Hegemony or Empire?

According to S. Ryan Johansson, one of the contributors to Two Hegemonies, the word "hegemony" was used originally to describe the relationship of Athens to the other Greek city-states that joined it in an alliance against the Persian Empire. "Hegemony" in this case "mean[t] that [Athens] organized and directed their combined efforts without securing permanent political power over the other[s]." By contrast, according to the "world-system theory" of Immanuel Wallerstein, the book's final contributor, "hegemony" means more than mere leadership but less than outright empire. A hegemonic power is "a state ... able to impose its set of rules on the interstate system, and thereby create temporarily a new political order." The hegemon also offers "certain extra advantages for enterprises located within it or protected by it, advantages not accorded by the 'market' but obtained through political pressure."

Yet another, narrower definition is offered by Geoffrey Pigman, in his introduction to a useful and original chapter in Two Hegemonies on agricultural trade liberalization in the 1990s. Pigman describes a hegemon's principal function as underwriting a liberal international trading system that is beneficial to the hegemon but, paradoxically, even more beneficial to its potential rivals. Pigman traces this now widely used definition of the word back to the economic historian Charles Kindleberger's seminal work on the interwar economy, which describes a kind of "hegemonic interregnum." After 1918, Kindleberger suggested, the United Kingdom was too weakened by war to remain an effective hegemon, but the United States was still too inhibited by protectionism and isolationism to take over the role. This idea, which became known, somewhat inelegantly, as "hegemonic stability theory," was later applied to the post-1945 period by authors such as Arthur Stein, Susan Strange, Henry Nau, and Joseph Nye. In this literature, the fundamental question was how far and for how long the United States would remain committed to free trade once other economies -- benefiting from precisely the liberal economic order made possible by U.S. hegemony -- began to catch up with it. Would Americans revert to protectionist or mercantilist policies in an effort to perpetuate their hegemony, or stick with free trade at the risk of experiencing relative decline? This is what Stein called "the hegemon's dilemma," and it appeared to him to be essentially the same problem faced by the United Kingdom before 1914. Paul Kennedy drew a similar parallel in his influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

THE BRITISH MYTH

Having defined "hegemony," the next question becomes which of the two states, the United Kingdom or the United States, was more hegemonic? In the book's introduction -- a tour de force of truly magisterial scope and penetration -- O'Brien gives an unequivocal answer: the United States. To be sure, the United Kingdom had a moment of "hyperpower" in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when, as one Prussian general noted, it was "mistress of the sea. ... Neither in this dominion nor in world trade has she now a single rival to fear." Yet the United Kingdom was never truly hegemonic in the century that followed. The "Pax Britannica" depended mainly on the Royal Navy, O'Brien explains, "and was therefore bound to be far more constrained than the 'penetrative' military power which allowed governments ... in Washington to become really 'hegemonic.'" For a century, with the sole exception of the Crimean War, the United Kingdom avoided military interventions, preferring to "placate the sensitivities and political antagonism of European governments."

Moreover, the international spread of free trade and free navigation -- the "public goods" most commonly attributed to the British Empire -- were as much spontaneous phenomena as they were direct consequences of the United Kingdom's power. Indeed, when "neomercantilism" reared its baleful head in the later nineteenth century, the empire actually acted as "an impassable barrier to the formulation of a clear and effective strategy" that might have otherwise preserved the "liberal international order." Likewise, the spread of the gold standard was achieved "more by example than by any exercise of authority"; "the diffusion of gold simply evolved at its own pace." O'Brien is dismissive of the idea that the Bank of England was an "agency of Britain's hegemony before 1914." In short, he sees British hegemony as a "myth." Also unfounded is the idea of "two interconnected and evolving hegemonies" linking the United Kingdom and the United States in a line of "hegemonic succession." Such notions, O'Brien mischievously concludes,

[have been] propagated by historians and social scientists [as] part of the cultural foundations of a prolonged and now indisputably unprofitable special relationship (of Greece to Rome, as Macmillan suggested to Kennedy) pursued by British political elites since the War.