Monthly Review Volume 55, Issue3, July-August 2003 U.S.

Hegemony Today 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 toexercise political dominance over the entire capitalist core. Before 1945different 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 obsessingAmerican 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 GeneralAgreement 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 politicaldominance 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-andspokes 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 DeanAcheson, hit upon a masterly concept for assuring long-term Americanpolitical dominance over the entire core. It offered to help all the maincapitalist states with their particular key concerns, whether imperial orfor 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. Once the other powers had accepted the governing character of the globalcleavage between the "free world" and the "Communist enemy," overriding all other possible political cleavages, the United States swiftly made that cleavage the basis for a continuous military confrontation with theCommunist world. And it also drove the cleavage into the domestic political systems of the allies: the basis upon which a party was to be treated as legitimate within these domestic political systems was to be how the party stood on the global divide. In the generalized military confrontation with the Soviet Union the United States became the protector power, since if a war broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, the allies of the United States lacked the military capacity to defend their territories from Soviet conventional forces. And the United States thus acquired the rights of such a protector power: a substantial degree of control and supervision of each ally's military and foreign policy strategies, as well as an insistence on an overriding allegiance to the relationship with the United States, not to be substituted by any other affiance relationship. And in return for guaranteeing their security, the United States could ask for special rights and privileges both in the political and indeed the economic field. The result was thus a unipolar capitalist world in which the United States had the right to take unilateral decisions on the great global cleavage with the Communist Bloc. This set of political relationships at an interstate level was thenbuttressed by the structure of the allies' domestic political systems. These effectively precluded the possibility of political leaderships emerging legitimately on an international line of opposition to the global politics of the United States. A further beauty of this system was that it gave the basis for rebuildingaggressive bourgeois parties within the allied states. Such parties couldtrump parties of labor and the left by being the most aggressive antiSoviet and anti-Communist political force. And they could use the military threat and the ideological connection between social democrats and Communists as weapons against domestic demands for social reform. Thus the interests of domestic capitalist power and strong pro-Americanism became virtual synonyms in most allied states. The one weak center in this system was French Gaullism, for long the mainpolitical force on the right in France and a nationalist force rather than a Cold War pro-American force. De Gaulle withdrew from the military structure of NATO and removed U.S. troops from France, while simultaneously taking strong stands against some U.S. political drives in the South. But France did not leave the Alliance itself and was in most respects still strongly linked to the United States in East-West relations. French attempts in the early 1960s to form a bloc with Germany and the attempt of the West Europeans to form a common position on Israeli-Arab relations in the early 1970s were both easily defeated. This set of dependencies was supplemented by others as the West Europeanempires crumbled. The core states found that their links to oil and rawmaterial suppliers in the South and the protection of the investments in the South depended increasingly on American power and operations in the South. If the U.S. sanctions were imposed on, say, an important supplier of oil, the core state which had been buying that oil or whose company was extracting it, would be suddenly cut off. And if a revolution or coup

d'etat threatened the foreign investments of any core capitalism, crushing the challenge would typically require either direct help from the United States or its acquiescence. The U.S. role as leader of the core in controlling the South was weakened by its defeat in Vietnam, but it managed to use proxy forces along with its sea and air power and capacity for covert action to sustain this system. It is worth stressing that this set of Cold War arrangements was not some sort of trick or bluff. There was a genuine Cold War confrontation and it did, on the whole, serve the interests of all the core capitalist states very well. There was bound to be a degree of conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world and there was bound to be deep hostility between Communist Parties and the various capitalist classes where Communism was a threat. But these antipathies did not necessarily mean a massive expansion of American power into Eurasia, turning the rest of the core capitalist states into subaltern allies. This was the achievement of the Achesonian system. Combining Development Paths for Other Capitalist States with Structures Assisting the Dominance of U.S. Capitalism This political system was a necessary but not a sufficient condition forsustained U.S. hegemony over the capitalist core. Sustained hegemonyrequired that the United States could