ABSTRACT
Much of the discussion of international relations in the 1970s and 1980s has tended to focus on the question of American decline. In so doing, many writers have tended to ignore or overlook the transformation of both US hegemony and the global political economy. US hegemony has changed from an outward projection of US ‘national’ hegemony. What is emerging is a necessarily incomplete form of transnational, neo-liberal dominance, one which is nevertheless anchored in US political and military centrality. At the level of world order, then, the world is undergoing a shift from a relatively hegemonic to a post-hegemonic world order. Although this is not a crisis in the dominance of the United States per se, its policies have been intimately bound up with the transition, albeit in a contradictory manner.
