hegemony, institutionalism and us foreign policy: theory and practice in comparative historical...

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Hegemony, institutionalism and USforeign policy: theory and practice incomparative historical perspectiveMark Beeson & Richard HiggottPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Mark Beeson & Richard Higgott (2005) Hegemony, institutionalism and USforeign policy: theory and practice in comparative historical perspective, Third World Quarterly,26:7, 1173-1188, DOI: 10.1080/01436590500235777

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Hegemony, Institutionalism and USForeign Policy: theory and practice incomparative historical perspective

MARK BEESON & RICHARD HIGGOTT

ABSTRACT This paper explores the theoretical and policy implications ofcontemporary American hegemony. A key argument is that the developmentof US hegemony generally, and the distinctive turn in US foreign policy that hasoccurred in the wake of 11 September in particular, can best be understood byplacing recent events in a comparative and historical framework. The immediatepost-World War II order laid the foundations of a highly institutionalisedmultilateral system that provided key benefits for a number of countries whilesimultaneously constraining and enhancing US power. An historical reading ofUS hegemony suggests that its recent unilateralism is undermining thefoundations of its power and influence.

The re-election and subsequent policy direction of the administration ofGeorge W Bush suggests that the distinctive qualities that emerged during hisfirst period in office will continue to be central to his second. Unilateralism,pre-emption and a disdain for the sort of multilateral order that distinguishedearlier phases of US ascendancy look set to continue. Unsurprisingly, therehas been an outpouring of analyses of the emerging ‘American empire’ as aconsequence. Our contribution to this burgeoning debate is threefold. First,we suggest that US power is best thought of as hegemonic rather thanimperial: from Vietnam to Iraq the empirical record suggests that Americansdon’t do empire well. On the contrary, we argue that the USA has been mostinfluential when its power has apparently been constrained by the array ofinstitutions it helped create in the aftermath of the World War II. The secondand main contribution of this paper, therefore, is to explain this seemingparadox by contrasting the postwar international order (PWIO) with thecontemporary period. The central argument that emerges from thiscomparative exercise is that unilateralism is difficult to sustain, corrosive ofAmerican legitimacy, and is undermining the international institutional orderit helped create—of which it has been the primary beneficiary. Indeed, thePWIO has been one of the principal mechanisms through which US national,rather than systemic, interests have been realised.

Mark Beeson is in the School of Political Science and International Studies, Room 560, Building 39A,

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Email: [email protected]. Richard Higgott is in the

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 7, pp 1173 – 1188, 2005

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/071173–16 � 2005 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590500235777 1173

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The final argument we make is that the USA is in danger of succumbing tothe temptations of hegemony as, supported by compliant allies like the UKand Australia, its dominance may generate what economists call ‘moralhazard’. Moral hazard sees investors fund risky or unwise enterprises securein the knowledge that, should things go wrong, it will be some other actor(host government or local investors) not they, who will carry the cost. In theforeign policy version of moral hazard the hegemon is encouraged toundertake risky foreign policy initiatives in which, as with unsuccessfulfinancial speculation, the principal speculator does not carry the major costsof failure. It is precisely this situation, we shall argue by way of conclusion,that is undermining central elements of the established strategic, diplomaticand economic order, consequently diminishing the longer-term primacy ofthe hegemonic power.

Recasting hegemony

Before considering the ways in which the idea of hegemony has been used todescribe the most dominant power of any era, it is worth saying somethingabout our preference for this term over the increasingly fashionable idea of‘empire’.1 At the most general level there is still much merit in AdamWatson’s distinction between empire as the ‘direct administration of differentcommunities from an imperial centre’, and hegemony as the ability of somepower or authority in a system to ‘lay down the law’ about external relationsbetween states in the international system, while leaving them domesticallyindependent.2 Although the recent attempt by the administration of GeorgeW Bush to articulate and justify a ‘doctrine of pre-emption’,3 and itsconcomitant attempt to occupy and control Iraq, can be seen as an imperialimpulse, this may prove to be an historical anomaly and one that mayultimately make similar future adventures less, rather than more, likely.Indeed, the long-term consequence of the Iraq conflict may be a reversion toformer patterns of less direct hegemonic control. For we argue that when USinfluence has been most effective it has generally been exercised indirectlythrough an array of institutions and intergovernmental organisationsestablished as part of the PWIO.Our understanding of hegemony draws on the critical formulation

developed by Robert Cox,4 which emphasises the interplay between ideas,material capabilities and institutionalisation; a dynamic process thatcrystallised in a rule-governed, normatively-informed PWIO that was broadlyreflective of US interests and values. Crucially, and contra Kindleberger,5

there is no assumption that the order created under the auspices of UShegemony is benign or necessarily beneficial to all parties. Nevertheless, oneof the major sources of legitimacy of the PWIO was clearly that it wasassociated with the ‘golden age’ of capitalist reconstruction and expansion ofwhich Western Europe and East Asia were the principal beneficiaries. Thekey point to emphasise at the outset, however, is that this was not altruism onthe part of the Americans, but a consequence of an—albeit sophisticated—calculation of their own long-term national interests.


