The mysterious case of vanishing hegemony; or, Is Mark Twain really dead?

International Organization

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 1985, Pages 207-231

  Russett, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84971189672     PISSN: 00208183     EISSN: 15315088     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020818300026953     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. For example, Susan Strange, “Cave! Hic Dragones: A Critique of Regime Analysis,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), pp. 299–324.
2. See Richard Rosecrance's “Introduction” to his edited volume, America as an Ordinary Country (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 1; Kenneth A. Oye, “The Domain of Choice,” in Oye, Donald Rothchild, and Robert J. Lieber, eds., Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World (New York: Longman, 1979), pp. 4-5; and George Liska, Career of Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), chap. 10.
3. For example, Mark E. Rupert and David P. Rapkin, “The Erosion of U.S. Leadership Capabilities,” in Paul Johnson and William R. Thompson, eds., Rhythms in International Politics and Economics (New York: Praeger, 1985).
4. See, for instance, Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), esp. chap. 7, who regards the United States as more autonomous, and hence stronger, than more internationally involved states.
5. a. “Hegemon” at the time is underlined; there was no hegemon in 1938, but I have arbitrarily used the U.S. values as the base.
6. b. U.S.A. ranked fifth.
7. c. 1872 data used, as figures for French and German (Prussian) military spending were inflated in 1870 and 1871 by the Franco-Prussian War. Sources. GNP data 1983 from OECD, Main Economic Indicators (Paris, May 1984), p. 182; USSR total is estimated. Other GNP data from Paul Bairoch, “Europe's Gross National Product, 1800-1975,” Journal of European Economic History 5, 2 (1976), pp. 273–340, and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975). Military expenditures 1983 from World Armaments and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook, 1984 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1984), pp. 117–18. SIPRI lists USSR military expenses as 74% of the U.S. figure, but U.S. government sources (C.I.A. and D.I.A.) give USSR expenditures as exceeding those of U.S.A. I have set the two countries as equal. The estimate for China, given by SIPRI and used here, may be somewhat low. Military expenditure data for previous years are from the Correlates of War national capabilities data provided by Professor J. David Singer. Manufacturing production data from Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11, 2 (1982), pp. 269–333. Data for 1870 are interpolated between Bairoch's figures for 1860 and 1880.
8. Karl W. Deutsch, The Analysis of International Relations, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978).
9. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 44, and Stephen Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 199.
10. Timothy J. McKeown, “Tariffs and Hegemonic Stability Theory,” International Organization 37 (Winter 1983), pp. 73–93, and Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 37.
11. Duncan Snidal, “Public Goods, Property Rights, and Political Organization,” International Studies Quarterly 23 (December 1979), pp. 532–66.
12. Stephen Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics 27 (April 1975), pp. 314–47, and John Ruggie's review of Krasner’s book in American Political Science Review 74 (March 1980), pp. 296–99.
13. Joe Oppenheimer, “Collective Goods and Alliances: A Reassessment,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 23 (September 1979), pp. 387–407.
14. George Modelski, “The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (April 1978), pp. 214–35.
15. Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
16. Giovanni Arrighi, “A Crisis of Hegemony,” in Samir Amin et al., Dynamics of Global Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), p. 77.
17. I am aware that much of the hegemonic stability literature (for example, a “founding father,” Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973]) is concerned with very specific issue-areas and goods rather than with such broader achievements or “goods” as “peace and prosperity.” Focus on narrow issue-areas makes the thesis of a decline in American hegemony more plausible—at least for those selected issue-areas. Nevertheless, issue-areas are usually selected because they are assumed, implicitly or explicitly, to be symptomatic of a broad decline in U.S. ability to maintain the conditions of global prosperity. “Peace” among industrial capitalist powers (and containment of the Soviet Union) is one of those conditions. Thus, while some hegemonic stability writing can escape the strictures of my critique, a general evaluation of the state of American “hegemony” and its consequences—an evaluation that is both common and necessary—must carry the discussion beyond selected, rather narrow issue-areas. Gilpin, War and Change, and many of the contributors to the Spring 1982 special issue of International Organization would surely agree.
18. See Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, World Politics: The Menu for Choice, 2d ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1985), chap. 15, and Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (Summer 1983), pp. 205–35.
19. The terms are, respectively, from Deutsch et al., Political Community, and Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978).
20. See J. David Singer and Melvin Small, “The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1815-1965,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 1, 1 (1976), pp. 50–69.
21. Not to me the most persuasive explanation, though see Erich Weede, “Extended Deterrence by Superpower Alliance,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (June 1983), pp. 231–53.
22. Krasner, “Structural Causes,” p. 185.
23. Robert Jervis, “Security Regimes,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 371.
24. See Arend Lijphart, The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 11; and Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 384.
25. See Zalmay Khalilzad, “Islamic Iran: Soviet Dilemma,” Problems of Communism 33 (January-February 1984), pp. 1–20.
26. Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 34.
27. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), p. 134.
