Hegemonic Orders in an Anarchical Society: Conditions for
Stability
Harry Papasotiriou, BA (Oxford), MA and Ph.D. (Stanford)
Associate Professor, Panteion University
Senior Fellow, Institute of International Relations
Abstract: Hegemonic orders can be stable if they fulfil two
conditions.?First, the hegemonic power must not pose a threat
of domination or conquest for the other great powers.?Second,
the hegemonic order must dispense benefits to the participating
states that are worth the attendant restrictions in their freedom
of action.?Even with the presence of these two conditions, the
inherent tension between the imperatives of independence and order
will continue to apply.?States will disagree about the precise
sharing of the burdens and the benefits of order.?The weaker
states will seek to tie the hegemonic power in the procedures of
multilateral institutions that favour the many against the one,
while the hegemonic power will be tempted to bypass such
constraints.?In the long run even a stable hegemonic order
will be threatened, if the distribution of power underpinning it
changes.?Eventually new powers will grow more powerful than
the status quo powers and will seek to rearrange international
order according to their interests and values.?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the inherent tension in
the international system between the desire of its units to be
independent on the one hand, and the need for international
leadership to promote international order and facilitate
institutionalized international cooperation on the other.?The
tension arises because order presupposes some degree of de facto
subordination of the weaker to the leading powers, which conflicts
with their desire for substantive independence.?If the
international system moves far in the direction of substantive
independence between its units, it will be marked by disorder and
strife.?If the system moves far in the opposite direction of
hegemony, the weaker units will be threatened with high degrees of
domination or even conquest by the hegemonic power and are likely
to resist.
This dilemma was resolved in the traditional European system
through collective hegemony, whereby five or six great powers
provided joint leadership for international order and
cooperation.?The balance of power kept any one of these great
powers from dominating the others.?This solution facilitated
both order and independence in significant degrees.
The post-Cold War distribution of power appears to conflict with
the principle of the balance of power.?Since the United States
has acquired a hegemonic lead in material factors of power, the
question arises whether a unipolar hegemonic order can be
stable.?The traditional balance of power approach would
require the other great powers to coalesce against the hegemonic
United States, which clearly has not happened thus far.?
This paper will examine the conditions under which a hegemonic
order can be stable.?The arguments presented here draw heavily
from the historical experience of the past few centuries, or even
earlier.?The apparent paradox of American hegemony without a
balancing coalition of the other great powers will be explained in
the light of previous experience, rather than by invoking some new
factors unique to the present age.?
Independence and order in an anarchical
society
The international system can fruitfully be analyzed as an
anarchical society. The absence of a government over the units,
i.e. the states, points to its anarchical aspect.?But it also
has attributes of a society, such as common values and institutions
that underpin international cooperation.?International
politics can thus be seen as moving between two poles: anarchy and
societal order.?The closer it is to the anarchical pole, the
more insecurity and instability will prevail.?When it moves
closer to the societal order pole, international cooperation and
stability will be more pronounced.
The international system is dynamic, i.e. it does not settle for
long at some stable equilibrium point somewhere along the continuum
from pure anarchy to pure order.?On the contrary, historically
it has oscillated between periods of pervasive conflict that
approach the Hobbesian state of nature in which there is bellum
omnium contra omnes (war of all against all) and periods of
widespread order in which stability and international cooperation
prevail.?One reason for the oscillations that is well
established in the literature is changes in the distribution of
power.?If a rising power overtakes the previous leading powers
in factors of power, it will seek to rearrange the international
system in its favor, while the status quo powers are likely to
resist, resulting in what Robert Gilpin described as hegemonic
wars, i.e. major system-wide power struggles.?Once a new
status quo emerges, international politics will settle into orderly
patterns until some new challenger arises to threaten the new
status quo.
Another reason for these oscillations is the tension between the
units’ desire for independence and their need for international
order. The desire for independence is reflected in the fact that
humanity is divided in discrete political communities that have
successfully established claims of sovereignty, i.e. which have
overthrown or resisted any involuntary formal subordination to an
external political factor.?The cry “Give me liberty or give me
death!” has resonated in many languages in the era of the nation
state, and has precedents across the ages.?The nation state
remains by far the most legitimate political unit, able to demand
the sacrifice of large numbers of its subjects when threatened in
warfare.?The drive for independence will be strong so long as
the nation states command the primary political allegiance of the
overwhelming majority of humans, i.e. so long as people’s national
identity is stronger than cosmopolitan political identities to the
point that it justifies the supreme sacrifices of war for the sake
of national independence and security.
