have fallen back instead upon the more comfortable notion of hegemony.^39
Donnelly explicitly acknowledges hegemony as one instance of his category of
‘hierarchy in anarchy’.^40
Finally, and for completeness, we need some overview of where hegemony is
located in relation to anarchy. Donnelly is ambivalent. For all that he works with
‘hierarchy in anarchy’, his mapping of the conceptual possibilities concludes that the
‘entire field is anarchic’, but with the notable exception of that cell into which
hegemony falls.^41 Although not explicitly grounding his scheme on an anarchy/
hierarchy distinction, Pape yet differentiates ‘Balance of Power Systems’ from
‘Hegemonic Systems’, and seems implicitly to replicate the distinction between
anarchy and hegemony in this way.^42 This separation, he insists, represents a ‘key
boundary’.^43 He accepts that there are varying degrees of hegemony but, whereas
Donnelly confines hegemony to the capability of the hegemon to exercise control
simply over the external behaviour of subordinate states, Pape points to categories
ofhegemonic states that additionally control their internal behaviour.^44 The
implication, again, is that some forms of hegemony transgress the bounds of
acceptable ‘anarchic’ relationships.
The challenging questions to emerge from these conceptual schemes are just how
much hierarchy the anarchical society can tolerate, and how much hierarchy does
hegemony actually entail. There is no doubt that some see hegemony amounting
to a new organizing principle, and hence as a structural change.^45 It denotes a shift
from anarchy. This is because hegemony, we are told, ‘is a hierarchical political
arrangement’.^46 Ikenberry concurs: in a hegemonic order, ‘the relations of power
and authority are defined by the organizing principle of hierarchy’.^47 This appears
to place hegemony beyond the pale of the anarchical international society. Others
are more flexible, and end by viewing a hegemonic order as ‘a particular con-
figuration of anarchy and hierarchy’.^48
On this latter reading, the anarchical society can evidently persist, even in condi-
tions of hegemony. It is this version of hegemony that we will carry forward into the
remainder of this discussion: although a form of hierarchy, it remains consistent with
the overall anarchical ordering of international society. Although the formal principles
of anarchy and hierarchy remain distinct, their embodiment within a particular
political system need not be mutually exclusive, but can be ‘mixed’, as Waltz had
already suggested. This echoes the claim that ‘in some areas of international politics,
international authority and international anarchy do coexist’.^49 Although hegemony
does indeed denote an element of hierarchy, it is no more inconsistent with
international society than are those many other institutions historically developed
within it. On those grounds, there can be no principled objection to hegemony, as
a form of hierarchy, as necessarily inconsistent with an otherwise anarchical society.
Beyond primacy: legitimacy and hegemony
How do legitimacy and hegemony relate to hierarchy, and how should we think
about concentrations of power? To date, those arguments that focus upon legitimacy
276 How hierarchical can international society be?