Heg good—all ev which states heg causes war is based on a false understanding of how the nation-state economy functions

Different kinds of international systems confront hegemons with varying relationships between military capabilities (protection) and the economy (production). In different ideal-type “worlds,” complementarity between protection and production—and therefore the costs and benefits of hegemony—add up very differently. These worlds map on to different historical international 5 Cf. Christopher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2012): 203–13; quote on 207. systems and, it turns out, different key arguments often propounded as universal in the literature on hegemony. The first set of highly relevant interactions that vary through time concerns productive economic activity and military strength. Here the key variation pertains to the degree to which military strength is necessary for wealth and the degree to which civilian economic productivity is necessary for military power (see Table 1). When strong states can grab economic resources by force, military power is necessary to protect and acquire wealth. Under these circumstances, militarily weak states can create wealth, but they cannot protect wealth. Militarily powerful states do not need to create wealth; they can acquire wealth by conquering and looting weaker states. Under these conditions, states can be affluent without a productive civilian economy but not without military capability. Easy lootability clearly has implications for the profitability of being a militarily potent economic predator. When civilian economic productivity is not required for military power, we are in a stark “state-of-nature” world in which economically unproductive military powerhouses routinely subjugate and loot more productive polities (northwest quadrant of Table 1). In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun proposed a cyclical theory of history that presumed just such a world.6 Unproductive but militarily powerful societies conquered productive polities until the erstwhile barbarians themselves succumbed to the weakening effect of civilization, only to be 6 Susan Strange, “Political Economy and International Relations,” in International Relations Theory Today, ed. Ken Booth and Steve Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 172. conquered by the next set of barbarians. 7 In such a world, the economic benefits of military primacy are obvious. In other cases, wealth is easily lootable, but civilian productivity is necessary for military power (southwest quadrant). Militarily strong states can still raid, but the spoils of conquest are insufficient to finance military prowess: indigenous economic capability is required. When the positive relationship between those who have military power and those who have wealth breaks down, a trade-off emerges. Developing productive economic activity diverts resources from maintaining a coercive capability, and vice versa. Managing this trade-off is necessary for political and economic survival. States exclusively relying on booty for enrichment to fund military prowess will be outcompeted by states mixing predatory looting with a productive civilian economy. Until the mid-twentieth century, this hybrid strategy was necessary to achieve great-power status, explaining the advantage of colonial powers (for example, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy’s) over noncolonial powers.8 Relatively unproductive states may seek to overwhelm that trade-off through massive resource extraction, as the Soviet Union did in the mid-twentieth century (northeast quadrant). But the postindustrial and information revolutions stacked the odds against that approach.9 Because the Soviet empire was created and maintained in a systemic setting 7 For a theoretical discussion, see Kai A. Konrad and Stergios Skaperdas, “The Market for Protection and the Origin of the State,” Economic Theory 50, no. 2 (June 2012): 417–43. 8 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 9 Scholars continue to debate the question; cf. Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Stephen G. Brooks, Producing hostile to pillaging, it was short-lived by historical standards. This overall setting prevailed with increasing strength after the industrial revolution and into the twenty and twenty-first centuries (southeast quadrant). During this time, however, military power continues to play a role in establishing and enforcing property rights. To some degree, therefore, wealth still emerges from the barrel of a gun.1 These four “possible worlds” derived from the relationship between military strength and wealth creation under conditions of low versus high barriers to plunder directly contradict a long tradition of rise-and-decline scholarship: there can be no universal theory of imperial overstretch. The costs and benefits of establishing and sustaining military primacy are contingent upon a Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), with the case for declining economic benefits of conquest strengthening in later twentieth century. 10 Douglass C. North, Structures and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). “barbarian” hordes; Mongols Soviet Union in mid 20th Athens, Rome, European imperialism Latter 20th -21st century constantly changing potential for complementarity between protection and production. In premodern worlds, specializing in military conquest could be profitable for centuries. Yet the complementarities and trade-offs captured in Table 1 did not figure prominently in the 1980s hegemony literature. This underlay the era’s focus on public-goods theory and the popular contention that security provision by a dominant actor will tend to prove too burdensome, as others free ride.15 The key benefit of free riding on US security was reaping the obvious welfare benefits associated with economic competition. The debate at the time centered on whether the United States itself could somehow exit the “atavistic” world of militarized competition or get dependent allies to assume greater burdens. The whole debate assumed a power–protection trade-off. You could be a trading state or an atavist military juggernaut—not both. As the next section shows, however, this debate missed the core argument here: even in the southwest quadrant, complementarity may emerge through the logic of raison de l’Hégémonie.