ABSTRACT

In the past two chapters we have charted the reconfiguration of US hegemony and the absence of any real pretenders to the US throne among Germany, Japan, China, Russia and the EC. In this chapter we return to questions of hegemony, hierarchy, order and territory from another angle. The focus here is on the rapid internationalization of economic and political affairs in the period since 1945, and the dangers and opportunities that might be presented in the realm of geopolitics by a decentring and deterritorialization of the means of production, destruction and communications. We join with some other commentators in linking a tentative globalization of modern life to the construction of overlapping sovereignties and networks of power that are in turn associated with a new form of hegemony: what we shall call transnational liberalism.