Bringing Hegemony Back, Clark, International Affairs

Bringing hegemony back in:
the United States and international order
IAN CLARK *
There are three problems in how the idea of hegemony is conventionally deployed
with regard to the current international order. First, even those who think it a
good thing (mainly using residual variants of Hegemonic Stability Theory [HST])
concede that hegemony is decreasingly sustainable in emerging conditions.
Second,only those who think hegemony thoroughly malign consider it to have
a durable future. Third, both sides hold an unquestioned assumption that there is
a single model of hegemony: whether it is benign or malign, we all at least agree
on what the beast looks like. All three of these entrenched positions have led to a
distorted and impoverished discussion of the potential of hegemony. This article
reviews the muddled state of the hegemony debate, stakes out a positive case on
behalf of hegemony, and does so by revisiting the historical precedents to establish
its subtly diverse institutional forms.
It has become fashionable enough across the past decade to refer to US hegemony
as the defining feature of the post-Cold War international order. Such claims
seldom rest on anything more than a view of US primacy, namely that the system
is now unipolar, and the US enjoys an unprecedented preponderance of material
resources within it. There have more recently been premonitions of the possible
end of this hegemony, as the US is predicted to lose either its will or its nerve to
sustain that role, or even more importantly because of US decline in the face
of the rise of the rest.1 This article stands that conventional analysis on its head.
It starts from a wholly different understanding of hegemony, as rooted in social
legitimacy.2 Accordingly, it rejects the contention that we are now experiencing,
or have recently experienced, any American hegemony at all. Appealing to the
same logic, it argues that evidence for the rise of others does not, by itself, amount
to any decisive objection to the development of hegemony in the near future.
The key question, as Barry Buzan reminds us, is whether the United States will
This article has been written as part of the authors ESRC Professorial Fellowship and he gratefully acknowledges the support of the ESRC. He also wishes to thank Dr Rachel Owen for research assistance.
1
Michael Cox, Is the United States in declineagain? An essay, International Affairs 83: 4, July 2007, pp. 64353;
M. J. Williams, The empire writes back (to Michael Cox), International Affairs 83: 5, Sept. 2007, pp. 94550;
R. Singh, The exceptional empire: why the United States will not declineagain, International Politics 45: 5,
2008, pp. 57193; F. Zakaria, The post-American world (London: Allen Lane, 2008).
2
This extends my earlier work in Ian Clark, Legitimacy in international society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
*
International Affairs 85: 1 (2009) 2336
2009 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Ian Clark
prove capable of recruiting followers.3 Hegemony, as advanced here, describes an
international order project that confers on the United States a leading, but circumscribed, role. Moreover, the possible textures of that role can better be grasped
after closer reflection on the relevant historical precedents.
What is meant by this hegemony? It does not refer simply to a set of material
conditions in which one state is predominant: it is not, in other words, primacy
alone.4 Neither is it something that is unilaterally possessed by the hegemon, nor
something that the dominant state has in its pocket, to save or squander at will.
Rather, it is a status bestowed by others, and rests on recognition by them. This
recognition is given in return for the bearing of special responsibilities. In short,
by hegemony is meant an institutionalized practice of special rights and responsibilities
conferred on a state with the resources to lead.
This draws explicitly on the international society approach to international
relations.5 International society interpretations generally seek to negotiate an
accommodation between systems of power relations and shared normative frameworks. They take both equally seriously. This enables such recurrent practices
to be regarded as institutions. Classically, these theorists have specified a number
of such institutions of international society: international law, diplomacy, war,
the balance of power andmost directly relevant for this argumentthe role of
the Great Powers.6 Historically, international society has recognized the collective
special role and status of the Great Powersthe permanent five members of the
United Nations Security Council provide one clear example. This has been done,
it is claimed, because it simplifies international life, and helps instil a degree of
central direction to it. So, in the past, international society has been able to institutionalize disparities of power and hierarchical degrees. Can it now do so in the
case of hegemony?
Once a hegemon? A hegemon still?
The present state of the hegemony debate is, to say the least, confusing. There
are broadly three types of story commonly told about US hegemony since 1945:
the tale from continuity; the tale from structural discontinuity in 1990; and the
tale from agential discontinuity at the beginning of the 2000s. For some analysts,
American hegemony stretches back unbroken to 1945. Having emerged as a
hegemon-in-waiting in the early decades of the twentieth century, the United
States fully embraced this role after 1945, and has played it ever since. For the US
power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for 60 years. Hegemony
3
Barry Buzan, A leader without followers? The United States in world politics after Bush, International Politics
45: 5, 2008, pp. 55470.
4
This is elaborated in Ian Clark, How hierarchical can international society be?, International Relations 23: 3,
2009, forthcoming.
5
For a fuller statement of this argument, see Ian Clark, Towards an English-school theory of hegemony,
European Journal of International Relations 15: 2, 2009, forthcoming. The study as a whole will eventually appear
as Ian Clark, Hegemony in international society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011).
6
Hedley Bull, The anarchical society: a study of order in world politics (London: Macmillan, 1977).
24
International Affairs 85: 1, 2009
Bringing hegemony back in

