Peter Gowan on Mark Leonard, Why Europe will Run the 21st Century. Panglossian manifesto for a Blairite Europeanism as model for the new Atlanticist world order.
PETER GOWAN
PAX EUROPÆA
Mired ever deeper in the disaster of occupied Iraq, Downing Street’s one remaining strategic hope has been to rally domestic forces around a Blairite Europeanism. With the 2005 election out of the way, Blair could repackage himself through British chairmanship of the g8 and the eu to link up with those on the British centre-left yearning for a Europeanist alternative to America under Bush. Mark Leonard’s tract, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, would have been an ideal intellectual support for such a turn. It manages to combine a clarion call to build Europe as a progressive alternative to Bush’s America with an artful defence of both Atlanticism and neoliberalism.
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The Ways of the World
In an interview recorded earlier this year, Peter Gowan recalls his political and intellectual trajectory, from the end of empires to Marxist militancy, from Eastern Bloc shipyards to the rise of the Dollar–Wall Street Regime.
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The American origins of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and the duality of US usages and conceptions of it ever since: from the Cold War through the collapse of the USSR to today’s war on terror and occupation of Mesopotamia.
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John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics disdains liberal-imperial rhetoric for a tough-minded theory of ‘offensive realism’. Peter Gowan argues that, whatever its merits, the behaviour of states in the international system cannot be dissociated from the internal dynamics of the political orders they protect.
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After America?
Peter Gowan on Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver: Chaos and World Governance. Plotting the different axes of any international hegemony, and the prospects for American supremacy in the new century.
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Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism
A reigning doctrine of international relations proclaims that, despite everything, the world is entering a new epoch of hopeful cosmopolitanism—narrow state sovereignty being overcome by the common and, where necessary, armed resolve of a ‘Pacific Union’ of democratic nations. What then of the asymmetric hegemony of the United States?
