The United States and the European Union: The End of Hegemony?

Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the debate on US decline which had characterised the 1980s was succeeded by a debate on the new and unchallenged dominance of the United States, following the implosion of its one serious military rival. The end of the Cold War was an ideological and political triumph for the United States and was widely celebrated as a vindication of the long-term strategy of containment and pressure which the Americans had pursued over four decades. At the same time it created a vacuum in US policy, raising questions of whether the elaborate system of bases and the huge military budgets established during the Cold War were any longer necessary. Although there was some reduction in budgets, the overall contraction of US military capacity and reach in the 1990s was small, and instead a strong campaign was waged to consolidate and extend the unprecedented system of supremacy which the US had acquired. New doctrines of unilateralism, pre-emption, and primacy were formulated to justify the maintenance of US global power. A typical product of this effort was the Project for an American Century in 1998, signed by many of the people who were soon to take office in the Bush Administration.1