Hegemony

Hegemony is the political, economic, military or cultural predominance of one entity over others, whether a state, a social class or a group within a society. Its original sense was military: in ancient Greece the hegemon was the supreme leader or commander, and the term designated the politico-military dominance of one city-state over others. Sparta led the Peloponnesian League, and Athens played a similar role in the Delian League.

Over time the concept broadened. In the nineteenth century it served to describe one country's preeminence over others and, by extension, one group's preeminence over an entire society. In international relations it refers to a state's capacity to shape the international system. It differs from empire in that the hegemon usually directs the foreign affairs of other states without governing their internal life directly. Some authors distinguish benevolent hegemony, which provides public goods such as security or financial stability to its sphere of influence; coercive hegemony, which disciplines recalcitrant states through economic or military power; and exploitative hegemony, which extracts resources from subordinate countries.

The concept reached its most influential formulation in twentieth-century Italian Marxism. Antonio Gramsci argued that a ruling class maintains its power not only through force but above all through consent: through schools, the press, religion and other cultural institutions, it spreads a system of values and a common sense that presents the social order as natural. For Gramsci, hegemony is complete only when the subordinate themselves accept that order and defend it as their own. The idea was taken up by critical theory and cultural studies, which applied it to the analysis of the media and social norms.

In international relations, hegemonic stability theory, developed in the 1970s by Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner, holds that a stable international order requires a dominant power. Critics point out that the thesis is hard to test empirically. The debate over the decline of American hegemony, and whether the rise of China challenges it, remains lively.