Why the Great Powers Permitted the Creation of an American Hegemon

THE YEAR THE UNITED STATES declared its independence, a German writer conjectured, “Are we at the beginning of an epoch in history that will forever remain remarkable to posterity? Isn’t the foundation stone being laid right now on the other side of the ocean for a powerful state that in the future, when American fleets will cover the seas, might terrify the European powers?”1 Americans thought so. Gouverneur Morris boasted in 1801, “the proudest empire in Europe is all but a bauble, compared to what America will be, must be in the course of two centuries, perhaps one.”2 European powers may be more than a “bauble” today, but Morris’s prediction, and that of many other Europeans, was more or less correct. Why, then, did the European powers not do something to prevent this outcome? This is a puzzle, particularly for the realist tradition, which has dominated the discussion of how great powers respond to the rise of rival states and potential hegemons. Probably the most fundamental claim from this tradition on this topic is that because states do not rely on the goodwill of other states, they fear other states becoming more powerful than they are, and thus they will try to prevent the rise of competitors. Because this logic is so basic, it exists in many different theories, such as the power transition literature begun by A.F.K. Organski, Dale Copeland’s dynamic differentials theory, and John Mearsheimer’s theory of great power politics.3 Often the empirical analysis of realist theories has focused on one region: Europe. In some of this work, there is a problem of selecting on the dependent variable—analyzing cases of great power war to examine claims about how states respond to rising powers. However, the case of the United States has garnered some attention, particularly in light of John Mearsheimer’s offensive realist theory.4

Economic history · Economics · German · Goodwill · Hegemony · Independence (probability theory) · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law

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