offer a development path for othercore capitalist classes while at the same time structuring the patterns of international capital accumulation in ways that facilitated a leadingposition for American capitalism. A development path is not just about economics. It is also about politics. Capitalist classes must be confident that they have a secure path towards their own enrichment--an effective way of extracting value out of production activity They must also have a path to the strengthening of the political authority of their state over their population: economics and politics must combine in what is at bottom an overall social power strategy of development. But another central issue in this area is the obvious tension betweenproviding a development path for other core capitalisms and assuring thecontinued dominance of American capitalism. For thirty years the UnitedStates triumphantly achieved this task, but its efforts to restructurepatterns of accumulation from the 1970s on were fraught with tensions andproblems. In the first phase of the postwar period, war destruction and economicdislocation in Eurasia offered the possibility of a great postwarreconstruction boom. And American capitalism was the bearer of a new type of industrial capitalism with very dynamic possibilities. The so-called Fordist type of capitalism was different from the typical interwar and nineteenth century European form of capitalism. This had involved using workers only for production, while the products of the most advanced industries were to be sold to middle-class markets around the world. The Fordist idea gave the industrial workers the possibility of a role also in "realization," as consumers of the products of advanced industries. And when this idea was linked to the power of the labor movements that emerged in a number of West European societies after the Second World War, often Communist led, and was linked also to Keynesian ideas of class compromise in economics and to fears of Communism, the basis was laid for a powerful economic growth dynamic in Western Europe based upon a great deepening of domestic product markets. (1) These production arrangements were sufficiently dynamic to draw the social democratic labor movements into stable cooperation with the new social order, giving the state concerned a solid basis for establishing liberal democracy. In societies where this class coalition was too shaky, the United States backed authoritarian regimes, as in the Mediterranean European states (with Italy as a half-way house), in South Korea, and Taiwan. Fitting these development paths together with the dominance of Americancapitalism was relatively easy in the 1947-1970 period. On the one hand, the U.S. planners took the strategic decision to revive both German and Japanese capitalisms as the industrial hubs of their respective regions. These centers were thus destined to become the main competitors of American capitalism in the central field of industrial competition. But at the same time, they were also the most strongly controlled and dependent in the political field, as quasiprotectorates and were thus most susceptible to U.S. political pressure.

For twenty years Washington's strategy for assuring the dominance of U.S.capitalism was centered on opening European labor markets to U.S. capitaland opening product markets to U.S. industrial goods. On one side,Washington's 1954 economic agreement with Germany guaranteed that Germanproduct and labor markets would be open to U.S. products and foreign direct investments. On the other side, Washington pushed for a treaty-based West European integration which would guarantee in international law the openness of each West European economy to the products of other West European economies. Thus, from their West German base, American industrial capitals would have access to the product markets of the whole of Western Europe. The result was a single unified political and economic space covering theentire capitalist core under U.S. political and economic leadership. On this basis, the U.S. and other core states could act in partnership to control the South. The 1970s Crunch and the Drive for New Development Paths Favoring U.S.Ascendancy As Robert Brenner has so graphically demonstrated, by the 1970s the United States faced a powerful competitive challenge from the industrialcapitalisms of Germany and Japan. And the Fordist path had also produced an industrial labor movement with great social power and a large measure of entrenched security. The result was a crisis of core-wide developmentstrategy. The old strategy could have been continued, but it would haveinvolved a deepening of collegial management of international economics, a deeper corporatist collaboration with labor and a more inclusive arrangement with the South. Some capitalist groups argued for this in the 1970s, as in the Brandt Commission. But victory was achieved by the AngloAmerican New Right's program. This involved a rollback of the social power of labor in the core countries, a rollback of the social coalitions for state-centered development in the South, and a return to the forms of capitalism that had existed in the pre-1945 period and before the New Deal. Post-1945 restrictions on the property rights of capital were to be swept away: capital would no longer be treated as an instrument for achieving social goals such as full employment and social welfare; it would be treated as king. State social policy would be governed by the priority of serving capital in all fields. And capital no longer meant industrial output: it meant money capital, the largest possible pyramids of finance, looking for the most profitable rate of return in any direction at home and abroad. Tightly