Dynamic Hegemonic Stability: averting hegemonic challenges and global war

Dynamic Hegemonic Stability: averting hegemonic challenges and global war

The objective realities of Atlanticism, as long as they are coupled with joint institutions and with a basic awareness of the Atlantic Perspective, make possible an unusual kind of stability-in-dynamism, which we might call “sliding continuity”. We have described the basics of it earlier: the rest of the world keeps growing, by nature gradually catching up in production and technology, but the Atlantic-West also keeps growing as more countries graduate into its ranks. The West retains all along a strong hegemonial position in economic and security affairs, and retains all along its internal coherence as a grouping of sociologically similar and politically likeminded First World countries. This situation can potentially continue until the West becomes the entire world.

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  The need for a coherent, reliable core of world order.
  
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  The need for the core to be large enough as to be hegemonic, allowing latitude for a relaxed, generous approach and for provision of public goods.
  
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  The need for the core not to be however so large and diverse as to undermine its coherence and reliability.
  
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  The need for the hegemony of the core to be stable and continue -- avoiding the most predictable cause of war, the rise of a plausible challenger for the hegemony -- and yet also be generous and support the rapid growth of poorer non-core areas.
  
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  The possibility of the core retaining its hegemony by expanding its membership to include other countries once they assimilate sufficiently to its characteristics that their membership would not detract from its cohesion.
  
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  The need for the core to be attractive enough, through its freedoms and values and wealth, to get others to make an effort to qualify to join.
  

Remarkably, a “fit” was provided for all these characteristics and qualifications by the Atlantic group of countries. They had a close mutual similarity as modern industrial democracies; and, combined, they had a large margin of economic and military predominance in the world. This Atlantic grouping served as the concrete point of convergence of the simultaneous equations; the value for the variable that, plugged into them, made them all work.³⁹

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  A strong global organizational order was needed in face of the depth of interdependence and rush of technology.
  
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  But an institutional grouping of all the countries of the world was bound to be weak.
  
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  Stronger unions were feasible, and were often advocated for fixed geographical regions.
  
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  But even if a regional union could solve the problems of its own region, it could not serve as a flexible, expandable core of world order.
  

By turning attention from strictly regional groupings to the transatlantic grouping, Streit found a point of common ground among these equations, preventing from running off in their seemingly foreordained contradictory directions. The Atlantic grouping had enough organic commonalities to qualify as a region capable of deep integration, and had a solid hegemony in global affairs, yet it was not a fixed intra-continental region. It built its commonalities more on the universalistic societal forms and norms that grew out of its history than out of the past peculiarities of history or location, enabling it to be open for others to join as Western ways kept spreading.

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  The only international Unions that are possible are those of a factional fraction of the world; and they cannot unite the world, but only revise the lines along which it is divided.
  
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  Countries can unite into a deep union only on a basis of fighting deadly external threats and enemies, not just internal commonalities. (Carl Schmitt)
  
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  Any Union will engender a countervailing Union, restoring the global balance of power on a higher, more intense plane (Reinhold Niebuhr, Leo Strauss).
  
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  Unions are never formed on the basis of a multipolar balance among genuinely independent powers such as exist globally, but through leadership of a core area within a fairly homogenous society (Prussia within Germany, Piedmont within Italy), or as a pretended “new Union” that is really only a revival of the unity of a half of a just-sundered larger Union (the American Union, formed during America’s separation from the British empire-union, with Britain uniting the colonies as Enemy after having long united them as their common Government). (Karl Deutsch)
  

Somehow the Atlantic grouping does not fall victim to these impossibilities. It does have a core area of its own, the Anglo-American core area, and within that, the U.S. core; however, it has been the main core area for the world system, not just for one power or region among others. Its core position has not been one within a multipolar balance, or even one half of the world, but a supermajority hegemonic position, both economically and strategically. And it has more often and enduringly attracted countries to join it than repelled them to unite against it. Its gradual growth has maintained its superhegemony; potentially this can continue until it becomes someday the entire world.

V. Implications for Policy

What specifically needs to be done?

To maintain the global stability whose objective foundations are still in good order, and avoid miscalculation, what policy measures are needed?

