Abstract
While hegemony is often deemed a defining feature of a world-systems perspective, I agree with Babones that it should not be. I would agree not just because hegemony, as Wallerstein defines it, is so rare. No doubt it is. But more importantly because such a premise would affirm the centrality of functionalist logic. This approach reads the evident political dominance of a particular state in the world as having arisen out of a functional need for a hegemonic state in the capitalist world-economy. Certainly, such functionalist logic can be valuable. It enables us to denounce those who have greater responsibility for the myriad injustices in our world, as in holding the US accountable for the myriad injustices it creates and sustains as the world’s hegemon.
Nevertheless, to incorporate such functionalist logic into the defining elements of the perspective unnecessarily downgrades the perspective. It does so unnecessarily given that such functionalist logic has already been repudiated by many world-systems practitioners, in favor of McMichael’s (1990) incorporating comparisons, or more general approaches which stress the ‘reciprocal, interactive nature’ of the ‘local-global’ relationship (Kenter, 2009: 2). More to the point, it leaves compelling questions unanswered. For example, if hegemony is a necessary feature of the capitalist world-economy, why has capitalism been so resilient despite the long periods of hegemonic decline, or its periodic crises? Similarly, why would it wane in some parts of the system more than others, as the uneven geography of anti-systemic movements and regimes demonstrates that it does? A functionalist understanding of hegemony cannot answer these questions because it precludes elaborating the mechanisms whereby countries around the world come to align themselves with the hegemon.
It might also be tempting to incorporate into a world-systems perspective the definition of hegemony as economic dominance. Such an operationalization of hegemony, as Babones rightly notes, is widely accepted among world-systems practitioners, whether it be that of trade dominance (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005), control over the means of payment (Arrighi, 1994), or simultaneous ‘productive, commercial, and financial superiority’ (Wallerstein, 1980: 38–9). We might be even more sympathetic to such a conceptualization if we consider that scholars do more than merely describe it; they deploy it to explain the origins of the long-term cycles of capital accumulation or even the endurance (read hegemony) of capitalism as a system. And yet, defining a world-systems perspective in this way assumes much of what world-systems research should be, and has been, about.
Thus, I would offer that we identify a world-systems perspective as one that considers how the structure and dynamics of the capitalist world-economy, including the hegemon’s relative economic dominance, configure (but do not determine) the political struggles which produce variation in hegemony. This defines a world-systems perspective in a way that promises to address the key questions about hegemony’s vicissitudes. A premise of this proposal is to conceive hegemony as a political phenomenon; as the assent (or to put it in more Gramscian terms partial consent) of political leaders and their constituents to the hegemon’s preferred project.
Inquiries which contribute to such an agenda, then, would encompass existing world-systems identified work that focuses on the sites of political struggle where shifts and variation in hegemony originate. Such sites of struggle include policy changes within the hegemon which are pivotal in that they determine the hegemon’s project for the rest of the world, such as the adoption by the US of a free trade agenda (Chorev, 2007) or protectionist agricultural policies (Winders, 2010). Additionally, it includes political changes within non-hegemonic societies which are pivotal in that they are vehicles through which political leaders, who alter their nation’s orientation towards the hegemon, come to power. Such pivotal political changes have included democratization (Robinson, 1996; Schwartzman, 1998), the bureaucratic restructuring which consolidated the power of neoliberal technocrats (Gates, 2009) or the rise of left regimes. It would also include studies of sub-national political outcomes which indicate society’s relative embrace of the hegemon’s project, such as anti-neoliberal social movements (Almeida, 2014) or the surprising instances of local acquiescence to neoliberalism (Bair and Hough, 2012).
This agenda, while not new, is one that could be more clearly articulated as integral to a world-systems perspective if conceived of as collectively elaborating the mechanisms of hegemony. Existing work suggests that such a mechanism is best illuminated by analyzing how the domestic societal underpinnings of pivotal political changes are configured by the structure and dynamics of the capitalist world-economy. That is, it is best illuminated when we take domestic class relations as the bridge between the domestic and the global, or ‘the social mechanism linking world-system processes to national political dynamics’ (Schwartzman, 1998: 179).