has been a way of life.7 From this perspective, it is unquestionable that the United
States remains a hegemon still, whatever the future may hold.
Bruce Cumings, among many, shares this note of continuity. Describing the
postwar order, he insists that it has been a hegemonic one, and it has hadand
must havea hegemonic leader.8 Others concur: If ever the term hegemony
were appropriately applied, it is to what the United States became in the latter half
of the twentieth century and now remains.9 A surprisingly wide constituency of
analysts shares this perspective, even when having little else in common. Historian
Eric Hobsbawm, for example, speaks confidently of the US hegemony of the
second half of the last century, resting upon its enormous wealth.10 Chomsky
meanwhile insists that there has been continuity in the basic missions of global
management since the end of the war, even if there has now emerged a new
declaratory strategy aimed at permanent global hegemony.11
The second perspective contrasts sharply, in some fundamental respects, with the
above. It attests not to continuity but to discontinuity. At some finite point around
the early 1970s, the United States ceased to be the hegemon. U.S. hegemony began
during the Second World War, we are told, and peaked some thirty years later.12
Elsewhere, Wallerstein agrees that we have to start in 1945 when the United States
became hegemonic, really hegemonic, but is of the view that this lasted only about
twenty-five years.13 It was only the new constellation of power consequent upon
the end of the Cold War that subsequently allowed it to resume its former, or new,
hegemonic role. This is important because it emphasizes a radical break between the
1970s and 1980s, taken together, and the following period from the 1990s onwards.
In short, there are two major ingredients in this perspective. One is that the United
States initially experienced a period of decline, such that its hegemonic position
was eroded; the second is that, under the new conditions of unipolarity after 1990,
it became possible for that role to be resumed, or reinvented.
This perspective then focuses upon the restoration of US hegemony after 1990.
Whatever became of that earlier hegemony during the 1970s and 1980s, it was
the end of the Cold War that created the opportunity for its renewal.14 The only
interesting questions about this new hegemony, we were told, concerned how
stable and durable it might prove; whether it was so unnatural a condition that it
would evoke new forms of balancing behaviour to displace it.
7
P. S. Golub, The sun sets early on the American century, Le Monde diplomatique, Oct. 2007, at http://www.
globalpolicy.org/empire/challenges/overstretch/2007/10sunsets.htm, accessed 20 Nov. 2008.
8
Bruce Cumings, The United States: hegemonic still?, Review of International Studies 25: 5, 1999, pp. 2856.
9
M. H. Hunt, The American ascendancy: how the United States gained and wielded global dominance (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 314.
10
Eric Hobsbawm, War, peace and hegemony at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in C. Chari, ed.,
War, peace and hegemony in a globalized world: the changing balance of power in the twenty-first century (London:
Routledge, 2008), p. 22.
11
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or survival: Americas quest for global dominance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p.
16.
12
R. Du Boff, US hegemony: continuing decline, enduring danger, Monthly Review 55: 7, Dec. 2003, p. 1.
13
I. Wallerstein, US weakness and the struggle for hegemony, Monthly Review 55: 3, JulyAug. 2003, at http://
www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2003/0812hegemony.htm, accessed 20 Nov. 2008.
14
Michael Cox, Whatever happened to American decline? International relations and the new United States
hegemony, New Political Economy 6: 3, 2002, pp. 31140.
25
Ian Clark
Finally, those accounts that trace the origins of a new American hegemony
after 2001 simply extend the logic of the same arguments: the incoming Bush
administration exploited the potential of the system to a greater degree than had
been attempted during the 1990s.15 However, the emphasis now shifts away from
hegemony as a structural product, and towards hegemony as an agential design.
Hegemony, in this latter understanding, needs to be approached as a policy
choice, and the emphasis shifts to the volition of the new Bush administration,
especially in the aftermath of 9/11. Hegemony is the new agency, not the new
structure.
Those who espouse this view locate it in a grand strategy aimed at preventing the
emergence of new great powers that could challenge US hegemony.16 Although
already clearly articulated by previous administrations, this policy became much
more pronounced after 9/11, and for this reason it is common enough to date
a new phase of US hegemony from this period. Its centrepiece was the Bush
Doctrine in its various manifestations, which encapsulated a largely unilateral
project of hegemonic renewal and global transformation.17 At the very least, if
not ushering in an entirely new hegemony, the terms of that hegemony have been
changed by the doctrine.18
Collectively, the administrations doctrinal statements were taken to represent
a formal promulgation of hegemony on the part of the United States.19 Above all,
the National Security Strategy in 2002 was understood as the declared intent of
the most powerful state in history to maintain its hegemony through the threat
or use of military force.20 This was implicit also in the Nuclear Posture Review,
and its expressed intent to dissuade future competitors.21 Running through the
Bush Doctrine as a whole is a commitment to the establishment of American
hegemony, within which the dominant power behaves quite differently from the
others.22 Others see the Bush Doctrine as giving expression to a more deep-seated
reorientation in US strategy whereby Americas temporary Cold War hegemony
in Western Europe and East Asia should be converted into permanent U.S. global
hegemony.23 Such an American hegemony, especially in its military sense, has
been considered unassailable for at least a decade.24
15
C.-P. David and D. Gronding, eds, Hegemony or empire? The redefinition of US power under George W. Bush (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
C. Layne, The unipolar illusion revisited: the coming end of the United States unipolar moment, International Security 31: 2, 2006, p. 12.
17
Christian Reus-Smit, The misleading mystique of Americas material power, Australian Journal of International
Affairs 57: 3, 2003, p. 423.
18
Martin Griffiths, Beyond the Bush doctrine: American hegemony and world order, Australian Journal of American Studies 23: 1, 2004, p. 63.
19
John L. Gaddis, A grand strategy of transformation, Foreign Policy, no. 133, Nov.Dec. 2002, pp. 507; D. J.
Caraley, Editors foreword: some early lessons, in Caraley, ed., American hegemony: preventive war, Iraq, and
imposing democracy (New York: Academy of Political Science, 2007), p. vii.
20
Chomsky, Hegemony or survival, p. 11; Neta Crawford, Principia Leviathan: moral duties of American hegemony, Naval War College Review, 57: 3, 2004, p. 71.
21
R. Jervis, Understanding the Bush doctrine, in Caraley, ed., American hegemony, pp. 1415.
22
Jervis, Understanding the Bush doctrine, p. 14.
23
M. Lind, Beyond American hegemony, National Interest, MayJune 2007, at http://www.newamerica.net/
publications/articles/2007/beyond_American_hegemony, accessed 20 Nov. 2008.
24
K. Bajpai and V. Sahni, Hegemony and strategic choice, in Chari, ed., War, peace and hegemony, p. 105.
16
26