Edouard Balladur, former Prime Minister of France has concluded that the West needs to unite in order to avoid miscalculations and overreaching by a growing China, and stabilize a world order that is being shaken by the pace of change.⁴¹ The identical conclusion has been reached Richard Rosecrance, a respected leader in international studies⁴². So has Theo Sommer, a leading German foreign affairs analyst and editor at Die Zeit⁴³. All three perceive the simple reality that, combined, Europe and America are unsurpassable.
The argument was anticipated some years ago in the journal of the World Systems school: Europe and America must form a Union so China will see it cannot surpass them. It was unusual for this to come from a bitterly anti-Western school of analysis. Nevertheless, even from that standpoint, it was possible to understand that the West as a whole is the core of the World System, this Western hegemony nor American hegemony is the underlying long duree reality, it is the Western core that a periphery power such as China would have to surpass, and it would be good for it to avoid miscalculation on the matter.
The problem therefore is really: how much does the West need to be united, and in what ways, to convince the world of this reality?
Rosecrance invokes the ghost of Clarence Streit. And indeed, a consistent federal political Union, as envisaged by Streit, would suffice to convince the world of the reality of the West. But Rosecrance proposes for immediate purposes something far less than this. The problem here is to define the minimum that would suffice. By all odds it can be short of consistent Union but more than exists at present.
A related problem, which helps us define how much more is needed, is: why do people fail to perceive that Europe and America are in fundamentals already united? This reality means that Europe and America are already jointly the unit that a challenger would need to surpass; the problem is almost -- not quite -- reducible to one of perceptions. If Western affirmation of its unity could somehow be vigorous enough, it might suffice to get the reality universally recognized. But it is evident that it cannot be vigorous enough to convince the necessary elites and publics, unless there are also new steps on practical and institutional unity.
Both Balladur and Rosecrance urge a focus on further economic union of Europe and America. This seems the easiest thing to do, now that their economies are already so closely linked and harmonized, and in any event it is an economic surpassing that the declinists are predicting on behalf of China. However, it could be argued that this is yet another optical illusion of the declinist debate. Since the West economy is already in most respects a single economic space, completing this economic unity, while useful in a secondary way, would have only a secondary impact. Why do declinists fail to recognize the existing economic unity of the West? Why do the main declinist theorists, Kennedy and Khanna, count the EU exaggeratedly, as a single unit for international throw weight, just like any a nation-state, but, contradictorily, don’t recognize the institutional Concrete West at all or count the West as a unit in any degree; and further, count the EU against the U.S. rather than with it? This is not a matter of reality, but of perception; and no doubt to some extent a matter of willful illogic, a debater’s necessity, as the goal of their argument is to give up on the West and accommodate more to non-Western powers.
The crux of the matter is not the total economic weight of the West; it is already more than sufficient. The crux is to give sufficient visibility and conviction to the political reality of Western unity, so that the West will be seen as a single economic throw-weight. This is what determines whether the combined Western weight, or a separate national weight, is recognized as the entity that a challenger could need to match.
This means: the main need is to reinforce the political, diplomatic, and military unity of the transatlantic space (no doubt parenthetically reinforcing the economic side at the same time). The military unity, like the economic unity, is already fairly well organized. That leaves diplomatic unity as the decisive outstanding variable: the one that -- alongside the simple visibility of the West and its élan as a self-proclaimed self-affirming unit -- determines the extent to which the Western national weights are counted as a single weight in the world, or as separate weights.
Western diplomatic unity has made enormous progress since 1900, not to say 1800 when the westernmost powers were still engaging in mutual wars. But it still could go a lot farther. One need mention only Iraq, or Kyoto, to see why people fail to perceive the economic and military weights of the Western countries as a combined weight on the global scale.
To be sure, the Western weights always end up being combined when facing a major threatening external power. Even in more ordinary circumstances, the Western countries agree and act together far more often than they differ; and when they do differ, it is almost always tactically, on how to achieve shared goals, not -- not even on Iraq or Kyoto -- a strategic opposition. With other powers around the world they have differences of strategic goal; among themselves, as among ordinary parties domestically, they have differences in tactic and priority. What tempts external powers to miscalculate, and dream of gaining the global leadership by surpassing some single part of the West, is the frequent failure of Westerners to project a sense of unity and demonstrate in ordinary condition that they need to be reckoned with as a combined force. The dearth of political élan in the Concrete West -- its institutions are usually invisible and are weak on self-affirmation, its Atlantic perspective is nearly forgotten -- reinforces the doubts.
To recover the needed élan, Balladur urges a new institutional departure, to be named a “Union of the West”. To be sure, as a Gaullist realist, he urges only limited near-term substantive proposals: an additional, or refurbished and renamed U.S.-EU consultative channel, and a program of working on further steps in the economic union. He advocates a complete foreign policy union as the logical goal of what is needed for stabilizing the world order and world perceptions; but, seeing little of the heavy political will that would be required for achieving such a result, leaves this for the future, a hoped-for eventual product of the additional consultations.
Here it needs to be noted that, while the will is indeed weak in this period, there are other channels for Western foreign policy unification that are more promising than the U.S.-EU one alone. It is more realistic to move toward the goal by using these other channels for consultation and joint action in foreign policy, particularly NATO and the G7-8. They have both been working on foreign policy unity for decades. NATO since 1991 has been focused on getting more global coordination of the foreign policies and military actions of the Western countries. NATO’s tasks and efforts have in fact grown more and more worldwide. This is sometimes called “Global NATO”, because it implies a gradual global union of Western foreign policies.⁴⁴
This process is in a sense a belated playing out of the original Atlantic Perspective, held by Atlanticists from the 1890s to the 1930s, on the need for the Atlantic countries to follow a common policy worldwide in order to stabilize the world order. It was a perspective that kept having to get put off: from the 1890s to the 1960s, because of American opposition to European empires around the world and refusal to share in their burdens⁴⁵, after the 1960s because of European reluctance to share the burdens of American efforts around the world. The obstacles to common Western policy congealed around the accusations of “imperialism” traded between Europe and America when Western initiatives were under discussion. The symbiotic accusatory tone was reinforced by the global context: there were constant, much harsher mutual accusations of imperialism between the West and the Soviet Union, with Third World as audience and judge.
With the end of the Cold War, the accusatory rhetoric died down. NATO gradually came out of its shell and regained parts of its underlying global Atlantic perspective. The process accelerated after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which for the first time caused NATO to invoke Article 5, in defense of its metropolitan area but with the joint war in a place very far out of area. A century after the need for it was understood, there is gradual progress on achieving joint global policy among the Western countries. This gradualism has gone on, accelerating slowly, for two decades. It can be accelerated further; and it can be declared more loudly and made more visible, which is what a proclamation of “Global NATO” would do.
Here is where progress can most be made on a common foreign policy: that is, on a reality and perception of the West as a unified actor whose entire weight is what would have to be surpassed by a challenger. For this requisite visibility and conviction, the progress needs a name, as Balladur understood. “Global NATO” gives rise to serious confusions. A less confusing, more Balladurian, name such as a “Foreign Policy Union of the West” would make more sense; presumably put forward with Balladurian realism as a goal at this stage, to be proclaimed as an actual Union only after further progress makes it a label that could stick and not get discredited by the remaining internecine differences.

