Hegemony

Hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others (especially of countries) with the most powerful controlling the others. The dominant state is known as the hegemon.

The unwavering conviction that Our America is one, from the Río Bravo to Patagonia, is imperative, and that we have a fundamental duty to prevent them from plundering our natural resources and subjugating us to their hegemony. ~ Miguel Díaz-Canel (President of Cuba)

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. ~Fareed Zakaria

According to Pompeo [U.S. Secretary of State], Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” ... China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.” ~Jeffrey Sachs

Quotes

Sorted alphabetically by author/source

• The construction of a multipolar world...obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet. In my eyes it is an overweening project, criminal by its very nature, which is drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance, not only in the countries of the South but also, to a seemingly lesser degree, in those of the North.
  • Samir Amin in Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, World Book Publishing (2006)

• The hegemonist strategy of the United States, which operates within the framework of the new collective imperialism, seeks nothing less than to establish Washington’s military control over the entire planet. This is the means to ensure privileged access to all of the world’s natural resources, and to compel subaltern allies, Russia, China and the whole third world to swallow their status as vassals. Military control of the planet is the means to impose, as a last resort, the draining of ‘tribute’ through political violence – as a substitute for the ‘spontaneous’ flow of capital that offsets the American deficit, the Achilles heel of US hegemony.
  • Samir Amin in Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, World Book Publishing (2006)

• In order to protect its position as a valuable trade and security partner, the United States should find ways to reassure Asian countries that it continues to be invested in the security, stability, and prosperity of the region. Such reassurances must include a demonstrated willingness to respect and accommodate its partners, old and new. Even after hegemony, a global order, based on multilateral cooperation, can yield shared benefits for all its members, including the United States.
  • Bidisha Biswas and Anish Goel in What Comes After US Hegemony?, The Diplomat (19 December 2018)

• In September 2002 the [G.W.] Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home.
  • Noam Chomsky in Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003) Full text online<

• The unwavering conviction that Our America is one, from the Río Bravo to Patagonia, is imperative, and that we have a fundamental duty to prevent them from plundering our natural resources and subjugating us to their hegemony. The hostility of imperialism is today directed against our most genuine values.
  • Speech by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, delivered during Inauguration of the 16th ALBA-TCP Summit in Havana, Granma (17 December 2018)

• If the world experiences a slow, relatively peaceful transition away from U.S. hegemony, then the subsequent global order just might maintain some of the liberal international institutions that still represent the best of American values. If, by contrast, the golden-shower diplomacy of Donald Trump continues... then we will likely witness a harsher world order based on autocracy, Realpolitik, and commercial domination, with scant attention to human rights, women’s rights, or the rule of law.
  • Alfred McCoy in American Global Power Is Fading – And Here’s How That Could Change the World, TomDispatch, (22 May 2018)

• No one has the right to oppress others, no hegemony can crush any country...
  • Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico ready to sell gasoline to Venezuela for 'humanitarian' reasons

• According to the postmodern theorist Lalita Pandit conventions of history writing are more often than not marked by intellectual bad faith that serves and maintains hegemonic ideologies.She adds, ``it is nearly impossible to alter the premises of hegemonic claims, because hegemonies are founded in such retellings, and passing off of myth for fact and history, non-truth for belief. In part at least, all hegemonies are founded in discourses. Discourse conventions are automatically set to deal with exigencies. When a contrary, anti-hegemonic view comes out strong, historiagraphic conventions, having become habit or mind-sets, are all set to transform the contrary view and absorb into a grand paradigm that ultimately only serves the hegemonic ideology. At the same time, hegemonic institutions are automatically set up to not validate, not give authority to contrary views. After all, what is considered truth is what comes from the horse's mouth, and who decides who this privileged horse, the subject who knows the truth is?
  • Pandit, Lalita. "Caste, Race, and Nation:History and Dialectic in Rabindranath Tagore's Gora" . In Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, And Culture." Eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995, quoted from 'Edmund Leach on Racism & Indology' by Subhash Kak

• According to Pompeo [U.S. Secretary of State], Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” with “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”
  • Jeffrey Sachs, America’s Unholy Crusade Against China, Project Syndicate, (5 August 2020)

• In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.
  • Leon Trotsky (1928), quoted by A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016, by David North, World Socialist Web Site (11 July 2016)

• Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since... As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies.
  • Fareed Zakaria in The Self-Destruction of American Power Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment (July/August 2019)

• U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet.
  • Fareed Zakaria in The Self-Destruction of American Power Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2019)

See also

• Colonialism
• Counter-hegemonic globalization
• Democracy
• Imperialism
• Monetary hegemony

• Plutocracy
• Post-hegemony
• Supremacism
• Oligarchy
• Tyranny