In the historiography of the Cold War a small but active group of American historians influenced by New Left radicalism rejected the view prevailing in the USA at the time in regard to the assignation of responsibility for the beginning and continuation of the Cold War.1 Although their reasoning took them along different routes and via different perceptions as to key dates and events, there were certain features all US revisionists had in common (some more generally recognized than others). Heavily involved as they were in the analysis of the US socio-economic system, the Soviet Union was largely left out of their concerns and it was the United States who had been found the ‘guilty’ party. The revisionists, of course inadvertently, corroborated Soviet conclusions, a fact gratefully acknowledged by Soviet writers.2

Bargaining power is a somewhat neglected concept in the study of international negotiations. Who comes on top in the negotiating process and why, i.e. its power or influence aspect, has never been a central perspective of negotiation theorists. The ‘classical’ negotiation theorists of the 1960s1 make only passing references to the effects of differences in power resources on international negotiations, and even though more recent works pay considerably more attention to such variables,2 they can hardly be said to be central to the field. Nor has bargaining as a particular instance of the exercise of power been an important preoccupation of power theorists. Perhaps for these very reasons, the concept has remained a rather tricky one, often being used as an ad hoc or residual factor to ‘explain’ what cannot otherwise be accounted for. However, Christer Jönsson has argued that ‘focussing on bargaining power promises to be… an avenue to further clarification of the perennially elusive concept of power’.3 To what extent what he calls the ‘bridge-building and cross-fertilization between power analysis and bargaining studies’4 may also contribute to a better understanding of international negotiations, is an empirical question to which this article will attempt to give at least a preliminary answer.

This essay attempts to apply concepts of hegemony to the case of contemporary North American—Western European—Japanese (‘Trilateral’) relations and, more specifically, to analyse the role and importance of a unique international organization the Trilateral Commission (TC), within Trilateral relations. The essay comprises: (i) a comparison of the Realist and Gramscian concepts of hegemony and relates them to aspects of the post-war international order; (ii) a more extended discussion of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and related concepts; (iii) an exposition of aspects of the ‘Trilateral’ approach, a discussion of the TC and an interpretation of the TC using Gramscian analysis; and (iv) a discussion of the long-term structural pressures on the Trilateral relationship in the context of a reconstituted hegemony.

When, in May 1945, the Allies finally defeated Nazi Germany and began their military occupation, no-one expected that within five years the country would be divided into two political halves, one tied to the West and the other to the Soviet Union. Germany, despite its defeat in 1918, had remained the most powerful state in central Europe and had been an undoubted great power since 1870. If anything, the fear was that Germany would revive quickly and become a menace to the peace again. That it did become divided between East and West was of course due to the start of the ‘Cold War’ after 1945, with the Americans and British on the one side and the Russians on the other seeing, not Germany, but each other as the post-war ‘enemy’. In 1946 Winston Churchill was already able to speak of an ‘iron curtain’ stretching from Trieste, on the Adriatic, to Stettin, on the Baltic. By 1949 each side had established control of its own bloc—the Russians predominating in the Eastern European ‘People's Republics’, the Americans drawing the West Europeans together with the Marshall Aid Programme and the North Atlantic Treaty.

If Churchill's aphorism about Russia being ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ was an apt formulation of Western puzzlement about that nation, several further layers of obfuscation would be required accurately to depict Western perceptions of China. Since 1949 a number of conflicting conceptions of China's nature and purpose have vied with each other to gain the allegiance of analysts, governments and the general public alike. There was, for too many years, the China of American demonology: aggressive, expansionist and cruel, conspiring with the USSR to bring about world domination, its implacable rulers brooding malevolently over their nation of docile ants. Even while this notion held centre stage, an alternative perspective was available from such eminent Sinologists as C. P. Fitzgerald and I. K. Fairbank: that China had not undergone such a dramatic metamorphosis under the communists as many believed but was still ‘eternal China’, reproducing the same age-old patterns of behaviour that had persisted with little change through many centuries, if not millennia. Then, during the 1960s a new image emerged: China the ultrarevolutionary power, itself engaged upon a process of radical transformation through the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously acting as the principal inspiration of violent revolution elsewhere in the world. The Sino-American rapprochement soon produced an entirely different perspective: China was now a responsible great power, maintaining a global balance of power in accordance with the Nixon–Kissinger vision of international order.