David Wilkinson

Unipolarity Without Hegemony

The current power configuration of the world system is unipolarity without hegemony. Nonhegemonic unipolarity is understudied, and deserves study. A few previous instances can be found in the history of the Central world system: they are usually brief, associated with intense warfare, hegemonism, counteralliance, exhaustion, and collapse into multipolarity. In other world systems, however, nonhegemonic unipolarity has been more frequent, more durable, and with more diverse exits. Plausible exit scenarios from the current unipolar nonhegemonic phase exist for U.S. hegemony, for bipolarity and tripolarity (via rise of the European Union and/or China), and for multipolarity (via U.S. introversion), but all entail rather lengthy evolutionary processes. Unipolarity without hegemony is not inherently unstable, and could endure for decades. A unipolar configuration probably has equilibrium rules for its maintenance. Nonhegemonic unipolarity affects the characteristic structure of “deadly quarrels” in the world system, and allows some approaches to the policy issue of “deadly quarrels” not readily available in less centralized system structures. Unipolarity without hegemony deserves further comparative and theoretical attention.

Spykman and Geopolitics

Nicholas John Spykman, Dutch-American journalist, sociologist, political scientist and geopolitician, was chief among the diffusers of geopolitics from Europe to America..[1] His attempt to link geopolitics on the one hand to liberal-idealistic values of individual freedom, national independence, national liberation and anti-imperialism, and on the other hand to political-realist assumptions of the permanence and inevitability of struggles for power, have had a significant influence on the ideological bases of American foreign policy since 1941, of a durability not widely recognized. Though he did some work of a “normal science” type and in state-level geopolitics, he is best known, as a theoretical geopolitician, for his part in the system-level grand-theoretical debate over Mackinder’s Heartland doctrine, to which he counter-posed his own Rimland idea, which remains theoretically signifi-cant.