Hegemonic Shift Research Articles

The Rise and Decline of the Liberal World Order and the Multilateral Trade System: A Critical-Constructivist Synthesis to International Regime Analysis

This article devises an analytical framework that synthesizes neo-Gramscian and social constructivist perspectives to dissect international regimes amid global hegemonic shifts. It portrays regimes as intersubjective constructs with unique social purposes within the broader hegemonic fabric, shaped by dominant ideologies and power distributions. The study examines the transition of the trade regime from General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Uruguay Round (1986-1994) and the Doha Round’s deadlock since 2001. The article posits that the Uruguay Round marked a pivotal hegemonic transformation, transitioning the regime from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism by transforming its social purpose, norms, and generative grammar. Yet, this shift, which precipitated a legitimacy crisis within the WTO and was exacerbated by the Doha Round’s failure to regenerate neoliberal hegemony with a fresh synthesis of free trade and sustainable development, arguably rendered the WTO directionless and contributed to the fragmentation of global trade governance amidst emerging regional pacts and varied ideological visions of economic liberalism.

The Political Economy of Pandemics’ Influence On Hegemonic Shifts: A Comparison of the Influenza of 1918 and COVID-19

Following the World Health Organization (WHO)'s declaration of ending the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) for the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2023, this study seizes the opportune moment to analyze it alongside its historical precedent, the Influenza of 1918, commonly known as the Spanish flu. Amid the ongoing US-China rivalry for global leadership, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out when a century had elapsed since the Influenza of 1918. This analysis aims to test the hegemonic cycles approach of the World Systems Theory and to contribute to the literature of international political economy. The hegemonic cycles approach of the World Systems Theory calls for an analysis of the figures of industrial production, international trade, and finance to judge the changes within the international economy as a hegemonic shift, which occurs at 100-150 years in a circular nature. This study furthermore adds up the figures of GDP per capita to the analysis to provide insight into the level of welfare offered by the ascending hegemons to their citizens vis-à-vis the descending ones. Thus, changes in GDP per capita, industrial production, foreign trade, and finances of the UK vs. the US during the Influenza of 1918, and the US vs. China during COVID-19 provide insights into the political economy of pandemics in terms of their impact on changing hegemonic orders. The findings reveal that both pandemics triggered a period of hegemonic shift that was preeminent on economic terms within the international order.

Editor's Note

As of this issue, AUSTRAL presents eight articles, with authors from countries not yet represented: Oman, Jordan, Vietnam and Peru. The first two are general in nature, addressing the Sino-American hegemonic shift through Giovanni Arrighi’s accumulation cycles and the power of American digital technology multinationals. Afterwards, the role of China in the stability of the Taliban’s Afghanistan is analysed and then, in the same region, the role of the Sultanate of Oman in the Yemen Civil War. Next, there is an article on Maritime Security in the Indo-Pacific, based on the perception of analysts from the region itself. Another innovative topic, in the context of slow and interminable negotiations between the European Union and Mercosur, is a historical analysis of the contradictions between the European Community and Latin American integration in the late 1980s. Also original is the discussion on the civilizational divide of the far-right from the perspective of German politics. Finally, Mozambique’s foreign policy under the presidencies of Samora Machel and Joaquim Chissano receives an exciting overview.

From “Liberal” to “Liberating” Empowerment: The Community Protection Approach as Best Practice to Address NGO-ization

Several studies highlight the phenomenon of NGO-ization, pointing to the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGO) guided by a “neoliberal mode of governance” and supplanting “indigenous forms of civil society,” primarily social movements (Dana 2013, 5). This phenomenon has attracted attention in relation to women’s activism, making the case that NGOs cannot promote “sustainable development and democratization” due to their lack of “locally grounded vision and […] power basis” (Jad 2004, 40). This paper argues that the limitations of incorporating NGO modalities of work in rights activism can be better understood in relation to a hegemonic shift toward a more individualist and apolitical approach to empowerment. An alternative is outlined to address major shortcomings of the current development model, by recourse to an innovative approach to empowerment, the Community Protection Approach (CPA). To support such a position both theoretically and empirically, desk research is combined with individual semi-structured interviews conducted with nine women’s rights activists in Tunisia, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Land financialisation, planning informalisation and gentrification as statecraft in Antwerp