In practice the independence, i.e. the freedom of action, of the
states is circumscribed by all sorts of dependences between them
that are promoted for the sake of international order and
cooperation. The point that needs to be emphasized is that
international order requires international leadership, i.e. some
degree of substantive subordination of weaker states to the leading
power or powers.?This has been established by Adam Watson in
his magisterial The Evolution of International Society,
which examines major cases of international societies across
history from the origins of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia to
the post-Cold War period. As Watson states in his conclusion, the
“gravitational pull towards hegemony, and the ubiquity of some
hegemonial authority in societies of independent or
quasi-independent states, stands out so clearly from the evidence
that the question arises why studies of states systems and
political theory underestimate or even ignore it”.
States are apt to compromise some of their substantive
independence for the sake of the security provided within a
hegemonic alliance, the prosperity facilitated by a hegemonic
international economic system and other benefits of international
order. But at the same time they will seek to keep as much of their
freedom of action as possible. If the hegemonic power pushes too
far in the direction of hegemony, the weaker states are apt to pull
in the opposite direction. When they are threatened with conquest
and direct imperial rule, they are apt to resist through
anti-hegemonic warfare.?On the other hand, if the
international system moves too far in the other direction of
disorder and insecurity, the weaker states will be more willing to
give up some of their freedom of action for the sake of protection
in a hegemonic sphere. The violence and instability of the
Napoleonic Wars was followed by the collective hegemony of the
Concert of Europe, and the Second World War by the formation of
NATO.
A hegemonic order will be more stable if it is perceived as
legitimate. As Watson’s survey demonstrates, some international
societies in the past were much more hegemonic than
others.?Rome, Byzantium and China, for example, constituted
the imperial cores of international societies, the weaker members
of which formally accepted their inferiority and dependence on the
imperial center, though without thereby relinquishing all or even
much of their freedom of action.?Classical Greece on the other
hand was marked by a strong anti-hegemonic legitimacy: a series of
hegemonic powers were eventually brought down by anti-hegemonic
coalitions that fought in the name of the liberties of the Greek
city-states.
The modern society of sovereign states that evolved in Europe
since the Renaissance is also based on a strong anti-hegemonic
legitimacy, much like the classical Greek.?The main landmarks
of its institutional development are a series of system-wide
treaties that were agreed upon at the end of major anti-hegemonic
conflicts (Westphalia in 1648, Utrecht in 1714, Vienna in 1815,
Versailles in 1919, the UN Charter in 1945 and, arguably, the
Charter of Paris in 1990.) International law is based on the notion
that all sovereign states are formally equal and respect each
other’s sovereignty – even though in Krasner’s terms this amounts
to “organized hypocrisy”.
The force of the anti-hegemonic orientation in the society of
sovereign states is evident by the centrality of the principle of
the balance of power in both its practices and its theoretical
conceptualization.?Indeed, the balance of power has been seen
as fundamental to the system of sovereign states, the precondition
for its very existence. If the most powerful state is able to
conquer the other great powers, it will be able to conquer all
states and replace the society of sovereign states with a world
empire. Consequently, for their very survival the sovereign states
will coalesce in order to counter-balance a power that grows so
much as to threaten to conquer them. It has therefore long been
argued, that state behavior will produce a balance of power whether
by conscious design or not. As early as 1605 Botero argued that
“given the plurality of princes it follows that a balance of power
is useful and good not as a result of volition, but circumstances”,
a point established with greater scientific rigor by Kenneth Waltz
in our days.?? Hedley Bull, who analyzed
international politics from the point of view of the society of
sovereign states, maintained that the balance of power is the
society’s most central institution. The insistence on a balance of
power is echoed today by the calls of French leaders for the
restoration of multi-polarity in international politics.
While the society of sovereign states has historically resisted
any bid by one power to dominate it, it did require some forms of
hegemonic authority to provide order. Three kinds of hegemonic
authority need to be emphasized. First, there was the collective
leadership exercised by the great powers to promote system-wide
order, such as when they put forth the landmark treaties mentioned
above. In the eighteenth century, an era of power politics and
shifting alliances that may give the impression of weak great power
cooperation, Voltaire described Europe as “une espece de grande
republique” (a kind of great commonwealth), an assessment echoed by
the historian Edward Gibbon and the international law theorist
Vattel, indicating the degree of order provided in common by the
great powers in spite of their frequent conflicts. In the
nineteenth century the Concert of Europe was formally a system of
collective hegemony, as is the UN Security Council in regard to the
enhanced powers of its permanent members. In its various forms,
collective hegemony provided system-wide order without violating
the principle of the balance of power.
