understood as embedded in institutional and normative structures. Normative influence is heavily dependent on political skill, and all the more so in a world in which so many, if not most, important initiatives are multilateral.

The second constituent of hegemony is economic management. In the posthegemonic era this function is primarily custodial. We elaborate on the meaning of the term, ask who performs this role, and how well it is performed. Above all else, custodianship entails the management of risk through market signaling (information passed, intentionally or not, among market participants) and intergovernmental negotiations in a variety of venues. The intent, according to Charles Kindleberger, the progenitor of hegemonic stability theory, is to stabilize and undergird the functions of the global economic system.¹⁷ This formulation has become foundational for his realist and liberal successors as they seek to justify the global need for continued American hegemony. Many American international relations theorists nevertheless ignore the evidence that America has either willingly contravened, or is increasingly incapable of performing, these fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Wall Has Fallen
• Chapter 2: Power and Influence in the Global System
• Chapter 3: Europe and Agenda Setting
• Chapter 4: China and Custodial Economic Management
• Chapter 5: America and Security Sponsorship
• Chapter 6: The Future of International Relations
• Index