parcelized and controlled credit systems were swept away, controls on the right to move financial property in any direction were abolished, public services and state industrial sectors would be offered to money capital, macroeconomic po licy was to be geared to protecting the value of money capital, fiscal policy was to be geared to freeing money capital from taxation. This was a program for a return to the late nineteenth century capitalism of J. P. Morgan or Barings. Labor was to be shoved out the door again, allowed only to press its collective noseagainst the icy window to gaze at the feasting financial barons and theirpolitical toadies within. Keynes was dead, the rentiers were back, wavingbooks by Hayek and hailing the new road from the supposed postwar serfdom of capital. (2) But linked to this recidivist program for social change within capitalistsocieties was also a new set of inflections of the effort to maintain thedominance of American capitalism. To understand this we must first examine how the United States sought to structure the international political economy in the postwar period to combine development paths for all with the ascendancy of U.S. capitalism. The American Playing Field for International Capitalism The ideology of the postwar international economy was free trade on amultilateral basis. The idea was that international economics within thecapitalist world was radically separated from politics and the international economy was based not only on common rules applicable to all, but on rules that were derived from the norms and principles of free trade, enabling comparative advantage to drive the international division of labor for the benefit of all. But the United States never really had a free trade approach tointernational economics, nor a multilateralist approach. The basic tradition was to open others' markets to whatever sectors U.S. business was

strongest in, while protecting U.S. sectors which could face superior competitors. The U.S. principle was reciprocity rather than most-favored-nation multilateralism. And this tradition persisted throughout the postwar period. At the same time these policies were partly concealed by other features of the American approach: U.S. postwar expansion was led less by trade than by foreign direct investment--a pattern that has persisted to the present day. Sales revenues from American overseas subsidiaries have been, and remain far larger than U.S. export revenues. Thus for the most dynamic and internationalized sectors of U.S. business the key issues were not so much tariffs and quotas and safeguards--the traditional stuff of trade politics--but access to labor markets abroad for U.S. capitals under very favorable terms. Thus the United States ensured, when the European Economic Community was created, that it would treat U.S. capitals (unlike other foreign capitals) as if they were European, with full "national treatment." Secondly, the United States did allow international economics to be governed by legal procedural rules to a very great extent. It did not, on the whole, support managed trade geared to volume targets. Formally, the Uni ted States remained outside the GAIT regime--the U.S. Senate never ratified GAIT. But it allowed the GAIT system to work in a legal sense, by and large. The fact that international economic exchanges were largely governed bylegal procedural rules was very important because it gave capitalistseverywhere a large measure of predictability and security for theiroperations. But the legal rules themselves were "positive law," not norm-based on liberal free trade principles. The world of international trade law thus became a thicket of power-driven interests in which argumentswere won less by those on the side of the angels of liberalism than by those able to pay the biggest lawyers' fees and able to use market power threats to settle arguments about trade rights. Against this background we can note the ways in which the United Statessought to maintain its capitalism's dominance on an international level. The general goal has been to assure U.S. leadership in new growth sectors and to ensure U.S. entry into (and supervision of) new growth centers. New growth sectors are in the so-called high-tech fields, especially technologies with a wide impact across economies. New growth centers are those countries or regions experiencing rapid, sustained economic growth; such centers need to be both penetrated by U.S. capitals and brought under U.S. political dominance so that the United States can have leverage over their future development path. Very important in ensuring leadership in new growth sectors is Americanindustrial policy and not least the role of the military budget in suchpolicy. This can fund research and development which can generate new growth technologies. It can also prime the pump with large military-related investments in relevant infrastructure and with the U.S. state acting as an initial market for the products. No other core capitalist country has an equivalent set of instruments for launching new growth sector technologies. When U.S. fears arise that another center may be developing new growth sectors of global reach, we can see how it is inclined to sweep aside the liberal rhetoric and demand managed trade, using political threats. The classic example here was its confrontations with Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s over microchips and semiconductors over which the United States simply imposed a bilateral managed trade regime. As far as new growth centers have been concerned, U.S. attitudes toexclusion have again been demonstrated by the example of Japan in the 1980s and also other East and Southeast Asian countries in the 1990s, with