Power and the Varieties of Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 38

Gilpin also argues that a wider set of resources—ideology and status appeals—are integral
to the perpetuation of hegemonic order. 30 But the authority of the hegemonic state and the
cohesion of the hegemonic order are ultimately based on the preeminent power of the leading
state.
The hierarchical system is maintained as long as the leading state remains powerful
enough to enforce the rules and institutions of order. When hegemonic power declines, the
existing order begins to unravel and break apart. As Gilpin contends, “a precondition for
political change lies in a disjuncture between the existing social system and the redistribu-
tion of power toward those actors who would benefit most from a change in the system.” 31
The power transition leads to geopolitical struggles and security competition that ultimately
culminate in hegemonic war—and the emergence of a new leading state that organizes the
international system according to a new logic.
A.F.K. Organski offers a similar depiction of this process of making and unmaking of in-
ternational order. “At any given moment the single most powerful nation on earth heads an
international order that includes some other major powers of secondary importance and some
minor nations and dependencies as well.” Britain and the United States in their respective
eras followed this pattern: rising up and establishing international order, defined as a system
in which participating states “accept the given distribution of power and wealth and . . . abide
by the same rules of trade, diplomacy, and war.” 32 The resulting international order “is legit-
imized by an ideology and rooted in the power differential of the groups that compose it.” 33
Over time, international shifts in power and wealth create challengers, and eventually a trans-
fer of “world leadership” takes place. This grand process of power transition will be either
peaceful or be accompanied by great-power war, depending on whether the rising state ac-
cepts or rejects and seeks to overturn the “working rules” of the existing international order.
The basic argument in Organski's grand narrative is the same as Gilpin's—namely, that the
international order is most stable when it is commanded by a dominant power.
In another version of this theory, George Modelski argues that the global political system
goes through distinct historical cycles of domination by powerful states. According to Model-
ski, four states have played dominant or hegemonic roles since AD 1500: Portugal until the
end of the sixteenth century, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Great Britain in the
early eighteenth century until the Napoleonic wars and again in 1815 to 1945, and the United
States since 1945. Modelski argues, as does Gilpin, that each cycle of hegemonic domination
ends with war, ushering in a new hegemonic era. 34
These conceptions all see international order as a project undertaken by leading global
states. Order is established and maintained through command. Each era is defined by a
powerful state that rises up to organize and dominate the system. It is the power and control
exercised by the leading state that gives shape and stability to the order. As the leading state
declines—as all leading states inevitably do—the international order begins to unravel. 35