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Introduction
The last fifty years have been rife with predictions that America's hegemony in the international political economy has peaked. According to this stance, the United States would be bound to face a steady decline of its power position from that point onwards. In fact, some scholars have even claimed in the 1980s that US hegemony had already been lost.1According to Immanuel Wallerstein and other proponents of the world-system approach, hegemony is cyclical; once a hegemon has reached the apogee it is bound to face perpetual decline vis-à-vis the rising power(s): 'The decline of the United States is not the result of poor decisions by its president, but of structural realities in the world-system.'2This declinism also pertains to the field of global finance, the focus of this article. Many observers saw the end of the Bretton-Woods system in the early 1970s as an unmistakable sign of vanishing dominance of the US in the international financial system. Only a minority of scholars disagreed arguing that the demise of Bretton-Woods rather represented a shift or transformation of US hegemony from forms of direct power articulated via intergovernmental channels to forms of indirect or structural power exerted through private markets.3
The latest wave of US declinism came in the years after the global financial crisis. Post-2008, the debate about America's position in the global political economy has mainly focused on the 'rise of the rest', such as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and especially on the rise of China. The basic argument is that in a 'Post-American World'4we witness a 'relative erosion of the power, and political influence, of the United States in general'.5This is not to say that there was a complete absence of observers who argued for the persistence of US power in the international political economy.6However, declinism generally prevailed. In 2015, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), proposed by China, became the latest supposed piece of evidence for the continuous decline of America's dominance and the seemingly unstoppable rise of China. Sceptics of US power claim that the AIIB can become a means for China to 'establish a parallel global financial order.'7Moreover, the fact that key allies of the...