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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

American hegemony « Previous | |Next »
May 6, 2009

Perry Anderson in Jottings on the Conjecture in New Left Review states that the twin objectives of American foreign policy since World War Two have been to extend capitalism to the ends of the earth, and uphold the primacy of the US within the international state system—the second viewed as a condition for realizing the first. He says that capitalism has extended with a steady increase in the interlocking of all the major capitalist economies in a common dependence on each other. He states that politically what we see is the emergence, still in its early stages, of a modern equivalent of the Concert of Powers after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

That is: increasing levels of formal and informal coordination to maintain the stability of the established order, accompanied by traditional jockeying for advantage within its parameters, from which there is no radical discord .... This time a single superordinate power, occupying a position unlike any other, holds the system together. In the days of Metternich and Castlereagh, there was no hegemon comparable to America. With still the world’s largest economy, financial markets, reserve currency, armed forces, global bases, culture industry and international language, the US combines assets that no other state can begin to match. The other powers accept its asymmetrical position among them, and take care not to thwart it on any matter to which it attaches strategic importance.

He adds that while the relative weight of America in the global economy is plainly declining, with the rapid rise of alternative capitalist power centres, the political leverage of the United States in a now densely interconnected universe of profit and privilege, all of whose elites regard themselves as fellow-members of the ‘international community’, remains incommensurable with that of any other state. He says that:
just because there is no automatic coincidence between the particular interests of the US and the general interests of the system, a consciously managed Concert of Powers is required for the adjustment of tensions between them. That adjustment will never be perfect, and the mechanisms for achieving it have yet to be fully formalized: pressure and counter-pressure intertwine within a bargaining process that is unequal but not insubstantial. To date, however, the gaps and rough edges in the system have not seriously threatened the emergent legitimacy of the ‘international community’ as a symphony of the global capitalist order, even with a somewhat erratic conductor.

The decline of American hegemony means that we can draw a distinction between US primacy and a worldwide liberal civilization:--they are not logically interdependent. China—and East Asia more generally—is likely to become the centre of gravity of the global economy within a few decades.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:46 AM |