This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

Much of the future of the international order will depend on the interactions of China and the United States, the world's most important autocracy and democracy. Each of these countries has very different conceptions of international order and the place of law within it. Yet despite their very different approaches, both China and the United States share similar attitudes to international law. Both are essentially hegemonic in their approach, and this provides a space for the continuing presence of prodemocratic international law among smaller countries.

Mailer’s definitions of manhood lie at the center of much of his work; they not only inform the construction of his fictional protagonists, but are also connected to his ideas of existentialism, and are tied to his hopes for the future of America. Mailer’s notions of manhood also often intersect with his theories of violence, and thus threaten to uphold toxic notions of masculine power (which Mailer himself internalized throughout his life, evident in his performance of machismo), though Mailer also confronts the many pressures and vulnerabilities associated with cultural expectations of manhood.

This chapter traces the spread and evolution of proportionality in Greek public law. Contrary to English and French public law, proportionality met no major resistance in Greece. It emerged in this context during the 1970s and has been applied as a constitutional principle by courts for more than forty years. Greece is one of the rare legal systems where, since 2001, proportionality explicitly enjoys constitutional status. However, a survey of judicial practice nuances this image of success. Soon after the recognition of the constitutional status of proportionality, its application was limited to a manifest error test. Until the late 1990s, proportionality’s application in judicial review was particularly formal. Its function was more important in substantive case law, where it had a content close to equity. Since its constitutional entrenchment, proportionality is a hegemonic method of reasoning in Greek law. However, consensus as to its content has not led to its consistent application in case law.

In Latin America, goods substitution dynamics are evident in states that have recently opposed US hegemony, such as Venezuela and Ecuador. However, the case of Colombia – one of the USA’s closest allies in the region – shows how asset substitution dynamics come to operate under conditions of hierarchy. Colombia does not seek to challenge the USA directly. Rather, Colombia is consistently seeking to diversify its ties with the USA, thereby increasing its leverage and autonomy and hedging its bets from within a hierarchical arrangement. Colombia is a “least likely” case for the theory of goods substitution, and there is limited evidence of actual Chinese goods substitution in Colombia. Yet, China’s increasingly central role in a global goods ecology is a new context in which Colombian hedging strategies are used to threaten with goods substitution. This chapter shows that the mere threat of exiting or hedging strategies has the potential to effect policy change, particularly when combined with domestic political context – a diversification of ties interacts with domestic and international politics, with one area having possible unintended effects on the other.

This introductory chapter first reviews the major categories of goods: private, public, common-pool, and club, and discusses the concept of good specificity – essentially, the number of possible suppliers – which matters to the politics of substitution. It then turns toward a discussion of how this volume defines and understands international order: An important feature of international order is its “goods ecology” – that is, patterns in the production, supply, quality, and nature of international goods. The next major section elaborates the logic of goods substitution, which serves as the common framework for the chapters in the book, before illustrating how many of the goods in international politics are cultural or symbolic in character and having performative dimensions. The chapter concludes by laying out the plan of the volume and the contents of each of the chapters.

Goods are not only tangible things, like military hardware or trade goods, but may also be normative in nature. In this chapter, Rumelili and Towns emphasize the centrality of international symbolic and normative goods in maintaining or challenging hegemony. International orders may be characterized by different systems of supply of normative goods and status. They analyze the role played by ranking organizations and the country performance indices they produce in transforming norms into a set of normative goods. Such country performance indices provide moral value in three ways: They supply public and comparative information, which constructs moral hierarchies; they define norms by assigning moral value to specific indicators; and they distribute moral status to states through the ranking systems they employ. States may acquire normative goods to challenge the dominant position of the United States, or they may challenge the existing set of normative goods to undermine the liberal normative order that undergirds US hegemony. Conceiving of norms as goods alerts us to a distinct terrain where hegemony is challenged in a bottom-up and gradual fashion, through putatively technical measures and standards.

This chapter illustrates how a potential for goods substitution may foment a strategy of playing the big powers against one another. Client states are using the threat of exit to gain leverage, and to renegotiate deals. There are signs of decline of US hegemony in the North Atlantic, and an increased potential for goods substitution by Russia and China. However, goods substitution has not been initiated by Russia and China offering what the USA or the West have ceased to offer. Rather, alternative goods provision has been sought out from below, by polities with complex post-colonial and hegemonic relationships with a variety of states. These polities are experimenting with new ways of playing the USA, Russia and China against each other. Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes exploit their strategic positions to push great powers to compete in offering a variety of public and private goods. Client states may be using the threat of substitution as strategic leverage, which drive the hegemon to renegotiate. Client leverage will be at the highest when the client can easily switch goods provider, but where the hegemon cannot easily find an alternative client.

