hegemony
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be quarter-baked: I haven't done another one until now.
Do rising powers have an intrinsic advantage in "flexibility" when compared to dominant ones? The answer to this question matters a great deal, I submit, to debates over the persistence and decline of hegemonic orders. As I've alluded to before, there's a curious blindspot in mainstream hegemonic-order theory.
On the one hand, hegemonic-order theories emphasize the significance of, well, hegemonic orders. The costs and benefits of those orders are supposed to influence the disposition of second-tier states and thus whether they challenge the dominant power. Gilpin noted, in particular, the allocation of status as a key factor in accounting for whether rising powers adopted a status-quo or revisionist approach to hegemonic orders. Ikenberry, among others, sees the character of hegemonic orders as of central importance: the US-led order, he argues, is durable because it provides "voice opportunities" for other states and involves multiple mechanisms ("self-retraining" or "self-binding" elements) that limit the potential for American predation.
On the other hand, such theorists don't really treat order itself as an object of contention. The character of the order might be important, but all the action occurs at the level of alterations in the distribution of state capacity. Hegemony lasts so long as the dominant power avoids, or prevails over, rising revisionist states. Yet, as should be obvious, hegemony isn't separable from order. A political community might stand at the apex of the international pyramid of power, but if doesn't build and maintain an order then it isn't exercising hegemony. Indeed, this is why Ikenberry invests a great deal of energy in arguing that the liberal order can persist even without unipolarity, and that states might even accept US security primacy after relative decline.
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers.
A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its ideological and material interests. After World War II the United States worked actively to promote norms and institutions consistent with a broadly "liberal internationalist" environment, albeit ones refracted through the prism of Cold War competition. After the Cold War the United States enlarged the order, however unevenly, and during the Bush Administration it sought, but generally failed, to recast that order along neoconservative lines.
The two most importnat "mainstream" pieces to focus on the normative dimensions of hegemonic orders are probably John Ruggie's "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order" and G. John Ikenberry's and Charles Kupchan's "Socialization and Hegemonic Power."
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