Second, great powers have established spheres of influence,
providing hegemonic order to a sub-set of units within the society
of sovereign states. The division of Europe and other parts of the
world into two rival alliances during the Cold War is a prominent
example. Such hegemonic spheres have been stable whenever they were
compatible with the overall balance of power.?But historically
if one power threatened to acquire so large a sphere of influence
as to increase its power to the point of threatening to overthrow
the balance of power, it was resisted.
Third, there have been examples of unipolar hegemonic authority
exercised in specific issue areas in ways that did not threaten to
result in the domination of other powers, i.e. that did not
threaten to overthrow the balance of power. One instance was
Britain’s unilateral use of its naval mastery in the first half of
the nineteenth century to abolish the slave trade in the seas and
oceans.?? Another example was the open
international economic system promoted by Britain in the middle of
the nineteenth century, when the British economy was producing half
the industrial product of the globe. It is true that the open
international economic system was in Britain’s national interest,
since it created asymmetric economic dependences with her weaker
trading partners.?Nonetheless, it did not threaten them with
Napoleonic-type domination and it did secure for them over the long
run economic growth and prosperity.?
One can conclude from these cases, that the exercise of hegemony
in the society of sovereign states has been unacceptable only if it
is incompatible with the balance of power. While the sovereign
states are loath to surrender their freedom of action, they may be
willing to do so to some degree for the benefits of order offered
by the leading powers, so long as they are not threatened with
domination and conquest.
The role of ideology
The establishment of a hegemonic order is facilitated by
ideological homogeneity. International order involves at least to
some extent the projection of domestic values at the international
level.?Units with the same domestic value systems are more
likely to agree on the values-content of an international order and
thus to form a consensus in support of the hegemonic power. This
factor creates an imperative for great powers to spread their
ideology internationally, in order to increase the number of units
that share their values and support their conception of order.
Unsurprisingly, cases of great powers striving to export their
ideology can be found across history.
Nonetheless, this apparently straightforward point needs to be
qualified in two important ways.?First, the imperatives of the
balance of power have time and again trumped the imperatives of
ideology. Cardinal Richelieu led Catholic France into the Thirty
Years War (1618-1648) on the side of the Protestant powers of
Germany and the Netherlands in order to prevent the Catholic
Hapsburgs from becoming so powerful as to threaten to conquer
France herself. In the later nineteenth century republican France,
the most democratic great power of Europe, formed an alliance with
tsarist Russia, the most absolutist great power, against the Second
German Reich, which ideologically was in between. In the 1970s
Mao’s China moved close to the United States in order to balance
Soviet power, in spite of the ideological affinity of the Chinese
and the Soviet regimes. These examples suggest that ideological
affinity has historically been insufficient for the establishment
of a hegemonic order, if the hegemonic power threatened to dominate
and conquer other great powers.
Second, attempts by great powers to export their ideology have
at times resulted not in hegemonic order but in major ideological
conflicts and disorder. States are more likely to accept hegemonic
constraints on their external policies (e.g. membership in an
alliance) than changes in their domestic structures, which
constitute a much heavier degree of hegemony. Indeed, the sovereign
states system that arose in the wake of the early modern European
religious wars was designed to end the efforts of each side in the
religious divide to export its ideology to the other side. Mutual
respect of sovereignty meant non-interference in the domestic
affairs of other states. This feature of the sovereign states
system facilitated its global spread in the 19th and 20th
centuries. If Protestant and Catholic states in early modern Europe
could coexist by formally respecting each other’s
sovereignty (in practice of course powerful states always
intervened in the internal affairs of weaker states), so for
example could Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Confucian states, or
during the Cold War Liberal and Communist states. Forceful attempts
to promote ideological homogenization go against this major feature
of the sovereign states system and have at times been resisted
fiercely (for example during the religious wars, the wars of the
French Revolution, WWII and the Cold War).
The distribution of power in the early twenty-first
century
In terms of material factors of power, the United States has
established since the collapse of the Soviet Union a commanding
lead over the other great powers. What is more striking is that
this lead has been growing. This is evident by GDP data, the most
commonly used indicator of economic power. Japan, the world’s
second economy, had been closing the gap with the United States
during most of the post-war period. But since the 1990s it has been
falling behind.
