Hegemony is an indirect form of government, and of imperial dominance in which the hegemon (leader state) rules geopolitically subordinate states by the implied means of power, the threat of force, rather than by direct military force.[4] In Ancient Greece (8th century BCE – 6th century CE), hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states.[5]
In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country upon others; from which derived hegemonism, the Great Power politics meant to establish European hegemony upon continental Asia and Africa.[6] In the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) developed the philosophy and the sociology of geopolitical hegemony into the theory of cultural hegemony, whereby one social class can manipulate the system of values and mores of a society, in order to create and establish a ruling class Weltanschauung, a worldview that justifies the status quo of bourgeois domination of the other social classes of the society.
In the praxis of hegemony, imperial dominance is established by means of cultural imperialism, whereby the leader state (hegemon) dictates the internal politics and the societal character of the subordinate states that constitute the hegemonicsphere of influence, either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government. The imposition of the hegemon's way of life — an imperial lingua franca and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing) — transforms the concrete imperialism of direct military domination into the abstract power of the status quo, indirect imperial domination.[4] Under hegemony, rebellion (social, political, economic, armed) is eliminated either by co-optation of the rebels or by suppression (police and military), without direct intervention by the hegemon; examples are the latter-stage Spanish andBritish Empires, the 19th and 20th century Reichs of unified Germany (1871–1945),[10] and by the end of the twentieth century, the United States.
Imperialism, as it is defined by the Dictionary of Human Geography, is an unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in the form of an empire, based on ideas of superiority and practices of dominance, and involving the extension of authority and control of one state or people over another."[2] Lewis Samuel Feuer identifies two major subtypes of imperialism; the first is the "regressive imperialism" identified with pure conquest, unequivocal exploitation, extermination or reductions of undesired peoples, and settlement of desired peoples into those territories.[3] The second type identified by Feuer is "progressive imperialism" that is founded upon a cosmopolitan view of humanity, that promotes the spread of civilization to allegedly backward societies to elevate living standards and culture in conquered territories, and allowance of a conquered people to assimilate into the imperial society, an example being the British Empire which claimed to give their "citizens" a number of advantages.[4]
The term as such primarily has been applied to Western political and economic dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some writers, such as Edward Said, use the term more broadly to describe any system of domination and subordination organized with an imperial center and a periphery.[5] According to Marxist theorist Vladimir Lenin, imperialism is a natural feature of a developed capitalist nation state as it matures into monopoly capitalism. In his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin observed that as capitalism matured in the Western world, the economy shifted away from real commodity production towards banking and finance, as commodity production was outsourced to the empires' colonies. Lenin concluded that the competition between empires and the unfettered drive to maximise profit would lead to wars between the empires themselves, such as World War I in his contemporary time, as well as continued future military invasions and occupations in the undeveloped world to establish and expand markets and exploit cheap labour for the monopolist corporations of the empires.
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