After Hegemony VI: what comes after exit?

Last month Brad DeLong noted the end of US hegemony, asked what will come next, and concluded that Chinese hegemony is not a possibility (yet):

“Hegemony” comes from the Greek “hegemon” … manager of alliances—not strong enough to dominate, yet powerful enough to lead, while being restrained enough to maintain the consent (or at least acquiescence) of those it leads … “Hegemony” is neither a birthright nor a permanent condition; it is a practice, fragile and perishable, dependent on the continual renewal of both material capabilities and the legitimacy of leadership. …

Kindleberger … Keohane … Krasner … Strange … Ikenberry ... “hegemony” became a framework for analyzing not only the provision of economic public goods, but also the construction and maintenance of security alliances, the shaping of international norms, and the creation of durable institutions. “Hegemonic stability theory” … When the hegemon was strong and engaged, the world saw relative peace, open markets, and institutional innovation; when the hegemon faltered or withdrew, the system became vulnerable to fragmentation, rivalry, and crisis. …

We can think of hegemony as having four dimensions: Geostrategic … Political … Economic … Cultural …

But that U.S. hegemony is gone does not mean that China’s hegemony is next.

This is the default logic in liberal international political economy. I’ve done a lot of research (and teaching) on the structures and durability of hegemony, and I’ve sounded many similar notes to these.

Where Brad ends the analysis is where most folks end it: US hegemony may be ending, but China isn’t ready for hegemony, and the world doesn’t want Chinese hegemony anyway. So if the US will not perform these functions, and China cannot, where are we heading?

Brad expects:

not Chinese hegemony but rather (hopefully peaceful) balance-of-power, and of influence, [in] global politics

without spelling out what that looks like. In this he is not alone, the default analytical position is that if we are shifting away from the “liberal international” hegemonic order produced under American hegemony, but no hegemonic contenders are emerging, then we must be moving into a “multipolar” world, characterized by fragmented blocs of rivals.

I.e., we’re heading back to (the common portrayal of) the Cold War as a “bipolar” system, characterized by two “great” powers (“poles”) operating within disconnected “spheres of influence” of similar-enough size and strength to “balance” each other’s expression of power through deterrence. Many claim that the post-hegemonic era will likely be bipolar again, a “New Cold War”, perhaps involving the US (or "the West,” whatever that means now) vs China, with both poles “weaponizing interdependence” using whatever power resources are at their disposal.

This narrative is common but is analytically confused.1 By which I mean that the “hegemony” theorists mentioned — Kindleberger, Keohane, Krasner, Strange, Ikenberry — were writing during the Cold War, which they characterized as a hegemonic era. This means that they rejected the polarity metaphor in real time. Hegemonic eras are not balanced by definition, the hegemon’s power and influence is preponderant.

Hegemonic analysis is not just different from polarity analysis, the operational logics are contradictory: in polarity analysis, system stability comes from power balance; in hegemonic analysis, system stability comes from power imbalance.2

Consequently, in polarity analysis, balance-of-power may be peaceful, even the most peaceful; but in hegemonic analysis, approximate power-parity is when world wars happen, cataclysmic events that destroy the old order and birth the new one, under a new set of principles constructed by the winner.

As Brad alluded, “hegemony” scholars have been very interested in the implications of hegemonic decline. Many, like Kindleberger, were deeply pessimistic, and expected order to dissipate with hegemonic collapse.3 This is why Ikenberry titled his most famous work After Victory, arguing that hegemonic orders end when a hegemonic power is decisively defeated in a major war, as with the dissolution of the British empire via the world wars and depressions of the 20th century, and new orders are built in the image of the new preponderant power.

In After Hegemony, Keohane argued against Kindleberger’s pessimism — that the world economy is only ordered when a hegemon is willing and able to order it — that global structures and institutions established under a hegemonic order were functionally capable of ordering the global economy even in the absence of a hegemon. He argued that other arrangements, those arrangements associated with complex interdependence, could provide order in the absence of a hegemon.

Realists disagreed, and made some good points: there are issues with After Hegemony as a book and set of arguments. But realists were wrong about the way in which the Cold War ended, they were even wrong about how it began. Realists have difficulty maintaining a consistent narrative about great-power politics for any reasonable length of time. Nor do they proffer any internal consensus regarding the likely direction of the world now, nor do they proffer a normatively-desirable direction.

The USA has exited hegemony (I’ll return to this argument), which means that we have three choices: accept Kindlebergian chaos (which involves world wars and great depressions); hope and pray that realist analysis will perform better in the world of emergent complexity than it did in the world of modular industrialism (which is unlikely); or start fixing “in practice” the problems with prior after-hegemony analyses “in theory”.

To do that we must reclaim the concept of “complex interdependence” from the muck of 20th century theorizing, and update it for the 21st century.

According to some recent theorists from comparative political economy, “Interdependence … exposes states to potential coercion.” It would be better to say that states face potential coercion full stop. Interdependence affects which vectors of coercion states are exposed to. But independence exposes states to the most possible coercion, with the least-amount of potential resistance, because autarky imposes strict limitations on the expression of power (as dependency theorists eventually learned) while embeddedness functions as a power multiplier.

The story of 47’s attempts to coerce China is that attempted independence — what Trump is pursuing — leaves states unable to access critical resources and technologies that interdependence would have supplied.

Not all interdependencies are the same. Some are highly asymmetric; others are not. According to the original theorists of complex interdependence, greater complexity implied less asymmetry, and thus less coercive potential from interdependence.

Indeed, the original concept of “complex interdependence” was to construct an ideal type on the opposite end of a spectrum from realism: if realism emphasized the ordering potential of power, complex interdependence emphasized the potential for emergent orders in which there effectively is no power hierarchy.

Which type of interdependence we have, or should want to have, is a question about the performance of systems under different organizing structures, each of which contain different organizational logics. Miscalculating which structure you are in, and thus which logic you are bound by, can lead to disaster.

That is the mistake 47 is making.

We are now testing these academic arguments in the real world, and it’s happening very quickly. As far as I can tell, I am alone among theorists in believe that we have a chance to exit from hegemony into a world of complex interdependence. There’s no model for that. There are no examples in histroy. It would be a different world, and that is hard to envision.

But if the alternative is to re-run the 20th century — just with nukes, drones, smartphones, and AI this time! — then there is no alternative. We need to reduce the amount of power in the world, or at least its effectiveness. Parsing complex interdependence is our best chance of doing that.