its insistent pressure for opening up to the entry of U.S. capitals: the classic example here would be the U.S. Department of the Treasury's operations towards South Korea in 1997-1998. And for a new growth center such as China, the drive to assure a liberal political regime easily influenced by U.S. leverage is evident today. A key lever for exerting pressure on new growth centers is that of opening the U.S. market to their products in exchange for their opening their asset and other markets to the entry of U.S. capitals. But the recidivist turn to private finance-centered capitalism in the United States and its U.K. satellite was combined with an important new range of instruments for assuring the dominance of U.S. capitalism. The most important of these is what I have called elsewhere the Dollar Wall Street Regime (DWSR). (3) The Imperial Monetary Shift and the Dollar Wall Street Regime

Any idea of a free trade level playing field in international economics has been premised on the assumption of a homogeneous, stable international monetary system. Multilateral steps eliminating trade barriers make no sense as a level playing field if a leading state can then manipulate exchange rates at will and free itself from the payments disciplines applying to other states. And when that leading state is also the producer of the world's main international currency, you have something like an imperial economic framework facing other capitalisms. You also have a monetary framework constantly generating payments crises and debt crises all over the place--except in the state issuing the lead currency. That is why, from the nineteenth century until the early 1970s, all author ities accepted the need for a stable, homogeneous international monetary order. But then the American authorities broke with that tradition and turned in just such an imperial direction. The first step was taken with the closing of the Gold Window in August1971--a conscious strategic decision, planned far in advance, entailing aconscious rejection of a new, reformed homogeneous international monetaryorder. (4) This was followed by the effective sabotage by the United States of attempts by the rest of the capitalist states to construct a new system in the early 1970s. (5) And after an agreement to manage the dollar exchange rate with the deutschmark and the yen at the Rambouillet Summit of 1975, the United States in fact soon went its own way, eventually dismissing the whole idea of such management in the early Reagan years. The result has been quasi-imperial in two main respects. First, byfragmenting the international monetary system, it pushes economic operators and states to seek stability by operating almost entirely within what is in effect a dollar bloc. The only alternative to extreme monetary instability is to regionalize their operations behind a monetary shield of their own, as the West Europeans chose to do beginning with the de facto construction of the deutschmark bloc in 1979. Secondly, by freeing the dollar from the constraints of any internationalanchor and rules common to all, the United States could unilaterallysubordinate international monetary conditions to the perceived requirements of American capitalism. When the United States was in recession, the U.S. authorities could drive the dollar down to generate export-led revival; when the United States was rising into boom, the Treasury Department could swing the dollar up massively against other currencies. Some believe that these gigantic swings in exchange rates are steered not by governments but by financial markets and foreign exchange markets. This is trivially true but actually false. These markets are situated principally in New York and its London satellite. The biggest players in these markets take their cue in exchange rate issues from every word and gesture of the Treasury Department's authorities and every move by the authorities of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And since the two sides share fundamentally common interests, the U.S. Treasury Department can use the main financial market operators precisely as instruments and multipliers of public policy. (6) The full force of this power to swing the dollar's value in great arcs can be appreciated when we remember the consequences of the dollar's role as the main monetary unit of account and as the main means of payment for oil and many other international products. However much the dollar swings one way or the other, prices do not change for these products for those operating in the dollar zone. Furthermore, because of the dollar's dominance as a means of payment, the United States can run up huge current account deficits and enormous external debts without facing the kind of monetary payments constraints facing other states. The dominance of the dollar is not simply the result of the size of the U.S. economy. It is also and very importantly the result of two other things: politics and finance. A state that protects regimes and trade routes all over the world can, as Britain showed with its sterling area, gain the privileges of having a world money. So can the United States. A state that controls the sources of world oil politically can ensure that oil is priced and largely paid for in dollars and thus can defend the dollar's international dominance. And a state which is the most politically secure in the world is a very safe place for storing financial property, thus ensuring huge inflows of funds into New York and its London (offshore) satellite. And a state with the largest, most liquid financial market in the world is the least risky place to store wealth since you can swiftly move your wealth out for other purposes in such large, liquid markets.

