America, capitalism, and the interstate system

Critical Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 413-432

  Gowan, Peter ^a  

^a LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM;

EID: 24344465258     PISSN: 14672715     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14672710500200425     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. A classic example of such a wilful effort at naturalization is Barry Eichengreen, International Monetary Arrangements for the Twenty-first Century (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994).
2. It is sometimes argued that hedging through derivatives contracts answers this problem. It doesn't, since such contracts last no more than six months at the outside.
3. In reality, U.S. military-political dominance over the capitalist world also greatly reinforced dollar dominance - a factor that cannot be precisely quantified but is nonetheless real despite the refusal of many specialists on international monetary relations to build this into their theories.
4. Kristen Nordhaug, "The United States and East Asia in an Age of Financialization," Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2005): 103-16.
5. Stephan Collignon, "Adjusting the US Current Account Deficit: What Role for the Dollar, Euro and Yen?" Claves de la Economía Mundial, summer 2005.
6. Ravi Arvind Palat, "On New Rules for Destroying Old Countries," Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2005): 75-94. Palat also takes me to task for failing to register two key aspects of America's postwar role: the fact that it led the capitalist world along a reconstruction path in the general interest of capitalism and that it promoted the full membership of non-European peoples in the interstate system. He is right about both these points and right too about their great historical significance. In my article I did, however, make reference to the first of these points, noting: "American primacy produced a strong development project for the capitalist world until the crisis of the 1970s."
7. Hansjorg Herr, "The International Monetary System and Domestic Economic Policy," in Regime Changes: Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Regulation in Europe from the 1930s to the 1990s, ed. Douglas J. Forsyth and Ton Notermans (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997).
8. Clinton himself famously declared that he was being forced into an Eisenhower Republican domestic macroeconomic policy by demands on all sides for budget deficit reduction. See Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 185.
9. Vijay Prashad, "American Grand Strategy and the Assassination of the Third World," Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2005): 117-27,
10. and Marika Vicziany, "Peter Gowan's American Grand Strategy': An Asian Regional Perspective," Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2005): 128-39.
11. Another way of saying this would be that the United States cannot achieve Gramscian "hegemony" as that concept has been developed in Cox's work.
12. For splendid and illuminating polemics against globalization theory, see Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London: Verso, 2000),
13. and Justin Rosenberg, "Globalisation Theory: A Post-Mortem," International Politics 42, no. 1 (March 2005): 2-74.
14. Given his time of writing, Marx grasped an extraordinary amount about the economic role of the state in capitalism, but much that became central occurred after his time.
15. For a vivid account of this partnership in the U.S. case, see William Greider's superb book, Secrets of the Temple (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
16. On the Japanese case, see the fascinating account in Richard Werner, Princes of the Yen (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).
17. Paul Hirst coined this apt phrase.
18. Sir John Hicks, Value and Capital: An Enquiry into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 84,
19. cited in Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 [1954]), 972. I am grateful to Robert Wade for pointing this out to me. The neoclassicals hide this secret by immediatism and by excluding the range of forces generating increasing returns, such as technological change and learning, the role of the credit system, and the roles of the state.
20. This does not, of course, mean that monopoly as an institutional form is always good or in any way efficient. It just means that under increasing returns, efficiency maximization has a monopoly telos.
21. Jeffrey E. Garten, "The Big Blowout: Why the Airbus-Boeing Case Could Wreck the WTO, and How to Stop It," Newsweek International, 27 March 2005.
22. European Commission, "EU-US Agreement on Large Civil Aircraft 1992: Key Facts and Figures," MEMO/04/232, Brussels, 6 October 2004.
23. Garten, "The Big Blowout."
24. Flamm, Mismanaged Trade? 36-39.
25. Ibid., 147.
26. Alex Berenson, "Drug Makers Reap Benefits of Tax Break," New York Times, 8 May 2005.
27. One weakness of Rugman and Verbeke's work is their failure to address issues concerning informal alliances and joint ventures between MNEs in different regions. In some cases, these relationships may increase regional sales in ways that do not show up in the data. On the other hand, for tax purposes, MNEs in Europe and especially in the United States may often exaggerate their overseas sales (and profits) for home tax purposes. And interregional alliances of MNEs are notoriously unstable.
28. Alan M. Rugman and Alain Verbeke, "A Perspective on Regional and Global Strategies of Multinational Enterprises," Journal of International Business Studies 35, no. 1 (2004): 3-18.
29. Alan M. Rugman and Alain Verbeke, "Towards a Theory of Regional Multinationals: A Transaction Cost Economics Approach," Special Issue, Management International Review 44, no. 4 (2004): 3-15. Available on-line at http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/%7Emir/ http:// www.palgrave-journals.com/cgi-taf/Dyna-Page.taf?file=/jibs/journal/v35/ n1/full/8400073a.html.
30. "Antitrust Policy in an Evolving Global Marketplace," in Antitrust Goes Global: What Future for Transatlantic Cooperation? ed. Simon J. Evenett, Alexander Lehmann, and Benn Steil (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000), 14-15.
31. This was established clearly for industries with large learning economies at the start of the 1980s in the United States. See Michael L. Spence, "The Learning Curve and Competition," Bell Journal of Economics 12 (spring 1981): 49-70.
32. For a detailed, rather sympathetic, account of the use of trade war measures by the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, see Thomas O. Bayard and Kimberley Ann Elliott, Reciprocity and Retaliation in US Trade Policy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1994).