Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

Conclusion 177
nomic arrangements onto the world” (Burley 1993, p. 125). When examined
at the level of states, rather than the level of transnational actors, this
case shows that the hegemon achieved a regime serving its combined environmental,
economic, and political interests. In the final analysis, therefore,
this regime grew out of a self-initiated regulatory change in the United
States. At the intergovernmental level, the case therefore could suggest a
hegemonic explanation for the very existence of this global environmental
regime.
Yet the hegemon created the regime neither through military force nor
by offering rewards or side payments; instead, it projected the politically
constructed rationale for domestic regulation onto the international level.
Similar to the domestic-level process in the United States, policy entrepreneurs
pushed a powerful public idea (the “dying oceans” idea) identifying
a seemingly evident and indisputable need for international
environmental regulation. U.S. leadership was of an ideational nature,
and it seems best captured by a concept of hegemony stressing material
and structural resources as well as cultural norms. The Gramscian concept
of hegemony in particular emphasizes the hegemonic state’s ability to
maintain cohesion and identity within a core group of states through the
propagation of a common culture. 3 In addition, this concept of hegemony
envisions that international organizations, such as the United Nations,
assist in spreading and consolidating values and norms of the hegemon.
Accordingly, the Gramscian concept of hegemony can also account well
for the important role the Stockholm secretariat played during the process
of regime establishment.
Though it is neither possible nor advisable to draw broad generalizations
on the basis of a single-case study, it is not too difficult to point to other
examples of such U.S. leadership and hegemony in a nonmaterial, ideational
sense in the environmental field. For example, a former U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations had such ideational hegemony in mind when he
observed, as mentioned in chapter 6, that the U.S. government and
American elite groups in the early 1970s had become great producers and
distributors of world environmental crises. Examples also exist in other policy
fields. In the area of macroeconomic policy, for example, the United
States spread Keynes’s economic ideas to other countries after World War
II. Stressing American military and economic dominance at that point,
Hirschman generalizes this hegemon-initiated ideas process as follows