The hegemon stabilizes the world? Or does the hegemon arouse apocalyptic suspicion? The grand stabilizer is but a myth. What one side sees as the necessary and grand stabilizer for international order, liberal democracy, enlightenment, and so forth, the other condemns as the "great Satan", proliferator of tyranny, greed, corruption - assuredly both moral and ethical, and so on. So does the great hegemon bring stability? Or does it simply exacerbate strife and augment conflict?
Thus, when Australian PM John Howard reminds us of the "blackmail of the enlightenment", that freedom is possible only through collective capitulation, as global citizens and individual nations, to the great power - be it 'man' or 'hegemon', he states it as if it is truth - at once parsimonious and unshakeable. Order and stability, true, but at what price?