This article offers insight into the role of the state in land financialisation through a reading of urban hegemony. This offers the basis for a conjunctural analysis of the politics of planning within a context in which authoritarian neoliberalism is ascendant across Europe. I explore this through the case of Antwerp as it underwent a hegemonic shift in which the nationalist neoliberal party the New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie; N-VA) ended 70 years of Socialist Party rule and deregulated the city’s technocratic planning system. However, this unbridling of the free market has led to the creation of high-margin investment products rather than suitable housing for the middle classes, raising concerns about the city’s gentrification strategy. The consequent, politicisation of the city’s planning system led to controversy over clientelism which threatened to undermine the N-VA’s wider hegemonic project. In response, the city has sought to roll out a more formalised system of negotiated developer obligations, so embedding transactional, market-oriented informal governance networks at the centre of the planning system. This article highlights how the literature on land financialisation may incorporate conjunctural analysis, in the process situating recent trends towards the use of land value capture mechanisms within the contradictions and statecraft of contemporary neoliberal urbanism.

Hegemonic Change and the Role of the Intellectual in Atlas Shrugged A Gramscian Study

Abstract This article focuses on the hegemonic shift portrayed by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. The book focuses on the conflict between producers and those who exploit them. The protagonist, John Galt, leads a strike of the producers, which undermines the society's looters and puts an end to the hegemonic control of the left. Neoliberalism—used here as a synonym for contemporary libertarian thought—rescues the world from the havoc wreaked by statism. This shift is studied in the light of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, focusing on the role of intellectuals.

Manifestations of Microfascism in Spatial Dimensions

Mumbai has an identity that is built around its multicultural, multi-ethnic population, with an enterprising community that prides itself on its resilient spirit. The pluralism that marks the city’s social spaces remained powerful for decades resulting in an immigrant population from all over the country finding its home in this city. When Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it was also a reflection of the altered social sensibilities and the manifestation of an exclusionary politics which began to get reflected in the public spaces of Mumbai. Post globalization and economic liberalization, a hegemonic shift in power centers brought about further negotiations with identities and social spaces, with the new cityscape evolving steadily. The pervasive presence of the politics of othering that marks the contemporary Indian political sphere has its presence felt in Mumbai’s public spaces. The rapid gentrification and erasure of the poor from the public spaces, the expanding privately-owned public spaces and the social interactions that mark the new global city of Mumbai unfold the hegemonic power relations of the new India. This article attempts to imagine the new social narratives and cartographies within the theoretical framework of microfascism as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari. Mumbai’s public spaces are closely observed and analyzed to comprehend the new dynamics of power at work and its political and social ramifications in relation to the rest of the nation. This paper also seeks to look at the patterns of dissent evolving out of the microfascist spaces of Mumbai.

Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan

Reviewed by: Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan Erika T. Hermanowicz Robin Whelan. Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. xvi + 301 pp. Augustine died in 430 while the Vandals were besieging Hippo. This coincidence, as well as the fact that of all extant Vandal-era texts, Victor of Vita’s History has exercised great influence over modern readers, crystalized the idea that the break between Roman and Vandal rule in North Africa was sharp and brutal. Recent English-language studies on Vandal Africa, however, including work by J. P. Conant, A. H. Merrills, and R. Miles, have challenged that assumption, and Robin Whelan’s superb contribution to the conversation rewards the reader with a vision of Vandalic Christian Africa that is more déjà vu than departure. Despite a hegemonic shift in Africa and the new court’s affirmation of Homoian Christianity (called Arian by its enemies) over Nicene Christianity (Catholic as self-styled by the Nicenes), the bishops proceeded in ways remarkably similar to predecessors living under Roman rule. Whelan removes the Nicene and Homoian churches from their overdetermined (and strictly rhetorical) dependence on Vandal kings and ethnic identity: Homoian bishops were not obliging extensions of the court, nor were they necessarily of Vandal or “barbarian” origin, just as Nicene bishops were not exclusively identifiable as Roman. Once Whelan extricates churches from false ethnic and royal entanglements, he concludes that the ferocious competition between them was born from commonality, not difference. The most famous Nicene bishops from the Vandal era, Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage, and Fulgentius of Ruspe, fretted that believers could not easily tell the two churches apart. Nicene and Homoian churches competed for and claimed the same honors: who had the greater number of bishops; who was more faithful to the legacy of Cyprian; who understood scripture better; [End Page 235] who had received legal recognition from the rulings of emperors and kings. In order to distinguish themselves, these ecclesiastical doppelgängers pushed the other rhetorically into suspect realms of heresy and crime: the Homoians accused the Nicenes of being pagans, and the Nicenes claimed that to the unwary, the Homoian church might resemble the bride of Christ, but she was in fact a soul-devouring whore. These examples suffice to give an idea of the barbs traded, but they also offer reassurance that in terms of the rhetoric deployed, North Africa had not changed much since Roman days. Whelan’s deft handling of episcopal rhetoric is one of many strengths in this well-written and persuasive book. Many of the literary sources he engages are not well known, even to students of Roman Africa, and their (re)introduction to the world is alone worth the price of admission. But Whelan’s work goes far beyond that, exploring (and in many cases, debunking) assumptions regarding the lives and loyalties of elites in post-Roman Africa. Examples: Vandal military uniforms were the court dress, not a declaration of ethnic identity. There is plenty of evidence, despite the courts’ official antipathy toward Nicene Christianity, that Nicene Christians worked at court, and that, exceptions notwithstanding, Vandal kings not only made concessions to the Nicene bishops, but also were fully aware that Nicene Christians occupied important posts and were uninterested in calling them out. Political efficiency superseded religious preferences. Among political elites who had ties to the court, a conscious effort was made to subsume the theological and legal labeling of doctrinal preferences (Homoousian or Homoian, heretic or orthodox) under more general, and generous, terms, such as “pious,” and “a good Christian.” More broadly, people everywhere gave their loyalty to revered martyrs more readily than to specific doctrines. The martyrs were for everyone. Whelan’s point is that the new regime had strong religious preferences, but did not let them get in the way of political expediency and practical existence. Still, Africa was different. The book’s epilogue compares Vandal Africa to Burgundian Gaul, Ostrogothic Italy, and Visigothic Spain. The effort by the Vandal ruling house to unify its territory under one doctrinal allegiance was more...

Civil War writings of the Pennsylvania Dutch

AbstractFor eighteenth and nineteenth century Pennsylvania Dutch speakers, a variety of German was the language of their books, their newspapers, and their schools. Being far from the European homeland created a hegemonic shift in the linguistic lives of these early German Americans; they were adopting an American regional identity. Along with their shift in identities and in linguistic hegemony, structural aspects of the languages they used also changed: their written German was in contact with English and with their spoken Pennsylvania Dutch. In addition, the limitations of formal education in German at rural schools meant that the emphasis among most Pennsylvania Dutch was on the receptive knowledge of German and not on productive control of the language. In time, a variety of German called Pennsylvania High German emerged in the publications, writings, and schools of Pennsylvania. This article shares recent findings of a large corpus of written attempts at Pennsylvania High German by Civil War soldiers. It discusses both the structural aspects of their written language as well as the negotiation of their American regional identities through a multilingual lens at the first major moment of increased contact with outsiders.

