ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore the complex of relations linking changing configurations in the world economy to changes in hegemony, social organisation, cultural identities and representations. The thrust of the argument is that increasing ethnic fragmentation and a polarisation between emergent global elites and nationally downwardly mobile lower classes are phenomena characteristic of the declining hegemonic centres of the world system, i.e. Europe and the United States as well as weaker zones of the global peripheries. The new elites are linked by the emergence of a matrix of globalising discourses of which hybridity has gained in dominance. The latter is used in an attempt to redescribe the world and as such is a candidate for what is classically known as a dominant ideology. It is reinforced by its opposition to the clear and often violent cultural and social fragmentation which characterises the middle- and lower-class levels of what appears to be declining Western nation states. These processes are not globally salient, but are, on the contrary, regionally specific since they are generated by declining hegemony. They do not apply directly to East and Southeast Asia, although the long stagnation of the Japanese economy bears evidence of analogous tendencies. Until this latest crisis, however, it is argued that the processes typical of this region were quite the opposite to those occurring in the West, that is, there was a tendency towards consolidation and even integration of formerly conflictual ethnic divisions into larger units, the integration if not eradication of indigenous groups and the strengthening of nationalism, national elites and regional identity. In important respects, the processes of consolidation that have been so evident in East Asia are part of the same process that has led to decline and fragmentation in the West. This chapter explores the mechanisms involved in these inverse processes, trying ultimately to clarify the social and cultural correlates of declining hegemony.
