This volume aces the two essential criteria for edited works: The chapters cohere, and they provoke. Editors Morten Skumsrud Andersen, Alexander Cooley, and Daniel H. Nexon propose that international orders, defined as “relatively stable patterns of relations and practices in world politics” (p. 9), are constructed and maintained by a hegemon or dominant power.
International orders possess three tiers (p. 11), “rules and norms,” “international institutions,” and a “goods ecology,” meaning the structure (distribution) and “texture” (composition) of capabilities and conditions that enhance a political unit’s security, economy, status, or other desired outcomes. In their conclusion, Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann (p. 185) usefully push their colleagues to distinguish between consumable “goods,” such as loans or military tanks, and “assets,” such as membership in a coveted club controlled by the dominant power, and make several pertinent observations about theory (see especially pp. 180–81).
The volume’s second big idea builds on prior work of editors Cooley and Nexon with Steven Ward, and clarifies the strategic choices for potential hegemonic challengers. Power transitions, which are inevitable, may occur gradually, as through differential rates of economic growth among major states, but throughout history often have invited adventurism and war. Meanwhile, counterhegemonic preferences, and thus strategies, vary along two dimensions: adherence or resistance to a particular international order—in this volume usually the post–World War II US-led liberal international order (LIO)—and acceptance or efforts to shift the current distribution of capabilities among the international system’s major powers (pp. 36–42 and passim). The polar ideal types are satisfied “status quo” states, who accept both the system’s order and its hierarchy, and “revolutionaries” (somewhat confusingly labeled “radical- revisionists” or simply “revisionists” elsewhere in the book), who hope to upend the reigning normative-legal-institutional order and also redistribute capabilities toward themselves. “Positionalists” broadly support the order, but seek greater influence within it, while “reformists” seek a different order with more congenial norms, rules, and institutions, but are satisfied with their own rank in the systemic hierarchy. Russia is, of course, a radical revisionist. China is sometimes positionalist, for example in its efforts with the BRICS to acquire larger quotas and votes within the Washington Consensus international financial institutions (pp. 44–45), but more often reformist, as when it creates parallel institutions that implicitly challenge the LIO, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (pp. 49–54), and the alternative development financing options, the New Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and Belt and Road Initiative (see the chapters by Julia Bader, pp. 88–103, and Cooley, pp. 104–24).
When combined, the two themes generate the volume’s rationale and policy relevance. Within the LIO, guarantor of global free commerce and other global public goods (“assets”) that even dissatisfied powers value, there exist dense multilateral and transnational networks supportive of negotiated dispute settlement and the rule of law. Hot wars with revisionist or revanchist aims are less likely, although not impossible. In this content, the editors characterize most international diplomacy, as well as sovereign economic relations of trade, aid, migration, health, and finance, as a mostly intentional process of “goods substitution.” Diplomacy substitutes for war. Challengers attempt to displace existing dominant states by offering alternative goods to their traditional clients, while lesser powers seek to profit from temporarily competitive supply conditions to negotiate better deals for themselves. Two chapters, rich in entertaining detail, apply the framework to least-likely cases: longtime clients within the United States’ vast network of security or economic dependencies. Andersen, examining Colombia (pp. 125–50) and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Benjamin de Carvalho, and Halvard Leira, analyzing Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes (pp. 151–75), find the framework fits.
The volume’s broad arguments are plausible and powerful, but here are three points to ponder. First, what are the theoretical consequences of conceptualizing norms, ideologies, and values (including quintessential liberal precepts of mutual tolerance of difference, or individual liberty within consensual rules) as international goods or assets deployable as implicit or explicit bargaining chips? Yes, in practice this occurs constantly, as international status is clearly a highly valued asset or attribute. Bahar Rumelili and Ann Towns (pp. 62–87) trace the paths by which relative rankings on global performance indicators, employing components chosen within the Global North, have become important status or “normative” goods precisely because of their concrete nature. Some dissatisfied states try to game the indices; another option is a counterhegemonic ranking or certification system, such as Russian election observers in Central Asia (pp. 122–23). Rumelili and Towns are convincing, but may go too far when they seem to suggest that it is only ideas that have become thus concretized that matter for international power competition or cooperation. One shouldn’t forget that ideas, even (or especially?) where diffuse and nonconcretized, may retain stunningly important intrinsic and persuasive international influence in a period of rising multipolarity, power transition, and multiple sources of confusion and doubt over the role and capabilities of government. Thus Daniel Drezner (“Counter-Hegemonic Strategies,” Security Studies 28(3): 505, 2019) interestingly argues that the optimal revisionist strategy is to sequence attacks on an international order’s ideational dimensions before its material ones. This seems accurate: Russia was quite successful with fake news.
Second, a useful path forward for this project, and incidentally for defenders of the LIO, may be its application to the experiences of positionalist revisionists, or those broadly sympathetic with the (mostly) liberal postwar order, but dissatisfied with their relative lack of voice within it. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany and the European Union legitimately will claim recognition as a global pole. Or consider Japan, the world’s third economy. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997–99, Japan floated the idea of co-leadership in crisis management with the United States through an Asian Monetary Fund but was brushed off. Other important states, including India, have had similar experiences. Explicit attention by the declining hegemon to the allocation of status as well as material goods, and humility about the need for this, would go a long way. Moreover, and this is a theoretical as well as a policy-relevant point, when and if geographic neighborhoods of small and intermediate powers are able to constitute themselves as somewhat coherent “regions,” they are likely to be positionalist revisionists. This is true in Latin America, as argued in a recent book edited by Carlos Fortin, Jorge Heine, and Carlos Ominami (El No Alineamento Activo y América Latina, Catalonia, 2021) making waves in the region.
Third, this volume is unduly stuffed with clever conceptual lists of theoretically intriguing concepts. Thus, the “alternative logics of goods substitution” (p. 13) include addition, exiting (client switches to a new dominant power provider), hedging (clients ensure against future risks of their current provider raising “prices,” by “buying” a bit from an alternative supplier … such as China), and leverage (client prefers its current supplier, but pretends to switch to secure a better “price”). See also the editors’ short discussion (pp. 20–21) of the social construction of goods, which may bear symbolic, social, or performative qualities. I counted 10 such lists scattered throughout: A nice meta-theoretical task for the future would be to decide which are important and which merely clever.
Overall, Undermining American Hegemony provides a timely theoretical structure for seeing a few steps further into the fog.