Table 2: Great powers’ GDP as a percentage of
American GDP
|
|
Japan
|
Germany
|
Britain
|
France
|
China
|
Russia
|
|
1998
|
51.8%
|
27.8%
|
15.9%
|
18,6%
|
14,9%
|
4,2%
|
|
2004
|
39.6%
|
23.3%
|
18.4%
|
17.2%
|
14.2%
|
5.0%
|
American superiority over the other great powers is even greater
in terms of military power.?Clearly the United States occupies
an increasingly hegemonic position in the present distribution of
power. According to the theory and the past practice of the balance
of power, one would expect some or all of the other great powers to
coalesce against the United States (external balancing) and to
raise their own strength, especially military power (internal
balancing).?Yet this has not happened.
It should be emphasized that there is international discontent
with American hegemony. As has always been the case, weaker actors
are loath to accept diminished freedom of action, even while they
enjoy the benefits of hegemonic order. In the present case their
discontent is manifested in what the German publisher Josef Joffe
has described as “psycho-cultural balancing”, which in effect means
a rise in anti-American sentiments, as well “political-diplomatic
balancing”, which means an attempt by the weaker actors to tie down
the hegemonic power through the multilateral procedures of
international regimes. As Joffe argues, “hegemonic powers are loath
to submit to international regimes they do not dominate. Lesser
powers like them precisely because they strengthen the many against
the one. In a world that does not (yet) gang up formally against
the ‘last remaining superpower’, international regimes have become
the functional equivalent of classical balance-of-power
politics.”
Nonetheless, this does not amount to genuine balancing in the
traditional balance-of-power sense.?This is seen most clearly
by an examination of relative defense spending.
Table 3: Great powers’ defense spending as a
percentage of American defense spending
|
|
Japan
|
Britain
|
France
|
Germany
|
Russia
|
China
|
|
1994
|
13,1%
|
12,0%
|
11,2%
|
9,0%
|
4,7%
|
4,0%
|
|
2003
|
11,2%
|
8,9%
|
8,4%
|
6,5%
|
3,1%
|
7,9%
|
As Table 3 shows, the other great powers except China have been
reducing their defense spending relative to that of the
United States. This fact provides concrete and incontrovertible
proof that the other great powers do not feel militarily threatened
by American hegemony. If they felt insecure, they would be expected
to engage in internal balancing, i.e. to strive to increase their
military capabilities relative to those of the United States.
Instead, they commit lower percentages of their GDPs to defense
than the United States, and the trend is downward. The other great
powers have not engaged in external balancing either, given that
most remain formally allied to the United States.?By way of
contrast, the rise of Germany in the later nineteenth century had
sparked a major armaments race, as well as the formation of an
anti-German coalition (entente). What must now be examined are the
causes for the apparent current suspension in the operation of the
balance of power and whether they are likely to sustain a stable
hegemonic order.
Conditions for stability of the American hegemonic
order
One prominent line of argument in the literature suggests that
the absence of an anti-American coalition is explained by the
strong bonds between the liberal democracies, which include most
current great powers. Ickenberry has argued that Western post-war
institutions have mitigated the security dilemmas of anarchy and
hence have made balancing unnecessary within the
West.?? Risse has made a similar point, arguing
that the West constitutes a stable Liberal security community.
Doyle, Russett and others have argued that, quite apart from the
effect of Western international institutions, democracies on
account of their domestic structures do not fight wars with one
another and hence do not face the traditional security dilemmas
among themselves.
These arguments certainly describe the current relations among
the democratic great powers better than traditional balance of
power theory. Moreover, they are supported from earlier historical
evidence that hegemonic orders are more acceptable within groups of
states with similar ideologies. Note that China, the only
unambiguously non-democratic great power, is also the one that has
been increasing its military spending in relation to that of the
United States (Table 3).?? Nonetheless, it is
difficult to accept that democracies will never ever face security
dilemmas among themselves. The democratic peace argument as refined
most recently applies only to mature democracies, i.e. mainly the
West since 1945, which throughout the Cold War was tightly aligned
in the face of the Soviet threat. The sixteen years since the end
of the Cold War are simply not enough as empirical evidence to
suggest that the security dilemmas that were present in all
previous history have disappeared forever among democracies.
Similarly, Western Cold War institutions may be said by their
momentum still to alleviate the security dilemmas within the West,
but it is hard to accept that they have fundamentally changed the
very nature of international politics.?