Timing is everything

It can be complained, by proponents of correcting the world’s inequities through World Government, that the Atlantic perspective fails to get remediation out of the West for its wealth and dominance and injustices against the rest of the world. If it ever achieves a world government, it will be done by completing Western predominance, not punishing the West for its predominance. It is a fair complaint, and indeed, a fair statement of the virtue of the Atlantic approach. A viable world government cannot be achieved as a punishment of any major portion of the world; that is the road to world civil war, not world government.

It can be complained, on the other hand, by opponents of any World Government at all as something that would submerge the West, that the Atlantic perspective would lead, in the end, to World Government, even if the end is a long time off. Almost true: it could lead; but continuing with getting there is at each stage an option belonging to free choice, not a preordained consequence of taking a “first step down the road”. And timing is not unimportant. The timing makes a fundamental difference to the meaning of that ultimate perspective for the West, and to the quality of the goal if ever reached. If it someday comes to pass that the West becomes the world on the terms of the Atlantic Perspective and a world government is developed, it will be a final completion of the process of enlargement of the West in a form that preserves and secures the West. While a more rapid enlargement, submerging the West, might be hoped by some enthusiasts to lead to an earlier proclamation of world government, in fact it could only produce another set of formal world institutions, not an effective or sustainable world government. A slow enlargement just might someday get to an effective, sustainable world government. At each stage, the choice will be open as to whether to proceed with further stages of enlargement; proceeding will have to be an active new step, which serves as a guarantor that it won’t be done carelessly. The Atlantic Perspective keeps the option open -- keeps open the chance for humanity to succeed, as world federalists would put it, not entirely without reason. Those who oppose world government will have plenty of opportunities to say no to further steps, plenty of time to argue against the option’s being taken; and plenty of time to consider if they haven’t been mistaken in treating the goal as intrinsically bad.
Finally, it can be said, by those who join in the current advocacy of a radical enlargement of the Western institutions to encompass the Third World, that the Atlantic perspective is in the end just such a radical enlargement, it merely delays it and puts it a long time off before receiving the benefits of it. The present study has opposed that advocacy of a radical enlargement; but what, it may be asked, is the difference, apart from timing?
The answer, again, is that the timing makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between an enlargement that preserves the West, as the Atlantic Perspective has done and would continue in a natural manner to do, and an enlargement that submerges the West. The difference between an enlargement that maintains the institutions of Western unity and their cohesion, and an enlargement that dilutes them and weakens their capabilities for acting jointly. Between an enlargement that is sober and one that is enthusiastic to the point of inebriation; that helps, or hurts; is self-enhancing, or self-destructive. The radical enlargement strategy would not be truly an “enlargement” of the West at all, but a self-euthanasia of the West.
Western enlargement has been for the past century a true enlargement: a careful enlargement of the West itself, not something that submerges the West. In the next century too, it should remain a genuine enlargement of the West.
Enlargement in some form is all but inevitable in the long run, thanks to the attractiveness of the West. What is at issue in the current rush toward a radical enlargement is, rather, this: whether the West will be preserved or submerged by its future enlargements.
“Timing is Everything”: it is the same as saying, everything should be kept in the right sequence, the right strategic perspective. But this is only to say that Perspective is Everything.
With the Atlantic Perspective presently still relegated to the back of the public mind, there is a growing problem of mistakes in timing. Serious mistakes are being urged, to some extent implemented, on a basis of acceptance of the Declinist perspective -- letting everyone into the Atlantic institutions, reducing them to global fora, within which Multipolarism can reign unhindered. Serious mistakes were also made by the last Administration from Democratic Peace taken as a full paradigm -- Democracy Everywhere Now, the universal solvent for problems of war and terrorism.
With the Atlantic Perspective in the forefront of the mind, it is likely that once again the West will make a practice of getting the timing right, as was done in years of the Marshall Plan and the founding of the EC and NATO. Planning can flow once again in a viable sequence. That, after all, is what a sound perspective is for: it enables policy to fall into place.

