ABSTRACT
Twenty-first-century globalization and global elite integration under United States global hegemony are long-term outcomes of the structural evolution of the global system. Most especially the internalization and commercialization of allied protection costs as part of the US military-corporate complex. This geopolitical economy of militarization is critical for understanding globalization, global elite integration, and democratization in the American century and the trajectory of the global system in the third millennium. The role of hegemonic powers in leading global coalitions and their constructions of sacred violence have provided these states with the cultural-ideological foundations for imagined communities, civilization, global military alliances, and related systems of political economy. US-led global militarization and related forms of neoliberal globalization are path-dependent processes. Anglo-American liberal civilian militarism allowed for massive public subsidies for capital-intensive high-tech warfare essential for global politico-economic, military, and geocultural supremacy, in a fusion of public policy and private corporate power.