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Following a recent study by Anatole Lieven we can now see thatnationalism, not the usual lens through which to observe US foreign policy, isin fact a much stronger and little understood factor underwriting itsbehaviour in the contemporary era.6 So powerful is it that it actuallycompetes with, indeed seems to overrule, the Wilsonian liberal reading ofhegemony in US foreign policy. As Leiven noted:

One way of looking at American nationalism, and America’s troubledrelationship with the contemporary world is to understand that manyAmericans are in revolt against the world which America has made. . .Americannationalism is beginning to conflict with any enlightened or even rationalversion of American imperialism; that is to say, with the interests of the US asworld hegemon.7

The point we are making here is that, while the roots of contemporary USforeign policy are national, they have been most successfully realised throughinternational institutions that enjoyed a good deal of legitimacy. Indeed,policy has always been mediated by US domestic interests and priorities,rather than simply reflecting the logic of the international system itself,something that helps to explain the particular character of the PWIO. In otherwords, as Ruggie famously observed of the USA’s emerging dominance, ‘itwas the fact of an American hegemony that was decisive after World War II,not merely American hegemony.8

Consequently, an important part of US dominance flows from itsinstitutionalised position at the centre of an increasingly ubiquitous, not tosay ‘global’, liberal economic order that was seen to benefit allies and bindthe USA to a regulated, rules-based order.9 Despite the arguments of criticswho claim the PWIO that the USA created was designed primarily to furtherthe interests of US capital,10 it was widely accepted as functionally necessaryand ideologically legitimate. As we shall see, this is no longer the case withthe contemporary order.This diminution of systemic legitimacy is important, because one of the

most important sources of ideational domination in the liberal market orderthat US hegemony helped create and legitimise was the separation ofeconomics and politics. The rule-governed economic international orderachieved an apparent independence that effectively insulated and entrenchedthe USA’s overall position as the lynchpin of the system created in the earlyphase of US hegemony.This separation of economics and politics is complex, multifaceted and

important to our story. It gradually developed throughout the 20th centuryat both the level of scholarship11 and the level of policy practice, with the oft-made distinction between the ‘high politics’ of security and ‘low politics’ oftrade. The scholarly development of economics as a problem-solving ‘science’in the wake of the marginalist revolution, on the one hand, and the lesstheoretically robust, but nevertheless policy-useful, scholarship of interna-tional relations, offering us the linked notions of ‘anarchy’ and the balance ofpower, on the other, suited the interests of the US national policy

HEGEMONY, INSTITUTIONALISM AND US FOREIGN POLICY

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community, which wished to maintain a distinction between high and lowpolitics in the 20th century. This situation largely prevailed until the end ofthe Cold War.But what the marginalist revolution in economics had rent asunder at the

end of the 19th century, globalisation, at least in terms of policy, has broughttogether at the end of the 20th.12 It is in the context of globalisation—definedhere simply as a process of enhanced global economic integration via theprogressive liberalisation of trade, the deregulation of finance, the privatisa-tion of assets, and the hollowing out of state activities—that this distinctionin both a scholarly and a policy sense is undermined. It is in this context thatthe unilateral application of US power and the re-securitisation of USeconomic foreign policy is to be understood.US hegemony, therefore, has generally operated indirectly, ideationally,

institutionally and at a distance. Direct military intervention has been thecostly exception rather than the rule. It was a system that allowed the USA topursue broadly national interests while enjoying a good deal of legitimacy.To see why US hegemony may ultimately be undermined by its own recentactions, it is useful to contrast post-9/11 policies with the immediate postwarperiod, when a particular confluence of geopolitical circumstances en-trenched US dominance at the centre of the emerging international order.

Present at the creation: the consolidation of American power

The parallels between the international system in the respective aftermaths ofWorldWar II and 11 September are striking indeed. TheUSA again finds itselfengaged in a major reconstruction project involving massive sums of, mainlyAmerican, money in a fashion that is routinely compared with the MarshallPlan that began in 1947.13 Similarly, the current Bush administration hasdescribed itself as being in a ‘war on terror’ that is eerily reminiscent of thestruggle with communism that defined the earlier era. Yet, while there arenoteworthy parallels between the two periods, there are also importantdifferences—differences which suggest that, despite the overwhelminglydominant position of the USA in both periods, specific foreign policyinitiatives, when combined with the dynamic interaction of material andinstitutional forces more generally, can produce distinctive outcomes thatstructurally based readings ofAmerican power alone cannot easily account for.While World War II may have enhanced and revealed the extent of its

primacy, the sheer fact of US dominance did not dictate policy. One of themost important influences on the thinking and actions of the policy makerswho shaped the immediate postwar order—and something which is notablyabsent from the present generation—was a ‘preoccupation with the past’.14

This is hardly surprising. Not only had the world emerged from the mostdestructive conflict ever seen, but the war itself had been preceded by anunprecedented economic crisis that had thrown millions out of work and intopoverty, fuelled the rise of fascism and raised major questions about thefuture of capitalism itself. Against such a backdrop, a desire to learn fromhistory and avoid the mistakes of the past was understandable.