The central structure of postwar capitalist economies had been the national columns running from the state through a tightly brigaded financial system to the industrial structures. The Anglo-American return to a Morgan-Barings style financial capitalism placed the private financial pyramids at the heart of the system, the industrial structures taking their places alongside real estate, private housing finance, private health care and a host of other private services, with the state's role redefined as the protector and service-provider for this new structure. The rise of the DWSR, assisted by the diplomatic efforts of Washington and London, opened the possibility of a vast new field of expansion outwards for American capitalism. Just as New York financial pyramids in the late nineteenth century acquired dominance over industrial capitalism further west by financing its development, so American financial pyramids at the end of the twentieth century could acquire dominance over industrial capitalists across the rest of the core. By sweeping away all restrictions on the centralization of American finance and by drawing Main Street under the sway of Wall Street, the American authorities gave American financial pyramids an overwhelming edge in international finance by the end of the 1980s. With the structural instability in exchange rates, industrial capitals in Europe and in East Asia could not securely expand their sales in the United States through export strategies. They had to expand their operations through mounting production operations in all three centers. And with overcapacity in most established industrial sectors, and the consequent need rapidly to seize international markets with new products, it could be hoped that the need to link up with American finance would be overwhelming. Changes were also sought in the institutional structure of capitalism toensure that industrial companies were dependent on securities markets and to ensure that hostile takeovers were permitted, with the intent thatproductive assets across the capitalist world would fall into Americanownership and a vast transnational centralization of capital would bepossible. And in conditions of generalized capitalist stagnation and crisis in much of the world, paradoxically governments and banks and industrial companies could be desperate for American finance to tide them over, giving American finance capitalism ever widening circles of control over international capitalism. International monetary instability greatlyenhanced these possibilities. The drive to transform capitalism across the capitalist world into a newprivate-finance-centered social system increasingly integrated into aninternational capitalism dominated by the DWSR has continued for twentyyears. It is widely assumed that the entire capitalist core has acceptedthis drive and changed accordingly. The idea of a globalized economygoverned by neoliberalism expresses this assumption. Yet in reality we have seen much more tension-ridden relations between capitalist centers, despite the fact that in all centers there has been a drive to shift soda] power from labor to capital. The concept of neoliberalism captures the generalized drive against the social power of labor. But it does not capture the parallel tensionridden relations between the three main centers of capitalism. Thus while it is true that the West European states and Japan haveliberalized financial systems, scrapped capital controls and accepted theforcing 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 reactionsbeen taken on behalf of labor. Far from it. The West European regionalistdefense mechanisms have simultaneously been mechanisms for eroding thesocial 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 andstates 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. The Soviet Bloc collapse has had a number of negative consequences for the exercise of U.S. political dominance over the capitalist core. The East Asian capitalisms (Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) remain dependent on U.S. military power for their security, but largely as a result of U.S. policies. This is most obvious in the case of South Korea. If the U.S. were to sign a peace treaty with the North and assure its security, South Korean security dependence on the U.S. would be ended. But the security dependence of Western Europe on U.S. military capacityended with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. This has opened up a very considerable threat to America's global political dominance because it has facilitated a turn on the part of West European continental states toward building an increasingly strong political caucus and thereby undermining the hub-and-spokes division and dependency of West European states in the field of international politics. The West European states did not turn towards stronger political integration out of some collective will to launch some sort of bid for world leadership, supplanting the United States. They did so because of the confluence of a number of specific pressures and needs. Germany desired to bind other West European states more closely around it, worrying that its greatly enhanced power might lead its neighbors (not least France) to want to gang up against it. Since France (and Britain) resisted a decisive move to a federal democratic EU, the obvious alternative was that of a strong political bloc in international politics. There was also the perceived need to present a common political as well as economic front to East Central Europe, and the obvious instrument for doing this was through strengthening the EU as thepolitical instrument for processing German and other West European policies towards the East. Critically, the EU was being used as the main instrument for transformingsocial relations within its member states in a "neoliberal" direction. The basic idea was to use European social democratic enthusiasm for European unity against European social democratic commitment to labor rights. But in the 1990s, the European economies were stagnating with high unemployment and the EU lacked any genuine democratic legitimacy. Therefore, to enhance the authority of the EU in pursuit of neoliberalism, new policy areas and activities were sought which would appeal to the European center left. Many of these were in the international political field: campaigns on human rights, environmentalism, arms control, aid and a host of other such causes. No longer legitimating the EU as a social model for the world, the EU statessought to legitimate it as the supreme global champion of the pacification of the world through international law rather than power politics. The drive for monetary union and the establishment of the euro wasperceived, rightly, in continental Western Europe as requiring a greatlystrengthened political base; but gaining such a base was very

