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Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons
WHY SECONDARY STATES SUPPORT, FOLLOW, OR CHALLENGE
Stanford Security Studies
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7163-4
Chapter One
THE LEADER CAN'T LEAD WHEN THE FOLLOWERS WON'T FOLLOW The Limitations of Hegemony
Neal G. Jesse, Steven E. Lobell, Galia Press-Barnathan, and Kristen P. Williams
U.S. HEGEMONY HAS DEFINED the post–Cold War world. By virtue of its preponderant military and economic power relative to the other states in the system, the hegemon is able to exert power and influence over those states. Most of international relations (IR) theory and security studies, from Thucydides to Hans Morgenthau to John Mearsheimer, is about the study of the leading power of the day: great powers, superpowers, hegemons, and, most recently, überpowers. This realist literature has vacillated between a portrayal of the world as one characterized by a balance of power between competing powers (for example, Waltz), and a portrayal of the world as characterized by periods of hegemonic control (for example, Gilpin). Reflecting this duality, IR scholars in the early post-Cold War years debated whether the American preponderance following the breakdown of the USSR was indeed the beginning of an era of U.S. hegemony or a "unipolar moment." Consequently, one drawn-out policy discussion with the end of the Cold War among scholars was whether the United States should try to perpetuate and prolong its "unipolar moment" as the sole preponderant power. Scholars debated whether preponderance was sustainable and durable (calling for a policy of primacy and unilateralism) or self-defeating, costly, and likely to provoke counterbalancing behavior (calling for a policy of selective engagement, offshore balancing, and buck-passing). A second policy debate was how to perpetuate America's unipolar moment: whether the United States should use military power, self-restraint, trade, democracy, international institutions, or security communities to prevent, punish, coerce, or reassure secondary states not to counterbalance.
These debates in the literature primarily focus on the motivations and strategies of the hegemon to exert its influence and power and in particular its attempt to stave off challengers. The literature shows that hegemons seek to ensure that the less powerful states follow, whether through coercion or benevolence. Strategies and incentives include trade, direct aid, diplomacy, and military alliances. And yet it takes two to tango. The reaction of other states in the system is not fully contingent on the hegemon's own strategies. Nor can these reactions be neatly classified into a "followers" or "challengers" dichotomy.
Building on the work of others who have addressed the issue of responses to hegemons, this book seeks to understand the motivations, objectives, and interests of the followers—why they follow, or not, the hegemon and whether they challenge the policies and strategies or the core position of the hegemon. Some of these second-ranked (major powers) and tertiary states are relatively powerful, and others are weak; some are satisfied status quo powers, and others are dissatisfied. This renewed interest in the "rest" of the states is reflected in the emerging debate over soft balancing as the common response by secondary powers to U.S. hegemony. Scholars have discussed other strategies, including leash-slipping, hedging, and prebalancing. The focus on soft balancing ignores the broader question of when and why states choose to support, follow, or challenge the hegemon and the tactics and grand strategies they employ. Using both historical and contemporary cases (in different issue areas—military, political and economic; different hegemons—global and regional; and different geographic regions-Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South Asia), this book, unlike much of the existing literature, examines the domestic and international factors that account for the motivations of the rest of the powers.
While also reviewing the literature on hegemonic leadership, specifically the strategies available to a hegemon to garner support from followers, the primary focus of the chapter, and thus the book, is to examine the strategies and motivations of the followers. Do followers follow (or not) because of external security threats (realism), coercion or cooptation by the hegemon, shared values about how the international system should be ordered, or domestic politics? This question is interesting and important both theoretically and for policy makers because it has direct implications for what the United States can and should do to generate followership as well as to the more fundamental question of whether this is really in U.S. hands.
