ABSTRACT
Whilst the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 spurred the international community to unite behind US leadership, as the previous chapter has shown there was a high level of opposition to the US vision for Iraq’s disarmament 12 years later. Here the US attempted to assert a leadership role over international society but found little political support among the members of the Security Council and the broader UN membership for the forcible disarmament of Iraq. The interesting question here is why did states largely reject US leadership during the Iraq Crisis? In the previous chapter we examined whether the rejection of US leadership was guided by normative beliefs about legitimate state behaviour. Here we found that questions of international legitimacy did in fact play a strong role in the decision to follow or reject US leadership. As such, the evidence did support a conceptualisation of hegemony as a leadership role in international society. However, could there be another, more compelling, explanation of followership? In this chapter our goal is to test whether the opposing conceptualisation of hegemony, as a relation of dominance, can provide an equally persuasive or better explanation of followership or the rejection of US leadership in the Iraq Crisis. Evidence supportive of a view of hegemony as a dominance relationship would include examples of followership motivated by US threats or coercion, or as a result of a rational calculation that considerable material benefits could be accrued. The chapter to follow examines the decision-making processes of the same four states that played an integral financial or military role in the coalition against Iraq during the 1990-1991 Gulf Crisis. The Iraq Crisis 12 years later brought about a split in positions among these states, with the United Kingdom and Japan choosing to follow the US lead and France and Germany choosing to reject it. The question we ask in this chapter is whether this pattern of behaviour is related to material motives for action. We have again chosen to focus on three material factors – oil dependence, alliance dependence and the balance of threat hypothesis – that may have affected the decision by states to either make a significant contribution to the coalition or to reject participation altogether. Domestic considerations have been largely excluded from consideration, except in cases where the evidence suggests that domestic opinion strongly impacted on the decisions of governments or political parties.