1^ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), 1918 and 1923. A century earlier, German romantic theorists made similar predictions; and Arthur Herman has traced an ideology of decline going back much further. Nevertheless Spengler marks a new phase of belief in Western decline, a phase widely remarked in terms of the increased aggressiveness and extremism of the anti-Western nationalisms with which it has been connected. What is less widely remarked is that it coincides with the new, concrete form of Western growth that is the subject of this paper.

2^ For definitions of these terms, giving them, not precision, but a degree of precision adequate for the matters being considered herein, see the section, “Defining ‘Single Society’”, in chapter III below.

3^ The OECD total is rarely mentioned, but is easy to calculate, by adding the figures for the members of OECD. The result, 73%, is the same no matter which source is used -- IMF, World Bank, or CIA. These are the standard sources. Their charts are all readily available on the internet.

4^ Francis Bacon said “a too forward retention of custom is itself a turbulent thing”, a quote much loved by the Atlanticist Lionel Curtis. The Atlantic hegemon has kept its organic essence stable by frequent adaptation. Advocates of organic conservatism in the East, always thinking in terms of delaying modernizing changes, and often changing things in other directions by constructing barriers to modernization or undertaking counterreformations, have often brought their countries to revolution and ruin. A sensible balance of continuity and change is a good thing, but often it is the wrong question; the more important thing is to make the right changes not the wrong ones: to find the needed changes and make them in good time.

5^ Perhaps it requires some reminding, in view of the frequency of rhetoric of balancing against whatever power system exists, that the ordinary attitude is not one of negative balancing, but one of fitting in and positively helping the system work. This attitude is upheld by all traditional religions and philosophies. It is also supported by the Enlightenment, which located the foundation of society in fellow feeling and cooperative sentiment, not in negative balancing. There is a widespread misunderstanding that the American Constitution was about creating checks and balances against Federal power; actually it was about forming a “more perfect Union”, i.e. a stronger joint power, by removing the negative State checks against Federal power and giving to the Federal “head” enough body and means to carry out its assigned powers. The attitude that gives primacy to negative balancing is a more radical one than most people realize; it verges on nihilism.

6^ This is a point on which Leo Strauss and Reinhold Niebuhr, the philosophers most esteemed by the opposite Bush and Obama Administrations, agree: radical, immediate universalism is a false universalism, and an unethical one. Hard moral choices have to be made, with some evil and some good in all choices; only God can choose an untrammeled universal good. On earth all universal choices will be linked to particular agendas and interests, and limited capabilities. “Hypocrisy” is unavoidable; in limited beings, selfless motives are inevitably mixed with selfish ones; limited capabilities positively require double or multiple standards in the use of principles. One should aim, not to eliminate this, nor to avoid hard choices for fear of it, but to restrain its excesses and enlighten it; a balance one can achieve only if one acknowledges it accurately. To be responsible as a moral agent -- to choose the lesser evil and greater good, and restrain and correct for the evils in one’s choice, as practicable -- one has to accept the reality of those evils. The Bush Administration proceeded in practice opposite to Strauss’ cautions; it ran in a straight universal line in the name of avoiding hypocrisy, with consequences that are almost universally deplored. One hopes the present Administration will be truer to Niebuhr than Bush was to Strauss.

