Abstract
Observing the latest trends of a rise in interest in the development of power distribution in a world-system created and dominated by states but increasingly challenged as such, this paper takes a deeper look at the historical evolution of this system, its current transformation, and likely future development. After a brief discussion of prevalent concepts of world(-)system development and its socio-political control, this work offers an evolutionary perspective to place current changes of power and its distribution in the dynamic long-term development of global system formation. It then presents alternative visions of the future development of political and economic hegemony. It concludes that a further rise in instability of global political power distribution accompanied by a likely challenge to existing distributional patterns has a high probability of occurrence.
Highlights
The latest resurgence of interest in the concept of hegemony1—in the context of this study understood as the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states (Arrighi 1994: 27)— and empire, both in the popular and academic realm, has been mostly the result of a change in the perception of power, its sources, application, and distribution
What kind of hegemony? Hegemony over what? And why the sudden burst of interest in “empires,” at times used as a substitute for hegemony, but often to describe a new or different kind of hegemonic power? More to the point, though: How did such confusion arise, when those concepts, especially in the sociology literature, had received plenty of attention and scholarship, recently but several decades ago? These questions make it well worth it to remind ourselves of the unfortunate disjunc
This article first challenges the arguments of discontinuation of the world-system as a result of the decline of states and the globalized nature in its current stage, continues to argue for an analytical synthesis, of the existing sociology and political science literatures on the problématique of global hegemony, and the broad spectrum of the social sciences in the form of an evolutionary model, briefly presenting such an approach
Summary
The latest resurgence of interest in the concept of hegemony1—in the context of this study understood as the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states (Arrighi 1994: 27)— and empire, both in the popular and academic realm, has been mostly the result of a change in the perception of power, its sources, application, and distribution. For world-systems students (in the tradition of Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1989; Arrighi 1994; Taylor 1996) and others following the structural world-historical development of the world system during the past centuries (in various lengths and variations, but as an interconnected social system, e.g., Frank 1978; Hugill 1993; Modelski and Thompson 1996; Dark 1998; for a summary of the literature on long waves, see Goldstein 1988) this was hardly a surprising development It was to be expected, as the decline from the initial height of American hegemony after World War II was merely following past trajectories of the rise and fall of actors characterized as hegemons (such as Portugal, the Dutch, and the British). Its purpose is to portray the different paths in the study of hegemonic power, or the power of states to act as predominant leaders based on means of coercion or attraction, to readers who might be less familiar with these developments in the political science literature, rather than to paint a nuanced picture of this very diverse field itself
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