“The persistent myth of lost hegemony,” revisited: structural power as a complex network phenomenon
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120952876 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | William Kindred Winecoff |
| Subject Matter | 25th Anniversary Special Issue |
research-article2020
EJ R
I
25th Anniversary Special Issue
European Journal of
International Relations
“The persistent myth of
2020, Vol. 26(S1) 209 –252
© The Author(s) 2020
lost hegemony,” revisited:
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120952876
DOI: 10.1177/1354066120952876
structural power as a complex
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
network phenomenon
William Kindred Winecoff
Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Abstract
This article resuscitates the idea of structural power in world politics by linking it to
modern complex network science, presents a theoretical framework for understanding
how global structures develop and change, and empirically analyzes the prominence
of leading states within global finance, trade, security, and knowledge networks. It
argues that the “fitness plus preferential attachment” (FPA) model of complex network
evolution provides a logical explanation for the durability of American influence even
as some of its advantages in country-level capabilities has eroded, and it introduces
a network methodology that is capable of empirically analyzing the organizational
complexity that exists within and across domains in world politics. It argues that the
rise of China and other emerging powers has been overstated in some ways, but that
a redistribution of structural prominence is taking place, in some domains, as emerging
markets increase their transnational connections; this has mostly come at the relative
expense of Europe, however, rather than the United States.
Keywords
hegemony, global networks, structure, power, political economy, hegemonic stability
theory
What makes some countries more powerful than others? This is the most important question for
the study and practice of international relations (Beckley, 2018a: 7).
This article resuscitates the concept of structural power in world politics by linking it
to prominence within global network structures and examines a range of these networks
Corresponding author:
William Kindred Winecoff, Indiana University Bloomington, 1100 E 7th St, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Email: wkwineco@indiana.edu
210
European Journal of International Relations 26(S1)
to uncover the structural positions of states and national industries. In so doing, the arti-
cle offers a theory of the formation and persistence of structural power and examines it
with a methodology developed in complex network science, neither of which were pre-
sent in Susan Strange’s original formulation of the structural power concept in
International Relations (IR).
Specifically, I examine whether the “fitness plus preferential attachment” complex
network model describes several domains of world politics—following Strange, I exam-
ine the financial, trade, security, and knowledge systems—and provide descriptive
empirical analysis that is consistent with the model, and discuss how further inferential
and multiplex analysis might proceed from this foundation. The overall picture that
emerges is that the United States remains overwhelmingly structurally prominent across
domains in world politics. While there is important variance across both domains and
time, the extent to which American centrality endures is surprising. The rise of China
(and some other emerging markets) is also noticeable, particularly in the production
subsystem, but in relative terms, their growth has not come at the expense of the United
States. Instead, they are catching up to, and in some ways have already surpassed, other
members of the Old Core, especially Europe and advanced East Asia. The broad conclu-
sion is that what was true in Strange’s day remains true today, despite the persistent myth
of lost hegemony: the United States retains core structural positions across domains in
world politics. But indefinite persistence is not guaranteed, and I also articulate the
mechanisms through which a structural transformation can take place.
As such, this paper should be viewed as another step in the turn toward “new interde-
pendence” scholarship that is already underway in International Political Economy (IPE)
and International Relations (Farrell and Newman, 2014, 2019; Oatley, 2019; Oatley
et al., 2013; Winecoff, 2015). It contributes to this special issue’s theme of
Interdisciplinarity and the IR Innovation Horizon by recasting legacy discussions from
IPE and IR in light of modern systems, complexity, and network sciences, which enriches
previous conceptualizations of structural power and complex interdependence while also
providing an empirical strategy for evaluating competing claims about them.
Structural power and world politics
Shortly after leaving her post as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department,
Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that the United States’ influence in the world is determined
by its position within global network structures (Slaughter, 2012: 45 (emphasis added)):
For the next decade, the United States should pursue of a grand strategy of network centrality.
The most important shift for America is not the rise of China and the realignment of power in
the international system, but rather the ubiquity and density of global networks. Existing grand
strategies—such as primacy, containment, offshore balancing, isolationism, selective
engagement and order building—assume a world of states acting essentially as unitary actors
with defined military, economic, and diplomatic strategies. . . . However, even if [states] are
the principal actors in the international system, they now act side by side with many types of
social actors who are able to come together and act independently on the world stage. The
Winecoff
211
resulting [network] system is messy, complex, and frustrating. Yet wishing for a simpler world
will not make it so.
Slaughter’s claim relies on intuition that is common to International Relations theory
(even if sometimes disputed): the world is comprised of sets of interdependent social,
political, and economic relationships that together form a common structure, so being at
the core of that structure is likely to confer substantial benefit. Thus, states interested in
maximizing their influence in world politics should conduct foreign policy in such a way
as to enhance the likelihood of increased “centrality,” or prominence, within these sys-
tems. According to this view, focusing too intently on dyadic competition and relative
capabilities—at the expense of broader structural considerations—can miss key determi-
nants of outcomes in world politics.
This observation from a leading policymaker recalls a previous era in which the
importance of structural position in world affairs was a topic of serious discussion by
International Relations scholars. In the mid-1980s many theorists of international poli-
tics had predicted the decline of American hegemony and the emergence of a multipolar
world where relative capability gaps were narrow.1 In response, Susan Strange argued
that power in world politics does not follow from national attributes alone—which she
called the “power base” that conferred what she called “relational power” capabilities of
compellence and deterrence—but that the distribution of power is determined largely by
countries’ positions within global structures (Strange, 1987: 553):
In this new great game of states, structural power decides outcomes (both positive and negative)
much more than relational power does, and the United States’ structural power has, on balance,
increased.2
In four key areas—security, goods production, finance and credit, and knowledge—
Strange argued that American prominence remained undiminished despite the intellec-
tual attention given to what she called “the persistent myth of lost hegemony.” Strange
made her argument by general description. Her unwillingness to develop broad theory
and a tractable methodology that linked structures to outcomes limited the influence of
her approach (Milner and Snyder, 1988; Strange, 1988b), at least in the American acad-
emy that was undergoing a sharp turn toward a “hard science” approach that privileged
inferential statistical methodologies to analyze implications from reduced-form bargain-
ing models that explicitly eschewed structural analysis (Amadae, 2003; Cranmer and
Desmarais, 2016; Lake, 2009b; Lake and Powell, 1999; Oatley, 2011; Winecoff, 2017b).3
But the events of the succeeding years—in particular the end of the Cold War and
initiation of the “unipolar moment,” as well as the near-universal integration into
American-led institutions and spread of liberal norms—indicate that Strange’s intuition
contained much value. Outside of the United States, especially in the “British School”
of IPE, Strange’s framework had much more influence (Cohen, 2008). Yet even there
the development of a general theory of structural power, and a tractable methodology to
measure and analyze it, was never fully developed.4 Methodologically, Strange argued
that quantitative indicators may be used for uncovering a state’s power base, but that
structural power as control over outcomes “can only be inferred from historical
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European Journal of International Relations 26(S1)
evidence” (Strange, 1987: 554). As a result, the utility of Strange’s approach in the
broader IR and IPE communities has been limited. For example, one of the most influ-
ential pieces of modern...
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