Hegemony Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term hegemony means domination with consent. From the Greek hegemonia, it denotes leadership of an alliance by a single leader, or hegemon. Although ancient hegemons tended to possess great power, their allies conceded them leading roles due to other qualities, such as skill and virtue, as well as the policies they embraced. The tendency toward domination without consent, however, has led many international relations scholars to equate hegemony with domination that does not respect the independent existence and autonomy of allies, thus providing a different definition of the term.

In the twentieth century, political theorist Antonio Gramsci renewed interest in the concept of hegemony when he used the term in the context of domestic politics rather than international relations. Gramsci sought to understand the formation of alliances among groups to achieve domination, and he stressed the important role of ideology in convincing followers to support a leadership. Gramsci assigned a distinctive role to intellectuals as formulators of ideas that link leaders to followers. At the same time, he stressed that political struggle continued as subordinate groups sought to achieve a position of domination through a counter hegemony. This implies that some groups, instead of being enlisted in a hegemonic enterprise, are suppressed, sometimes with force. Thus, hegemony in this interpretation is a system of domination with minimal violence.

Hegemonic And Nonhegemonic Domination

With respect to both international and domestic politics, a distinction can be made between hegemonic and nonhegemonic domination, that is, between alliance and empire and between democracy and tyranny. Both employ ideology to justify themselves and to provide policy guidance. In nonhegemonic alliances and tyrannies, the dominant leader or group exercises power over others without their consent and employs ideology largely to rationalize or justify its domination. In contrast, in hegemonic alliances and democracies, leaders employ ideology to convince others to follow, and followers extend their consent to domination, implying that they retain the freedom to withhold consent. Furthermore, a hegemonic system always includes politics in which discussion and debate are possible. A nonhegemonic system, in contrast, is based solely on violence and other coercive means.

Hegemony presumes ongoing debate and discourse, dominant states or groups exerting leadership to retain their power, and allies or subordinate groups striving to shape the policy direction of the leadership. Beyond policy matters, allies or subordinate groups sometimes strive to overturn the dominant states or groups through struggle, or counterhegemonic activity, and to establish a different hegemonic order. Thus, hegemonic arrangements involve continuous contestation. Counterhegemony arises from the ideological framework of a hegemonic arrangement, but its triumph relies upon crisis and the addition of new ideological beliefs that are combined with those from which it arose.

Autonomy And Persistence

The distinctive feature of hegemony is autonomy. There are three types: autonomy within hegemony, autonomy from counter hegemony, and autonomy based on an opposed hegemony. Within hegemony, groups can advocate and implement deeply opposed policies within the context of the prevailing hegemonic system; for example, within the same system, a shift in fundamental economic policy could occur from one based upon Keynesian principles of state intervention in the private economy to one based upon Friedrich von Hayek’s commitment to minimizing the state’s participation in the economy. Change with counterhegemonic autonomy involves a deeper shift in which once subordinate groups forge an alliance that brings a radically different hegemonic arrangement, as exemplified in the shift in Germany in 1933 from a republic to a dictatorship, or in the shift in Eastern Europe at the end of the cold war from communist systems to liberal democratic, capitalist ones. An opposed hegemony provides a foundation for a different sort of autonomy, for example, in the cold war in which the Soviet Union retained its autonomy outside the hegemonic system dominated by the United States.

Hegemony thus refers to long-term and persistent political arrangements within which a state or a coherent group provides leadership and direction over others. At the same time, allies and subordinate groups retain their scope for participation in, and even rejection of, the leadership. Leaders have a tendency to dominate without consent, but allies and other states tend to check or balance those aspiring to a position of dominance in international relations, and subordinate groups within a society struggle to affect policies and to achieve leadership within the society. So long as these autonomous activities are sustained, hegemony can be said to persist. When allies and subordinate groups lose their scope for free participation, hegemony ends, and empire or tyranny begins.

Bibliography:

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Fontana, Benedetto. “State and Society:The Concept of Hegemony in Gramsci.” In Hegemony and Power: Consensus and Coercion in Contemporary Politics, edited by Mark Haugaard and Howard H. Lentner. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.
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Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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