7^ The Education of Henry Adams, 1907, 1918; the scenario is offered several times in the later chapters, written 1903-1905 – chs. 28, 30, 34, 35

8^ Clarence Streit, Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic (New York, Harper, 1939). See also his article, “Peace through Democracy”, which appeared in 1934 in the New York Times, and in an annual League of Nations volume, Problems of Peace.

9^ This is a source of misunderstanding for those who are unaware of the genetic bond, historical and institutional between Trilataralism and Atlanticism. Thus the many writers who have treated the Pacific orientation as opposite to the Atlantic one, when actually it reinforces the Atlantic one.

10^ Russia has more nuclear weapons than the U.S. today, but qualitatively the U.S. has the edge; thus the approximate 60% figure.

11^ Streit, incidentally, said that the rule of thumb on this, as on other First World democracies deeply entangled in local conflict, is that the West must be able to take in at least one country from the other side of the conflict at the same time. In Israel’s case, he specified it would have to be a neighboring country, such as Jordan or Lebanon, not just a distant Arab country. Of course, there would also have to be a Mideast peace settlement before Israel would meet the most important of the conditions NATO established in the 1990s for new members: otherwise it would mean the West walking into an ongoing war with no good prospect of resolution, little prospect that the West would have the stamina to endure it or keep its balance even as well as Israel does on it, and a real likelihood that it would be treated as a declaration of war by other Arab countries and lead to a major escalation of Islamic warfare against the West as a whole.

12^ I owe to James V. Martin the concept of the stalagtite-stalagmite dynamic as a model for the dynamics of the global and sub-global levels of international organization.

13^ Straus, Supranational Norms in International Affairs (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, 1992). Ch. 4 gives the criteria and discusses them at length; ch. 8 examines the societies of the world to find which groupings could be united in this era.

14^ In fact such steps are in neofunctionalist theory proposed as first steps down the road, and are analyzed as containing a potential for needing eventual “spill-over” and movement to a common society in order to render their operation consistent and avoid backsliding or “spill-back”. However, pure functionalism maintains that they are separable, as does Deutsch. Experience has shown some validity to both views; the degree of relevance of the “spill-over” dynamic/requirement has varied among different institution, sets of countries, and functional sectors.

15^ The present writer compiled the information and statistics in this section. Despite much research, and much inquiry of scholars of population and migration, he did not find any sources that had looked into this matter. For further discussion see again Supranational Norms in International Affairs (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, 1992), ch. 4.

16^ James R. Huntley, Uniting the Democracies: Institutions of the Emerging Atlantic-Pacific System (New York: New York University Press, 1980)

17^ Union Now, ch. V, “Why Start with the Democracies”, section “Universality the ultimate goal”. In discussing the initial nucleus group, Streit specifically rejected including Latin American democracies or India. When outlining a sequence of anticipated subsequent memberships, he did not name either Latin America or any part of the colonized world; rather, he treated the Union as something that would give the colonized countries an immediate association and upgrade in dignity, and a chance for an evolution that avoids nationalism, and treated their membership as something that would come through gradual “maturation” rather than through a potentially quick overthrow of oppressors, the latter being a matter for the fascist and Communist countries. Decolonization has since then created an independent Third World, changing drastically the sequences, methods, and structures by which its countries might be associated with the Atlantic grouping.

18^ by the present writer, in the early 1980s. Streit died in 1986.

19^ Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of the Seas (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941)

20^ Streit supporters were found in many an Atlantic council; the US Atlantic Council was formed by a merger of Streit’s Atlantic Union Committee with other Atlanticist groupings, and was led in its first decades by a Streit disciple, Theodore Achilles, who had been the central State Department figure in negotiating NATO’s formation. While this relation is not visibly emphasized in most Atlantic Councils, the Danish Atlantic Council website has traced itself to Streit’s movement.

21^ The most widely read and systematic treatments of the Atlanticist realities in fact come from anti-Atlanticists. The Wallerstein school of World System theory is a prominent example; building on Lenin’s theory of Imperialism, it equates capitalism with the West and the Western-centered global economy dating back to early modern times, and identifies with the Third World as a kind of global proletariat. By translating Marxism’s capitalist-proletariat conflict into a global center-periphery conflict, and adding a category of near-periphery, it recognizes and gives prominence, under different and loaded names to be sure, to the basic realities of the world: the West and modernized First World, the Third World, and a second world of countries close enough to First World in their domestic conditions that they might soon join it, but might also embrace extremist ideologies that aim at overturning it. Those extremist ideologies belong to Right as well as Left: a long line of fascist theorists, from Carl Schmitt to Alexander Dugin, also treats Atlanticism systematically for the sake of overturning it. On both extremes, the knowledge of Atlanticist realities is considerably greater than that of most Westerners and Atlanticists, even though in embittered distorted forms that serve for efforts to draw countries into their anti-Western ideologies; efforts that have often succeeded, with considerable damage to the world order, and suicidal damage to the countries that succumbed to the extremist ideologies.

