Hegemony in a Region That Dares Not Speak its Name
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200606100303 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Andrew Hurrell
Hegemony in a
region that dares
not speak its name
| International Journal | Summer 2006 | 545 |
In many parts of the world we see recurrent attempts to talk regions into
existence even when material realities undercut the possibilities of viable
regionalism and militate against effective regional cooperation.1In North
America the opposite is the case. There seems to be a persistent discomfort
with the very idea of North America as a region, a persistent refusal to
accept the very high levels of regionalization that have developed over the
past 20 years, and a persistent unwillingness to consider the implications
of that regionalization. Patterns of regionalization have intensified dramat-
ically—in terms of trade, investment, energy, environment, migration, and
security.2But regional awareness and regional cohesion remain very low.
Theorists of governance tell us that intensified regionalization creates
increasing demand for new forms of governance. But formal interstate
regional institutions in North America remain weak and continue to be
Andrew Hurrell is director of the Centre for International Studies at the University of
Oxford and a fellow of Nuffield College.
1 For a recent analysis of comparative regionalism see Mary Farrell, Björn Hettne, and Luk van
Langenhoven, eds.,
The Global Politics of Regionalism: Theory and Practice
(London: Pluto,
2005).
2 For an overview, see Robert A Pastor, “North America and the Americas: Integration among
unequal partners,” in ibid., 210-21.
| Andrew Hurrell |
| 546 | International Journal | Summer 2006 |
characterized by bilateralism (US/Canada on the one hand; US/Mexico on
the other). There is serious disagreement as to how the governance that
does exist within the region should be understood and evaluated. And there
is a painful absence of serious debate on the forms of regional governance
that will be required to meet the challenges of the future.
The reasons for this discomfort and dissonance are not hard to find.
They lie in the combination of dense integration and stark inequality (both
of interstate power and of material conditions) and in the very different his-
torical trajectories and self-understandings of the polities and societies that
make up North America and its increasingly important but unstable south-
ern periphery. On almost every account US hegemony is central to the
story, and to the problem of how to understand that story. Contending views
of how to deal with the United States in a particular part of the world or on
a specific set of issues are bound up with perceptions of US power and of
where it is heading. The first section of this article therefore considers the
broad trajectory of US power in the world and questions the arguments of
those who talk glibly of a new imperial age or of the viability of a hegemonic
global order. My basic point is to stress the limits of US power and the insta-
bility of that power and the possible implications of these limits for the
region.
There is a powerful sense in much recent political and academic writ-
ing that the sheer extent of US power and the character of its foreign poli-
cy over the past three years have recreated a strong global logic to interna-
tional politics that will inevitably colour and cloud the nature of regional
politics in all parts of the world. Thus it was widely argued in the 1990s
that the end of the Cold War was opening or reopening regional spaces and
specifically regional security logics. The Cold War “overlay” had been
removed and regional security needed to be understood much more in
terms of the patterns of amity and enmity and in terms of security threats
that are internal to the region.3This contrasted not only with the Cold War,
but also with the powerful systemic forces of the classical era of European
imperialism and arguably also with the powerful transregional and transna-
tional ideological forces that characterized the interwar period. Now, for
many, this trend has been clearly reversed in the period since 11 September
3 See, in particular, Barry Buzan and Ole Waever,
Regions and Powers: The Structure of
International Security
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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