Hegemony, which essentially means the domination or rule of one actor over others, is mainly a concept in international relations, used both by academics and professionals. Its origin is in Greek historical thought but the concept, and indeed the specific word, has occurred frequently in the history of political thought, in a variety of intellectual traditions. At one level it is a relatively simple idea—a hegemony occurs when one country, for example the USA in the West during the cold war, is massively dominant over other actors in the relevant sphere—members of NATO, in this case. However, hegemony becomes more complex when one asks about the nature of this dominion, because hegemony cannot rest simply on force, or even on an implied capacity to do great harm to any challenger. Rather, a system is hegemonic when the domination of one actor is taken for granted and unchallenged by those over whom it holds sway.
At the least this requires that other actors, not only the hegemon itself, put pressure on any challenger from within the sphere. The extent to which the Soviet Union was hegemonic with respect to Eastern Europe during the cold war, is demonstrated more by what happened to Czechoslovakia in 1968 than Hungary in 1956. In the latter case Hungary’s attempt to liberalize its economic and political system was stopped by a brutal invasion of Soviet forces. But in 1968 the Soviet Union orchestrated what came to be known as ‘the fraternal invasion’, because the forces that entered Czechoslovakia came from several of the Eastern European states, not only the Soviet Union.
The major route to hegemony is to arrange that the other actors in the system, or their élites at least, share an ideology with the hegemon, so that its considerable, actual power is enhanced by the fact that most actors think that what is in the hegemon’s interest is in theirs as well—certainly if no obvious alternative arrangement seems even remotely plausible. Thus, returning to the example of the USA and Western Europe, the single major source of the USA’s hegemonic status was probably Europe’s early dependence on development funds under the Marshall Plan in 1947 and its later dependence on the dollar as an international currency, rather than the US nuclear weaponry.
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