22^ The Cold War ideological atmosphere actually disrupted much of the cooperation, outside of defense of Europe and general economic cooperation. The U.S., in competition with the Soviet Union for the global banner of anti-imperialism, undercut its allies’ empires in the first two decades of the Cold War and sometimes joined with the Soviet Union in opposing them. Thereafter, the allies’ tended to stand aside from U.S. efforts in the Third World, and their knowledge industries joined in Soviet and Third World attacks on those efforts for “imperialism”, the Left accusing the U.S. of capitalist imperialism and warmongering, the Right, of having stolen their countries’ empires and making always “mistakes”.

23^ Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978); William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1978)

24^ Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895-1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

25^ Other statistical sources would give different numbers than these, sometimes significantly different; and Goldman Sachs’ 2010 projection would be somewhat different from its 2005 projection. The most important relative result shown above -- that of the large margin of the collective West over China -- would not be altered by this. However, in terms of the result most people have been thinking about -- the U.S. versus China -- more humble statistical projections, taking into account contingency and instability risks, would not show China surpassing even the U.S. alone by 2050.

26^ The figures for collective entities, or groups of nations, are based primarily on summation of the figures offered for the national members of these entities. The Eurozone was calculated elsewhere on the internet in this manner (see note to Eurozone); the present author calculated on this basis the EU total, then calculated the totals for EU + US, EU + US + Japan, and First World OECD. As sums of GDPs of present-day groups of countries, these totals do not take into account the likely future growth in membership of these entities (or, in the case of BRIC, a possible loss of some of its members to OECD by 2050). To correct for this in the instance of the Concrete West and allow meaningful comparisons to other evolving global powers, we have added in blue letters the category of “Future Concrete West”. It is inherently speculative; just as, however, are all the other projections in this chart for 40 years out.

27^ The ranking given by Goldman Sachs; the collective entities were not provided, so not ranked. In this Goldman Sachs was, while misleading, consistent. Media commentary on the figures was less consistent; it weighed BRIC as a group, and sometimes the EU, but not the collective West groupings.

28^ We use here only the forecast of probable joiners in the earlier section on “the proximate future”, meaning next 20 years or so (tigers, Russia, former Soviet republics), not the joiners some decades farther out. By 2050 some of the latter will probably also have come in, but this is not shown in the figures in the text. Adding probable additional joiners by 2050 would increase the 2050 figure for the Concrete West to anywhere from 130,000 to 200,000 billion dollars.

29^ To calculate the joint power equivalent of the Concrete West at each date, one would multiply the figures in this row by 75% in 2000-2010, and 80% in 2040-50; this applies the discount percentage estimated in the section above on figuring the effective power of the Concrete West. It yields 100,000 bn for 2050.

30^ This is very close to the projection also of the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), which calculates a likelihood of an OECD average growth rate 2000-2040 of 2.7% a year. The ECE report simply assumes a constant membership OECD; its calculation is for the average of current OECD members, not for OECD as a concrete grouping that can be augmented by new members. “FORECASTS OF THE ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OECD COUNTRIES AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES FOR THE PERIOD 2000-2040, A study prepared for the European Forest Sector Outlook Study (EFSOS),” By NOBE, Independent Centre for Economic Studies, UNITED NATIONS, New York and Geneva, 2002.

31^ BRIC totals are provided because BRIC has often been cited as so powerful as to make Western leadership obsolete. It arguably lacks sufficient collective substance to be ranked at all as an economic power; it is listed and ranked here nevertheless, to make clear that even the entire combined BRIC will still be far behind the combined OECD by 2050. It would be a mistake to infer that BRIC has cohesion or Collective Actor capabilities comparable to OECD; it has almost none, and a reasonable projection is that it will develop little, due to deep lack of similarity of its societies. The 20-25% discount factor used for calculating the collective strength of OECD would be, for BRIC, a much higher discount factor, around 40-50%. BRIC has almost no collective structure, and its individual countries often align with OECD rather than align with each other against OECD. Compared to OECD’s projected $100,000 bn power equivalent for 2050, after discount for incomplete coordination, the BRIC 2050 power equivalent would be about $40-50,000 bn, barely if at all more than China by itself; and it is likely that two of BRIC’s members would by then have left BRIC and joined OECD.