difficult,especially because of the continued divisions within French state elites on French national strategy. What could be called a Mitterrandist wing was committed to France as a regionalist power, focused on leading Western Europe through the EU--a national strategy requiring very closecollaboration with Germany; but the other wing, which could be called theChirac tendency, defined French national strategy in terms of France being a small global power, with its bomb and seat on the UN Security Council. And as for the British role, it was principally directed to being the champion in the EU of the Anglo-American model of private-finance centered capitalism and to trying to break up the political cohesion of the EU. But from an American grand strategy perspective, the erosion of the hub-and-spokes dependency in Europe and the pressures in Western Europetowards political unity constituted a fundamental medium-term threat toAmerican global hegemony. The possibility of an equally large political,financial, and industrial center in Europe could not possibly be anythingother than a fundamental power threat. But it was one that could not beacknowledged because since 1947, the United States had itself championedEuropean integration. And although that policy had become increasinglydeclaratory rather than operational by the 1980s, the bulk of the European intelligentsia and, it seems, much of the political elites did not grasp just what a threat they posed to the U.S. from this angle: a threat equivalent to China, Japan, and South Korea getting together as an East Asian union modeled on the EU, and a threat all the more insidious for being difficult to denounce publicly. The problem posed by the EU was also connected to the drive forconsolidation of the new Anglo-American program for a world of privatefinance-centered capitalism, led by an imperial dollar and centered in the American financial pyramids. If the euro was consolidated and euroland built a genuinely unified financial base, the pressures towards federal political unity would be very strong, and within such a federal Europe pressures for a kind of capitalist society different from the Anglo-American model would become very strong. The fact that the huge range of U.S. subsidiaries in the EU-half of all U.S. affiliate business sales abroad are in the EU-benefited greatly from the EU political economy structures (including the euro) made this threat to the United States all the more insidious. A further threat derived from the possibility that Western Europe could find increasing common ground with East Asia on a wide range of issues in the international political economy: a common hostility to the imperial dollar and the potentially lethal financial strikes by U.S. operators (despite the fact that West European operators had also participated in the operations of U.S. banks and the U.S. Treasury in the East Asian cr1sis). The ideological basis for American military power projection during the Cold War had been the supposed massive military threat from the Soviet Bloc and Communism. This was largely accepted as legitimating the aggressive use of military coercion against pro-Soviet forces and regimes. But with the end of the Cold War, the aggressive use of U.S. military power faced serious legitimation problems. Many voices were raised for military aggression to be outlawed unless it was expressly sanctioned by the Security Council, as laid down in the UN Charter. And West European governments supported this line. Attempts by the Clinton administration to identify a new string of enemies--the so-called rogue states, dubbed such in 1994--were branded by many, including European governments, as exaggerated and inappropriate, and efforts by the U.S. government to enforce sanctions against Iran and Libya as well as Cuba were flouted by U.S. allies in Western Europe while the blockade against Iraq was also challenged. This West European effort to place political-legal constraints on the U.S. use of its major political instrument--its capacity for militaryaggression-actually contained the seeds of a new world order concept which can be very attractive to other capitalist states but which is thoroughly subversive of the entire way in which the American state is configured. The West European idea, expressed most cogently by German policy elites is that the Atlantic world should dominate the rest of the world by means of international public law. The Atlantic states, following the example of West European integration, should voluntarily subordinate themselves to international legal rules constraining their sovereign autonomy. They should then ask others wishing access to their markets and close political relations to subordinate themselves to the same rules. And states which egregiously flout the norms supposedly underlying the rules of the international system should then be subject to coercive sanctions, including, but only as a final resort approved by the Security Council, military force. The imperial secret of the whole concept lies in who