This all amounts to a terribly confusing history, and we might be well advised
to abandon the term hegemony at this point. However, in the specific terms
advancedhere, little of this history refers to any kind of hegemony; it simply
refers to stages in primacyits quest, realization, and possible loss. Accordingly,
we need a stricter concept. If we define hegemony such that a consensual legitimacy is a necessary part of it rather than an optional extra, then the recent phase of
US strategy represents no kind of hegemony at all. At best, it is a tale of hegemony
lost. In terms of a social theory of hegemonywhereby hegemony becomes
an accepted institution of international societythere has then been no recent
American hegemony, its primacy in material power notwithstanding. The focus
must then shift away from the attributes of the putative hegemon, and the resources
at its command, towards the perceptions and responses of the followers.
The great paradox is that a US hegemony conceived of in these terms is now
arguably ever more necessary at a time when its primary conditions may be ever
less attainable. The necessity arises in the context of the challenges currently facing
the international orderclimate change above alland the need for consensual
leadership to respond with a sense of urgency.25 Drawing his own distinction
between hegemony and empire, Schroeder concurs. He insists that, historically,
real advances in international order have been connected with choices leading
powers have made for durable, tolerable hegemony. Moreover, he thinks, recent
trends in the contemporary system have made hegemony more needed, and more
potentially stable and beneficial.26 What light, if any, can the history of past
hegemonies shed on this?
History abhors hegemony:27 revisiting some exceptions
Historical study of past hegemonies has been driven hitherto mainly by world
system theorists or by proponents of HST.28 Both have assessed the cases largely
in terms of the ability and willingness of the hegemon to perform that role:
neither has been much concerned with the social reception of its exercise. This is
the analytical turn that must now be made. Such a focus opens up the possibility
of hegemony having not a single form, shaped entirely by asymmetry of power,
but multiple forms, dependent also upon social context and scope of acceptance.
What are the historical precedents that might inform such a recast typology of
hegemony? The seeming decline of HST has been driven in part by disenchantment with its historical cases. If only single states qualify, then the roll-call of
hegemons is very short indeed. The plausible recent candidates, and certainly
25

