A Fractured Hegemony? The US position in the international politics of Whaling.

Once the most important whaling nation (70 percent of world whaling), the United States has become, in under a century, the champion of the struggle to save the whales. This paper reflects on the American role in the transformation of the International Whaling Commission into an anti-whaling regime. It seeks to analyse the American construction of a ‘green hegemony’ in this issue-area, paying particular attention to the external vs. internal dimensions of this process. Three aspects come under scrutiny: -Externally, the American position is at odds with its stance on most other multilateral environmental treaties. How did the whales become the chosen issue of the US’s international environmental policies? -The role of non-state actors. American environmental NGOs have proved particularly important in altering the negotiating position of the state at the table of the IWC. The paper explores how the state-NGO relationship impacts on the elaboration of an international environmental policy -Internally, the US position sits uneasily with the whaling cultures of its ‘first nations’, which continue to whale under the ‘aboriginal subsistence’ exception. How does this affect the continuance of the US’s position as hegemon? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]