Hegemony (, English: [UK] , [US]: ) is the preponderance of power, and the construction of consent by the powerless through cultural values. Hegemony, as the acquiescence of people to rule by a state, was first developed in Gramsci's sociology of the operation of capitalist society.
Sociologically, the political scientist
Antonio Gramsci developed
cultural hegemony by transposing
political hegemony beyond
international relations to Class structure and Culture, showing
how a social class exerts cultural ("leadership") dominance of the society's other classes in maintaining the socio-political
status quo. Cultural hegemony identifies and explains domination and the maintenance of
power and how the (hegemon) leader
class "persuades" the subordinated social classes to accept and adopt the ruling-class values of
bourgeois hegemony.
Etymologically
hegemony (leadership) derives from
hegeisthai (to lead), hence, the
hegemon (leader)
dictates the politics of the hegemony's constituent subordinate states via
cultural imperialism — the imposition of its
way of life, i.e. its language (the imperial
lingua franca) and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing), to make formal its dominance — thus transforming external domination into an abstraction, because
power is in the
status quo ("the way things are") not in any leader(s). In the event, rebellion (social, political, economic, armed) is eliminated — either by co-optation of the rebel(s) or by police and military suppression, all without the hegemon's direct intervention, e.g. the
Spanish and the
British empires, and the
united Germany (extant 1871–1945).
Politically, hegemony is the predominance of one political unit over the other units in a political group — a province within a federation (
Prussia in the
German Empire); one man among a committee (Napoleon Bonaparte in the
Consulate); and one state in a confederation (France in the EU). Since the nineteenth century, especially in historical writing,
hegemony describes one state's predominance upon other states (e.g. Napoleonic France's European hegemony), and, by extension,
hegemonism denotes the policies the great powers practice in seeking predominance, leading, then, to a definition of
imperialism. Moreover, in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985),
Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe refine
hegemony as the strategic combination of discrete political principles (from different systems of thought) to a coherent ideology, like-wise, 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 hegemony
In the Mediterranean Ancient World,
Sparta was the
hegemon (leader) 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 [霸]) 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 (cf.
cultural imperialism); 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's second half, the USSR and the USA fought the
Cold War (1945–91) for global hegemony after the
Second World War (1939–45) broke the old European empires. The
Warsaw Pact and
NATO were the regional arms in an ideologic, way-of-life-struggle of
Communism versus
Capitalism. Fighting directly (the arms race) and indirectly (
proxy wars) against any country whose internal, national actions
might destabilise its hegemony, the USSR defeated the nationalist
Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the USA precipitated the US–
Vietnam War (1965–75) by participating in the Vietnamese Civil War (1955–65) the
National Liberation Front fought against the
Republic of Vietnam, the US's client state.
In the
post–Cold War world of the twenty-first century, the French Socialist politician
Hubert Védrine describes the USA as a hegemonic
hyperpower, while the U.S. political scientists
John Mearsheimer and
Joseph Nye counter that the USA is not a "true" hegemony, because does not have the resources to impose a proper, formal, global rule; despite its political and military strength, the USA is economically equal to Europe, thus, cannot rule the international stage. Several other countries are either emerging or re-emerging as powers, such as
China,
Russia,
India, and the
European Union.
Geographic hegemony
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
