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This chapter examines the role and performance of the Group of Three and the Western Contact Group in the process leading to the independence of Namibia in 1990. At the United Nations level, decolonization resulted in a significant increase in membership that shifted governance in the General Assembly and the Security Council. The admission of post-colonial states turned decolonization into an ideological issue that contributed to a situation where direct UN involvement became ineffective. It complicated the process towards the further dismantling of the colonial system, and generated a push towards exit as epitomized in the formation of informal groups. The case of Namibia illustrates the potential and limits of engaging the United States in a cooperative framework.

Three-fifths of the civilian population of Jews of continental Europe were done to death in the course of World War II by Germany and its allies. It was to be the solution for all time of what was conceived in Berlin as the Jewish Problem. Most victims were killed by firing squads or in gas chambers installed in camps dedicated to the purpose. The rest were finished off by massive ill treatment and starvation in the ghettos and concentration camps into which they had been corralled, or by subjection to homicidally intense slave labour and forced marches. The military defeat of Germany occurred before the programme could be completed, but National Socialist hegemony over Europe lasted long enough for the result to fall very little short of the intention – which was to deal the Jewish people, notably in its great east European heartland, a blow from which recovery would be impossible.

The purpose is to trace and assess the ways in which the US has used multilateral institutions/organizations (both those international institutions/organizations of which it is a member and those regional institutions/organizations of which it is not) and multilateralism itself to pursue its interests on the African continent. The emergence of a noticeable multilateral dimension to American policy towards Africa is situated against two backgrounds: the first (Sect. 1 of the chapter) deals with the general features of American policy towards Africa since the Second World War and the role that multilateralism in general has played in that; the second (Sect. 2) deals with the rise of multilateralism (and multilateral regional institutions/organizations) on the African continent as a process that has a dynamic of its own. This perspective on Africa as an agent, and not simply as an object, of US policy is important for maintaining a critical perspective on the successes but also the contradictions and failures of US policy towards Africa. The final two sections offer a detailed description and evaluation of the dimensions of multilateralism in post‐cold‐war US policy, and, in particular, the Clinton era, which, in many respects, encapsulates much of what is right and wrong with US policy towards the continent. The evaluation made and the general assumptions used to approach the theme of US policy towards Africa are informed by a broadly neo‐Gramscian appraisal of the hegemonic function of the US in the current global political and economic order, and of the place of multilateralism within that hegemonic function.

This chapter presents a theoretical explanation for how interracial churches inadvertently reproduce white hegemony. It develops six archetypical categories of people (three that represent white attendees and three that represent African‐American attendees) who attend interracial churches and explains how each archetype contributes to this process.

This chapter documents Irish Cromwellian debates about church government. Quakers and Seekers denied any locus of authority beyond the “inner light.” Baptists and Independents argued that the proper basis of authority lay within the leadership of the local congregation. Presbyterians argued instead for a hierarchy of church courts, from the local elders to the General Assembly, while Episcopalians argued for a hierarchy of individuals in church offices. These debates were conducted alongside the pressing need to implement social control, local attempts to establish a clerical hegemony, and the civil administration's construction of the Civil List, which cut the link between preachers and congregations and put many clergy under government control. The debate about social control acted as a catalyst for emerging associations of clergy and early denominational structures.

The exclusive reliance on the Franco-German relationship to provide EU leadership is misleading because it acted as the brake rather than the motor of integration. The Coal and Steel Community was a French initiative, with Monnet and Schuman the leaders and Adenauer's Germany as follower. De Gaulle successfully challenged Hallstein's supranational aspirations and then dominated the alliance with Adenauerm but failed to exercise intergovernmental leadership. Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt launched the European Council to take over more of the leadership from the Commission. With Delors, the Mitterrand-Kohl cooperative hegemony of the 1980s prevailed but the 1989 reunification of Germany shifted the balance of power within the tandem. Thereafter, weaker national leaderships in France and Germany, in a context of enlargement, precluded joint EU leadership.

