Theories of international hegemony have been applied intermittently over recent decades, alternating between periods in which they seemed to bring the foundations of world order into sharper focus and those in which hegemonic theories appeared to lose purchase on the main world order questions – stability, peace, prosperity. Consider the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s, followed by widespread perceptions of American decline, the end of the cold war and the emergence of the unipolar moment, and, more recently, the rise of China and anticipation of another hegemonic transition. Over the course of these developments, the original centrality of material capabilities to theories of hegemony has given way a bit to more of an international society emphasis, including legitimacy. A preponderance of material resources, or primacy, is seen as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for hegemony.
Enter Ian Clark's third in a series of books on legitimacy, which provides a thorough reworking and expansion of this concept and how it fits with hegemony. The book is organized in a straightforward fashion: three parts each contain three chapters. Part one consists of more conceptual chapters on hegemony and IR theory, English School interpretations of hegemony, and Clark's conceptual elaboration of different institutional forms of hegemony. Part two draws three case studies from the historical record: the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe as an instance of collective hegemony, the late nineteenth-century singular hegemony under the auspices of Pax Brittanica, and the post-World War II coalitional hegemony that comprised Pax Americana. Part three applies Clark's conceptual apparatus to three contemporary international governmental organizations: the United Nations Security Council, regional order in East Asia, and the climate change regime, each of which is a work in progress.
Clark begins from the premise that hegemony is an institution that is rooted in social legitimacy. It is an institution, however, that can take multiple forms – four rather than one. The familiar singular form lies at one end of a continuum representing the composition of the hegemon; the unorthodox collective form anchors the other end. A second continuum represents the scope of the hegemonic constituency, which connotes something akin to followers and which ranges from inclusive to coalitional. Rendered in 2×2 form, these two continuums yield four ideal type institutional forms: singular inclusive (the usual ideal type hegemonic system), singular coalitional, collective coalitional, and collective inclusive.
With this framework the book has accomplished a substantial reworking of the conceptual apparatus that has built up around hegemony, and made a strong case for inclusion of legitimacy in our models and theories of how we think about it. In doing so, the book introduces a number of new or revised definitions, categories, and ideal types, indeed enough to overwhelm the few degrees of freedom available to studies of hegemony (a problem of which Clark is aware). The larger issue is whether the rewards offered by Clark's reformulation are large enough to exceed the benefits of sticking with the more familiar N = 1 approach.
It is of course unfair to criticize an author for not writing the book the reviewer would like to have seen, particularly when it is the third book in a magisterial series on an important subject. Nonetheless, a few such criticisms will serve to situate the book in the literatures and controversies it aims to add to and to change.
Sure to encounter some push back is the concept of collective hegemony, in which, in the absence of a concentration of material power in a singular hegemon, multiple great powers join to supply a collective form of hegemonic order. After all, for many observers of international relations, hegemony has always been an outcome to be prevented, not encouraged, and against which the balance of power mechanism, including wars, is viewed as having been set in motion many times. Facilitating collusive forms of hegemony, therefore, is likely to seem counterintuitive and to elicit a skeptical response (which Clark anticipates).
Also problematic are the roles played by collective and coalitional hegemony: the latter is not adequately defined and seems to spill over into the former. The two are on different continua, yet it is easy to think of real-world overlap and to view a variety of differences between the coalitional and collective forms as a matter of degree. Moreover, coalition behavior is widely thought to be ubiquitous, especially, but not only, among great powers, and intrinsic to most conceptions of hegemony.
Clark's conceptualization also enables the joint specification of a horizontal, or concert, axis consisting of great powers, and a vertical or, hierarchic, axis, tantamount to North–South relations. This formulation is reminiscent of the idea of post-World War II ‘minilateralism’, in which consensus is first forged among the hegemonic US and its great power cohorts, and then pressed upon the lesser members of the ostensibly multilateral institutions. The vertical axis seems to describe empire, which is missing from the book's overall scheme, despite being a cognate term to hegemony and the subject of a recent burst of literature concerned with whether the US was intending to (re)establish an empire during the George W. Bush administration.
There are a number of points that are mentioned in passing that could be developed more fully to enrich the book's second edition or figure into the next round of research. First, there is from the outset emphasis on the idea that material capabilities alone are not sufficient either to attain or to theoretically grasp hegemonic legitimacy; English school ideas and variables are also necessary. But there is no attempt to indicate how material resources might fit with international society considerations. For example, there is a page or so of attention given to the sea power–land power distinction but scant focus on how this distinction relates to questions of order-building, e.g, the connection between sea power and restraint. Also warranting closer scrutiny is the role of global war in the emergence of hegemons, specifically their skill in assembling and managing wartime coalitions, and converting them into legitimate postwar order.
What seems most lacking, however, in Clark's international society approach to hegemonic legitimacy are the systematic incorporation of challenge, contestation, or competition as integral parts of the processes under study. But this criticism, like the others raised in this review, amounts to the picking of nits, and small nits at that. Clark's fine, rewarding book will be required reading for anyone working in the field.