28. For the comparative data on trade I am indebted to Susan Strange, “Protectionism and World Politics,” International Organization 39 (Spring 1985). Helen Hughes and Jean Waelbroeck, “Foreign Trade and Structural Adjustment—Is There a New Protectionism?” in Hans-Gert Braun et al., eds., The European Economy in the 1980s (Aldershot: Gower, 1983), reply that the increase in protectionism during the 1970s was very small. There is some evidence that protectionism rises during periods of cyclical economic downturn, but those increases must not be mistaken for long-term trends. On the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system see Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovksy, “The End of Eras? Japan and the Western World in the 1970-1980s” (paper presented at the Japan Political Economy Research Conference, Honolulu, July 1983), p. 38: “In our view, despite excessively wide swings in real rates among currencies, the flexible exchange rate system was a way of maintaining the liberal international economic order rather than being a cause of its demise.” Also see Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 213: “Substantial erosion of the trade regime. has occurred, but. what is equally striking is the persistence of cooperation even if not always addressed to liberal ends. Trade wars have not taken place, despite economic distress. On the contrary, what we see are intensive efforts at cooperation, in response to discord in textiles, steel, electronics, and other areas.” On liberalization of the Japanese economy see Raymond Vernon, Two Hungry Giants: The United States and Japan in the Quest for Oil and Ores (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
29. Arrighi, “A Crisis of Hegemony,” p. 65. One could quarrel with the use of “national interest,” and qualify it by reference to the interests of the ruling classes, but on the whole I am not inclined to do so—major qualification would require some near-heroic assumptions about false consciousness.
30. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
31. Robert O. Keohane, “The Demand for International Regimes,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 348. Keohane’s discussion is reminiscent of Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1963).
32. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
33. Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 270: “So the United States farsightedly made short-term sacrifices—in growing financial aid, and in permitting discrimination against American exports—in order to accomplish the longer-term objective of creating a stable and prosperous international economic order in which liberal capitalism would prevail and American influence would be predominant.” The proposition that the burdens of empire almost inevitably outweigh its benefits is of course a common one. Note Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (London: Methuen, 1973): “The burdens of size consist mainly in the need to maintain a more extended bureaucracy with more intermediate layers, the growing difficulties of effective co-ordination as territorial area increases, and the heavier costs of maintaining troops on longer front lines further removed from the main sources of trustworthy manpower and supplies” (p. 19).
34. See Russett and Starr, World Politics, chap. 18.
35. Bruce Russett, What Price Vigilance? The Burdens of National Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), chap. 4.
36. Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson, “Global Wars, Public Debts, and the Long Cycle,” World Politics 36 (October 1983), pp. 489–516, carefully recognize the particular private benefits, to the commercially extended hegemon, of providing defense and deterrence for others. This should be set against the more familiar argument that military expenditures become a private “bad” by inhibiting capital formation and growth in the hegemon. For evidence see Rasler and Thompson, “Longitudinal Change in Defense Burdens, Capital Formation, and Economic Growth,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming.
37. Arthur A. Stein, “The Hegemon's Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order,” International Organization 38 (Spring 1984), pp. 355–86. For the argument that free trade is not necessarily a collective good see John Conybeare, “Public Goods, Prisoners' Dilemma, and the International Political Economy,” International Studies Quarterly 28 (March 1984), pp. 5–22.
38. Arrighi, “A Crisis of Hegemony,” p. 57.
39. Edward R. Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972); and Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The System Worked: The Irony of Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1979).
40. In his brilliant paper Duncan Snidal, “Hegemonic Stability Theory Revisited,” International Organization, forthcoming, notes that both Krasner, “State Power,” and Gilpin, War and Change, fully recognize the degree to which the postwar regimes benefited the United States in particular, and that Gilpin particularly argues that the United States was significantly able to extract contributions as a quasi-government.
41. See Keohane, After Hegemony.
42. That is, persuading someone to do something he or she would not otherwise do; see Robert A. Dahl, Modern Political Analysis, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984).
43. Robert W. Cox and Harold K. Jacobson, “The United States and World Order: On Structures of World Power and Structural Transformation” (paper presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Rio de Janeiro, August 1982), p. 7: “World hegemony is founded through a process of cultural and ideological development. This process is rooted mainly in the civil society of the founding country, though it has the support of the state in that country, and it extends to include groups from other countries.” Also see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 2: State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982): “Just as it was not possible in the West itself, from a certain stage of interdependence onwards, to rule people solely by force and physical threats, so it also became necessary, in maintaining an empire that went beyond mere plantation-land and plantation-labour, to rule people in part through themselves, through the moulding of their superegos. The outsiders absorb the code of the established groups and thus undergo a process of assimilation. Their own affect-control, their own conduct, obeys the rules of the established groups. Partially they identify themselves with them, and even though the identification may show strong ambivalencies, still their own conscience, their whole superego apparatus, follows more or less the pattern of the established groups.” Neither of these statements is meant to deny some reciprocal role of elites in the periphery in helping to shape the dominant world culture.
44. They form, for instance, a key element in conception of power. Hayward R. Alker, “Power in a Schedule Sense,” in Alker et al., eds., Mathematical Approaches to Politics (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972).
45. Arthur A. Stein, “Coordination and Collaboration: Regimes in an Anarchic World,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 324.