26
Bruce W. Jentleson, Americas global role after Bush, Survival 49: 3, 2007, p. 192.
P. W. Schroeder, Is the U.S. an empire?, in D. Skidmore, ed., Paradoxes of power: US foreign policy in a changing
world (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007), pp. 734.
27
Charles Krauthammer, The unipolar moment revisited, National Interest, Winter 20022003, p. 8.
28
On the former, see e.g. J. Friedman and C. Chase-Dunn, eds, Hegemonic declines: present and past (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2005); P. J. Taylor, The way the modern world works: world hegemony to world impasse (Chichester: Wiley,
1996); I. Wallerstein, Three hegemonies, in P. OBrien and A. Clesse, eds, Two hegemonies: Britain 18461914
and the United States 19412001 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
27
Ian Clark
those hallowed in HST, are reduced to nineteenth-century Britain and the United
States after 1945. This is hardly an impressive set.
An alternative way forward is to consider the historical cases from a revisionist
perspective, concentrating above all upon the dynamics of legitimacy generated
within them. The point is to bring out how past hegemonies have operated, not
just within asymmetric distributions of power, but also within diverse social
contexts of legitimacy. To facilitate this, two sets of distinctions are made. The
first concerns the hegemon itself, and whether it is singular or collective. The
second concerns the scope of the social constituency within which the hegemons
claims are legitimated: this can be either inclusive (extending to much of international society) or exclusive (restricted to one grouping or coalition of states).
This analytical framework presents a rich opportunity to investigate the diversity of hegemonic structures. The object is not to deny the relevance of distributions of material power. It is, instead, to stress that these distributions are, in
turn, mediated through social and normative lenses. In each, degrees of voluntary
compliance with hegemonic leadership were made possible by the specific attributes of the distribution of power, but only in conjunction with distinctive social
contexts. This offers a more rounded understanding of hegemony, as well as the
prospect of greater diversity in its practice.
Three cases will be reviewed. The first is least known from this particular
perspective: it is the Concert of Europe during the nineteenth century. While
often discussed, either as a group norm of the Great Powers, or as an embryonic
security regime, it is less commonly considered under the rubric of hegemony.29
However, it is precisely as an instance of collective hegemony that some have
approached it.30 Although hegemony is not normally considered in this collective
form,31 the Concertdespite this unusual featurenonetheless sheds interesting
light on legitimacy dynamics within this distinctive setting.
The second case is the nineteenth-century pax britannica, with Britain as
hegemon. There are many qualifications and objections to be entered against this
conventional interpretation. Nonetheless, rather than dismiss outright the British
experience as falling short of the standard model of hegemony, it is profitable
to consider it as a hegemonic relationship, distinct in its patterns of legitimacy
from the Concert and, subsequently, also from the United States. It was indeed
a singular hegemony, limited in functional scope, and yet operational within the
broad compass of then existing international society. It depended upon a stable
distribution of power more than acting as its source.
29
See e.g. R. B. Elrod, Concert of Europe: fresh look at an international system, World Politics 28: 2, 1976, pp.
15974; R. Jervis, Security regimes, International Organization 36: 2, 1982, pp. 35778; K. Booth and N. J.
Wheeler, The security dilemma: fear, cooperation and trust in world politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
30
For collective hegemony see A. Watson, The evolution of international society (London: Routledge, 1992), and
Watson, Hegemony and history (London: Routledge, 2007).
31
Most writers restrict the term to a single dominant state, as a defining characteristic of hegemony. See R.
Gilpin, War and change in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. Mearsheimer, The
tragedy of great power politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 2. An exception, close to my usage of collective, is
that of institutionalized group hegemony. See A. Bailin, From traditional to group hegemony: the G7, the liberal
economic order and the coreperiphery gap (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
28

