In the face of recent trends like growing authoritarianism and xenophobic nationalism, the rise of the Far Right, the explosion of economic and social inequalities, heightened geopolitical contest and global capitalism’s endless crisis, and the impacts of shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic, discourses about the ‘decline of the West’ no more look like mere ruminations of a handful of cultural depressives and politically disillusioned; they sound increasingly realistic. This volume addresses this issue by mapping and analyzing the forms, mechanisms, strategies, and effects, in the past, the present, and the future, of Western hegemonies, namely, asymmetrical relations that bring advantages or, at least, secure the superiority of Western state and non-state actors in politics, economics, and culture broadly understood. Over the past decades and centuries, Westerners never ceased claiming supremacy in all these spheres. A host of these relations were initiated through colonialism and imperialism, and perpetuated through informal imperialism, but there are other channels: political interference, inequalities between countries, and attempts at affirming the supremacy of the so-called Western way of life was also secured through the military might and economic power of great Western actors. This book explores sites of Western hegemonies and contributes to understanding the mechanisms through which international hierarchies are formed and maintained. Bringing together the research of scholars from various fields in the humanities and social sciences, political science, international relations, political philosophy, sociology, history, postcolonial studies, criminology, and linguistics, this volume develops a multidisciplinary outlook on the issue of Western hegemonies that allows uncovering resemblances between various forms of asymmetrical relations and their mechanisms.

Bush II, Obama, and the Decline of U.S. Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere applies competing definitions and conceptions of hegemony to various foreign policy initiatives and events during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama to test whether they manifest a decline in traditional United States dominance and leadership in the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the book examines the continued relevancy of the Inter-American system, the failure to establish a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the stillborn Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA). It also discusses the implications of the People’s Republic of China becoming a major trading partner and important source of financing and investment capital throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The book provides critical reviews of Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative, Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas, the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), 100,000 Strong in the Americas, and the restoration of normal U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba. There are extensive analyses, unusual for a work in English, on the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA), Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (CELAC), and Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR).

The destruction of local identity through the relentless encroachment of a 'McDonald-ized' cultural imperialism is a global phenomenon. Yet the reactions of Pacific peoples to this Western hegemony are diverse and encourage the creation of independent cultural identities through sports and games, political mediations, tourism, media and filmmaking, and the struggles for land rights and titles, particularly in Australia.This book, based on extensive fieldwork, addresses a subject of great immediacy to peoples of the Pacific Island nations. It fills an important gap in existing ethnographic literature on the region and confidently navigates what had previously been considered uncharted, even unchartable, waters -- that wide sea between the classic ethnography of Oceania and contemporary anthropology's theoretical concerns with global relations and transnational cultures. Its breadth, rigour, and timely contribution to post-colonial politics in Oceania are certain to ensure that this book will provide an enduring contribution to the field.

This book is a critique of claims regarding how emerging economies are supposedly rewriting the rules of global governance and ushering in alternative models to neoliberal orthodoxy. It argues that such assumptions are abstractions that ignore both the transnationalizing nature of the global political economy and the actual policy goals of the ruling classes within most emerging economies. Considering the larger issues behind the emerging economies (or powers) debate, the book deploys an adapted global capitalism perspective with insights from Gramsci, Poulantzas and Cox, to argue that the transnational nature of the global political economy and the actual policy goals of the dominant elites within most emerging economies merge to undermine any transformative element. Far from challenging the global order, these ostensible new rivals in fact seek to integrate their economies more and more within the existing liberal global economy. Inter-state dynamics and even inter-elite tensions exist and it is clear that the nation state has not simply become a transmission belt for global capital, but equally we must move beyond the surface phenomena that are most visible in global tensions to get at the underlying essence of social and class forces in the global political economy. Looking at the largest emerging powers, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, Taylor explains why the emerging powers’ elites, although essentially subscribing to neoliberalism (in all its variegated forms) may confront the core in a myriad of ways, but that these are not challenges to the ongoing world order and, in fact, the so-called emerging powers serve a legitimizing function for the extant global system. The book will be of great use to graduates and scholars of International Relations, Global/International Political Economy and International Development.

Annotation. This book is a critical non-European perspective to analyses of opposition politics and social democracy in modern Japanese politcs.

The intermixture in our own time of European, or Western, civilization with non-Western civilizations and cultures is producing a new, global civilization. It is the purpose of this book to tell the story of Western civilization from the "Dark Ages" when Europe emerged as a cultural entity up to the transmutation of Western civilization in the 20th century. It is not a story of continual progress. Throughout its history the European world has experienced fluctuations of fortune and circumstance, periods of harmony and periods of strife and discord. Nor does the story have a simple, obvious moral. The attentive reader, however, can learn much about his own cultural heritage and so arrive at a better understanding of the world in which he lives and his own place in it.