Neither the centrality nor cohesion of Franco-German EU potential leadership should be assumed. However, the EU has great institutional, symbolic, economic and political resources enabling it to initiate increased integration and formulate acceptable compromises to others. The Common Agricultural Policy was an enduring bilateral bargain. Any pretence of a hegemonic Franco-German directorate receded under the leadership of Chirac and Schröder, Sarkozy and Merkel. Disagreements over enlargement and constitutional provisions in particular have increased other bilateral and multilateral relationships in a larger EU. Where Franco-German agreement exists on intergovernmental matters they can block changes or enforce issues relating to the Stability and Growth Pact sanctions on which Germany had insisted. On foreign and defence policy (e.g., over Iraq), Germany has moved closer to France than the USA, while both Merkel and Sarkozy promoted a minimal substitute for the constitutional reform fiasco. Their leadership capacity is no longer what it used to be.

Gaddis primarily focuses on US dilemmas over the relationship between order and justice throughout the twentieth century. He argues that from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of Richard M. Nixon, a concern for order had superseded a concern for justice. After that time, and especially in the post‐Cold War era, these two concepts were finally to be brought together in ways that could be said to have been destabilizing world order. Nevertheless, once entwined, it has been difficult for the US to disentangle the promotion of order from justice even during its post‐September 11th struggle against terrorism. In order for the US to be successful in the promotion of its order and justice agenda, the author concludes that US hegemony needs to be coupled with legitimacy, consent, and a modesty of aims.

This chapter examines the relationship between authoritarianism, democracy and the emergence of Supreme Court independence in Mexico. It presents three mechanisms to explain why party hegemony meant unrestrained rule by the president; strong dominance of the president over the Supreme Court; and the absence of a rule of law. These are: a flexible constitution that could be modified by the power it was supposed to restrain; the president’s unilateral control of nominations and dismissals; and constitutional rules that delegated insufficient constitutional powers to the Supreme Court to interpret the constitution.

This chapter investigates global trends from 1991 to 2008. In particular, it inquires whether the macro-level propositions identified in Chapter 1 have been borne out. Therefore, it considers whether the level of interstate conflict has declined, whether global defense spending has decreased, whether the threat of global terrorism has begun to supplant interstate warfare on the global security agenda, and whether regional and global multilateral security institutions have begun to supplant states as the primary security providers, as many globalization scholars have predicted. It is shown that global trends are not very consistent with the globalization-kills-the-national-security-state hypothesis. Moreover, to the extent that certain features of the contemporary international system are consistent with the globalization school's predictions, it remains unclear whether globalization is the sole cause (or even the primary cause), or whether something potentially less enduring — such as American hegemony, the defense/deterrence dominance of contemporary military technology, or a lull after the all-encompassing global clash that was the Cold War — may have been more instrumental.

This chapter develops the idea that legitimacy is intimately related to power, and considers the extent to which contemporary problems affecting international legitimacy simply reflect the current distribution of power. It considers the specific debate about US hegemony in the contemporary world situation. It argues that the problem for legitimacy in contemporary international society does indeed reside in disequilibrium, but not in any straightforward sense. It is not simply a matter of international society coming to terms with the lack of a balance of power. Nor, for that matter, is it the case of international society having to adjust to the preferences and vagaries of US policy, as they variably reflect these underlying power conditions. The contemporary idea of legitimacy attaches itself to a notion of acceptable leadership in conditions of hegemony. That is to say that it must be a leadership that is acceptable both to international society at large, and also to the predominant state called upon to play that role.

The concluding chapter asks how our analysis has deepened, or reconfigured the concept of cosmopolitanism we began with. Cosmopolitanism in political thought is ongoing displacement by scholars who are located, at different times, in different relations of insidership and outsidership to different traditions. It is continuing destabilization; it is continuing confrontations with the hegemony of liberalism’s normative and structural hegemony. Cosmopolitanism becomes an ongoing set of practices by scholars themselves, a series of methodological interventions which, through the disciplined carrying-out of dislocative and relocative practices, leads to a shift in disciplinary self-understanding. Rather than the current status quo, in which challenges to liberalism’s hegemony are easily domesticated at the margins, we must seek a move towards a condition in which liberalism, along with other Westcentric presumptions and modes of thought, takes its place in a series of plural and co-eval engagements of thinkers and texts and ideas from all traditions with one another. It is from this possibility that we can begin to envision a political theory beyond Eurocentrism, after the presumptions of Eurocentrism’s primacy have been challenged and disestablished. Examples of such challenges are offered through the East Asian values debate, and the concept of veiling in Islam.