highly pertinent question is whether the horizontal in some way facilitates the
vertical: is it easier for international society to entrust a groupof great powers – where
power is dispersed, and there is some reassurance from the checks and balances
amongst them – than a singlehegemon, in which unrestrained power is con-
centrated?
This might be thought one practical demonstration of how hierarchy and anarchy
can be reconciled. A collective hegemony draws legitimacy from the reassurance to
smaller states entailed by its dispersal of power within the hegemon. It enjoys, to
some degree, the best of both worlds: it affords the benefits of ‘simplification’ by
central direction and management, and the collective goods associated with a
concentration of power, while retaining the essential checks and balances normally
available only from a dispersal of power. Its virtue, overall, resides in its potential
for an acceptable trade-off between expected benefits and feared costs.
Much depends on how the hegemony works. Ian Hurd has set out two
possibilities. The first sees hegemony as entrenching the dominant position of the
already most powerful, and therefore as objectively ‘entirely in the favour of the
strong’. This is quite different from his alternative model, where legitimacy functions
as a constraint on the strong, not simply on the weak. In this case, successful main-
tenance of hegemony ‘requires that the strong subscribe to a minimum standard of
compliance with the legitimized rule or institution’. The result is that ‘the strong
... may be induced to alter their behaviour by the effects of legitimated rules’.^67
The outcome, in this second version, is ‘to increase the autonomy of all parties, not
to compromise the autonomy of the less powerful in order to increase the autonomy
of the more powerful’.^68 This latter way of thinking emphasizes the institutional
dimension – the empowerment of the institutionof hegemony – rather than simply
the enhancement of the power of the hegemon. This restates the importance of the
original distinction drawn between hegemony and primacy.
Fundamental to any such view of hegemony is that it is understood as an
institution of international society. Within the English School version, the institution
of the great powers generally serves to simplify the processes of international poli-
tics. It does so because of the inherent power differentials that characterize it.^69
Specifically, the great powers can contribute to the promotion of international order
by exercising various ‘managerial’ functions.^70 Two principal, and interconnected,
theoretical points emerge. The first is that any such notion of the role of the great
powers is meaningful only within a conception of international society where certain
values are shared. This is not the universe normally depicted in neorealist accounts,
and within which the concept of primacy is typically deployed. Secondly, such a
conception places a particular emphasis upon the kind of power by which great
powers are constituted: it results from a status recognized and bestowed by others,
not a set of attributes and capabilities possessed by the claimant. To be a great power
is to be located in a social relationship, not to have a certain portfolio of material
assets. Both considerations apply with equal force to the concept of hegemony.
How hierarchical can international society be? 279