Is American Hegemony Bad or Just Better than Alternatives?

Abstract

War, Peace and Hegemony in a Globalized World: The Changing Balance of Power in the 21st Century. Edited by Chandra Chari. London: Routledge, 2008. 256 pp., hardcover (ISBN-13: 9780415435772). This collection of essays covers familiar ground but still offers value as a largely Asian perspective on hegemony and globalization. Fourteen of the 18 contributors are from Asia, nine from India alone. In an introduction by Chandra Chari, the volume rejects the notion, popular among Western realists, that American hegemony is necessary to avoid anarchy and expects “the processes of globalization, which have economically empowered a large number of countries across the globe,” to provide new “bargaining chips” to strengthen multilateralism. Opening chapters address global perspectives. Eric Hobsbawn, the eminent British scholar, leads off with a blistering attack against the “political crazies” (p. 23) in the United States who after 9/11 abandoned the “emollient cream” (p. 22) of American Cold War policies and sought global hegemony through military might. If these crazies prevail, he predicts “another century of conflict” (p. 20). Akira Iriye and Joseph Nye, two equally eminent Harvard scholars, celebrate the “momentum toward transnationalism” (p. 33) ignited by globalization and expect that growing diversity especially on the economic and information chess boards of world affairs will check American military pretensions. William Wallace at the University of Saint Andrews worries that the world may be approaching “a nuclear tipping point beyond which a ‘cascade of proliferation’ could occur as states assume that the international nuclear order can no longer provide them with sufficient protection” (p. 56). Prem Shankar Jha, an Indian journalist, argues that “capitalism has …