The third case is the familiar one of the United States from 1945 until the early
1970s. While usually offered in support a general theory of hegemonic stability,
what this example in fact demonstrates is not a generic model of hegemony at
all, but a distinctively coalitional version of it. The hegemon is singular, as in the
case of Britain. However, to the extent that consent was given to US leadership,
and public goods were distributed, this was only within the exclusive group of
states that chose actively to identify with the United States. The hegemons social
constituency was then confined to its own coalition.32
What these instances offer is not so much a series of cases to be tested against
a pure theory of hegemony as an opportunity to develop variant ideal types.
Rather than leading us to conclude that hegemony has never properly existed, the
historical record points rather to its having been embodied partially in a variety
of distinct institutional settings. Moreover, in terms of current policy relevance,
any pure hegemony is extremely unlikely in any event, given the highly diverse
constituencies present in the contemporary international system. Partial instantiations, however, do remain possible. In short, we can dispense with the notion of
hegemony as a single and reified political form, and present it instead as a range
of ideal types. Any instantiation of hegemony today is much more likely to be
a composite of these forms than one single version. Tentatively, we can begin to
explore a typology of these forms: collective, singular and coalitional. Each captures
distinct legitimacy dimensions, and, in combination, the three provide a template
for a more sophisticated form than the staple found in the existing hegemony
literature.
The Concert of Europe as a collective hegemon
That the Concert was a form of hegemony has been suggested in two related
variants. Adam Watson develops his notion of a diffuse hegemony,33 and elsewhere affirmed that the nineteenth-century Concert was a collective hegemony.34
Gerry Simpson adds his distinctive interpretation of the Concert as a legalized
hegemony. This resulted from four sources: the constitutional or legal basis to
the dominance; sovereign equality among the powers themselves; a directorate of
Great Powers acting in concert; and acceptance by consent from below as well as
imposition from above.35
While the Concert is collective, it is also on this account a legal regime. The
reasons are that the relationship between the Great Powers and the medium and
smaller countries was institutionalised, regularised and formalised for the first
time, that the Great Powers developed a set of legal rules to manage areas of
32
This echoes early Greek usage. The hgemonia of greatest interest in Herodotus is the supreme command of
the Greek coalition against Xerxes: John Wickersham, Hegemony and Greek historians (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 1994), p. 1.
33
Watson, Hegemony and history, p. 20.
34
Watson, Hegemony and history, p. 98.
35
Gerry Simpson, Great powers and outlaw states: unequal sovereigns in the international legal order (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 67.
29
Ian Clark
international social life, and that they had a constituting moment in the Congress
of Vienna.36 In short, hegemony is a juridical category dependent on the recognition of rights and duties, and the consent of other states in the system. The
outcome, he notes, is that legalized hegemony is much more effective, on the
whole, than other forms of dominance.37
These views directly raise the issue of legitimacy, and the degree to which
the Concert was consensual. On this, verdicts clearly vary. Charles Webster
was adamant that the Smaller Powers resented the European Alliance, and that
they always regarded it with great suspicion.38 He noted, however, that Lord
Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, was acutely sensitive to this concern,
and determined to address it.39 Others take a more benign view, recording that the
Concert was acknowledged as legitimate by the other actors,40 and that the Great
Powers operated with the wider consent of the lesser states.41
A collective hegemony, it has been claimed, may take on characteristics of a
single hegemony. Castlereagh was himself convinced of that possibility, as he made
clear to his prime minister, Lord Liverpool, on 20 October 1818 at the Congress at
Aix-la-Chapelle: It really appears to me to be a new discovery in the European
Government and giving to the great Powers the efficiency and almost the simplicity of a
single State.42 But how much reality was there to this? One of the fullest discussions was provided in 1818 by that key official and publicist of the Congress and
Concert, Friedrich von Gentz:
In place of the principle of equilibrium there has succeeded a principle of general
union, uniting all the states collectively with a federative bond, under the guidance of the
five principal Powers The states of the second, third, and fourth rank submit tacitly,
though nothing has ever been stipulated in this regard, to the decisions made in common
by the preponderant Powers; and so Europe seems really to form a grand political family,
united under the auspices of a high tribunal of its own creation, whose members guarantee
to themselves and to all parties concerned the peaceful enjoyment of their respective
rights.43
The conferral of authority on the Great Power directorate is the means to

maintaining the stability of the system, and is assisted by the checks among the
powers themselves. This provides safeguards to both great and small. The Concert
can be seen as an attempt to resolve the seeming contradiction that a collective
hegemony might prevent the emergence of a singular hegemony, but by replicating
36

37

38
Simpson, Great powers, pp. 734.

Simpson, Great powers, p. 70.
C. K. Webster, The European alliance, 18151825 (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1929), p. 9; Watson, The
evolution of international society, p. 241.
39
C. K. Webster, The foreign policy of Castlereagh 181522 (London: Bell, 1925), pp. 69, 51011.
40
A. Osiander, The states system of Europe 16401990: peacemaking and the condition of international stability (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 245.
41
Michael Broers, Europe after Napoleon: revolution, reaction and romanticism, 18141848 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996), pp. 1011; F. R. Bridge and R. Bullen, The great powers and the European states system
18141914, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2005), p. 2; Simpson, Great powers, p. 107.
42
Quoted in H. G. Schenk, The aftermath of the Napoleonic wars: the concert of European experiment (London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Truber, 1947), p. 126 (emphasis added).
43
Quoted in Mack Walker, ed., Metternichs Europe (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 712.
30

