Hegemony: the New Shape of Global Power
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P1: KPN/FFX P2: IML/FFX QC: IML/FFX T1: IML GRBT012-Agnew February 10, 2005 4:51 Hegemony i Hegemony John Agnew is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author or co-author of Place and Politics, The United States in the World Economy, The Geography of the World Economy, Geopolitics, and Place and Politics in Modern Italy, among other titles, as well as the co- editor of American Space/American Place. Hegemony THE NEW SHAPE OF GLOBAL POWER John Agnew Temple University Press PHILADELPHIA For Felicity Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright C 2005 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2005 Printed in the United States of America ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agnew, John A. Hegemony : the new shape of global power / John Agnew. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59213-152-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-59213-153-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign economic relations. 2. United States—Economic policy. 3. Consumption (Economics). 4. Globalization. 5. United States—Foreign relations. 6. Civilization, Modern—American influences. 7. World politics—21st century. 8. Geopolitics. I. Title. HF1455.A6155 2005 337.73—dc22 2004058896 246897531 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Hegemony versus Empire 12 3 American Hegemony and the New Geography of Power 37 4 Placing American Hegemony 71 5 U.S. Constitutionalism or Marketplace Society? 102 6 Globalizing American Hegemony 119 7 The New Global Economy 159 8 Globalization Comes Home 189 9 Conclusion 219 Notes 231 Index 267 v Preface s a child, I understood American “influence” in the world differ- ently than that of the “high politics” of diplomacy and economic policy that I had heard about on the radio or from my parents A and teachers. The first time I saw an American car taking up both sides of the main street in my home village in northwest England— brought there for display, not to drive, by a vacationing native son usually employed by Chevrolet (GM) somewhere “over there”—I understood something of the pull exerted on the rest of the world by the American cornucopia. I was disabused of all this as a university student. I was taught in international politics that the only important American influence was that exerted by the U.S. government as a result of its military strength and the capacity of the economy it governed. But apart from that, all states were more or less the same in striving for global primacy. The fact that the United States had “replaced” countries like Great Britain at the top of the global state-heap was attributed to its amazing industrial capacity, a dose of luck, and the support of such stalwart allies as the British, whose time as a world power had finally run out. My more pos- itivist social science instructors were particularly dismissive of the idea that anything “unique” about American history might have anything to do with anything. The “rise” of the United States was due to rational actors exploiting the universal conjunctures associated with spurts of technological change and the outcomes of wars (predetermined by who had most war materiel). The United States was just another “case” like all of the others. In the years since, the world seems to have changed beyond all recog- nition. Much of this change is put down to “globalization,” although quite what that means remains elusive. It is partly about “time-space compression”—the reduction in the importance of distance for a wide range of transactions—but it is also about significant changes in the vii viii Preface geographical scope and the temporal speed of economic transactions and the rapid transmission of cultural messages. Certainly, the old the- ories of world politics of states bumping up against one another now seem not just antiquated but positively misleading. This book ties globalization to that American influence on the rest of the world that I had inchoately recognized so many years ago. A paper I wrote previously, “Globalization Has a Home Address,” lays out some of the main strands of my thinking. That expresses well one of the main arguments that I make in this book: globalization is to a significant de- gree “Made in the U.S.A.” But now I want to go beyond this idea to make the further argument that globalization under American influ- ence has initiated change in the very spatial ontology of world politics. By this I mean that the geography of power is decreasingly organized on a singular territorial basis by reference to states as we have known them since the eighteenth century. In its place we are seeing a world with an increasingly complex spatiality of power, as localities, global city-regions, regions, and trading blocs connect or network with one another to challenge the primary state-based territorial divisions. So, if the twentieth century was the American century, the twenty first is not likely to be. American hegemony has set in motion a world that can no longer be dominated by any single state or its cultural fruits. Yet, one of the most common ways of addressing American influ- ence today is to refer to the United States as an actual or incipient “empire.” With the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a competing superpower, the U.S. government certainly seems to have no peer. In- deed, particularly since September 11, 2001, the U. S. government has confronted the rest of the world with the hubris and noblesse oblige that are associated with the imperial purple. But the term empire usu- ally implies much more than this. It implies a high degree of territorial organization, effective centralized power, and a directing intelligence. These traits do not seem to match the ways that an essentially impro- vising American government currently relates to the rest of the world. Perhaps history misleads us in looking for repetition in the behavior of powerful governments. If states with the largest military establishments or GDPs per capita in the past became or tried to become empires, then surely the United States must, too? I think that the empire designation is fundamentally misleading in understanding the current situation and influence of the United States in world politics. In its place I propose the concept of hegemony—not simply in the sense of dominance or equivalence to empire, but as a confluence between a globally dominant Preface ix position on the one hand and a set of attributes that that dominance has created, enabling it to spread and be imposed around the world, on the other: what I call “marketplace society.” Hegemony, therefore, has had a specifically American content, if one open to adaptation as it travels and enrolls others in its operations. This is not the same as modernization or the conversion of people to modernity in an American guise—that is, the adoption by individuals of a set of modern values in opposition to so-called traditional ones. Rather, it is about the adoption of rules of economic and political life that reorient and reorganize world politics. Globalization and the new geography of power that this entails have been the outcome. The temptation of empire, however strongly felt in some quarters in Washington, reflects the negatively charged reverberation of the success of what I am calling American hegemony on the United States itself rather than a coherent forward-looking strategy that grows out of either American experience or the main course of recent world history. Making the case for a new shape to global power that has developed from American hegemony but which now points to a world increasingly outside the direct control of the United States or any other state is the purpose of the book. Acknowledgments would like to thank a number of people who have helped with this book and the thinking behind it. James Anderson and Gerard Toalen- couraged me to develop my argument about empire versus hegemony. ITom Mertes made me clarify my criticisms of empire as a useful con- cept in the current world situation. David Lake introduced me to how a thoughtful political scientist considers questions of anarchy and hierar- chy in international politics. Leslie Sklair questioned my consumption model of American hegemony and encouraged me to spell out my ar- gument. Dennis Conway has tolerated my obsession with the need to understand the “American experience,” while understanding that this does not entail indulging in the exceptionalism that incites such hubris along the Potomac. Steve Legg provided me with a careful reading of Chapters 1 and 2. Mat Coleman made some pivotal suggestions that helped clarify the argument of Chapter 5. Jo Sharp and I worked to- gether on many of the ideas in Chapter 4. Chase Langford conceived and drafted the map of the “Coalition of the Willing” that appears as Figure 9.1. He also drew all of the other figures. Finally, Leslie Sklair and Felicity Nussbaum read the manuscript with great care, saving me from a number of errors and misstatements. Any that remain are my re- sponsibility alone. Felicity also offered kind encouragement at difficult moments. Peter Wissoker has smoothed the way with Temple Univer- sity Press. I am particularly grateful to him. A much earlier version of Chapter 2 previously appeared in Antipode 35 (2003), and Chapter 3 ap- peared as follows: Millennium: Journal of International Studies; sections of this chapter first appeared in Millennium (vol.