Backstaging the teacher: On learner-driven, school-driven and data-driven change in educational technology discourse

As digital technologies become more prominent in schools, and a host of new media products appear in classrooms, critical questions are being asked about the erasure of power and politics in contemporary education. To explore the discourse on digital education, this paper draws on discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews with for-profit and non-profit organizations in the field. It asks (i) what industry insiders describe as driving change in contemporary educational technology (edtech), and (ii) whether new actors/technologies shaping a novel educational hegemony, and if so, what this hegemony looks like. Initial findings suggest that while the teacher was seen as key to driving change in printed educational materials, three different discourses appear when describing change in today’s educational technology. In the first, learners drive change; the focus lies on the individual dimension. In the second, schools drive change; the systemic dimension. In the third, data drive change; the analytics dimension. Linking these three discourses is a shift from “education” to “learning”. The accounts of educational technology simultaneously advocate for improving opportunities for all students, especially weaker or disadvantaged learners, and also strengthen the hegemonic shift across policy and practice towards an instrumental understanding of education. Overall, the paper suggests that power and politics are by no means erased from the edtech industry’s accounts of digital technologies and datafication. The socio-material affordances engineered into the technologies invite particular teaching practices and thus affect power relations in education.

The politics of denazification: parliamentary debates in Austria, 1945–57

SUMMARYThe hegemonic Austrian post-Second World War narrative up to the 1980s was the victim theory (Opferthese), which presented Austria and the Austrians as victims of Nazi Germany with reference to a part of the Moscow Declaration signed in 1943, thus marginalizing the involvement of Austrians in Nazi crimes. In its formative period during the first decade of the Second Republic (since 1945), this narrative underwent a universalization, aiming to integrate former National Socialists (i.e. as victims of false promises, misled idealism, denazification). Shifting patterns of the political and public discourses on denazification were central in this transformation, which had a lasting impact on the Austrian politics of memory. This article intends to identify strategies and narratives integral to this hegemonic shift, as used in parliamentary debates. These debates are representations of the contemporary linguistic usage and part of the implementation of legislative initiatives coping with fascist legacies in the process of democratization. The changes in the rhetorical framing of denazification can be interpreted as an indication for shifting necessities in legitimating its repercussions. This becomes apparent in narratives used to accommodate the swing from punishment and exclusion to the reintegration of former National Socialists and in relations drawn between denazification/reintegration and democracy in Austria.

1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr.

Reviewed by: 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Mike Bunn 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace. By Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. 364 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1953-3. 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace explores in unprecedented depth the devastating final year of the war, as well as the tumultuous beginnings of the Reconstruction Era in the state. In the pages of the book, author Christopher Lyle McIlwain, Sr., argues for a reconsideration of our collective understanding of both, contending our hazy shared memories of the denouement to Alabama's wartime [End Page 267] trials and its postwar reality are heavily colored by a debilitating accretion of myth, legend, and partisan scholarship. McIlwain believes the year 1865 in Alabama history is rather simply defined by a cascading litany of bad decisions on the part of irrational leaders which manifested themselves in an unnecessarily prolonged and particularly devastating period of economic struggle, political turmoil, and isolation from the mainstream of American society that handicapped the state's progress for generations afterward. McIlwain opens his study by chronicling perhaps the paramount blunder among a series of poor choices by Alabama leaders, a decision which, in his opinion, flew in the face of common sense—the attempt to continue to wage a war he contends had long been lost by 1865. Continuing the theme from his recent book Civil War Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 2016), he portrays Confederate nationalism as something akin to either an elaborate hoax foisted on a gullible populace or a tragic disconnect with reality. The state's elite come in for the harshest of his criticisms, as he examines their self-serving efforts to prolong the war, offering either editorial or financial support—but rarely battlefield service—with a thinly veiled contempt. While he tracks in cursory fashion some of the major military campaigns which ravaged the state from the Tennessee Valley to Mobile Bay in the spring of 1865, this is no military history. McIlwain's focus is on the progressive disaffection with the Confederate military effort within Alabama and the wasted opportunities to end the struggle prior to the dismantling of its industrial complex, the complete destruction of its economy, and a wasteful loss of life. The conviction that the state's leaders should have been willing and able to move on and make the best deal they could with their conquerors in the wake of Appomattox undergirds McIlwain's assessment of events during the latter half of 1865. He notes that despite conventional wisdom, a good deal indeed could have been obtained when viewed from their perspective. President Abraham Lincoln, he argues, offered even more generous and lenient terms than commonly understood, pointing to evidence that indicates the president [End Page 268] did not intend to insist on full political rights for black citizens as a condition of the readmission process. Thus with Lincoln's assassination, Alabama's path towards rejoining the Union with any degree of its traditional political autonomy grew considerably more difficult. But the early days of President Andrew Johnson's administration offered opportunities for a relatively smooth readmission process, as well, asserts McIlwain. When Alabama's leadership stubbornly refused to comply, it not only marked the beginning of a hegemonic shift in the state's political power structure, but spelled doom for the state's prospects of economic recovery. It is actually in Alabama's marked recalcitrance during the first months of Johnson's tenure, McIlwain argues—not the later vindictive reprisals of radical Northern Republicans—that the state's postwar fate was sealed. Alabama leaders followed a course of arrogant retrenchment in the latter half of 1865, highlighted by the passage of an exceedingly conservative constitution which raised the eyebrows of observers in Washington. Overall, the first few months of Alabama's postwar era revealed state leaders to be committed to subverting efforts toward the full extension of civil rights to black citizens; the election of outspoken former rebels to the highest of offices; and even the entertaining of an outrageous attempt to repudiate the state's war debt. All this only encouraged...