32^ Author’s calculation, rooted in a sum total of EU member nations, but more immediately calculated as follows: using a 1.35 : 1 ratio for EU GDP : Eurozone GDP (IMF figures for EU are 18,387 in 2008 -- used in 2010 column above for EU; World Bank figure for Eurozone is 13,565 in 2008), and obtaining the EU figures for the later dates by multiplying the corresponding Eurozone figure by 1.35. One can find at http://www.photius.com/rankings/gdp_2050_projection.html a personal calculation, giving a total approximating the Eurozone total, on the basis of summing Goldman Sachs figures for individual EU nations.

33^ Implausibly high long term growth rates, and absence of political disruptions, are assumed by these figures for China: 9%/yr 2010-20, 7.2%/yr 2020-30, 6.4%/yr 2030-40, 5.5%/yr 2040-50

34^ Implausibly high long term growth rates, and absence of political disruptions, are assumed by these figures for India: 9%/yr 2010-20, 9%/yr 2020-30, 11%/yr 2030-40, 9%/yr 2040-50.

35^ This is calculated by using the effective power discount as discussed above. Of the 20-25% range of discount to apply to the Concrete West, we use here the more pessimistic end, taking 25% discount from the West’s raw total economy; of the 40-50% range for BRIC, we use the more optimistic end, taking a 40% discount. Use of the alternative discount figures would yield an even greater disparity in favor of the Concrete West.

36^ www.streitcouncil.org , citing Economist Intelligence Unit as the source of the statistics on which the totals are based. I wish this could be used as a basis for saying that the reality is coming to be recognized, but I should acknowledge that this is not much the case, as the use of the OECD, OECD + future members, US + EU, and G20 minus G8, as categories for measurement, was suggested by the present author to the Streit Council, which got its researchers to find the best available projections on the basis of which to calculate the totals for these categories. It seems the sphere of recognition of this central global reality is still for the moment limited to what I have been able personally to prod -- not counting those who are explicitly fighting for power for the Third World against the West for reasons other than the general global good, whether nationally interested writers in the Third World or ideological ones in the West such as the Wallerstein school, who often state the facts fairly accurately.

37^ It should be noted, however, that this graph limits its purview of future OECD members to Russia; the present author would recommend instead the category of “probable 2030 OECD membership”. OECD has decided on a goal of Russian membership and the two are negotiating toward this; by 2030 it is on balance probable that Russia will be a well-integrated member of the West, not just through OECD membership but also strategically, which is part of what makes the category relevant; but additional countries are also likely to have become well-integrated by then, making the actual total for OECD larger. This geographical growth of the concrete West is of course uncertain. Should be counted? Yes, as a conditional category; since equally uncertain, sometimes more so, are the rapid economic growth projections for other countries. If the purpose of the projections is to provide policymakers and public with an accurate picture of the probable future geopolitical and geoeconomic distribution, then the most relevant of the categories to use is the probable total of well-integrated OECD members by 2030 (the “well-integrated” proviso meaning, less than 100% of total 2030 OECD members, but probably more than the total for 2010 OECD membership).

38^ The closest that there comes to being a wider use of these categories in the mainstream West, apart from the present author and colleagues, is when totals for OECD or G8 are given. OECD does get totaled in numerous locations to which little attention is paid, e.g. OECD’s statistical charts, and such other places as the statistics on energy use and energy intensity given by the U.S. Government’s Energy Information Administration (since a major factual dividing line in energy intensity, or efficiency versus waste of energy use, is between OECD and non-OECD, a matter logically essentially for considering what is needed for reducing greenhouse emissions). However, this is almost never done for comparisons from which significant public conclusions are drawn, such as in the global economic power projections that have become famous, or in public discussions on reducing emissions. When the total for G8 is given, it is only for a comparison against the G20, a comparison that is almost invariably, and misleadingly, cited as evidence of the obsolescence of the 8. The Streit Council, notes at the site referenced above (www.streitcouncil.org), that what is more relevant is to compare G8 to the non-G8 members of G20 (more precise, but taking longer to explain, would be the category of “non-G8 non-OECD G20”, that is, the 7 out of the 20 who are not in the G8 or OECD; its adds up to 26.4% still less total GDP than the amount shown in the graph for the G20 minus G8); and to compare G20 to other extensions of the G8, some of them more cohesive than the G20 and more effective for most matters. This shows that the G20 is not the most relevant extension of the 8, from a standpoint of effectiveness; it has value-added practical utility often if used as complementary to the more effective ones, not in place of them. Among the more cohesive extensions of G8 is OECD itself, which is not an organizationally competing extension demanding a G35 alongside or in place of the 8 but an entirely complementary one, with a different, formal organizational structure and ministerial Council; for this Council, the G8 (or more precisely the 7) serves informally as a top-level executive summit, since it has a degree of dialogue unobtainable when all 35 national leaders are brought together for the formal OECD summits.