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What is more surprising is the precise form the US-led response to theseearlier traumas took. Significantly, and again in distinction to the presentsituation, broadly conceived economic initiatives were largely separate fromstrategic concerns. This distinction should not be drawn too sharply becausethe successful economic reconstruction of Europe was plainly capable ofserving a more encompassing geopolitical goal in the rapidly escalatingstruggle with communism.15 But not only is it possible to discern quitedistinct influences and rationales for the strategic and economic componentsof America’s emerging postwar policy, there are also important internalinfluences in policy which meant that the very conception of national securitywas shaped by domestic forces and experiences.16 It is possible to readunprecedented initiatives like the Marshall Plan as flowing directly out of theUSA’s own experiments in economic stimulation under the New Deal.17

Indeed, it is important to remember that the New Deal itself was ‘the firstwholly secular reform movement in American history’,18 and emblematic ofthe extensive internal transformation that the long 20th century was workingon the USA itself. Significantly, the USA’s postwar planners ‘sought toproject these principles onto the world as a macrocosm of the New Dealregulatory state’.19 In other words, without a major internal reorientation ofAmerican attitudes towards the possible role of government and appropriateresponses to wider geopolitical events, a very different form of hegemonymight have developed.As it was, the defining influence on postwar policy was, of course, the Cold

War and the rapidly evolving, Manichean struggle with the USSR. Here theparallels with the current ‘war on terror’ are irresistible, especially given thesense of moral certitude that has pervaded both periods of US policy making.Yet George Kennan’s highly influential analysis of Soviet behaviour dealtwith a potentially formidable opponent with a similarly global reach;20

contemporary events by contrast are plainly of a different order ofmagnitude, despite the inflated rhetoric that accompanies them. Not onlywere US planners in the postwar period constrained by a credible rival, theywere also inhibited by what—until recently, at least—had been a pronouncedsense of anti-imperialism,21 and a notable caution about ‘open-ended’ foreignentanglements.Realists might claim that US responses to the emerging bipolar order were

a product of the structure of that order itself and of the USA’s pivotal rolewithin it, but the precise nature of US policy is still somewhat surprising.Certainly, the Truman doctrine’s uncompromising commitment to support‘free people’ may have reflected Kennan’s hard-headed, realist analysis of theSoviet threat. However, there was also a recognition of the need forwidespread aid to support European reconstruction ‘for the more urgentpurpose of alleviating social and economic conditions which might breedcommunism’.22 Belatedly, a recognition of the complex causes of securitythreats is now becoming part of the ‘war on terror’, but it is important torecognise that, in the aftermath of World War II, US policy was part of amore broadly based effort to create an interlocking, multilateral institutionalstructure with which to facilitate not just European reconstruction, but also


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the international integration of economic and political activity moregenerally. True, the USA may have been the prime mover in the emergingPWIO and arguably its principal beneficiary but, as Ikenberry notes,23 it wasan order that not only offered pay-offs for allies, but one that providedpotentially important, institutionalised constraints on the USA and theunilateral application of its power.

The impact of institutionalised power

The story of the development of the PWIO has been told elsewhere and is wellenough known to need little recapitulation here.24 One point, however, isworth emphasising. The scope of US ambition for the institutionalarchitecture that it did so much to create should not be underestimated. Infact our preferred way of describing US policy during the Cold War is asprimarily ‘institutionalist’ rather than ‘multilateralist’. While the USA tookthe lead in building multilateral institutions like NATO and the Bretton Woodsinstitutions, the injunction to behave multilaterally always applied more tothe junior partners in these organisations than to the hegemon itself. Indeed,a hallmark of US hegemony in this period was the development ofinstitutions binding on others, but in which the hegemon was effectivelyonly ever ‘self-binding’.25 Thus the Bretton Woods system reflected whatIkenberry calls an institutional bargain.26 This bargain, underwritten by acombination of US power and resources, enlightened self-interest and liberalvalues, albeit leavened by a dose of technocratic Keynesianism,27 allowed thecreation of a set of collective goods providing institutions acceptable to boththe USA and its cold war allies.As we will suggest, this bargain has come undone since the end of the Cold

War as US administrations have progressively sought to free themselves fromthese institutionalised constraints. In the process they have seeminglyweakened the foundations of the PWIO that American power helped create,and which largely reflected US goals and interests. Indeed, the persuasivearguments of the likes of Ikenberry notwithstanding, even an apparentlyselfless and multilaterally-based initiative like the Marshall Plan was alwaystightly controlled by the USA, furthered US grand strategy and wasessentially ‘unilateralism in the clothing of multilateralism’.28 The implicationof this experience, and one that seems to have largely escaped the currentgeneration of policy makers in the USA, is that hegemonic power andnational interests can be effectively—perhaps more effectively—exercisedthrough multilateral auspices.The impact of US policy in the postwar period is that it had differential

impacts that reflected the complex interplay of the contingent, theinstitutional and the ideational. As Maier has pointed out,29 the USA’ssuccessful intervention in postwar Europe was made possible by afundamental transformation in domestic class attitudes across much of thecontinent: European social structures were consequently more accommodat-ing of US intrusion and receptive to the perceived necessity of nationalreconstruction. In addition, the fact that Americans were facilitating a


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process of reconstruction, rather than attempting to impose an alieneconomic order, obviously helps account for the success of the Europeanexperience; perhaps even more so that of Japan.30 But US attitudes towardsAsia also remind us that the impact of US hegemony was not a universalreflection of its structurally embedded position, but one that reflectedcontingent historical and cultural attitudes. As Hemmer and Katzensteinpoint out,31 the distinctive bilateral security architecture that emerged in EastAsia reflected US attitudes that saw potential Asian allies as ‘part of an alien,and in important ways, inferior community’. Europeans, by contrast, wereseen as potential equals—something that was reflected in the multilateralbasis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.But if US power has had differential regional impacts in the aftermath of

World War II,32 this should not blind us to the overall purpose of theinstitutional architecture it helped create. One of the most importantdifferences between this earlier period and the present is the relationshipbetween the economic and strategic arms of US foreign policy. As we shallsee, the current administration is self-consciously linking these elements toachieve short-term policy objectives. In the earlier period, by contrast, anddespite the encompassing brief of the Bretton Woods institutions,33 whichwere designed to encourage and manage international economic integration,a degree of national policy-making autonomy was built into the system.34

