Pandemics, Hegemony and Global Cooperation

I had not yet decided which coronavirus related topic I would write about next when I heard the news that the sitting president of the United States—amid a global pandemic of historic proportions—pulled America’s funding from the World Health Organization. I should not have been shocked, despite the perversity of the act. Trump, after all, ran a campaign promising to put “America first.” His stances firmly put him as representing anti-globalist right-wing populism. Undermining supranational organizations is definitely “on message” for the US President. Looking globally, it is not just Trump’s America pulling in when it should be reaching out. One would think, self-interest, alone, should be galvanizing global solidarity. As most people realize, this is a global health emergency. If the outbreak is not addressed sufficiently in the poorest countries, it will only return to the wealthiest. The need is evident for there to be a global effort to develop a vaccine and build global capacity in testing equipment. Otherwise, there will be successive waves of outbreaks wreaking havoc. To protect ourselves locally; we must act globally. However, instead of seeing the kind of global cooperation that the COVID-19 pandemic deserves, we are witnessing aggressive international unilateralism. But why? One explanation for the lack of a worldwide response to the pandemic comes from a concept in international relations called the hegemonic stability theory. The theory is both explanatory and predictive and touches other subjects to which I am dearly interested, so it is worth exploring in this post.

Before going right into the theory, I will explain a little about the concept of hegemony. An excellent place to start is stating that imperialism and hegemony are not the same despite many conflating the two—as when critics of US policy discuss US imperialism when they mean hegemony. Historically, imperialism refers to when a state occupies another country, governs it directly or through a puppet government, extracts resources from it, and imposes its ideology on its people. The problem that imperial powers often realize too late is that it is expensive to run an empire. It takes a toll on the citizens of the imperial homeland since administrating far-flung vassal states is costly and requires a large standing army.

Hegemonic power works differently than an imperial power. Rather than ruling through fear or coercion, a hegemon relies on cultural influence, non-military resources, and economic power. Nations fall under the sway of a foreign hegemon without realizing it through propaganda disseminated in movies and other media and the provision of cheap consumer goods offered by the hegemon. One cannot overestimate the power that Hollywood plays in extending US soft power abroad. Think about how Coca-Cola can be found no matter how remote the locale. If one can buy a Coke, then US influence is present.

A mature nation prefers to be a hegemonic power, rather than imperial, since the costs are substantially less in blood and treasure, and the return on investment far greater. Imperialists ruling by fear also must face the chance of revolt, and the possibility of freedom fighters taking the battle back to the imperial homeland in the form of terrorism. As long as a hegemon restrains from using their military might to do anything but offering protection for those under their sphere of influence, they mostly avoid the security concerns that an imperial power would face.

In international relations, there are generally two approaches taken concerning hegemony. The first approach was developed by Antonio Gramsci and adopted by those who describe themselves as historic materialists¹. The second tradition distances themselves from the first, and claim to follow the more orthodox, realist tradition within international relations. Hegemonic stability theory falls into the later, non-Gramsci, realist school.

The gist of hegemonic stability theory is that there are many obstacles to international cooperation, and it is most likely to occur under conditions that ease or remove them. When there is a dominant hegemon, say Great Britain in the 1800s and the United States after 1945, mechanisms for international cooperation exist. A hegemon provides the framework for collective goods such as stable exchange rates, fair trade, and, importantly, for today’s concerns, an international health regime. Hegemonic stability theory proposes that collective goods such as the World Health Organization—which exists to respond to global health issues—works best under the leadership of a major power. An excellent recent example of the theory working in practice was when US power aided the WHO under the Obama administration, thus successfully halting the Ebola outbreak.

As many countries, including, very purposely, the US under President Trump, retreat from internationalism, the world is left without a hegemon to provide the conditions (according to the hegemonic stability theory) that lead to global cooperation. In the meantime, according to theory, we can expect to see weak global responses to pandemics and other global threats that dearly need global solidarity.

Further Thoughts

Before I am accused of supporting imperialism or hegemony, I am putting it out there that I do not. I am just explaining how a prominent theory in international relations may explain what we are observing in the real world in these unprecedented times. I hope that in the future, states can face each other as equals, and self-interest would engender global cooperation and the strengthening of international collective goods.

In the meantime, keep washing your hands.

Footnotes

¹ I was amused that Gramsci became a trending topic among Conservative pundits during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign. The father of former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, Joseph Buttigieg, was a Professor of English at Notre Dame who specialized in Gramsci studies. Since Gramsci was a Marxist theorist, talking heads from the right of the spectrum insinuated that Pete Buttigieg was a closeted Communist with nefarious motives for running for political office.