From the perspective of the arguments presented in this paper
one can say that the presence of democracy in most great powers is
a factor that facilitates acceptance of the American hegemonic
order, but is insufficient for explaining why there is no balancing
against American superiority in factors of power. The democracies
tend to agree on the values-content of international order, and
unlike non-democratic states they are not afraid that the hegemonic
power will attempt forcefully to change their domestic structures.
But some other explanation is needed to show why they do not fear
that they may be dominated or conquered given the commanding
American lead in the distribution of power, given that the
imperatives of the balance of power have in the past trumped the
imperatives of ideology.
The same can be said about economic interdependence as an
integrating factor facilitating the American hegemonic order. The
establishment of the post-war open international economic system by
the United States benefited enormously all states that
participated, which have witnessed unparalleled growth and
prosperity. Its manifest superiority to the bleak performance of
the Soviet Union’s economic order in its hegemonic sphere was a
leading factor in the collapse of the Soviet system. Russia and
even China, which resists democratization, are now participating in
the open international economic system to partake in its economic
benefits. Thus it constitutes an even broader positive inducement
than shared democratic values for accepting the American hegemonic
order. Still, economic interdependence on its own is insufficient
in overcoming the traditional security dilemmas; high degrees of
interdependence in Europe before 1914 did not prevent the formation
of two rival coalitions and the outbreak of WWI.
Another argument in the literature points to nuclear deterrence
as the reason why the traditional security dilemmas are mitigated
among the nuclear great powers. This argument is theoretically very
plausible; the cost of conquering a nuclear power is likely to be
prohibitive. Still, this did not prevent the nuclear-armed United
States, Britain, France and China from feeling threatened by Soviet
conventional forces superiority during the Cold War, which led them
to an anti-Soviet alignment. Clearly the United States today does
not evoke similar threat perceptions in the other great powers.
A more persuasive argument for the absence of great power threat
perceptions in the face of American hegemony focuses on
geographical factors such as distance and the oceans that separate
the United States from the other great powers. John Mearsheimer has
argued that it is almost prohibitively difficult for a great power
to project military force over seas and oceans against other great
powers. This point is borne by European history: Conquerors such as
Napoleon and Hitler were unable to invade Britain, while the
British were unable to conquer and annex Continental European
territories. The United States was one of the most expansionist
powers in the world during the nineteenth century, when it expanded
from the original thirteen colonies all the way to the Pacific. But
its expansion was in its own hemisphere; it could not expand
territorially in the Eastern
hemisphere.???
Mearsheimer’s argument has the merit that it introduces the
geographical factor in the abstract reasoning of balance of power
theory. Anti-hegemonic coalitions have arisen historically whenever
the great powers perceived that the hegemonic power threatened to
dominate or conquer them. Such threat perceptions derive not only
from the hegemon’s superiority in factors of power; they also
depend on whether geography facilitates or hinders the use of
hegemonic power for the domination and conquest of the other great
powers. In the past there never emerged among the great powers an
anti-British coalition, even at the height of British power, since
it would have been virtually impossible for Britain to conquer and
annex Continental European territories at the expense of the other
great powers. The same applies today for the United States. If one
of the land powers of the Eastern hemisphere enjoyed the kind of
superiority in economic and military power that the United States
has today, it would be perceived as much more threatening by the
other great powers – as happened with Germany in the first half of
the twentieth century and the Soviet Union in the second.
The absence of threat perceptions by the great powers in the
face of American hegemony can also be accounted for by less fixed
factors, such as the structure of the US armed forces. The land
forces of the United States in particular have shrunk drastically
since the end of the Cold War.?They are suitable for limited
interventions in peripheral regions, rather than for a major war
against one of the great powers. The United States can project
military force across the oceans against small powers such as the
Taliban and Saddam Hussein.?But the fact that the operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq have already stretched the American land
forces very thin suggests the severe limits to such trans-oceanic
operations.?Thus the present American force structure does not
pose a conventional military threat for the other great powers,
unlike the Red Army during the Cold War.
An additional factor accounting for the absence of an
anti-American coalition is the actual or latent threat perceptions
among the great powers of the Eastern hemisphere, especially Asia.
Due to their geographical proximity and the resultant history of
wars between them, they fear potential threats from each other more
than they fear the United States. In spite of European integration
Britain and France jealously guard key national prerogatives such
as nuclear weapons and the veto power in the Security Council,
which prevent them from being overshadowed by an economically and
demographically more formidable reunited Germany. Russia, China,
Japan and India constitute an Asian balance of power subsystem
quite similar to that of Europe in the nineteenth century; they eye
each other suspiciously. The American hegemonic order actually
alleviates the security dilemmas within the Eastern hemisphere by
making potential security threats among its great powers less
likely to materialize, given that the United States is likely,
acting as an offshore balancer, to weigh in against any
aggressor.
