Pax Americana

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Pax Americana can be identified as a historic bloc; Cox (1983) states a historical bloc is a dialectical concept in the sense that its interacting elements create a larger unit. A historic bloc is an organic link between political and civil society, a fusion of material institutional, inter-subjective, theoretical and ideological capacitates (Gramsci, 1971 cited in Gill and Law, p.94, 1994). The interacting elements in this sense are the social forces that define a society; hegemony arises when a class asserts it dominance over another thus exerting its social forces on the subordinate class. Based on Gramscian and Neo-Gramscian perspective, this was the occurrence during the era of Pax Americana, where the established historical bloc sought …show more content…

According to Gill and Law (1993), hegemony is a concept to analyse the relation of forces in a given society. In this sense, hegemony is not based on the state and its dominance of other states through the accumulation of power but the relations of classes within the society. Hence, to begin with one must confront the hegemony within the US itself; Robinson (2005) states hegemony is rule by consent, or the cultural and intellectual leadership achieved by a particular class, class fraction, stratum or social group, as part of a larger project of class rule or …show more content…

Gramscian and Neo- Gramscian perceptive illustrate, to benefit from US supremacy one has to be in the core as the periphery are not drawn into the hegemonic project and are repressed, they view of hegemony as a form of social domination exercised not by states but by social groups and classes operating through states and other institutions (Robinson, 2005). Cox would argue proxy war still exists in the society, as there is no consensus to the establishment of the global capitalist bloc. Through institutions, capitalism entered a transnational stage, thus, the class system that existed in the US was soon replicated across the global political economy thus, this depicts the periphery as losers in this setting as their interests are completely overlooked for that of the TCC, hence the claims by neo-liberalist institutionalist IPE that Pax Americana is best considered an era of benign US supremacy does not apply because the benefits of institutionalisation are reserved for the newly formed transnational

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