Development, But on Whose Terms?

Sixty years of liberal development engagements with African states has had a significant impact upon socio-political relationships and expectations within the state. Societal expectations for the liberalization of economic-political space are evident within many African states, shaped through forms of normative intervention and liberal conditioning. However, with a rise of Chinese intervention in the African state, primarily through relationships centered on economic exchanges between China and African elites, the pressure for political change is being removed. This hegemonic shift not only changes who is influencing the African state, but also what is influencing as a normative shift is concurrently taking place. If societal expectations of liberalization are no longer supported by external pressures for change, what impact will this have on socio-political relationships within African states? This article questions the impact of a normative shift, or a potential normative shift, within development interactions and transactions, arguing that the removal of direct external liberal demands will raise socio-political tensions, and thus threaten stability, within African states engaged in Chinese development interactions.

The Impolitic Narrative of Grassroots Movements against Neoliberal De-Politicization. The Case of Commons

The essay aims to demonstrate that the process of de-politicization does not only affect political institutions but also the inspiring narrative of grassroots and anti-systemic move-ments engaged against neoliberalism. This circumstance is one of the most important reasons why, despite the huge and persistent crisis of neoliberalism, we do not witness a real hegemonic shift, and politics continues to be a very marginal forge of social life, the neoliberal recipe pre-scribes. De-politicization is the main effect of horizontalism, i.e. the descriptive and normative belief that social order is and has to be the ex post result of the interaction dynamics between social actors. Thus, a social order is much more desirable insofar it leaves out the subject as is, promoting a process of self-revelation. Our thesis is that both neoliberalism and the largest part of anti-systemic movements who pretend to oppose to it share this basic frame. The narrative of commons represents a special case of what we call conformist alternatives. It develops an ambivalent tension: on the one side the search for pre-symbolic spontaneity and, on the other, the unmentionable search for hyper-symbolism. Finally, we identify a structural and then a socio-cultural reason that currently prevent re-politicization.

Special Issue Introduction: Coloniality of Power and Hegemonic Shifts in the World-System

Introduction to Special Issue on Coloniality of Power and Hegemonic Shifts in the World-System

Prospects of Decline and Hegemonic Shifts for the West

The decline of the “West” and the loss of U.S. global hegemony is accompanied by a three-sided debate. Some scholars have argued that emerging powers in the Global South will succeed the United States and assume a hegemonic role in the world-economy. They argue that China or an alliance of semi-peripheral states in the South will dominate capitalist or post-capitalist cycles of accumulation in the future. Other scholars rather think that China and other emerging states will find it difficult to catch up and assume a hegemonic role. This paper discusses the consequences of decline for the West and describes three possible western responses to its global economic and hegemonic decline: Resisting Decline—The West will seek to maintain its claim to lead by mobilizing defensive and aggressive military forces, searching for new alliances and partnerships, undermining old and new competitors; Suffering (Semi-) Peripheralization—The West will surrender control of global commodity chains, which will move to the new cores, a development that will contribute to social polarization and the precarization of labour-relations in the old core; Accepting Re-regionalization/Provincialization—The West will accept the loss of hegemony and become just another “province” of the world.