Indeed, US policy makers were willing to tolerate different forms of economicorganisation and political practices at a time when the central geopoliticalpreoccupation was the larger struggle with the USSR.In retrospect, therefore, US hegemony in the immediate postwar period is

characterised by some significant continuities with, and differences from, thecontemporary era. The confrontation with the USSR was clearly a majormaterial constraint on US freedom of action, but one which—somewhatfortuitously—provided the legitimating domestic rationale for an expan-sionary fiscal policy both at home and abroad.35 Likewise, and despite thecriticisms that the Bretton Woods institutions have subsequently received asa consequence of the evolution of their agendas beyond their initial remit,these institutions marked the institutional expression of the ‘Big Idea’ that,according to Bacevich,36 has continued to inform US strategy: in a word,‘openness’.The USA’s European involvement may have been ‘by invitation’,37 and

actually encouraged by the Europeans in a way that is sharply at odds withthe situation in Iraq, but this only serves to highlight the importance—andunpredictability—of the interplay between contingent geopolitics, ideas andinstitutions. It was the USA’s ability to create an institutionalised,multilateral order to underpin its emerging hegemonic position that gave ita critical degree of legitimacy, and which enhanced the durability of theoverall order of which it was part. By contrast, at a moment when all agreethat US power is historically unrivalled, hegemony, as we have defined it, islooking increasingly brittle. When seen in the light of this earlier experience,the reasons for the surprisingly fragile and paradoxical nature of Americanpower in the contemporary period become more apparent.


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The securitisation of US foreign policy

Global terror demands a global solution. . .America and our friends must movedecisively to take advantage of these new opportunities. This is, then, a periodakin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of freeand democratic states. . .to create a new balance of power that favouredfreedom.38

The parallels with the postwar period are in some ways as striking asCondoleezza Rice’s remarks suggest. The attacks of 11 September did indeedprovide what Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as ‘the kind ofopportunities that World War II offered to refashion the world’.39

Significantly, however, the currentBush administration’s attempts to refashionthe international order are in line with a blueprint that significantly predatedthe events of 9/11. The new vision for the post-9/11 order had, in fact, beenoutlined while Bush was still on the campaign trail. As Daalder and Lindsaynote, ‘What September 11 provided was the rationale and the opportunity tocarry out his revolution’.40 While some of the rhetoric of the proposed neworder may have been replete with the familiar staples of US foreign policy—acommitment to liberty and the promotion of democracy—the substance isradically different from earlier periods and predicated on a unilateralapplication of US power, a self-conscious linking of formerly discrete strategicand economic issues, and the general securitisation of foreign policy.Because foreign economic policy under Bush has come to be articulated in

the language of security, the distinction between high politics and low politicsis disappearing. The audience for this rearticulation, namely the USA’sinternational economic partners, is made aware of the salience of the newinseparable relationship between two domains of policy that werediscursively, if not always practically, discrete for much of the 20th century.There is an accompanying expectation that allies will respond accordingly.The aim of securitisation is thus to justify the imposition of conditions andmeasures in the area of foreign economic policy that would not be consideredthe norm in this policy domain.41 Economic globalisation is now seen notsimply in neoliberal economic terms, but also through the lenses of thenational security agenda of the USA. Consequently, economic globalisationis seen not only as a benefit, but also as a ‘security problem’.The events of 9/11 offered the opportunity for a group of what some call

‘unilateralist-idealists’,42 to develop an agenda that might be described as apost-sovereign approach to American foreign policy.43 A key element of thisprocess is the privileging of security in the economics – security nexus orwhat—for heuristic purposes and borrowing liberally from the CopenhagenSchool44—we have chosen to call the ‘securitisation of economic globalisa-tion’. The securitisation of globalisation means that US policy towardsbroader issues in the global economy is being subjugated to the imperativesof the security agenda.In short, there would appear to be a correlation between the degree of

dominance of the international system by the USA in military terms, and the


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manner in which it uses economic policy as an arm of security policy.45 Anempirical reading of US policy in the contemporary era shows how a unipolarmoment—in the domains of both trade and finance, and at both multilateraland bilateral levels of policy making—has tempted the hegemon to integrateeconomic and security policy more closely than under conditions ofmultipolarity. It has done so in a manner in which economic policy hasbecome an arm of security policy. US economic policy—the details of whichcannot be discussed here46—rather than being a mere instrument of economicrelations and statecraft has become part of the armoury of influence that theUSA uses to develop a strategy towards potential challengers.The implications of this readjustment were highlighted by the doctrine of

pre-emption, outlined in the National Security Strategy,47 which declared thatthe USA reserved the right to act pre-emptively to ‘forestall or prevent attacksby our enemies’. Given the open-ended nature of such threats and PresidentBush’s claim that the USA has a moral duty to ‘take the battle to the enemy’,48

the implications for the sovereign independence of those states the USAassociates with terrorist activities is profound.The point to emphasise here is that, at the outset of his administration, the

more radical ‘post-sovereign’ liberal order envisaged by the Bush adminis-tration—in which the institutionalised principles of sovereign independencewere to be over-ridden where necessary—was to be underwritten by USmilitary power, and not by the collective approval of a wider liberalcommunity. As the National Security Strategy made clear, ‘while the UnitedStates will constantly strive to enlist the support of the internationalcommunity, we will not hesitate to act alone’.49 As Rhodes notes, ‘America’ssovereign responsibilities supersede its commitment to internationalinstitutions’.50