its artifice. If hegemony was the problem, it offered also its best antidote. William
Gladstone, the future British prime minister, was seduced by this very logic, as
he avowed to the House of Commons on 3 August 1855. There is but one way
of maintaining permanently what I may presume to call the great international
policy and law of Europe, but one way of keeping within bounds any one of the
Powers and that is, by maintaining the moral unionthe effective concord
of Europe.44 On this view, the instigators of the Concert pursued a collective
hegemony as one safeguard against the emergence of a singular one.
A collective hegemony draws legitimacy from the reassurance to smaller states
entailed by the dispersal of power within the hegemon itself. It enjoys, to some
degree, the best of both worlds: it affords central direction and management, and
the collective goods associated with a concentration of power, while retaining the
essential checks and balances normally available only from a dispersal of power.
The price is some sacrifice of the particular interests of the smaller states, when
maintenance of the Great Power group norm is otherwise at risk. Its virtue, overall,
is its potential for balance between these two tendencies.
Britain as a singular hegemon
Nineteenth-century Britain illustrates hegemony of a different type. Unlike the
Concert, Britain was a singular hegemon. However, like the Concerts, its social
constituency was potentially inclusive (even if this extended only partially beyond
the confines of Europe). The suggestion that the international economy of the
nineteenth century had taken on its liberal and open qualities as a reflection of the
exercise of British power has been most fully elaborated by Robert Gilpin: Great
Britain, and the United States, created and enforced the rules of a liberal international economic order. British and American policies fostered free trade and
freedom of capital movements. These great powers supplied the key currency
and managed the international monetary system.45 Britains role has most often
been assessed as a stabilizer in this sense, a view that has recently been challenged
in fundamental ways. Nonetheless, if attention is shifted from Britains material
power to the conditions that made its role relatively tolerable to others, it offers
one interesting model of hegemony, in which Britains weaknesses as well as its
strengths come to the fore.
Hegemony, as applied to Britains position in the international system from
18701914, it has been roundly stated, cannot bear the weight of explanatory
power that some have tried to thrust upon it.46 Moreover, it is considered fallacious
to concentrate solely upon a singular hegemony, as to do so ignores the collective
dimension in the general dominance of the European great powers over their own
44
Carsten Holbraad, The concert of Europe: a study in German and British international theory (London: Longman,
1970), p. 145.
45
Gilpin, War and change, p. 145.
46
Andrew Walter, World power and world money: the role of hegemony and international monetary order (New York: St
Martins, 1991), p. 112.
31
Ian Clark
spheres of influence.47 Similarly, the gold standard mechanism was dependent on
the collective hegemony of the European center relative to the non-European
periphery.48 Economic historian Patrick OBrien has spearheaded the most
sustained critique, dismissing the myth of two successive hegemonies.49
Hegemons may lead, it has been observed, but they need followers,50 and this
surely is the critical test. If Britain led, was it followed? If any one state was capable
of playing such an economic role at the time, it could have been Britain alone.
This was certainly so with regard to free trade. Yet in this liberal interlude from
184670, it has been confirmed, only Britain had the power to change the political
debate within those states by its propagation of liberal ideology and to make those
states not only do what Britain wanted, but also to want what Britain wanted.51 Its
ability to lead on this issue arose from its other fiscal resources, produced by direct
taxation, which liberated it from dependence on tariffs.52 Nonetheless, the main
beneficiaries of the economic goods provided by Britain were largely confined to
the core economies of Europe;53 and Britains remit in encouraging others to free
trade did not extend, for instance, to the United States.54
How concerted and systematic was the British effort in establishing a free trade
system? A number of empirical studies express doubts. The level of British effort
seems less than that suggested by the theory, is one such finding, and it is clear
that the effort was uneven.55 It is not that there was no such effort: but it was
intermittent, as were its successes, and there is no clear evidence that Britain was
making a major impact on the tariff policies of the European states.56 Moreover,
the absence of British influence can be demonstrated negatively by its inability to
stop the tide from turning back towards protectionism after the 1870s.57
If there are hard questions to be asked of Britains role as an economic hegemon,
its role as the provider of a security order is even more suspectnot least given
the limited nature of British military power, and the very ethos of the British
47

48
Walter, World power and world money, p. 111.

Barry Eichengreen, Hegemonic stability theories of the international monetary system, discussion paper 193
(London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 1987), p. 33.
49
Patrick OBrien, The Pax Britannica and American hegemony: precedent, antecedent or just another history?,
in OBrien and Clesse, eds, Two hegemonies, p. 55.
50
Arthur Stein, The hegemons dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the international economic
order, International Organization 38: 2, 1984, p. 358.
51
Patrick OBrien and G. A. Pigman, Free trade, British hegemony and the international economic order in the
nineteenth century, Review of International Studies 18: 2, 1992, p. 112. Albert Imlah stresses that British influence
was as a model for emulation: see his Economic elements in the Pax Britannica: studies in British foreign trade in the
nineteenth century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), pp. 26.
52
Anthony C. Howe, Free trade cosmopolitanism in Britain, 18461914, in OBrien and Clesse, eds, Two hegemonies, pp. 934. The number of dutiable goods in Britain fell from 1,146 in 1848 to 48 in 1860. See Kenneth
Fielden, The rise and fall of free trade, in Christopher J. Bartlett, ed., Britain pre-eminent: studies of British world
influence in the nineteenth century (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 82.
53
Walter, World power and world money, p. 97; Robert Gilpin, The political economy of international relations (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 127.
54
Stephen D. Krasner, State power and the structure of international trade, World Politics 28: 3, 1976, p. 336;
Stein, The hegemons dilemma, p. 367.
55
Timothy J. McKeown, Hegemonic stability theory and 19th century tariff levels in Europe, International
Organization 37: 1, 1983, p. 88.
56
McKeown, Hegemonic stability theory, p. 85.
57
G. A. Pigman, Hegemony and trade liberalization policy: Britain and the Brussels sugar convention of 1902,
Review of International Studies 23: 2, 1997, p. 190.
32

