Construction and Projection of US Hegemony

Abstract

The Neo neo-Gramscian (NNG) perspective adopted in this book understands world hegemony as having its origins in the global projection of social forces emanating from underlying social relations of production (SROP) embedded in a particular historical bloc, albeit always dialectically interacting with ‘international’ social forces, and in the context of a global capitalist system beset by uneven development. This chapter analyses how, against the background of looming post-war domestic over-production and huge inter-state wealth/power disparity, dominant social forces emergent from American capitalism mobilised around an anti-communist ‘hegemonic project’ (complete with ‘hegemonic apparatus’) aiming to launch a new global regime of accumulation facilitated/underwritten by US security arrangements. This required the restructuring of domestic/core countries’ SROP (Fordism) and the form of state (Keynesian), compatible with the needs of a mass consumption/mass production economy orientated towards Open-Door internationalism. Key here was the setting up of multilateral institutions (e.g. the UN, the Bretton Woods trio, the OEEC, NATO, etc.) in accordance with the third of Cox’s ‘categories of forces’ and Gramsci’s ‘second moment’. Yet, and reiterating a central tenet of NNG theory, American hegemony was never purely consensual. Whether it be disciplining the domestic/foreign subaltern classes or imposing dominance over core elites, coercion was omnipresent in Pax Americana, legitimised under the Cold War ‘Grand Strategy’ and embodied in Truman’s ‘national security state’, NSC-68, and the ‘empire of bases’ established around the world.