The rise and fall of multilateralism

In the theoretical literature, multilateralism relates to the management oftransnational problems where three or more parties operate with a series ofacceptable ‘generalized principles of conduct’.51 That is, principles shouldtake precedence over interests. But we need to distinguish betweenmultilateralism as a principled institutional form of behaviour in interna-tional relations,52 and the actual development and operation of formalinternational organisations as the centrepiece of multilateralism as policypractice. Over time the precedence of principle over interest should lead tocollective trust within an institution, among players of many differentstrengths and sizes. A key element in the development of this sense of trustwould be a feeling among the smaller players that the major actors, especiallyan erstwhile hegemon, would be willing to accept Martin’s principle of ‘self-binding’. As we have tried to suggest, the comparative historical narrative ofthe role of the USA in the second half of the 20th century, and especially inthe development of the Bretton Woods institutions, demonstrated a USwillingness to be ‘self-bound’ in a way that is not apparent in thecontemporary era.53


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But the distinction between multilateralism as a principled form ofbehaviour and multilateralism as the conduct of foreign policy throughinternational institutions is often confused in practice. For many observersof US foreign policy the use of multilateral institutions is believed to be butone policy option among many, rather than driven by any sense ofobligation to operate in this manner. It is in this context that the languageof the unilateralist that has prevailed in the early 21st century must belocated. Multilateralism, be it what we might call the practical realistmultilateralism of a Henry Kissinger,54 or the principled idealist multi-lateralism of a Joseph Nye,55 is seen by its opponents as a check onUS interests and action. To understand why, we must appreciate not onlythe ideological objections reflecting the resistance to global co-operationinherent in the increasingly nationalist underpinnings of US foreignpolicy identified earlier. We must also note that a key element in thecontemporary theory and practice of global governance—the evolution ofglobal networks at the expense of international hierarchies—is not welcomedin Washington.Networks pursue their activities (such as waging unconventional war on

states) by using systems of sprawling, horizontally interconnected networksof private power and authority.56 Reconciling state-focused US securityinstincts with these new network-based patterns of activity—influenced notonly by states, but by non-state actors, transnational forces and new kinds ofthreats—is proving hard for US governments to come to terms with. Theblurring of the borders between what is domestic and what is international inthe policy process has challenged traditional US understandings of nationalinterest. This is especially so in those policy domains where transnationaldecision making—for example, on issues such as the environment andclimate change (cf US attitudes towards the Kyoto protocol), or theapplication of international law (cf US attitudes towards the InternationalCriminal Court)—clashes with US domestic law or runs up against a USconception of national security.At best, for large sections of the US policy community, multilateralism

implies the opportunity for others to free-ride on the USA’s material support.At worst it implies sovereignty dilution and unwanted entanglements. This isnot simply to argue that the USA has repudiated multilateralism as aprincipled institutional form of governance in its entirety. Rather, the USA hasbecome more instrumental in its choice of issue areas, in which it will adopt amultilateral approach as a matter of preferred policy practice. It has adopteda ‘pick and mix’ approach. As can be seen from its efforts to establish a post-Saddam order in Iraq, it will accept ‘legitimating’ and burden-sharingmultilateral engagements provided they suit its preferred policy positions anddo not constrain its ability to manoeuvre. Ultimately, however, theunilateralist discourse—in which the USA expressed fears that the burdenof consensus building might constrain it from acting freely in the pursuit ofits stated ideals of promoting democracy, human rights and free trade—hasbeen in the ascendancy in the 21st century and has found its fullestarticulation in contemporary US policy in Iraq.57


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Implications for US policy

It is not necessary to accede to Robert Kagan’s overdrawn suggestion thatAmericans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus to see sharpdifferences between continental European and American approaches toworld politics in general and to global institutional co-operation inparticular.58 The EU and the USA differ on questions of ‘partnership’,‘burden sharing’ and ‘exceptionalism’, as well as on approaches to globaleconomic management.59 For the Bush administration what drives con-temporary world order is ‘primacy’ and freedom to manoeuvre. ForEuropeans (and, we might note, especially the UK before Tony Blair becameentangled in the Bush project) it is ‘globalisation’.60 Europe, in theory if notalways in practice, exhibits a stronger normative attitude towards multi-lateral governance structures than is to be found across the spectrum of theUS policy community. It is inconceivable, for example, that any USadministration would prepare a document similar to Commission of theEuropean Communities’ The EU and the UN: The Choice of Multilateralism,which argues for a ‘systematic integration of multilateral and bilateral policyobjectives’.61 Similarly, the EU disposition for multilevel governance and‘sovereignty pooling’ is equally incomprehensible to US foreign policymakers.Without overstating the case, similar distinctions may also be drawn from

East Asia in the early 21st century. It, too, places a greater emphasis onmultilateral and regional co-operation, although, as in Europe, there may bea marked disconnect between theory and rhetoric, on the one hand, andapplication and practice, on the other. But we live in an era of the ‘newregionalism’ in East Asia that has progressed apace since the financial crisesof the latter part of the 1990s. The key elements of the new regionalism havebeen enhanced regional economic dialogue and interaction both amongthe states of Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) and betweenthese states and the states of Southeast Asia through the development of theASEAN+Three (or APT) process. To be sure, these regional co-operativedialogues remain rudimentary when contrasted with the level of integrationto be found in Europe, but these dialogues have been spurred on by theperceived limitations of the multilateral system and the changing relation-ships of the major regional actors to the USA.62