Consequently one can say that the American hegemonic system has
been stable thus far because of the combination of positive
inducements on the one hand and an absence of great power threat
perceptions on the other. The latter is a conditio sine qua
non, as previous experience with hegemonic orders has shown.
The distance of the oceans, in conjunction with the current
American force structure, make the United States less threatening
to the great powers of the Eastern hemisphere than Germany or the
Soviet Union in the past. The democratic great powers are therefore
willing to give up some of their freedom of action, especially in
the context of Western institutions originating in the Cold War
era, for the sake of promoting a liberal democratic international
order under American leadership. Even non-democratic or
quasi-democratic great powers – China and Russia respectively –
accept American leadership for the sake of the benefits of the open
international economic system that the United States set up after
1945, so long as the United States does not attempt forcefully to
change their domestic systems. As has always been the case, there
is discontent among the weaker actors with the hegemonic power,
manifesting itself through anti-Americanism and soft balancing in
the context of multilateral institutions. But there is no real
balancing such as could undermine the American hegemonic order. So
long as the other great powers do not feel militarily threatened by
the United States, they are willing to draw the benefits of the
American hegemonic order even at the cost of some diminution in
their freedom of action.
In the long run this fortunate arrangement may contain the seeds
of its own destruction. The open international economic system is
highly dynamic. By virtue of the mechanism of uneven growth, it
alters the distribution of power over time. In earlier post-war
decades it facilitated the rise of the German and the Japanese
economies, which in the 1970s became serious rivals for the
American economy. Still, Germany and Japan were dwarfed by the
United States in terms of size and population. Eventually their
rapidly growing economies reached a stage of maturity and lost
steam, leaving them far behind American GDP.
The situation will be different if China and India follow a
similar sustained rapid-growth path.?Both nations have
populations of over a billion; China has a larger territory than
the United States.?Their economies are now among the fastest
growing in the world. Even if they eventually reach a stage of
maturity and lose steam, they will need less than half the per
capita GDP of the United States in order to have overtaken it in
total GDP. If that happens, they may seek to rearrange
international order according to their interests and values, which
the declining United States, perhaps in alliance with other Western
powers, may seek to resist, ushering an era of heightened
international friction and strife. In the past such transitions
usually entailed system-wide warfare.?We may not face such a
transition for decades, but when we do, managing it without warfare
or Cold-War style strife will be a much greater challenge than
managing a hegemonic order under a stable distribution of
power.
Conclusions
Hegemonic orders can be stable if they fulfill two conditions.
First, the hegemonic power must not pose a threat of domination or
conquest for the other great powers. Throughout history powers
valued their freedom of action, and this is particularly the case
in the modern society of sovereign states, which like the classical
Greek society of city-states is based on a strong anti-hegemonic
legitimacy. The great powers will be willing to submit to hegemonic
authority only to some degree; they will form balancing coalitions
against a hegemonic power that threatens to subjugate them to the
extent of changing their domestic structures or taking away all
their freedom of action. The present American hegemonic order
fulfils this condition of stability, as is evident by the declining
great power defense spending relative to that of the United States,
which demonstrates that they do not feel militarily threatened by
the hegemonic power.
Second, the hegemonic order must dispense benefits to the
participating states that are worth the attendant restrictions in
their freedom of action. The present American hegemonic order is
most beneficial to democratic states, since it largely reflects
American domestic values. But it also provides economic benefits to
non-democratic participants such as China, as well as overall peace
and security among the great powers.?
Even with the presence of these two conditions, the inherent
tension between the imperatives of independence and order will
continue to apply. States will disagree about the precise sharing
of the burdens and the benefits of order. The weaker states will
seek to tie the hegemonic power in the procedures of multilateral
institutions that favor the many against the one, while the
hegemonic power will be tempted to bypass such constraints. But the
fulfillment of these two conditions makes the management of such
inherent tensions feasible.
In the long run even a stable hegemonic order will be
threatened, if the distribution of power underpinning it changes.
Eventually new powers will grow more powerful than the status quo
powers and will seek to rearrange international order according to
their interests and values.?Historically such transition
periods were marked by system-wide warfare. Managing such a
transition in the future without warfare or dangerous levels of
strife will be a challenge much more formidable than maintaining
order under a stable distribution of power.
(China.org.cn)