ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 we found that legitimacy played a significant role in motivating a broad collection of states to follow the US lead in responding to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These findings support a conceptualisation of hegemony as a leadership role in international society, constituted and regulated by shared normative beliefs about legitimate behaviour. Normative beliefs, however, may not have been the only driver of followership in this case. For those who view hegemony as a dominance relationship, followership is likely to derive from the material interests of subordinate states: to avoid the threat of punishment or to acquire positive benefits that accrue from cooperation. In this chapter, our task is to look for evidence supporting the conceptualisation of hegemony as a dominance relationship by asking the question – what material interests might states have been pursuing in following the lead of the United States and how significant were they as motivating factors? In answering this question we have chosen to focus on four states that played an integral part in the coalition through either their military or financial contributions: Germany and Japan as major financial contributors, and France and the United Kingdom as major military contributors. These states have been chosen because their involvement contributed significantly to the success of the group enterprise as a whole, and their large contributions to the coalition provide an objective indicator of the success of US leadership. As Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and France were the major non-Arab states which supported the coalition, closer study of their involvement is most likely to provide us with a stronger assessment of whether the US was a true ‘leader’ in the crisis in the true sense of the word. There were a number of Arab states which made major contributions to the Gulf coalition in military and financial terms. These states have been excluded from the analysis because of the intense threat these states were under from further military action by the Iraqi regime and their immense security dependence on the United States. Given the heightened proximate threat these states faced from the Iraqi regime, it would have been difficult to differentiate between and evaluate their likely motivations for followership of the anti-Iraq coalition.