writes the rules in the first place. If this is done by the Atlantic states, they can dress them up as being universalist-liberal norm-based rules while in devilish detail they are simply "positive law" rules serving the interests of the Atlantic states. The model here is, of course, the European-inspired WTO which presents its rules as rooted in universalist-liberal free trade norms while in fact they are a concoction of positive law rules serving Atlantic capitalist interests. Under this world order concept, military coercive power operates not in opposition to international law but as its enforcer. Yet the United States has no tradition whatever of subordinating itself to international treaty-based law and it has no interest in a world order in which military force becomes operational only as a last resort. Yet the West European idea attracts powerful support from other core capitalist states as well as from many states in the South. Such support is indicated by the EU's success, in the teeth of U.S. opposition, on issues such as the international Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocols. These problems contributed to new potential challenges within the UnitedStates itself. While the U.S. capitalist class and its political leaders were overwhelmingly committed to maintaining and extending U.S. politicaldominance and the continued expansion of U.S. capitals on a global scale,the end of the Cold War raised the threat of majorities in the U.S.electorate demanding that U.S. governments prioritize domestic improvement and reallocate resources from the military field and overseas expansion to tackling problems at home. Though committed to rebuilding U.S. global political dominance, the Clinton administration did not attempt to mobilize a broad popular constituency for power projection abroad. The boom of the second half of the 1990s eased this potential pressure but did not solve the basic political problem, which had been demonstrated so strongly by the eviction of Bush Senior from the White House despite his Gulf War victory. We should add the fundamental geopolitical problem inherent in the turns of Russia and China towards capitalism. These turns undermined their useful status as potential threats to a Western Europe and Japan in need of U.S. military services for protection. They also set up competitive pressures within the core countries to gain privileged relations with these two states and privileged access to their labor and product markets and resources and assets. The obvious danger from an American point of view was that in the West a Germany anchored within a more cohesive EU could establish a privileged partnership with Russia, while some or all of the East Asian capitalisms could link up with China in a strong regional network that could weaken American leverage and economic penetration. A final consequence of the Soviet Bloc collapse for American politicalleverage was the following paradox America was the purest of symbols ofcapitalism and thus the defeat of Communism should have, and in many waysdid, greatly enhance the attractive power of the American capitalist model. Yet at the same time, the deepest source of American political power during the postwar period lay in the fact that capitalist classes throughout the world knew that they could rely upon the United States to help crush labor or socialist challenges to their power. Yet, with the great decline of this threat after the Soviet collapse, this particular American service was also facing significant redundancy. Indeed, there was a growing tendency for liberals and others in the core capitalist countries to argue that the greatest challenge to the world came not from the enemies of liberalism and democracy but from the deep and growing divide between North and South as well as from environmental crises. And on this agenda the Uni ted States was identified as a major source of problems, rather than as a provider of solutions. And as the 1990s wore on, the pernicious, destructive consequences of the DWSR and of the WTO regimes generated a growing opposition from young people in the North as well as from social movements in the South. Thus, by the end of the 1990s there were plentiful indications that theUnited States was facing multiple challenges as a result of the Soviet Bloc collapse and its consequences. The most serious of these challenges came from what for many is a surprising quarter: Western Europe. The Bush-Lieberman Counter-Punch There is abundant evidence that in the face of the challenges of the Soviet Bloc collapse a consensus quickly emerged in the United States for the American state to attempt to transfer its political hegemony from one over the capitalist core to one over the globe as a whole. (7) Ways would be found to bind all the

main powers across Eurasia into hub-and-spokesdependency relations with the U.S. of a kind that would ensure that eachsuch power would privilege its desire to accommodate U.S. political thrusts over all other options. The main emphasis of the Clinton administration was upon economic statecraft and upon driving through the program for a new global accumulation regime in which U.S. rentier-centered capitalism would be central. "Economic globalization" and the operations of the U.S. Treasury were at the heart of the Clinton approach on a global scale. But at the same time, in the political field, the priority was to re-establish U.S. dominance over Western Europe and over its expansion eastward. The Clinton administration, building on Bush Senior's success in keeping Germany in NATO and thus preserving the NATO structure, successfully undermined West European attempts to resolve the Yugoslav crisis outside the NATO framework. Its Bosnia victory over West European efforts to resolve the crisis was followed by NATO's eastward expansion, a polarization against Russia in the Kosovo War, and the consolidation of strong American political ties with Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, and Romania. But what the Clinton administratio n failed to prevent was the continuing efforts to strengthen the political cohesion of Western Europe, its search for greater autonomy and its drive to restrict the political value of U.S. military power. The West European states responded to U.S. geopolitical maneuvers in Europe by what could be called subversive bandwagoning. They went along with each U.S. thrust, on Bosnia, in the Yugoslav war, and visa-vis Russia and NATO enlargement, but they simultaneously also responded by trying to