I think that in the emerging modern networked "Economy 3.0" as I like to call it, firstly the financial economy has become a multiple of the 'real world' economy, and secondly markets are able to take alternate routes to bypass the former controlling nodes.
So even though a power may exercise physical hegemony and a veto power over physical trade movements, the financial markets have evolved in a way that even the mightiest physical hegemony no longer confers a veto over movements of money and capital.
We are now in a bipolar world with China now having a de facto economic veto power, and IMHO they have probably exercised it in their 'red line' area - which is just the same as that of the US - ie Energy Security.
"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The catch is that you don't need to keep buying them forever. You only need to keep buying them until the networked system has existed for so long that the previous system has atrophied sufficiently to make the ability to obtain a larger slice of the cake at the cost of diminishing the cake a losing proposition.
Why would people engage in an activity that so obviously undermines their power in the long term? Because people don't think long-term, particularly psychopaths.
Economy 3.0 is even more dependent upon an empire-like power than investment and commerce in less network-dependent economies of the past. And it has nothing to do with physical manifestations of power or resources. It has to do with who is capable of making and enforcing rules because Economy 3.0, as you have described, is even more dependent rules and norms than less networked economies are.
I completely disagree.
Economy 3.0 is what makes empires impossible: the Internet interprets hegemons as damage and routes around them.
A would be hegemon may be able to dominate any one or any half dozen nations, but cannot dominate more than a few of the nodes all of the time.
Interactive partnership-based protocols are key to Economy 3.0: these agreements - eg international trade agreements cofigured around transaction repositories - will act like a form of legal XML linking disparate jurisdictions and legal entities together, rather than disparate hardware and software.
Law is Code.
We are seeing the end of one way, statutory or judge-made protocols - 'contrats de mandat' as the French have it - and a transition to 'contrats de societe'. These are the same sort of two way protocols you find in Japan, and elsewhere in the East, and also the consensual approach of Islamic jurisprudence, which many think underpinned the Napoleonic code.
A hegemon would simply find themselves excluded from participation at worst, or participating on inferior terms, at best. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
The point of a hegemony-resistant architecture is to make sure that wannabe hegemons can't exclude other actors without imperilling the core function of the system. Mutually assured destruction works, most of the time.
Historically, there's never been any such thing. At best, relative stability is maintained by cripplingly expensive wars until the economy implodes and the wars are no longer affordable.
Ethically and practically, mutually beneficial relationships are vastly more productive and stable for everyone except the psychotic predator class who would rather cover themselves with scraps and baubles than allow a peace dividend to grow the world economy.
It's self-styled 'realists' who are the biggest brake on progress and innovation.
Not everyone wants to remain a stupid rat chasing other stupid rats for scraps around a barrel. Some of us have more interesting plans.
