Yes, more schoolwork. I like to see myself in print. :^)
BTW, look up the following if you get the chance:
"A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire", Peter Temin
"The Rise and Fall of World Trade, 1870-1939", Antoni Estevadeordal, Brian Frantz, Alan M. Taylor, NBER Working Paper No. w9318
Good stuff.
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"Globalization only survives if a `hegemonic power' is willing to bear an additional burden. The U.S. is ill-equipped to do so."
The above statement touches on several issues of importance in the 21st century, but the simplicity of the two sentences masks a great deal of complexity. It can be deconstructed into several different propositions, each of which should be examined separately.
1. Globalization requires a `hegemonic power'.
2. The United States is such a `hegemonic power'.
3. Despite this status, the United States is not properly constituted to fill said role.
The statement is unsuitably vague as to what is meant by globalization, hegemony or the precise nature of the additional burdens the hegemonic power must bear. The former two are definitional matters, and so I will endeavour to make them more concrete before we proceed to the main questions.
By globalization, I will use a definition that borrows heavily from The Oxford Companion to Politics: Globalization the growing extent, intensity and velocity of global interactions, particularly the movement of goods, services and the mobile factors of production, capital and labor. These movements can take the form of increased and longer-distance trade, capital flows, movements of labor, etc.
The term "hegemon" will be taken to mean a state with a preponderance of power with regards to some zone of influence, such that it can impose its will throughout said zone. I will leave the physical and temporal extent of the zone open, since I believe it impacts our propositions in various ways and should be looked at in greater detail.
Globalization requires a `hegemonic power'
Is a hegemon necessary in order to maintain and increase the level and rapidity of global trade, investment and travel? It would appear to be useful, but perhaps not necessary. In examining the Early Roman Empire, for instance, Peter Temin finds that "ancient Rome had an economic system that was an enormous conglomeration of independent markets." Given that much of the trade he describes was long distance (i.e. Egyptian grain being shipped for consumption in Rome), it speaks to the advantages of hegemony. The level of trade Temin describes implies a relatively high degree of division-of-labor, even for vital goods. Was Roman hegemony necessary, though? Temin argues that a large proportion of transactions were market driven, which implies that the parties would have tried to transact regardless of political realities. But many transactions he describes, such as the pooling of risk between shippers and the sharing of shipping risk with lenders, would clearly be impossible if a high degree of political or NGO (i.e. pirate) risk was extant. If Roman hegemony wasn't necessary, it at least lowered transaction costs significantly.
The British case holds different lessons. By most reasonable measures, the heyday of the British Empire prior to the Great War was an era of globalization. As Niall Ferguson points out in both Empire and Cash Nexus, it was a time of unparalleled labor mobility, with flows as high as 14% of the population per decade for Ireland in the 1880s. Likewise, global trade as a percentage of GDP had been rising steadily throughout the period and had reached a zenith just prior to the war that would not be matched again until late in the century. Capital exports from Great Britain were significant (running at an average rate of 4.6% of GDP prior to WWI), and much of it went outside of the formal Empire. Yet it is questionable to what extent the British Empire can be considered to have been a true global hegemon.
On a macro level, the Empire was already facing serious threats by 1870. As Paul Kennedy points out, the combination of spreading industrialization (and the surpluses and military strength that flow from it), a decreasing share of total output and slowing productivity growth was putting the Empire under serious pressure precisely during the period that is seen as its heyday. On a micro level, the lack of hegemony is evidenced by the scarcity of British involvement in Great Power wars between the end of the Crimean War and the start of WWI, the period 1856 and 1914. This has conventionally been interpreted as a result of British hegemony, but one must question the logic unless it's clear that no serious challenges arose to British interests during the period. What good is hegemony, after all, if you can't use it? What one sees, however, is a steady chipping away at British interests by other Powers, with concessions to the United States in the Western hemisphere, to France in Africa and Asia, attempts to mollify Germany. This is not hegemony, but rather a rear-guard effort to maintain advantages which the Empire already possessed in the face of relative decline.
Even the vaunted "Two Navy Standard" can be seen, in a way, as a sign of less-than-hegemonic might. Even when it in fact exceeded the next three largest Powers (as in 1883, when the Royal Navy had more battleships than the French, German and Russian fleets combined), the sheer extent of British interests meant that local superiority in any given theatre was never assured and action in multiple theatres simultaneously would have been difficult. The key to the Two Navy Standard, then, was reliance on the idea that it was unlikely that the Empire would ever face a larger combination of Powers, perhaps since the complexity of relationships and the division-of-spoils problem rise rapidly as one adds coalition partners. It was the traditional British game of playing other Powers against one another in order to leave a margin of safety between the Empire and likely groups of competitors. This is clever and effective, but not hegemony.
If Britain was not truly hegemonic during the high Imperial period, however, then our primary question has been answered. Globalization was at its height during a period when British power, though pre-eminent, was hardly hegemonic. Therefore, a hegemonic power is not required for globalization to occur. Most global links during the period must have had at least a partially voluntary character, since the Empire was not equipped to force the issue in every case.