Die Eiserne Seidenstraße

In May 2014, the Thai military staged a coup d’état and ousted the democratically elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. This coup, which marks the climax of the split between the Redshirt and Yellowshirt political camps, is difficult to explain solely in terms of inner Thai power relations. Instead the article argues that the Chinese mega infrastructure project one belt one road needs to be taken into account. This project is another major step in the rise of China – a process, which has often been seen as part of a hegemonic shift towards a new accumulation cycle with China as new center. Against this background, the present upheaval in Thailand is interpreted in a historical perspective and as one example for the kind of conflicts, which accompany the historic shift towards China as a new power center. However, the article also argues that the turn towards an autocratic form of governance can not be attributed to direct Chinese influence. Rather, it is the result of the fierce rivalry between two capitalist fractions and domestic factors.

Towards a ‘Post‐Neoliberal’ Mode of Housing Regulation? The Israeli Social Protest of Summer 2011

AbstractIn the summer of 2011, after decades of virtually uncontested neoliberalization, Israel was swept by unprecedented protests against the rising cost of living, social inequality and, most particularly, escalating housing prices. Within two weeks, a small protest camp established on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv had grown into a mass movement involving hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Given an ambivalent sense of the significance of urban movements in bringing about social change, the aim of this article is to analyze whether the Israeli social protest was able to push forward a post‐neoliberal mode of housing regulation. Building on a framework developed by Brenner, Peck and Theodore to grasp transformations in the landscape of regulatory restructuring, this article argues that the movement has indeed achieved a far‐reaching hegemonic shift in public discourse and also become an important driver in promoting regulatory experiments. Despite its achievements, however, the movement was unable to challenge the Israeli ‘rule regime' of neoliberalization, on account of two structural constraints that were shielded by the most powerful state apparatuses: the commodity character of housing; and a neoliberalized land regime, where state‐owned land is treated as a profit machine for public finance.

Hegemonic Shifts: The Latest from the Walls of Northern Ireland

This essay considers the changes that have taken place in the murals of Northern Ireland over the past decade or so. It will be argued that although there have been important developments in the murals that reflect the consolidation of ‘peace’ during this period, the walls also tell a different story. It will be shown that, perhaps predictably, given the paralysis and stagnation that have characterised the power-sharing arrangements, and the disillusionment, cynicism and bitterness towards the political settlement which is now evident, a number of murals offer representations that indicate the growth of tendencies that present latent but real dangers.

Biennials that promote an ‘emancipatory politics’

This essay argues that smaller and more innovative art biennials offer a better chance for what postcolonial theory has termed an ‘emancipatory politics’ – one relatively free from Western hegemony, whether of global capitalism or the Euro-American art world. Such biennials typically exercise ‘powers of the weak’ through trickster tactics that allow them a momentary freedom before disintegration or institutionalization. In their experimental approach and unstable leap into the future, they may resemble avant-gardes. By contrast, several mega-exhibitions of 2002–2003 led to debates about biennial merits and goals that have remained inconclusive despite three recent conferences in Gwangju, Karlsruhe and Berlin. ‘In the early days biennials were synonymous with the innovative and experimental nature of contemporary art,’ the Gwangju co-directors recalled; ‘Three decades into the boom of biennials, a systematic evaluation and debate is imperative’. A Gramscian response to such demands explaining why emancipatory politics are an important biennial goal that can be achieved by leveraging hegemonic shifts in biennial structure seems promising in this regard, although a recent Istanbul Biennial offered challenges. As an alternative, the essay turns to discuss eight unusual biennials that propose models not only for recapturing the ideals of ‘early days’ but for illuminating where the biennial movement still might go and what its range might be.