U.S. hegemony today

Monthly Review, July-August, 2003 by Peter Gowan

American hegemony since 1945 has been structurally different in its degree and type of dominance from that of any other power in the history of capitalism. Instead of simply being the biggest power with the biggest capitalism among a number of great powers, the United States was able to exercise political dominance over the entire capitalist core. Before 1945 different capitalist centers had geographically different zones of political and economic dominance. The United States ended that arrangement, making the whole capitalist world its geographical sphere of political dominance. On this basis it shaped and reshaped the conditions and forms of international capital accumulation throughout the capitalist world.

The question today is whether the United States can continue this system in the post-Cold War world. This is the question that has been obsessing American and other state leaders since 1989, and it is the governing item on the agenda of the Bush administration just as it was on the agenda of the Clinton administration. As the Bush Senior administration noted correctly in its 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance, the key threat to this kind of American hegemony lies in regionalist political challenges from the two other main centers of core capitalism: those at the western and at the eastern ends of Eurasia. The U.S. grand strategy since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc has sought to ensure that such regionalist political developments do not force the United States into accepting a more collegial political center of world capitalism.

The resulting conflicts and aggressive power plays by the United States are thus focused today principally upon competition between capitalist centers, not direct conflicts between the United States and international labor and the anti-imperialist left. This article attempts to explore the forms and substance of intercapitalist relations in the post-1945 era of American hegemony.

American Hegemonism: The Cold War Hub-and-Spokes Model

American hegemonism during the Cold War was widely seen, on the left as well as the right, as really nothing more than American leadership of a core capitalist partnership. In other words, the core capitalist states were seen as having established a deep, organic, cooperative affiance to defeat Communism, manage international capital accumulation, and keep the South open and under control. On this view, the United States was simply the first among equals, enjoying that status because of its size. Marxists had a model for this: a Kautskyite "ultra-imperialism." And this vision was even radicalized in the 1990s into conceptions of a transnational capitalist class across the core, with a shared identity and shared fundamental interests to match. But this view is not, and has not been, the case.

There was indeed a partnership of core capitalist states during the Cold War in the fight against Communism and to keep the South under control. Institutions like the international financial institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the security alliances as well as Western cooperation in the UN indicated this.

But there was not only partnership. There was also American political dominance over the other core states. The partnership and its institutional expressions could be thought of as a superstructure. But underpinning that superstructure was a deeper structure of American political dominance.

This deep structure derived from the ability of the United States to create a particular kind of hub-and-spokes structure of relations which ensured that for each of the main core capitalist states its political relationship with the U.S. hub was more crucial to its vital interests than any other possible relationship with any other power.

During the Cold War this hub-and-spokes arrangement of dependency operated as a political system, which continually reproduced itself. This system was constructed in the second half of the l940s when all the main capitalist centers in Eurasia were desperately dependent upon the United States in almost every field: West Germany and Japan were occupied by the United States, the capitalist classes of France and Italy were weak and threatened internally, while the French state was desperate for help to regain and retain its empire as well as being worried about a German revival; Britain was financially crippled and desperate for resources to retain its empire. All needed dollars and American imports.

In these conditions the U.S. ruling elites, under the guidance of Dean Acheson, hit upon a masterly concept for assuring long-term American political dominance over the entire core. It offered to help all the main capitalist states with their particular key concerns, whether imperial or for reintegration into the state system, or fear of each other, or in some cases fear of domestic Communism. But at the same time it asked them to join U.S. centered alliances for a military confrontation with the Soviet Bloc and Communism.