This raises other questions. If the Empire was not a hegemon, what was it? And does the U.S. currently equipped to fill a similar role? The key may lie in the wars the Empire did fight between 1856 and 1914. The period starts immediately with the second Opium War and suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Along the way are numerous small colonial actions, punctuated by a second Afghan War, the Zulu War, the Boer War, the Maori Wars and the annexation of much of Africa. What the Empire seems to have engaged in was the application of force against small or weak opponents in order to gain territory, resources, commercial rights, debt repayment and the like. It is this sort of activity which brought vast swaths of territory in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa into production, which created secure commercial and financial rights for British investors and expatriates, which in general created a climate favourable to globalization. This was not the entire story, as much trade and investment was conducted with relatively advanced states that were unlikely to be swayed by British coercive force (not least the United States), but it did produce a codification and regularization of relations in the less-developed regions. How could this have encouraged globalization? Via the same process by which Hernando De Soto sees the regularization of land title as encouraging economic activity amongst groups that have been otherwise excluded from legal commerce.
I thus see the British Empire's crucial role not as a hegemon, which it could never have truly achieved in the face of declining strength relative to the other advanced nation, but rather as "regulator", encouraging, cajoling and sometimes forcing a regularity of commercial relations on a selective basis and thereby encouraging the inclusion of ever more areas and people into an international system of which it was not the only beneficiary. I will, for want of a better term, call it a "regulatory Power", rather than a "hegemonic" one. This leads us to a restatement of our second proposition.
The United States is a `regulatory power'
It appears clear that the United States has been the only Power since the end of the Second World War in a position to fill such a role. While, like the British Empire not actually hegemonic on a global scale, it has managed to be the prime-mover in a number of localized and global regulatory schemes (i.e. Bretton Woods, GATT, WTO) and has encouraged others (i.e. European Coal & Steel Community). At the same time, it has managed through the use of coalitions to prevent Great Power wars while simultaneously using unilateral force in those arenas where it could safely do so. Hegemony has not been within its grasp, but an Empire-like "greasing of the wheels" has.
The forms this "regulatory power" has taken have not been identical. Formal empire has generally (although not entirely) been anathema due to both internal political tastes and the apparently greater efficiency of letting local elites who are tied into the global system run things at a local level. (What Franz Fanon called the "comprador" class, perhaps?)
Despite this status, the United States is not properly constituted to fill said role.
Niall Ferguson, for one, doesn't appear to be sanguine about the U.S. ability to fill those shoes. While urging the United States to take on the role at the end of Cash Nexus, later writings (such as his review of Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 in the October '03 issue of Foreign Affairs) take the United States to task for such failings as the longstanding import of capital from the rest of the world (in opposition to the Imperial British model), the relatively light spending on the "warfare state" as opposed to the "welfare state" and what he calls "the small matter of will".
These criticisms appear shaky, to me. Whether the U.S. is a net importer or exporter of capital is, I think, beside the point. Capital looks for the best possible risk-adjusted returns. This may have been outside of the British Isles during the Empire and appears to be within the United States during the current period, at least for the moment. The key is that returns are maximized. One can argue that the direct export of capital from China to the United States via Treasury bond purchases and the underpinning of Chinese industrialization that flows from it via a competitive forex rate for the Yuan have done more for development and living standards worldwide than any amount of FDI flowing from the Empire did. The keys are free-flow and comparative advantage, not the direction per se.
The problem of relatively heavy spending on domestic priorities is also chimerical. As both he and James Macdonald point out , the key invention in the development of the "warfare state" was an efficient financial mechanism that allowed the state to temporarily harness the economic strength of the nation while causing relatively little harm to long-term productive power. If the United States is filling a "regulatory" role rather than a "hegemonic" one, the need for such harnessing should be, as it was for the Empire, limited. For the "day-to-day" tasks (up to and including Iraq-scale interventions), normal levels of spending actually appear to be up to the task. If and when the need for true mobilization arises, the same mechanisms that have always existed to fund such undertakings will still exist. In the meantime, the matter simply becomes one of the democratic desires of the populace as to how much production they would like to funnel through the government before it returns to them.
The last objection, that of a lack of "will", is a mixed bag. A will for formal empire seems unnecessary and even counter-productive. It may have been more necessary in the 19th century, given that much of the world was completely isolated from and even unaware of the global trading system. This is manifestly not the case in the age of radio, TV and the Internet, and most smaller states appear to desire entry (if on the best possible terms they can get.) There does not appear to be a need to forcibly organize resources in the Imperial manner; they self-organize nowadays.
The issue of the will to continue in the face of casualties and setbacks seems less pressing given the recent electoral results, since a defeat for the President would have spelled a decisive rejection of even mildly onerous (in aggregate terms, not individual) costs. However, given the short tenure of the operation to date, I will admit that the jury is still out. |