In short, US Allies, especially the Europeans and, to a lesser extent theAsians, seem intent on creating an institutional order less dependent onAmerican power, more dependent on rules and principles and in which theUSA is granted less prerogative and licence than in the past. These differenceshaving been noted, it behoves us to remember that the current historicalrupture in thinking between Washington and other points of the globalcompass is so sharp that much of what was learned in the post-cold wardecade is in danger of being forgotten. Before the rise to power of theneoconservatives, it was possible to identify a high degree of trust and loyaltyamong the ruling transatlantic policy communities.63 Such was the degree ofthis trust that even serious conflicts (over trade, for example) did not threaten


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the ability of the wider structure of institutions and shared expectations tocontain them. It is because the ideological position and behaviour of theneoconservatives is so far to the unilateral end of the curve that trust in theUSA to use of its power responsibly, in what Risse calls a ‘liberal securitycommunity’,64 appears to be waning.

Conclusion: hegemony and institutionalism in an era of ambiguity

While the USA was and is still plainly the most powerful country on theplanet, its current position looks less assured than the, by now routine,comparisons with the Roman Empire might suggest. The USA is widelyconsidered to have achieved a position of unipolar dominance in an era inwhich it is confronted by no serious rival. Equally, market based capitalismas a form of economic organisation—notwithstanding differences of opinionabout how best to manage it—is similarly unchallenged. Yet it is clearly notinappropriate to ask if we might have already reached the high-water mark ofAmerican power.The invasion of Iraq highlights both US power and potential vulner-

abilities. Crucially, the entire project has relied on the efforts of a ratherexclusive and narrowly based ‘coalition of the willing’, which not onlyhighlighted divisions between formerly staunch allies in North America andWestern Europe, but which lacked the institutional imprimatur of the mostimportant intergovernmental organisation of the era. The UN’s failure toendorse the conflict meant that from the outset the USA lacked the sort ofbroadly based support and legitimacy that distinguished its position in thepost-World War II period. Revealingly, the sort of institutionalisedconstraints that distinguished the PWIO and legitimised American actionsare now seen by the Bush administration as ‘spiteful anti-Americanism’.65

More fundamentally, perhaps, the war also highlights the USA’s economicvulnerabilities. The USA’s budgetary position had already been transformedunder the Bush administration as a consequence of economically dubious,ideologically motivated tax cuts. The Vietnam war is a sobering reminder ofthe way security issues can transform economic policy, with profound,unexpected, long-term consequences for both the USA domestic economyand the international system more generally. The war in Iraq has made afragile fiscal position dramatically worse.66 For all its military might, theUSA remains reliant on other countries—especially in East Asia—tocontinue funding its debt and consumption patterns.67

It is here that our moral hazard argument is salient. To-date, the USA hasbeen able to spend on overseas ventures reliant in the knowledge that otherswill share, indeed carry, most of the costs. The assumption, if never explicitlystated, has been that others would be unwilling to cease funding the debtbecause of the implications this would have for the continued health of theirown economies. But things are changing. In contrast to the first Gulf war—which thanks to the support of wealthy allies (notably Japan and Germany)was effectively revenue neutral for the USA—the cost of the overthrow ofSaddam has been borne more-or-less exclusively by the USA. In the first Gulf


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war, as Fred Bergsten noted, ‘collective leadership’ meant that America ledand America collected.68 In the second Gulf war the financial costs have beenborne by a limited ‘coalition of the unwilling’; there is a marked reluctance onthe part of major economies such as France and Germany to provide largeamounts of financial, or indeed any other kind of, support as part of a post-war rapprochement with the USA.Contemporary US foreign policy stands in marked contrast to the earlier

periods in other ways, in terms of both content and application. As LisaMartin has persuasively argued,69 the USA has effectively adopted an ad hocapproach towards multilateralism in particular. The very idea that thedominant global power might need to act in a self-binding way has beendisregarded over the early years of the 21st century. For multilateralism towork as an effective form of governance, rules must bind, or at least appearto bind, the hegemon, as well as the smaller players. For much of the PWIO theUSA behaved in such a way, with an eye to the future. By contrast, the Bushadministration regards multilateral organisations like the United Nations in‘an entirely instrumental light’.70 As Martin notes:

Turning to multilateralism only under duress and when it appears con-venient demonstrates a lack of commitment, even an implicit rejection of theprinciples of multilateralism. . .This hollows out the core of such organisations,as they no longer provide the self-binding function they once did. . .Withoutthe self-binding of the hegemon, multilateral organisations become emptyshells.71

The reputation of multilateralism as a principal (and principled) institutionalform of global governance in both the economic and, it goes without saying,the security domain is consequently badly damaged. A change of heart in theUSA is not all that is required to undo this situation. This is a necessary, butnot a sufficient condition to (re)build positive structures of global economicgovernance and it is not axiomatic. Any administration will be subject topressures to respond to increasingly assertive domestic interests that—likeUS allies in the international domain—have been freed from the disciplinesof the Cold War. Growing numbers of politically powerful domestic actors,resorting to increasingly nationalist rhetoric about what they see as thenegative impact of globalisation on jobs and welfare, are railing against theUSA accepting binding multilateral commitments or indeed undertaking otherforeign policy initiatives in general. This helps to explain the dramatic rise inbilateral agreements between the USA and inevitably less powerful tradingpartners.72