strengthen their own regional political unity, most notably in the case of the European Security and Defense Policy, but in other areas as well. And the chief problem for the United States from a strategic point of view was precisely this West European effort at unity and autonomy on international political questions. The Bush administration came into office determined to crack the Europeanist nut. September 11, 2001 gave them their opportunity. They announced a new strategic doctrine which utterly repudiates the entire Europeanist position on world order. The new strategic doctrine focused on the legitimate use of force, rogue states, and the politics of the Middle East. The Bush administration then called for war against Iraq as an operationalization of this strategic doctrine. It turned to the West European states and asked them if they wished to get on the bandwagon this time, adding that they faced only two choices: being for the United States or against it. Lieberman and all other leading Democrats either supported this line or went along with it. Bush was acting firmly within the programmatic and strategic consensus of the American capitalist class since 1990. Cheney is not a marginal figure, he is a central figure amongst American class political leaders. The American attack on Iraq had a number of objectives, in the region and on a global scale (including U.S. control of world oil). But among the global targets, ending the growing cohesion and influence of Western Europe was central. The war has split Western Europe as intended. It has not, however, produced a strategic victory for the U.S. efforts to consolidate the hub-and-spokes dependencies basis for a unipolar hegemony. That remains a long way off, and the path to it must include not only military-political victories and large geopolitical maneuvers across Eurasia, but also the political consolidation of the recidivist private-finance-centered rentier capitalism and the imperial dollar across the whole capitalist core. Conclusions Postwar American capitalism and the American state were an advance forWestern European capitalism over what had gone before, in the inter-warperiod. The Europeanist capitalist program for world politics would now be an advance on the American way today, both in the military-political field and to some degree in the social field. Ironically, this is in large part because of the advances made in Western Europe under American and-to be honest about history--Soviet and Communist influence. But we are now in a chaotic world where the American state is probably too weak to win on a global scale, while the West Europeans and East Asians are probably too weak and divided to shift the direction of world politics in a more pacific and socially inclusive direction.

The U.S. drive to remilitarize world politics as the basis for consolidating its global hegemony in the postCold War conditions will tend to generate a vast and heterogeneous coalition of opposition across the globe for some time to come. It will also generate great suffering in many parts of the South. At the same time, the new rentier-centered capitalism is a recipe for social regression on a global scale. A global left, centered on international labor movements will arise tooppose the American global program. Already many around the world, most of whom are not socialists, reject the U.S. program. They recognize that the real challenge for capitalism is to demonstrate that it can tackle the North-South divide. It is possible to imagine a capitalism that could tackle this divide: the kind of New Deal-Keynesian-Social Democratic capitalism that accepted the Welfare State model after the Second World War. But that capitalism was born under the spur of the challenge from Stalingrad and a gigantic international Communist movement, with an alternative social program. Without that spur today, we have the old story of chaos, wars, imperialist exploitation-all the things that make Hobson's book on the nature of finance capitalism at the start of the twentieth century fresh and topical today. Notes (1.) The pattern was somewhat different in Japan and East Asia, where thepower of labor was much weaker, U.S. military-related demand during theKorean War was much stronger, and where an exportoriented growth strategy directed at the U.S. market was much stronger. (2.) The new (Anglo-) American capitalist model is typically presented inthe language of economics and called monetarism or a free marketderegulation approach or "neoliberal" economics. But it was as much aboutpolitics as economics: about freeing the state from its social commitments to the mass of citizens and using the state's powers much more narrowly to enhance the social power of capital. It is simultaneously a new way of expanding outwards in both politics and economics. (3.) Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble (Verso, 1999) (4.) Joanne Gowa, Closing the Gold Window. Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1983). (5.) John Williamson, The Failure of international Monetary Reform 1971-1974 (New York New York University Press, 1977) (6.) This is not to deny that there are objective limits to U.S. Treasuryefforts, but these limits are wide. A useful discussion of the failings of mainstream economic explanations for exchange rate swings can be found in Paul de Grauwe, International Money (Oxford University Press, 1996). (7.) Paul Wolfowitz has written persuasively about the emerging programmatic consensus. See Paul Wolfowitz, "Remembering the Future," The National interest 59, Spring, 2000. The programmatic convergence between the Wolfowitz-Lewis Libby positions in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance and the conceptions of the Clinton administration are evident in ClintonNational Security Adviser Anthony Lake's key policy statements: see Anthony Lake "From Containment to Enlargement," School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C., September 21, 1993, and Anthony Lake, "Laying the Foundation for a Post-Cold War World: National Security in the 21st Century" Speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations May 24, 1996.