Paper short abstract:

The Washington Consensus' universal ambitions were only possible in an era lacking a great power antagonist. Today, rivalry with China is reshaping US hegemony around exclusionary rather than universalising aims, unevenly creating new spaces and constraints for development worldwide.

Paper long abstract:

Some scholars contend that US hegemonic decline has brought the world to a multipolar interregnum in which other powers and actors are more able to assert their interests and reshape global systems and structures. This paper recasts such understandings of the current conjuncture by positing that, while US hegemony remains, we are in fact currently leaving a (post-Cold War) interregnum- defined by a lack of major challenges to the US-led order- and returning to a more typical period whereby the modalities of hegemony are configured around great power competition, with major implications for development. The post-Cold War ‘end of history’ presented unique conditions which allowed for an unparallelled, universalising scale of hegemonic ambition (embodied by the Washington Consensus) that had not been feasible during the Cold War. With the rise of China and the failure to incorporate Chinese (and more broadly southern) capital and institutions into the existing order, the US is now retreating from such totalising ambitions towards a hegemony premised on marginalising and excluding antagonistic elements of the world-system. Using financial sanctions as an example, this paper argues that these nascent shifts are unevenly creating new spaces and constraints for development. Much can be learned from recent scholarship on the relationship between the Cold War (understood as a global field of contestation rather than a bipolar struggle) and historical development, though with a recognition that the context of today’s highly globalised world economy makes for substantially different vectors of competition.