The chapter begins with a brief overview of the literature on hegemons—namely the dominant theories in IR to account for how the hegemon is able to influence the behavior of secondary states. We then turn to a discussion of followers and an examination of the literature that explores the strategies they can take to challenge or resist the hegemon. Following this, we address the motivations of followers, pose several questions, and provide an explanatory framework for examination in the subsequent case study chapters: namely, domestic and international factors that account for the motivations of the followers in response to strategies of the hegemon. While not covered as a separate case chapter in the volume, as way of illustration, this chapter notes examples of followers and their motivations in looking at the historical case of the 1991 Gulf War and the contemporary example of responses to U.S. hegemony in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, we provide a brief overview of the organization of the book.
HEGEMONS, UNIPOLARITY, LEADERSHIP, AND IR THEORY
In assessing the distribution of power in the post-Cold War international system, one thinks immediately of the overarching dominance of the United States, whose power (economic, military, and technological) surpasses that of any other state in the system. As Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth note, "What truly distinguishes the current international system is American dominance in all of them [power dimensions] simultaneously." Moreover, there is no state today that can rival the United States "in any critical dimension of power. There has never been a system of sovereign states that contained one state with this degree of dominance." Both the capabilities and influence of the United States, according to Elke Krahmann, enable it to engage in policies deemed both hegemonic and imperialistic. For the most part, scholars seem to be in agreement that the structure of the contemporary international system is unipolar. But is it hegemonic?
While much has been written about hegemony, it is possible to make a rough distinction among three approaches to the concept. Put succinctly, they address the questions of what a hegemon has, what a hegemon wants, and what a hegemon does. The first is purely material, focusing on the necessary power capabilities needed to be called a hegemon (this approach nowadays compares hegemony to unipolarity). The second approach focuses on the state's motivation to exercise hegemony. A third, yet closely related, approach focuses on hegemony as a certain relationship between a preponderant state and other states in the system. This approach implies that hegemony is not a trait but rather a type of interaction or relationship. These approaches find their expression in various theoretical as well as policy debates among offensive realists, defensive realists, neoliberal institutionalists, and constructivists, all really arguing mostly about strategy and interaction rather than about hegemony as a condition.
Robert Keohane, in his formative work in After Hegemony, distinguished between the "basic force model," which identifies a hegemon by examining material power distribution in the system, and the "force activation model," which insists that a hegemon is not only a preponderant power but one that has the will to lead the system. A hegemon is thus a state "that is powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and is willing to do so." This basic distinction runs through most of the discussion of hegemony to this day. The first definition, focusing on concentration of capabilities, is obviously appealing as it is more elegant and potentially more deterministic. Stephen Krasner's seminal work on state power and international trade discussed a hegemon as "a much larger and relatively more advanced state." Robert Gilpin defined a hegemon as "a state that is politically the most powerful and economically the most efficient." Military power is also seen as important, especially in its ability to guard economic resources. Keohane talked about "control over raw materials, sources of capital, markets and competitive advantage in the production of highly valued goods." David Lake focused on the combination of relative size (each country's proportion of world trade) and relative labor productivity to define a hegemon as a large state with high labor productivity.
All of these are what we can call "first-wave hegemony studies," focused mainly on the international political economy (IPE) arena and driven by the puzzle of explaining the openness of the international economic system and its prospects in face of perceived (or not) American decline.
"Second-wave hegemony studies" emerged several years after the end of the Cold War, as the continued strengthening of the United States and the lack of balancing against it slowly gave way to an understanding that we do not live in a "unipolar moment" but rather a "unipolar system." The very discussion of "unipolarity" rather than "hegemony" highlights the focus on studying the impact first and foremost of material power capabilities, along the same lines Kenneth Waltz adopted in his characterization of bipolar and multipolar systems. This approach finds clear expression in Wohlforth's discussion of the United States as unipole, which focuses on various indicators of economic and military capabilities. A similar focus on material power preponderance can be found in Barry Posen's work and in the recent work of Brooks and Wohlforth. While they note what they call the confusing use of the term hegemony, both as concentration of capabilities in one state and as political domination, they choose to focus on the distribution of capabilities.
