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Hegemony
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Hegemony (leadership) (English: [US]: , [UK] ) first denoted the dominance (“leadership”) of a Greek city-state over other city-states, then denoted the dominance of one nation over others. The political scientist Antonio Gramsci developed the former conceptions to identify the dominance of one social class over the other social classes in a society by means of cultural hegemony. Moreover, an hegemony is the type of empire, wherein, the imperial state controls the subordinate state with power (the perception that it can enforce its political goals), rather than with force (direct physical action to compel its political goals), (cf.
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Hegemony (leadership) (English: [US]: , [UK] ) first denoted the dominance (“leadership”) of a Greek city-state over other city-states, then denoted the dominance of one nation over others. The political scientist Antonio Gramsci developed the former conceptions to identify the dominance of one social class over the other social classes in a society by means of cultural hegemony. Moreover, an hegemony is the type of empire, wherein, the imperial state controls the subordinate state with power (the perception that it can enforce its political goals), rather than with force (direct physical action to compel its political goals), (cf. suzerainty).
In the field of international relations, the hegemon (leader) dictates the politics of the subordinate states upon whom it has hegemony via cultural imperialism — the imposition of its way of life, i.e. its language (as imperial lingua franca) and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing), to make its dominance formal — and, so, render as abstract its foreign domination of the subordinate state; thus, power does not rest in a given person, but in the way things are, yet, any rebellion (social, political, economic, armed) is eliminated by the local police and military, without the hegemon’s direct intervention, e.g. the Spanish and the British empires, and the united Germany (extant 1871–1945).
Definitions
Politically, hegemony is the predominance of one political unit over other units in a political group — a province within a federation (Prussia in the Second Reich), one man in a committee (Napoleon Bonaparte in the Consulate), and one state in a confederation (France in the EU). Sociologically, as cultural hegemony, it denotes and explains the domination and the maintenance of power (either by a person or a group), and how the hegemon class “persuades” the subordinated social classes to accept and adopt the imposed external values, i.e. bourgeois hegemony; per Gramsci, the hegemonic Imperial State is a mixture of coercion and hegemony, distinguishable as force and power. To wit, it is the social and political power(s) derived from the populace’s “spontaneous consent” — given because of the intellectual and moral authority that grant leadership to the subalterns of the Imperial State — thus, hegemony is exercised through power (coercion and consent), rather than through force (arms). These constitute the cultural hegemony — its agents (the Imperial State’s subalterns) are the press (mass communications media), organised religion, the schools (educational curricula), and the commercialised, popular arts (cinema, music, et cetera) — imposed from above, that influence the citizens of the subordinate state to accept the hegemon’s (foreign, external) values, thereby, maintaining the hegemonic status quo, so that the empire can continue.
Since the nineteenth century, hegemony has been especially used to describe one State’s predominance upon other States (e.g. Napoleonic France’s European hegemony), and, by extension, hegemonism denotes the policies with which the “great powers” seek their predominance, leading, then, to one definition of imperialism. Furthermore, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe refine the definition of hegemony as the discursive strategy of combining discrete principles of thought (from different intellectual systems) into a coherent ideology; and, continuing from that, the critic Jennifer Daryl Slack further refines it as “a process, by which a hegemonic class articulates (or co-ordinates) the interests of social groups, such that those groups actively ‘consent’ to their subordinated status”.
Historical hegemonies
Etymologically, hegemony (leadership) derives from hegeisthai (to lead); in the Mediterranean Europe of the Ancient World, Sparta was the hegemon city-state of the Peloponnesian League, in the 6th century BC, and King Philip II of Macedon was the hegemon of the League of Corinth, in 337 BC, (a kingship he willed to his son, Alexander the Great); in Eastern Asia, it occurred in China, during the Spring and Autumn Period (ca. 770–480 BC), when the weakened rule of the Zhou Dynasty lead to the relative autonomy of the Five Hegemons (“Ba” in Chinese [?]) who were appointed, by feudal lord conferences, and were nominally obliged to uphold the Zhou dynastic imperium over the subordinate states. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century-Japan, hegemon applies to its “Three Unifiers” — Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu — who exercised hegemony over most of the country.
As a universal politico-cultural practice, the hegemon’s cultural institutions maintain the hegemony; in Italy, the Medici maintained their mediæval Tuscan hegemony, by controlling the Arte della Lana guild, in the Florentine city-state; in Holland, the Dutch Republic’s seventeenth-century (1609–1672) mercantilist dominion was a first instance of global, commercial hegemony, made feasible with its technological development of wind power and sophisticated “Four Great Fleets” for the efficient production and delivery of goods and services, which, in turn, made possible its Amsterdam stock market and concomitant dominance of world trade; in France, Louis XIV (1638–1715) established French economic, cultural, and military domination of most of continental Europe; other monarchies (e.g. Russia) adopted French as their court language, and imitated the French style.
In the twentieth century, the world-wide Russo–American Cold War (1945–1990), between the USSR and the USA, was fought via their respective (formal) hegemonies — the Warsaw Pact and NATO. In said imperial war, speciously justified as ideologic (i.e. Communism vs. Capitalism), both superpower hegemons fought directly (propaganda) and indirectly (proxy war), each hoping to overcome and dominate the nemesis with an arms race (military superiority) and with economic aid (hearts and minds). In the event, each cold warrior forswore indirect (hegemonic) rule to ensure its direct imperium; in Eastern Europe, the USSR suffocated the nationalist, anti-Stalinist Hungarian Revolt of 1956, and, in South East Asia, the USA intervened and then participated in the Vietnamese Civil War of 1955–65; those departures, from the indirect rule of hegemonic empire to the direct rule of territorial empire demonstrated the limitations of imperialism.
In the post–Cold War world of the twenty-first century, Hubert Védrine describes the USA as a hyperpower hegemon, yet, John Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye counter that the USA is not a “true” hegemon, because it has neither the resources nor the matériel to impose a proper, global hegemony; despite its politico-military wherewithal, the USA is economically equal to Europe, thus, cannot rule the international relations among non-State actors. Moreover, other States (countries) are either emerging or re-emerging as regional hegemonies with a limited sphere of influence, e.g. China, Russia, India, and the European Union.
The geography of hegemony
Hegemony affects geographic space; in The Production of Space (1992), Henri Lefebvre posits that geographic space is not a passive locus of social relations, but that it is trialectical — constituted by mental space, social space, and physical space — hence, hegemony is a spatial process influenced by geopolitics. In the ancient world, hydraulic despotism was established in the fertile river valleys of Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia. In China, during the Warring States Era, the Qin State created the Chengkuo Canal for geopolitical advantage over its local rivals. In Eurasia, successor state hegemonies were established in the Middle East, using the sea (Greece) and the fringe lands (Persia, Arabia). European hegemony moved west-wards, to Rome, then north-wards, to the Holy Roman Empire of the Franks. At the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, Spain, France, and Britain established their hegemonic centres; in due course, geography dictated that the political centre then move to the USA and the USSR; to wit, geography can determine the long- and short-life of an hegemony, e.g. China’s, Pax Sinica and Rome’s Pax Romana in contrast to those of the Mongol Empire and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; (see Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Chantal Mouffe).
Resistance and survival
In Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (2004), Conrad Phillip Kottak elucidates hegemony ideologically — that an ideology explains why the extant order (politico-military and socio-economic) is in the best interest of everyone; the ideology promises much, and asks the ideologue’s (believer’s) patience (time) for the promises to be fulfilled.
See also
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