[2] George Yúdice, in 1995, was one of the first commentators to summarize the background to the emergence of this concept: Flexible accumulation, consumer culture, and the "new world information order" are produced or distributed (made to flow) globally, to occupy the space of the nation, but are no longer "motivated" by any essential connections to a state, as embodied, for example, in a "national-popular" formation.
[4] Posthegemony and its related terms are influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's accounts of the supra- and infra-national forces that are said to have rendered obsolete the national-popular forms of coercion and consent through which, for Antonio Gramsci, hegemony structured and constituted society.
[8] This exemplifies the hegemonic decline: how could the US maintain the legitimacy of their interventions if their own citizens find them wrong and immoral?
[citation needed] Following this period of rising US dominance on the world stage, there have been no shortage of people who, from the rise of the [Soviet Union's] space programme in the 1950s, through to the third world revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere, and to the emergence of Japan, Europe and now China as major economic powers, have predicted that US dominance, predominance, hegemony or, in more recent, post–Cold War terms, "unipolarity", are ebbing away.
"[10] Johnson concedes that "one considerable achievement of 'the post-hegemony project' is to draw many observable post-9/11 features into a single imaginative picture, while also synthesizing different currents in contemporary social theory."