The Cold War: The Hegemonic Stability Theory

In the contemporary era, the international situation is developing in a direction unpredictably. Hegemonic stability theory can explain the world tendency. After the Cold War, the United States has become the global major power and had been growing faster than Europe and Japan which has caught up in a decade. At the initial time of modern age, the world’s most dominant state can manage the international affairs without concerning about counterbalancing with competitors. The world has entered the age of American unipolarity. (Ikenberry, 2005). However, in international affairs, there needs to be cooperation among countries. Although the United States persists to be the sole preponderance, this kind of dominant power will no longer endure the

Webb and Krasner (1989) mentioned that the hegemony takes the role of introducing trade liberalisation, maintaining an open market, and adjusting the changing interest rates when the global economy faces up to the urgent situation, especially when in crisis. The international system keeps a relatively secure and stable situation when that hegemonic power exists and functions. The hegemonic stability theory is appropriate and acceptable for the time after the Second World War. The appearance of world economic crisis a decade after the Second World War, was primarily caused by the unwillingness of the United States to take the hegemonic role, and the Britain’s incapability, which led to the unstable international relationship. However, the long-term dominance of one state attracts other competitors and weakens the stable international regime. The world’s unstable system seems to develop towards multiplicity. Modelski (1978) explained that the continuous growing superpower will lead to monopolistic competition, what system is a dangerous global system. The factor that is most likely to damage the global stability is the unbalanced development of the power among international partners. These growing differences of capability will result in the redistribution of

Firstly, the self-creativity of one dominant state’s economy and the adaptability of global economic changes are laborious to retain permanent, which means there would appear a newly political environment and then damage the hegemon. In other words, as other states grow more powerful, their aspirations, reputation and the dissatisfaction of the status grow as well. As Schweller and Pu (2011) demonstrated, when the competitors arise enough, the system become fluctuation. The rapidly growing states are generally more conceivable to the threat to the hegemon and international allies. Secondly, to sustain the cost that supply for the common goods, the economic surplus of leadership decreased gradually, even been using up. On the country, the benefit side grows faster than the hegemony, despite the Gilpin (1988), Keohane (2012) also mentioned that the free riders increased without efforts and would not share a load of hegemonic power, which made the predominance may not be sustainable. Thirdly, according to Webb and Krasner (1989), all countries are of benefit in the open market and public goods regardless of whether or not they assist in it. However, only the hegemon has sufficient motivation could they maintain a free economic system, open market and supply goods for international partners. The situation that other