Introducing Globalization by Matthew Sparke

Author:Matthew Sparke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

7.1.3 Leveling and national-state hegemony

While the new-ness and inevitability myths obscure the enduring importance of nation-states in authorizing neoliberal governance, the leveling myth hides hierarchies of national-state power globally, including the very special power the United States has as a global pro-market enforcer. Sometimes called leadership and praised for bringing “Pax Americana” to the world, and at other times criticized as imperialism and a “Pox Americana,” there is no doubting that this enforcement role has been important in pushing through neoliberal reforms globally. It is not new, though, and the American emphasis on opening up markets abroad and using military power to secure access for US business interests has a long history that predates Fordism as well as neoliberalism. To understand it, we therefore have to turn from the topics of sovereignty and authority to a third enduring feature of national-state power that is equally obscured by ahistorical “end of the nation-state” obituaries: namely, hegemony.

Hegemony refers here to two interrelated sorts of power. First, as it is used by international relations and world systems theorists, hegemony means global ­dominance, most often through military means. Second, as it is used by social and cultural theorists, hegemony refers rather differently to the ways in which dominant social classes secure consent from subordinated classes, including consent to their own subordination, by shaping popular representations of what policies and social norms make good sense. In historical empires, the two forms of hegemony sometimes operated in distinct spatial zones with military hegemony abroad and sociocultural hegemony at home. For example, during the original Pax Romana of the ancient Romans, brutal hegemonic dominance of the empire’s enemies in the periphery combined with the hegemony of free “Bread and Circuses” to ensure ­support from the plebs in Rome. With a famous mix of architecture, infrastructure, and pubic displays of beneficence, the Romans also tried to supplement their military hegemony with efforts to enlist peaceful consent in the colonies. But as with many empires that followed, the efforts at sociocultural hegemony still worked much better at home. Victorian imperialists, to use an English example (itself a place that the Romans never fully pacified), may have deeply believed in their empire’s “civilizing mission,” but their overseas dominance depended much more on ­weapons and military violence than on successful Christian conversions.13 A nineteenth-­century parody of a popular hymn captured the resulting contradictions all too well:

Onward Christian soldiers, on to heathen lands,

Prayer-books in your pockets, rifles in your hands,

Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,

Spread the peaceful gospel – with the Maxim gun.

However, when we fast forward to contemporary globalization, we see that the two kinds of hegemony have blurred the inside/outside division and come to shape one another. Beginning from the Jeffersonian ideal of America being an “empire of liberty,” US leaders have generally seen themselves as advancing American interests abroad ­consensually in the name of freedom and over time rather than coercively in the name of the nation-state and over space. Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, spoke of the twentieth century thus as an American Century.

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