A hegemon, any hegemon, inevitably attracts enmity and resistance. But analtruistic73 or a benign74 US hegemony, capable of delivering global publicgoods, has clearly had, until recently, a longstanding degree of acceptanceand implicit (if not overt) legitimacy in large quarters of world opinion. Thesame cannot be said in the contemporary era. Now the USA—in what manysee as an assertively nationalist projection of a narrowly conceived interest(Bhagwati and Panagariya’s ‘selfish hegemon’75)—demonstrates little or no


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concern for problems other than those which affect it directly and in whichthe issue of the legitimacy of the hegemon’s behaviour ceases to be one ofimplicit acceptance and becomes one of explicit scrutiny. Notwithstandingthe continuities and changes we have identified in US foreign policy over theperiod under review here, this difference—between a relatively benign, albeitinstrumental, hegemony underwritten by liberal principles and institutions,on the one hand, and a more selfish hegemony, underscored by a strongerJacksonian nationalism, on the other—is the key difference between thetwo eras.

Notes

1 AJ Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2002; and M Cox, ‘The empire’s back in town: of America’s imperialtemptation—again’, Millennium, 32 (1), 2003, pp 1 – 27.

2 A Watson, The Evolution of International Society, London: Routledge, 1992, pp 15 – 16.3 US Government, National Security Strategy of the USA, Washington, DC: The White House, 2002.4 RW Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History, New York:Columbia University Press, 1987.

5 CP Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929 – 1939, London: Allen Lane, 1973.6 A Leiven, ‘Demon in the cellar’, Propsect, March 2004, pp 28 – 33.7 Ibid, p 30.8 JG Ruggie ‘Multilateralism: the anatomy of an institution’, in Ruggie (ed), Multilateralism Matters:The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p 593,emphasis in the original.

9 GJ Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After MajorWars, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; and R Latham, The Liberal Moment:Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1997.

10 J Kolko & G Kolko, The Limits to Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945 – 1954,New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

11 See J Caporaso & D Levine, Comparative Political Economy, New York: Cambridge University Press,1992.

12 For a discussion, see R Higgott ‘Economics, politics and international political economy: the need fora balanced diet in an era of globalisation’, New Political Economy, 4 (1), 1999, pp 23 – 36; Higgott,‘Taming economics, emboldening International Relations: the theory and practice of InternationalPolitical Economy in an era of globalisation’, in S Lawson (ed), The New Agenda for InternationalRelations, Cambridge: Polity, 2002.

13 R Dalton ‘We’ll never run away, vows Bush’, The Australian, 5 November, 2003, p 8.14 JL Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941 – 1947, New York: Columbia

University Press, 1972, p 31.15 By the time George Marshall articulated the contours of the Marshall Plan in his celebrated speech at

Harvard in 1947, George Kennan’s analysis of the nature and ambitions of the USSR had become theaccepted view of ‘virtually all the top policymakers’. MJ Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain,and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947 – 1952, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987,p 44. For the content of Kennan’s highly influential ‘long telegram’, see G Kennan, ‘The sources ofSoviet conduct’, in JF Hoge & F Zakaria (eds), The American Encounter: The United States and theMaking of the Modern World, New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp 155 – 169.

16 T Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in theTwentieth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

17 Hogan, The Marhsall Plan.18 Walter A McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since

1776, Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 1997, p 149.19 A Burley, ‘Regulating the world: multilateralism, international law, and the projection of the New Deal

regulatory state’, in Ruggie, Multilateralism Matters, p 125.20 Kennan, ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’.21 JL Gaddis,We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 38;

and Smith, America’s Mission, p 143.22 Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, p 317.


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23 Ikenberry, After Victory.24 See Latham, The Liberal Moment; and DB Kunz, Butter and Guns: America’s Cold War Economic

Diplomacy, New York: Free Press, 1997.25 L Martin, Multilateral Organisations after the US– Iraq War of 2003, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University, Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, (Working Paper) 2004, pp 1 – 17.26 GJ Ikenberry ‘State power and the institutional bargain: America’s ambivalent economic and security

multilateralism’, in R Foot et al (eds), US Hegemony and International Organizations, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003.

27 GJ Ikenberry, ‘A world economy restored: expert consensus and the post war Anglo-Americansettlement’, International Organization, 46 (1), 1992, pp 289 – 321.

28 Kunz, Butter and Guns, p 33. Significantly, the predominantly bilateral disbursement of aid in thepostwar period actually established a general pattern for the next 30 years, one that reinforced theUSA’s position at the centre of a distinctive ‘hub and spokes’ security architecture that becamethe model for US engagement outside Western Europe. See AS Milward, The Reconstruction ofWestern Europe, 1945 – 51, Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp 113 – 114.

29 CS Maier, ‘The two postwar eras and the conditions for stability in twentieth-century WesternEurope’, American Historical Review, 86 (2), 1981, pp 327 – 352.

30 WK Tabb, The Postwar Japanese System: Cultural Economy and Economic Transformation, New York:Oxford University Press, 1995.

31 C Hemmer & PJ Katzenstein, ‘Why is there no NATO in Asia? Collective identity, regionalism, and theorigins of multilateralism’, International Organization, 56 (3), 2002, p 575.

32 M Beeson, ‘Re-thinking regionalism: Europe and East Asia in comparative historical perspective’,Journal of European Public Policy, forthcoming.

33 The Bretton Woods institutions were the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. TheGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later replaced by the World Trade Organization) isinvariably lumped together with them. For an overview see B Eichengreen & PB Kenen, ‘Managing theworld economy under the Bretton Woods system: an overview’, in PB Kenen (ed),Managing the WorldEconomy: Fifty Years after Bretton Woods, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics,1994, pp 3 – 80.