state. Its industrial revolution had not provided access to military hardware and
manpower,58 nor did the political balance within the British state readily allow
for their extraction. Strikingly, Paul Kennedy assesses that in the mid-Victorian
period Britain was probably less mobilized for conflict than at any time since
the early Stuarts.59
There is widespread consensus on the relative lack of decisive British influence
in the European theatre. Even if Britain had been a European hegemon in 1815,
it became unusually detached in the performance of that role. For most of the
century, Britain virtually withdrew from active engagement in European power
politics,60 and any involvement remained largely peripheral.61 Schroeders judgement is that between 1815 and 1855 Britain played a certain kind of leadership in
Europe, and he therefore describes that period as one of half-hegemony. This,
however, was wholly eclipsed over the next two decadesparadoxically, usually
taken to be the zenith of British economic power. It is hard to find two decades
in British history from 1688 to 1945, he pronounces unequivocally, in which it
exerted less influence in Europe or control over the international system than 1855
to 1875.62
There is then the widespread depiction that, in seeking its future outside
Europe, Britain relied upon stability on the continent as a permissive condition.
British ambitions did not extend to establishing stability in Europe, but rather
required it as a precondition of its objectives elsewhere. To this extent, Britain
has been described as a free rider.63 Nor could British power, on its own, furnish
stability beyond Europe, the Royal Navy notwithstanding. Britain relied upon the
co-option of other powers for this task,64 and was just as evidently the missing
hegemon in the face of such crises as the American Civil War.65
To the limited extent that Britain acted as a leader, it did so as a singular hegemon.
However, the exercise of this role was facilitated by the collective hegemony of the
European Concert, of which Britain was a part. Britain could, in this way, operate
through a singular and a collective hegemony at the same time. While Britains
singular role was more apparent in the economic than in the security sphere, the
two dimensions cannot be rigidly separated, as both were integrally related to
Britains international role, and to the viability of its form of state.
As a consequence, where British hegemony was accepted this was as much for
negative as for positive reasons. Critically, the limits of Britains military power
intrinsic to the kind of state it wasoffered some reassurance to continental rivals.
58
Paul Kennedy, The rise and fall of the great powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 152.
59
Kennedy, The rise and fall of the great powers, pp. 1523.
60
OBrien, The Pax Britannica and American hegemony, p. 12.
61
Muriel E. Chamberlain, Pax Britannica? British foreign policy 17891914 (London: Longman, 1988), p. 7; Kennedy,
The rise and fall of the great powers, p. 153.
62
P. W. Schroeder, Historical realists vs neo-realist theory, International Security 19: 1, 1994, p. 144.
63
David Reynolds, Britannia overruled: British policy and world power in the 20th century, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman,
2000), p. 18.
64
OBrien, The Pax Britannica and American hegemony, p. 12.
65
Peter Thompson, The case of the missing hegemon: British non-intervention in the American civil war,
Security Studies 16: 1, 2007, pp. 96132; Richard Little, British neutrality versus offshore balancing in the
American civil war: the English school strikes back, Security Studies 16: 1, 2007, pp. 6895.
33
Ian Clark
The other side of the coin was a geopolitical landscape marked by the absence
of any rival hegemon.66 This had two effects. First, the exclusions from Britains
order did not result from any structured rivalry with a competitor. Second, it was
not the presence of a threatening rival that encouraged supporters to commit to
Britains order. Hegemony was not promoted by a context of strategic competition. In this it differed from its successor.
On the economic front, compliance with Britains hegemonywhere it was
to be foundresulted primarily from emulation of what was seen as a successful
social and economic model, rather than from direct leverage to reduce tariffs or
commit to the gold standard. Even those most critical of the claim that Britain
acted as the stabilizer concede that the model of industrial and financial success
which Britain represented played some role in encouraging other states,67 and that
its influence was as much cultural as coercive.68
The United States as a coalitional hegemon
There is widespread agreement that the United States emerged as a hegemon at
the end of the Second World War. The only issue to trouble this consensus is
the status of the socialist world that opted out of the US sphere. Was the United
States hegemon of half the world only? The United States exercised a singular
hegemony, but within a social constituency that was distinctively coalitional.
The strategy of institution-building was central to that coalitional outcome. A
binding institution is symbolic of the restraint to which the hegemon is willing
to commit in order to reassure the secondary states. After the Second World War,
the United States promoted a diversity of institutions, spanning the political,
economic and security fields,69 a project that has been described as remarkable
and unprecedented.70 US officials, we are told, made a self-conscious effort to
infuse their creation with a sense of legitimacy and reciprocal consent.71 All
these elements provided reassurance and legitimacy despite the huge asymmetries of power.72 This effort can be discerned in particular strategies of delegation,
for example under the Marshall Plan, when the United States self-consciously
attempted to hand over its planning initiative to the Europeans themselves.73
It was not the series of institutions created in the second half of the 1940s
that cumulatively issued in US hegemony: rather, these institutions became
possible only because a group of states had already accepted hegemony as the
basic organizing principle for their sphere of international society. It was within
66

