Hegemonies Of Legitimation

Since the Enlightenment, liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have been compelled to secure the legitimacy of their authority by constructing rational states whose rationality is based on modern forms of law. The first serious challenge to liberal democratic practices of legal legitimacy comes in Marx's early writings on Rousseau and Hegel. In addition to examining Marx's critique of Kant, Hegel, and liberalism, Schecter investigates the reasons for the authoritarianism and breakdown of state socialist governments in Russia and elsewhere claiming to put Marx's ideas on democracy and equality into practice.

The legitimacy of the European Union is a much studied and highly contested subject. Unlike other works, this book does not engage in another review of the shifts of public opinion and perception regarding the EU. Instead, it offers a different and innovative perspective by focusing on constructions of legitimacy in the European Commission. Starting from the premise that legitimacy is discursively constructed, the book engages in a fine-grained analysis of legitimacy discourses in the European Commission since the early 1970s. Embedded in a poststructuralist theoretical framework, Hegemonies of Legitimation also sheds light on the conditions that made radical shifts of legitimacy discourses possible, and illustrates how these discursive shifts paved the way for different types of legitimation policies. As such, the book maps and reconstructs the historically variable discursive landscape of competing articulations of what legitimacy signifies in the case of the EC/EU, and provides us with a detailed picture of the history of the Commission's struggle for legitimacy.

This book examines US hegemony and international legitimacy in the post-Cold War era, focusing on its leadership in the two wars on Iraq. The preference for unilateral action in foreign policy under the Bush Administration, culminating in the use of force against Iraq in 2003, has unquestionably created a crisis in the legitimacy of US global leadership. Of central concern is the ability of the United States to act without regard for the values and interests of its allies or for international law on the use of force, raising the question: does international legitimacy truly matter in an international system dominated by a lone superpower? US Hegemony and International Legitimacy explores the relationship between international legitimacy and hegemonic power through an in depth examination of two case studies – the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91 and the Iraq Crisis of 2002-03 – and examines the extent to which normative beliefs about legitimate behaviour influenced the decisions of states to follow or reject US leadership. The findings of the book demonstrate that subordinate states play a crucial role in consenting to US leadership and endorsing it as legitimate and have a significant impact on the ability of a hegemonic state to maintain order with least cost. Understanding of the importance of legitimacy will be vital to any attempt to rehabilitate the global leadership credentials of the United States under the Obama Administration. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, IR theory and security studies. Lavina Rajendram Lee is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University, Australia, and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Sydney.

A major re-thinking of the concept of hegemony in international relations. On the basis of historical examples, Ian Clark presents an innovative scheme for rethinking hegemony, and applies it to the US role in international organizations, in East Asia, and in the policy on climate change.

Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric as conventional wisdom suggests. Instead, throughout the early modern period, Chinese hegemony was accepted, defied, and challenged by its East Asian neighbors at different times, depending on these leaders' strategies for legitimacy among their populations. This book demonstrates that Chinese hegemony and hierarchy were not just an outcome of China's military power or Confucian culture but were constructed while interacting with other, less powerful actors' domestic political needs, especially in conjunction with internal power struggles. Focusing on China-Korea-Japan dynamics of East Asian international politics during the Ming and High Qing periods, Ji-Young Lee draws on extensive research of East Asian language sources, including records written by Chinese and Korean tributary envoys. She offers fascinating and rich details of war and peace in Asian international relations, addressing questions such as: why Japan invaded Korea and fought a major war against the Sino-Korean coalition in the late sixteenth century; why Korea attempted to strike at the Ming empire militarily in the late fourteenth century; and how Japan created a miniature tributary order posing as the center of Asia in lieu of the Qing empire in the seventeenth century. By exploring these questions, Lee's in-depth study speaks directly to general international relations literature and concludes that hegemony in Asia was a domestic, as well as an international phenomenon with profound implications for the contemporary era.

In this new introduction to Antonio Gramsci's thought, James Martin reconstructs the central analytical themes of the Italian Marxist's famous Prison Notebooks : the 'organic' intellectuals, the relation between state and civil society, and the revolutionary party. The contemporary relevance of his concept 'hegemony' to the analysis of state legitimacy is critically considered and the limitations of Gramsci's historicist Marxism to understanding social complexity are outlined. The book will be of interest to undergraduates and teachers in the social sciences.

""We live in a period of uncertainty about the fate of American global leadership and the future of international order. The 2016 election of Donald Trump led many to pronounce the death, or at least terminal decline, of liberal international order - the system of institutions, rules, and values associated with the American-dominated international system. But the truth is that the unravelling of American global order began over a decade earlier. Exit from Hegemony develops an integrated approach to understanding the rise and decline of hegemonic orders. It calls attention to three drivers of transformation in contemporary order. First, great powers, most notably Russia and China, contest existing norms and values, while simultaneously building new spheres of international order through regional institutions. Second, the loss of the "patronage monopoly" once enjoyed by the United States and its allies allows weaker states to seek alternative providers of economic and military goods - providers who do not condition their support on compliance with liberal economic and political principles. Third, transnational counter-order movements, usually in the form of illiberal and right-wing nationalists, undermine support for liberal order and the American international system, including within the United States itself. Exit from Hegemony demonstrates that these broad sources of transformation - from above, below, and within - have transformed past international orders and undermine prior hegemonic powers. It provides evidence that that all three are, in the present, mutually reinforcing one another and, therefore, that the texture of world politics may be facing major changes""--

"... a book of striking originality and depth, a brilliant and quite new interpretation of the nature and history of philosophy." -- John Sallis In Broken Hegemonies, the late distinguished philosopher Reiner SchÃ1⁄4rmann offers a radical rethinking of the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks through Heidegger. SchÃ1⁄4rmann interprets the history of Western thought and action as a series of eras governed by the rise and fall of certain dominating philosophical ideas that contained the seeds of their own destruction. These eras coincided with their dominant languages: Greek, Latin, and vernacular tongues. Analyzing philosophical texts from Parmenides, Plotinus, and Cicero, through Augustine, Meister Eckhardt, and Kant, to Heidegger, SchÃ1⁄4rmann traces the arguments by which these ideas gained hegemony and by which their credibility was ultimately demolished. Recognizing the failure of ultimate norms, Broken Hegemonies questions how humanity today is to think and act in the absence of principles.