Global but Leaderless? The New Capitalist Order

During the last two hundred years the fundamental nature of the world economy has changed on several occasions in respect both of its degree of globalization and also of the extent to which one nation is hegemonic. Just as there is a widespread belief that it has recently become unprecedently global, so there is also a matching belief that it is undergoing a major shift of hegemony, concretely that the period of US hegemony is coming to an end. The purpose of this article is to evaluate these two beliefs. In order to do so it is useful to characterize the state of the system at any moment along these two dimensions: globalization and hegemony. First, how 'open' is the system, in terms of the importance of trade and capital flows, and thus how closely are individual countries tied to one another and disciplined by forces operating at the international level? Second, to what extent is there a hegemonic power which can enforce certain rules of the international economic game