Hegemonic leadership is what states make of it: reading Kindleberger in Washington and Berlin

Abstract

What explains the nature of a dominant state’s systemic crisis response? In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, the U.S. acted as the hegemon for the world economy, showing ‘benign’ leadership by serving as consumer, investor, and lender of last resort. During the euro crisis two years later, Germany played a rather different role, practicing a more ‘coercive’ form of rules-based leadership within Europe’s regional context. In this paper, I explain how ideas and crisis narratives, informed by national economic traditions, shaped how the leading states behaved. By rescuing Charles Kindleberger’s original version of hegemonic stability theory from both its realist and liberal institutionalist interpreters, the paper clarifies why elites in the U.S. followed a hardheaded path of soft Keynesian ideas resulting in global public goods provision while their counterparts in Germany, be it more constrained, opted for a more principled road of rule enforcing ordo-liberal ideas avoiding public goods provision. The crucial role of ideas – in addition to structural and institutional factors – in defining the national interest during periods of crisis helps us better understand “why hegemonic leadership is what states make of it.” This led American and German elites to interpret Kindleberger in very different ways.