HEGEMONIC DECLINE & UNITED STATES

Hegemonic Decline & United States

Hegemonic Decline & United States

The anti-globalisation movement that took shape in the campaigns against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment before achieving world notoriety in Seattle, has rekindled all the debates within the Left that animated it during the twentieth century. Although the contemporary, 'global' Left has moved beyond the .xation on conquering national state power, its concept of politics has suffered from the fact that so far, very little is on offer in the way of a framework analysing power struggles among social forces in the global arena and identifying their focus, if the state no longer can be that focus.

Gowan discusses what he labels the 'Dollar-Wall Street Regime', which denotes the set of monetary mechanisms by which the United States seeks to reinforce and deepen its hold on the rest of the world. As a result, the benefits of the 'régime' will accrue to the rich in the United States, whereas the risks and costs can be passed on abroad. The author rightly qualifies this as a 'gamble', and if there is anything about this book that has meanwhile been vindicated, it is indeed the title. The suicide attacks on the symbols of the Dollar-Wall Street Régime, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on 11 September 2001, have dramatically demonstrated the stakes that are being played for here.

The way Gowan writes about the globalisation of US hegemony is 'beyond politics'. There is no way in which one can imagine that countervailing forces can have an impact - short of dying into the Twin Towers. As societies are opened up and re-engineered as stock-market-centred economies with convertible currencies to allow their wealth to be siphoned off by hedge funds and other transnational investment operations, [t]hose states and social systems that try to resist these transformations will themselves increasingly shut out from the US market and from its allied EU market, and subjected to hostile economic statecraft. The most internationally competitive of their productive sectors, fearing such exclusion, can thus also be turned into supporters of globalization and neo-liberalism. Hostile statecraft, as we meanwhile know from NATO's war against Yugoslavia, can also take more vicious forms.

Gowan's book is strongest where it seeks to demystify the technicalities of national markets; it is weakest in its political aspect - there is no class analysis. On the positive side, Gowan shows that the term ...