Equating unipolarity and hegemony thus offers us an elegant way to measure and define a hegemonic state, as well as to test more elegant hypotheses about how this unique power position shapes the hegemon's preferences and policies, as well as the preferences and policies of other states in the system. This solution, however, is more problematic on closer inspection. One reason has to do with the "will factor," to which we turn next. But, even on their own terms, capability-based definitions of hegemony fail to come to terms with the relative importance of various power capabilities across time and space. Whereas the United States today is perhaps a relatively easy case, given its preponderance across so many power indicators, it becomes much more complicated to assess other cases of possible hegemony, especially in a regional context. Throughout the 1980s experts debated as to whether Japan could be considered a hegemon in Asia, given its huge economic power preponderance but limited military and political capabilities. Today, scholars continue to debate whether China is becoming a regional hegemon in Asia and, if so, when that is likely to occur. These debates highlight the limitations of a power-as-resource approach to hegemony. Such an approach to hegemony could, however, be fine-tuned if we choose to assess it on either an issue-area or a regional basis. This way we can identify, for example, wider or narrower power disparities between the lead state and others across regions or issues and examine the extent to which such variations have an impact on how others treat the lead states.
The second basic approach to hegemony adds to the material capabilities a motivational element. Keohane stressed that a hegemon has both the power and willingness "to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations." Earlier, Charles Kindleberger emphasized that a hegemon is a strong state that is willing to assume responsibility for the system and to exercise leadership. A hegemon is measured in large part by its acts of leadership (serving as a lender of last resort, opening its markets to goods in distress, ensuring coordination of macroeconomic policies, and so on). This focus on motivation, in turn, created a distinction between two types of hegemons: benevolent (Kindleberger) and malevolent (Gilpin). More recently, in the second wave of hegemony studies, this has found expression in discussions of U.S. motivation to continue leading the world and to remain engaged internationally. Layne argues that hegemons and hegemony can be described by five characteristics, most of which are material, but he brings in the motivational factor: "raw, hard power" and "economic supremacy"; "acts self interestedly to safeguard its security, economic, and ideological interests"; "is about polarity.... a hegemon is the only great power in the system, which is therefore, by definition, unipolar"; "is fundamentally about structural change"; and "is about will. A hegemon purposefully exercises its overwhelming power to impose order on the international system." An important distinction between structural and motivational approaches is that structural approaches argue that the hegemon's preferences can be deduced from its material power preponderance, whereas a motivational approach gives room for other factors that may shape motivation to lead one way or another.
The third element defining hegemony in the literature is the nature of the lead state's interaction with others in the system. Hegemony is mainly about what a hegemon does. From Gilpin to G. John Ikenberry, hegemony is about creating a certain international order through the construction of various institutions. In War and Change Gilpin argued that a hegemon controls the processes of interactions among the elements of the system and seeks to organize political, territorial, and economic relations in terms of its respective security and economic interests. Twenty years later, and from a different, neoliberal, theoretical perspective, Ikenberry elaborated on how great powers in general, but hegemons in particular, have used international institutions to build a favorable international order, as well as to reassure other states in the system. The discussion of strategy is also central in recent debates about whether to describe the United States as a hegemon or as an empire. While this distinction is perhaps not central here, much of it falls on the nature of the governance structure created by the powerful state in the system. A hegemonic order, according to Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, "involves the existence of at least some weak and sparse ties of authority between the hegemon and the lesser powers. These represent the minimal level of authority, or asymmetric influence, created by the hegemonic bargain." They are also characterized by a higher level of interdependence among states. This type of order combines anarchic and hierarchical elements. The recent debate about a U.S. empire, and the strong political undertones that accompany it, do raise an additional point worthy of consideration in a volume discussing followers. It seems that much of the debate on whether the United States is simply a great power, a hegemon, an empire, a hyperpower, or the like, is not a theoretical debate about the core elements of U.S. power or power more generally but rather a political-ideological debate about whether such power and influence are good or bad. This suggests an important point: The meaning of hegemony is often in the eyes of the beholder. Keeping this point in mind may be useful when we move to examine different reactions to American power preponderance.
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Excerpted from Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford Security Studies. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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