39^ Streit elaborated the criteria for finding a viable nucleus of world order, in effect seeking one that could resolve all these equations, and showed the Atlantic grouping’s “fit” to the criteria, in his chapter, “Why start with the democracies”, Union Now, ch. V.

40^ Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System, James Huntley, Uniting the Democracies.

41^ Edouard Balladur, Pour une union occidentale entre l’Europe et les Etats Unis (Paris: Fayard, 2007). Balladur does not, to be sure, present this directly in terms of preserving the imbalance. Rather, in French Gaullist style, he calls it a matter of rebalancing the world, whose balance is being shaken and destabilized; even calls it a matter of establishing stability in a multipolar world that respects all the diversity of civilizations (while adding, almost parenthetically, that it is also for overcoming the paradox of the West’s enormous objective strength and its subjective weakness, preventing miscalculation, and preserving the West’s global systemic influence and the universal values that were developed in the West and are practiced there quite imperfectly but more than anywhere else). The traditional British formulation is similar, and has a similar inconsistency, developed in the style of British understatement; it is to call any Western union a matter of “preserving the balance of power”. The phrase aims at reassurance, as a matter of systemic stability, and as building on the international legitimizing role of the phrase “balance of power” as far back as the 1600s; “a just balance” was formally enshrined in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714. But it can be misleading unless it is understood that the “balance” that is being preserved is not Utrecht’s temporary multipolar continental balance of power but the highly unequal imbalance that evolved out of it: it is a concrete evolved balance, not the abstract principle of balance. The European “balance” ensured British leadership in the wider oceanic world ever since the 1600s, something that was translated into hegemony outside of Europe in the 1700s while “holding the balance” of Europe, then British leadership within Europe as well after 1815; a leadership that fed after the late 1800s into a collective trans-Atlantic leadership, which gained a hegemonic and then an absolute majority power position. That is the current state of the evolved balance: it is an evolved imbalance. See Adam Watson’s final book, Hegemony & History (NY, Routledge, 2007), for a British treatment of this; similarly F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace and Sovereignty. Watson demonstrates that there is a necessary duality or self-contradictoriness in the legitimizing terms of an international society of sovereign states, and urges the wisdom of continued legitimizing usage of the formula “preserving the balance” while also preserving hegemony, “preserving sovereignty” while compromising it.

42^ Professor Rosecrance is presently at Harvard; he has been president of the International Studies Association, and author of books and articles too numerous to mention. “[U]nless the Chinese economy implodes or globalization is stunted or reversed for some reason—both could happen, of course, but the odds lean against it—a Euro-American deal of unprecedented scale is the only way the United States can preserve its privileged position atop the global hierarchy... [I]n geopolitical terms, the balance of world power would already be inside the union with 60 percent of world GDP. Others could not balance effectively against it. Japan almost certainly would wish to be associated with it... [A]s the economic magnetism of an economic Atlantic Bridge grew, the size of the political-economic state unit would begin to approach the size of the international market for the first time in world history.” Richard Rosecrance, “Size Matters”, The American Interest, July/August 2008. The theme is developed further in Rosecrance, “Transatlantic Economic and Political Merger as the Ultimate Implication of Technological and Economic Imperatives”, lecture at Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC., December 5, 2008

43^ Theo Sommers, “Let’s go for ‘Eumerica’”, The Atlantic Times, v. 7 no. 3, March 2010, p. 1. Sommers observes that the U.S. + EU are the only real G2, one that has endured half a century; the ones proposed in line with declinist thinking, such as Chi-merica or China-India, have collapsed in a matter of a couple years due to huge divergences in society, interest, and values. He gives greater attention than Balladur and Rosecrance to the extent to which the existing trans-Atlantic unity could, in principle, suffice to calm the international waters, if it were simply reaffirmed and better recognized.

44^ It should not be confused with an almost opposite “Global NATO” project, fairly widely advocated in this period of declinism but thus far not underway nor agreed in NATO, that would dilute the West and its unity by globalizing NATO membership to include all democracies everywhere.

45^ This was why the NATO Treaty limited the boundaries of its Article 5 defense obligations to a defined metropolitan space, relegating to its permissive clauses, Articles 2 and 4, its calls for joint efforts beyond that space. This division into obligatory and permissive clauses is frequently misinterpreted, by opponents of wider joint actions, as prohibiting NATO from doing anything beyond its obligatory space; critics often go to the length of calling such actions a “violation of its own charter” and therewith of “international law”.

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