U.S. hegemony today

Monthly Review, July-August, 2003 by Peter Gowan

Thus while it is true that the West European states and Japan have liberalized financial systems, scrapped capital controls and accepted the forcing open of other financial systems and service sectors through the WTO and other mechanisms, it is also true that neither the West Europeans nor the East Asians have fully embraced the U.S. model and the U.S. program for the world economy. The West Europeans built a regional monetary shield against the dollar system and combined an adaptive deal with the United States on the WTO with efforts greatly to strengthen their own economic and regulatory integration through the EU. And in East Asia also there have been strong reactive tendencies towards regional networks.

Neither in Western Europe nor in East Asia have these defensive reactions been taken on behalf of labor. Far from it. The West European regionalist defense mechanisms have simultaneously been mechanisms for eroding the social power of labor, most obviously in the policy framework for the euro, which is patently geared towards driving through a qualitative weakening of the rights and bargaining strength of labor, particularly in Germany.

It is also true that no other capitalist center has advanced an alternative program for international capital accumulation or proclaimed its own capitalism as an alternative model to that of the United States. Only through the emergence of such an alternative can the advance of the U.S. model be checked or defeated. And indeed, the risks of advancing such an alternative would be very great. It could after all stimulate labor to join the challenge. It could split the capitalist core's approach to the South in political economy matters, opening the way towards resistance to common transatlantic economic interests in the South. And above all it could delegitimize the American model even within the United States itself. All these possible consequences would ensure that any important center offering an alternative would face ferocious resistance from the United States and its transnational supporters.

The fact that neither the German nor the Japanese capitalist classes and states have embraced the new American system is extremely important and it is all the more remarkable given the gigantic pressures from the 1995-2000 American boom. But the boom has now turned out to have been a bubble, and the American bubble has turned out to have involved a great deal of parasitic and predatory activity, actually undermining the American productive base as in the paradigmatic case of Enron. This marks a very substantial setback for the drive to reorganize American and international capitalism to assure U.S. capitalist dominance through the first half of the twenty-first century.

New Challenges to American Hegemony and U.S. Responses

Against this background we can more easily appreciate the challenges to U.S. hegemony in the post-Cold War period. We will first examine the challenges and then consider the possible strategies of the United States for meeting them.