67

68
Christopher J. Bartlett, Introduction, in Bartlett, ed., Britain pre-eminent, p. 5.

Walter, World power and world money, pp. 912.
OBrien, The Pax Britannica and American hegemony, pp. 1718; OBrien and Pigman, Free trade, British
hegemony, p. 112.
69
G. John Ikenberry, After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 164.
70
G. John Ikenberry, Liberal order and imperial ambition (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 5.
71
Ikenberry, After victory, p. 202.
72
Ikenberry, After victory, p. 166.
73
David P. Calleo, Beyond American hegemony: the future of the American alliance (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987),
p.30.
34

this constituency of alliesand only therethat US hegemony came to enjoy
reasonablecertainly not absoluteconsent and acceptability. There remains
something very distinctive about American action within this post-1945 western
system. It enjoyed recognition not by all the other Great Powers, or by inter
national society in general, but only from within its coalitional group.
Conclusion
If we are to think about any kind of contemporary hegemony, a single model
can safely be discarded. The actual historical practice has been richer, both with
regard to the number of actors that constitute the hegemon (singular or collective), and also with reference to the social constituency (universal or coalitional)
within which the hegemonic role is (to some degree) accepted. Previous attempts
to shoehorn this diversity into a single model have simply fed disquiet about the
historical cases, with resulting loss of interest in the potential of hegemony generally. We have drawn the wrong conclusion: it is not the historical examples that are
deficient, butthe application to them of a uniform and reified concept. A revised
appreciation of the historical casesuncovering not just the material springs
of hegemony, but also its dynamics of legitimacybrings out this diversity of
forms.74 With these models available, the potential of hegemony for the current
international order can be explored in an interesting new light. It is, of course,
naive to imply that any future institution of hegemony needs necessarily to be
limited to past historical patterns. Nonetheless, this exercise opens our minds to
the plurality of forms that such hegemony might possibly take.
Above all, the richness of these models moves the discussion beyond the limited
confines of primacy. The framing of the debate about contemporary international
order by this narrow view has been highly detrimental. The United States continues
to enjoy substantial, albeit qualified, primacy in international affairs, but without
this currently translating into hegemony in any of the above forms.75 Indeed, most
analysts would probably dismiss any idea of an American hegemonyunderstood
as a condition of legitimate US leadership within international societyas largely
unattainable in present conditions.76 If by American hegemony it is meant that the
United States could become as predominant globally as it was after 1945 within
the Atlantic region, and evoke similarly high levels of voluntary compliance, that
scepticism seems fully warranted. The more modest possibility opened up here is
that hegemony, considered as some composite of these models, might nonetheless
emerge as one constructive element of future international order.
This would entail some combination of roles to balance the differing demands
of the sundry constituencies of international society. At the very least, this would
74
As recognized by Joseph Nye: a simple model of the United States as a hegemonic successor to the United
kingdom no longer captures the complex leadership role America must play in the twenty-first century: Nye,
Recovering American leadership, Survival 50: 1, 2007, p. 56.
75
The current proposals being mooted in the United States for Leagues or Concerts of Democracies may be
understood as the latest version of a US coalitional model. See Ian Clark, Democracy in international
society, Millennium 37: 3, 2009, forthcoming.
76
Buzan, A leader without followers?, makes the sceptical case very effectively.
35
Ian Clark
be reflected in some degree of regional and functional variegation: it is unnecessary to think that one form fits all. A plausible working hypothesis is that any
singular hegemony is likely to represent an unstable fulcrum, or tipping point,
always prone to tip towards either collective or coalitional forms. Negatively, any
such tilt is certain to aggravate the potential tension between those two forms.
Positively, it is the singular hegemon alone that has any possibility of keeping these
two tendencies in check, and of acting to minimize the disruptive incompatibilities
between them.
At present, no single version of hegemony seems viable on its own. As a
composite, these types map out a hegemonic project that is respectful of the diversity in international society, its traditional nervousness about too much concentration of power, and its already existing expressions within the highly developed
western system. At the same time, it acknowledges that a concentration of power
is, whether we like it or not, an inescapable constituent of contemporary order.
The political challenge is to find a tolerably consensual basis on which to make
most effective use of the distribution of power we face, rather than indulging the
futile wish to start from one that is different, however much more appealing it
might seem. A different world may possibly emerge in the next 2030 years, but
what is needed is an effective blueprint for action in the interim. In meeting this
challenge, hegemony has its own distinctive contribution to make. This article
offers a messy, but more realistic, version than that commonly posited. It seeks
what all forms of legitimate hegemony have the potential to deliver, namely the
exploitation of asymmetries of power for collective advantage. This is a principle
that international society has been persuaded to accept in the past, and its benefits
are potentially even greater today.
36

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Christopher J. Bartlett, Introduction, in Bartlett, ed., Britain pre-eminent, p. 5.

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