34 JG Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwareconomic order’, International Organization, 36 (2), 1982, pp 379 – 415.

35 Kunz, Butter and Guns, p 331.36 Bacevich, American Empire, p 88.37 G Lundestad, ‘Empire by invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945 – 1952’, Journal of

Peace Research, 23 (3), 1986, pp 263 – 277.38 C Rice, ‘Remarks on terrorism and foreign policy’, Johns Hopkins University, 29 April 2002, at http://

www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04, p 3.39 Cited in Bacevich, American Empire, p 227.40 I Daalder & JM Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Washington, DC:

Brookings Institution, 2003, p 13.41 Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the relationship between negotiations on free trade

arrangements and support for US foreign policy. For a detailed study, see R Higgott, ‘US foreigneconomic policy and the securitisation of globalisation’, International Politics, 41, 2004, pp 147 – 175;and Higgott, ‘After neo-liberal globalisation: the ‘securitisation’ of US foreign economic policy in EastAsia’, Critical Asia Studies, 36 (3), 2004, pp 425 – 444. A clear example of this possibility can be seen inThailand’s crackdown on terrorism—something the Thai government hopes will win it a bilateral tradedeal with the USA. See S Crispin, ‘Falling in step’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 26 June 2003, p 19.

42 P Hassner & J Vaisse, Washington et le Monde: Dilemmes d’un Superpuissance, Paris: CERI/Autrement.They are epitomised in the New American Century Project. See http://www.newamericancentury.org.

43 See R Skidelsky, ‘The American contract’, Prospect, July 2003, pp 30 – 35.44 See O Waever, ‘Securitsation and desecuritisation’, in RD Lipschutz (ed), On Security, New York:

Columbia University Press, 1995.45 M Mastanduno, ‘Economics and security, statecraft and scholarship’, International Organization, 52

(4), 1998, p 827.46 But see Higgott, ‘US foreign policy and the securitisation of globalisation’ and ‘After neo-liberal

globalisation’.47 US Government, National Security Strategy of the USA, p 15.48 GW Bush, ‘Graduation speech’, Westpoint Academy, New York, 1 June 2002, at49 US Government, National Security Strategy of the USA, p 6.50 E Rhodes ‘The imperial logic of Bush’s liberal agenda’, Survival, 45 (1), 2003, p 136.51 Ruggie, Multilateralism Matters, p 11.52 Ibid, p 8.


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53 Higgott provides a detailed empirical discussion of US attitudes towards self-binding in the early yearsof both the IMF and the GATT. See R Higgott, ‘Multilateral economic institutions and the limits toglobal governance’, paper prepared for the Task Force on Global Governance of the InternationalInstitute for Administrative Sciences, New York, 29 March 2004.

54 H Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy: Towards a New Diplomacy for the 21st Century, NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

55 J Nye, The Paradox of American Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.56 RB Hall & TJ Biersteker (eds), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002.57 See T Dodge, ‘US interventions and possible Iraqi futures’, Survival, 45 (3), 2003, pp 103 – 122.58 R Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, New York: Knopf,

2003.59 See W Wallace, ‘US unilateralism: a European perspective’, in S Patrick & S Forman (eds),

Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement, Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 2002,pp 145 – 146.

60 I Daalder, ‘The end of Atlanticism’, Survival, 45 (2), 2003, pp 151 – 53.61 Commission of the European Communities, The European Union and the United Nations: The Choice of

Multilateralism, Communication from the Commission to the Council and the Parliament, Brussels, 10September 2003, COM 526 final, p 10, emphasis in the original.

62 See M Beeson, ‘ASEAN plus three and the rise of reactionary regionalism’, Contemporary Southeast Asia,25 (2), 2003, pp 251 – 268; H Dieter & R Higgott, ‘Exploring alternative theories of economicregionalism: from trade to finance in Asian co-operation’, Review F:/TAYLOR_AND_FRANCIS/CTWQ/Article Files/CTWQ123560/CTWQ123560.3dof International Political Economy, 10 (3), 2003,pp 430 – 454.

63 See T Risse, ‘US power in a liberal security community’, in GJ Ikenberry (ed), America Unrivalled: TheFuture of the Balance of Power, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

64 Ibid.65 RW Tucker & DC Hendrickson, ‘The sources of American legitimacy’, Foreign Affairs, 83 (6), 2004, pp

18 – 32, p 26.66 ‘A flood of red ink’, The Economist, 8 November 2003, pp 24 – 26.67 PS Goodman, ‘US debt to Asia swelling’, Washington Post, 13 September 2003, p E01. China’s

unwillingness to be swayed by American pleas for it to revalue its currency indicates the potentialvulnerabilities this generates.

68 Cited in AF Cooper, RA Higgott & KR Nossal, ‘Bound to follow? Leadership and followership in theGulf conflict’, Political Science Quarterly, 106 (3), 1991, p 439.

69 Martin, Multilateral Organisations after the US – Iraq War of 2003.70 Tucker & Hendrickson, ‘The sources of American legitimacy’, p 27.71 Martin, Multilateral Organisations after the US – Iraq War of 2003, p 14.72 Higgott, ‘Multilateral economic institutions and the limits to global governance’.73 Kindleberger, The World in Depression.74 S Strange, ‘The persistent myth of lost hegemony’, International Organization, 41 (4), 1987,

pp 551 – 574.75 J Bhagwati & A Panagariya, ‘Bilateral treaties are a sham’, Financial Times, 14 July 2003, p 13.


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