Miguel Afonso Caetano"I recently finished a close, deep reading of Arrighi’s master work, The Long Twentieth Century, and he does not assert that a new hegemonic order will follow American decline. There is some speculation at the end of the book about East Asia being the new global North, in effect, which is increasingly conventional wisdom anyway. But nothing about a new dominant single power, nothing about now being an interregnum followed by a new regnum.
The confusion arises because cycles of hegemony are only identifiable within capitalism itself; it’s the expansionist imperative of the capitalist mode of production that knits together the world-system. But many world-systems analysts recognize that capitalism is on borrowed time. Cycles within capitalism do occur in intervals, but only as long as capitalism continues to dominate global relations. We’ve had a good 500 years in which each hegemonic order emerges out of the crisis of the previous order…capitalism is prone to crisis until it can no longer be patched up, until it reaches its terminus and the world-system becomes something else.
I believe, and it seems Tooze believes, that what we’re entering into is the world-system becoming something else. A world in which even China cannot deign to become global hegemon. The way in which “rupture” is a correct way to think about our conjuncture, then, is that we’re living through a rupture of the old hegemonic cycles and what’s emerging is some other thing. I wouldn’t call it post-capitalist, because capitalism isn’t going away, but it won’t be a capitalist world-system that orders relations."
https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/adam-tooze-on-the-end-of-hegemonic
Robert Heinze
Geoffrey Hughes