ABSTRACT
The multipolar moment of the twenty-first century closes in the history of imperialism in which single powers could dominate, or attempt to dominate, the capitalist world order. The present multipolar moment contains more hopeful possibilities than even the end of the Second World War. The world dominance of the first industrial capitalist country was inevitable as long as the world outside it remained pre-capitalist and pre-industrial. Though the United Kingdom’s commercial and financial dominance persisted longer, it too ended in the First World War. That set in train the developments – historical and intellectual-historical – that would give imperialism the strange afterlife it lived in the repeatedly failing US attempts to sustain the dollar’s world role, and the cosmopolitan ideologies – hegemonic stability theory (HST), and later globalization and empire – that accompanied them. HST contributed to making each one credible before it failed, and another became necessary.