China has begun to take a more active and assertive role in international public goods provision and the results of this are more varied than the duality of revisionism versus status quo orientations would have it. As a goods supplier, China is increasingly identifying gaps in the existing international order and filling them without necessarily challenging the USA directly. In this chapter, Julia Bader shows how China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) became a successful example of asset substitution. The AIIB was initiated as a counter-hegemonic attempt, targeted at the architecture of international finance and at US dominance therein. Yet, as ever more European democracies somewhat unexpectedly joined the Bank – against the wishes of the USA – the institution gradually transformed into an integrated part of the existing international financial architecture. The case of the AIIB illustrates how opportunistic hedging and uncoordinated herding by third states may inadvertently undermine the existing order. Bader shows how the framework of international goods provision, involving producers and consumers alike, directs our attention to non-hegemonic actors as crucial but overlooked players.

In this concluding chapter, Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann sum up the volume’s contribution to the discipline of international relations and the study of international order, and suggest how the goods substitution framework may be extended in future research. Moving beyond a contractual view of goods substitution, they emphasize how identity could play a central role in goods ecologies, particularly in instances where a goods recipient uses its own resources to coproduce the goods with the provider as a means of gaining recognition and relevance. In turn, the quality and perceptions of goods and assets are also likely to play a part in a global goods ecology.

In this chapter, Cooley and Nexon argue that instead of operating with a continuum from “revisionist” to “status quo” powers, we should rather focus on the broader strategic environment in which power political maneuvers take place. This is an international goods ecology, comprising types of goods and their distribution. The key advantage of studying power politics as operating within such an asset ecology is how order itself then becomes something different from polarity or hegemony. This makes it possible to distinguish between challenges to the power position of the hegemon and challenges to the architecture of the international order itself. Cooley and Nexon therefore develop an alternate typology of how international orders are challenged to show how acts of substitution are themselves potentially order transforming. They argue that US-led hegemonic order may be undermined before any overt challenge to the power position of the United States emerges. The main benefit of studying the logic of asset substitution is that it gives us a tool to assess how seemingly unimportant acts of substitution, bit by bit and regardless of a lack of revisionist intent, can shape and transform the international order.

In the wake of the Cold War, the formerly Communist countries in East Europe, with Western support and urging, took up capitalism and democracy with considerable alacrity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a quest to identify new threats in the succeeding decade. Most of these, however, were already out there during the Cold War: proliferation, terrorism, drugs, oil dependence, and economic and environment “challenges.” A new opportunity brought forward by the ending of the Cold War was that former enemies could work together to police the world. Disciplined policing forces were effective in pacifying thug-dominated conflicts and in removing thuggish regimes in Panama, Somalia (at least at first), Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. And the Gulf War of 1991 chiefly showed how easy it is to run over an enemy that had little strategy, tactics, defenses, morale, or leadership. However, the deaths of tens of thousands in the war and in its immediate aftermath might have been avoided through negotiation. These ventures were mostly ad hoc, and it is much too grand to consider them to constitute exercises in “liberal hegemony” or a “liberal world order.”

This chapter explores the mutually reinforcing transformations in American state-society and foreign relations engendered by the First World War and its aftermath. Scholars have long recognized the war as a critical event in the emergence of American global power and the concomitant rise of Wilsonian liberal-internationalism. Yet it is the post-World War II period that is typically designated as the decisive moment of epochal rupturing in US history. This chapter seeks to problematize these notions of a sharp epochal break, demonstrating the more fluid lines of continuity between the two periods contextualized within the longue durée of American state-formation. In particular, it highlights the ideo-political and cultural antecedents to Wilson’s liberal internationalist order-building project and its relationship to the defence of white supremacy at home and abroad. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how the post-1945 US-led Western liberal international order was built upon white supremacist foundations and a particular form of racialized anti-communism that had emerged decades earlier. US hegemonic practices were, on this view, constituted in and through the racial articulation of an anti-communist “common sense” defined by a militantly normative Americanism that found its roots in the First World War period.

Divided into five sections, the introduction surveys American involvement in the First World War and provides a guide to the collection itself. The first section, “War Guilt, Disillusionment, and Beyond,” charts broadly the way the war was seen during wartime and in the postwar era up to the present. Section two, “Why the First World War Was Fought and the United States Joined,” examines briefly why the war occurred and why the United States, distant from the center of the conflict, became involved. One important aspect contributing to that involvement—the debate among American intellectuals that came largely to embrace the Allies--is the subject of section three, “The Great War and the Intellectuals.” Section four, “How the United States Built an Army, Won the War, and Lost the Peace,” considers how the US fought the war, its role in the outcome, and the ultimate defeat of Wilson’s vision of a US-led postwar world order. The final section, “How to Read This Book,” highlights its three overall aims: canvassing the diverse forms of war literature and culture; analyzing the many settings and perspectives that occasioned responses to the war, and describing the depth and durability of the war’s impact.