indication of what is required to address it. Its intent is not to create any new
distribution of power that will constrain the hegemon externally, but rather to
encourage the hegemon’s adherence to its own self-restraint. The imagery of balance
is in this way quite misleading. Just as primacy is about distribution, and hegemony
about legitimacy, what is depicted as soft balancing is not about restoring any kind
of balance at all, other than in the hegemon’s sense of its own priorities, and between
its professed beliefs and actions. What it seeks to establish is the legitimacy of the
hegemonic order. To be sure, a crisis of legitimacy (including one for a hegemon)
does result in disempowerment, but this is a consequence of that power’s social
nature, not any outcome of balancing behaviour.^88
The critics of soft balancing insist that such activities amount to no more than
standard diplomatic bargaining, and object that this should not be confused with
balancing.^89 If there is no intention to balance the capabilities of the hegemon, then
the language of balance should be eschewed. We can agree, and yet reach this same
conclusion by a different route. The imagery in the depictions of soft balancing is,
to be sure, misleading. What it refers to is not any attempt physically to reduce the
power capabilities of the hegemon, but rather to constrain it by other means. Soft
balancing can ‘increase the costs’ of the hegemon’s exercise of its power.^90 This latter
is a symptom, not of diminished material assets, but of legitimacy deficits.^91 At this
point, soft balancing needs to be viewed, not as a proactive policy to reduce the
material power of the hegemon, but as evidence of the friction that its loss of
legitimacy entails. This emerges even more clearly in those other analyses of soft
balancing, where the theme of ‘legitimacy denial’ is very much apparent.^92 In Nye’s
words, ‘even when a military balance of power is impossible’, he suggests, ‘other
countries can still band together to deprive the US policy of legitimacy and thus
weaken American soft power’.^93 Soft balancing is tantamount to a strategy of
legitimacy denial. Brooks and Wohlforth are certainly correct to insist that this
represents something other than balancing, but they miss an equally important point
when they then wish to reduce it to mere bargaining. Hegemonic delegitimation
may well be an outcome of bargaining strategies, but the two are not the same thing.
Second-tier states can choose to balance the hegemon, or to bargain with it: neither
is tantamount to a challenge to its legitimacy.
Conclusion
Legitimacy-based and hegemony-based accounts share much in common, even if
seemingly pulled apart by divergent prescriptions for the distribution of power. Both
provide additional insight into the kind of power that characterizes anarchy. Neither
hierarchy, nor hegemony as an instance of it, is incompatible with an anarchical
society. What would be incompatible with international society is any unchecked
primacy. One major problem at the moment is then the tension between the
seeming ‘fact’ of US primacy, and its (in)ability to translate this into a socially
acceptable hegemony. This argument thus rejects that view of hegemony, criticized
byReus-Smit, as ‘simply the material capacity of a dominant state to dictate the
282 How hierarchical can international society be?