Introduction: Towards a complex being of benign hegemony

The world stage is an anarchy – it has always been. But at one point or another a clear leader emerges to conduct history if not to synchronicity then at least to an interest-driven syncopation. Here I wonder: Is it even possible for such a leader to be benign? Not the willingness to label oneself as such, or the propensity to be labelled by others as such, but to be existentially a hegemonic entity that is somehow wired to just do good.

To analyse the notion of benign hegemony as a conceptual conjunction of benignity and hegemony is to simultaneously consign benignity to the vicissitudes of armchair ethics and grant political theorist a carte blanch to define hegemony on whatever terms they see fit. Here the language of ethics all too easily gets caught up in its own quagmires of increasingly banal controversies – Is benignity rule-based (deontological) or outcome-based (consequentialist)? Is it somehow tied to a state’s character (virtue ethical)? These controversies then lead one straight down the path towards even more banal epistemological controversies – Can a state know enough to be moral? Here I propose to keep our sights firmly on benign hegemony as a discrete phenomenon. This means we commit neither to it as a concept, nor to it as an object, as the political theorist is wont to do. A conceptual commitment to benign hegemony leads us to fruitless analyses, meanwhile an objective commitment to benign hegemony compels us to locate specific examples of benign hegemony and to describe them as a bundle of observable qualities. This is likely to result in counterexamples, theoretical superficiality, and all manners of empirical controversies that are by no means easier to resolve than their conceptual counterparts.

Before I am charged with intellectual timidity – as all I am doing seems to be just avoiding controversies for as much as I can – I am going to brave a more audacious proposal: What should interest us, since we are going to encounter and invoke benign hegemony in discourse, is the being of benign hegemony. By this I mean a certain access to this phenomenon which passes through, and is hence validated by, our individual experiences. Now why should I care more about this than the meaning of “benign hegemony” or certain examples of the notion? Well, for one, when I recall my first impressions of various states, either they come up as a kind of void, because I simply do not know enough about these states to have formed any sort of affect towards them, or they take on valence that ranges from warmly positive to cautiously apprehensive. For sure I can competently name countries, or point some of them out on a map, but the behaviour of states – even to international relational theorists who study it for a living – is not relatable as a dialogical other. I cannot point to a single instance of a “good” or “bad” interaction with Japan as a state actor beyond my one time of travelling to Tokyo and realising that everywhere I went people were whispery and exceedingly wary of outsiders. But my experiences notwithstanding I cannot hold together in my mind a coherent impression which in any way resembles a moral feeling towards any state – even China where I came from. For those who study states, what has probably stood in for their impressions of their objects of endless fascination would be the smell of library books, a certain sensation of fatigue or satiation that awaits those who are exposed to certain terms for a bit too long, or even the average luminosity of their supervisors’ office. The point here being – what is exhaustive of the “stuff” we bring to discussions, be they academic or dinner-table, regarding benign hegemony, will be first and foremost a style of approaching the notion. This style is in turn developed through however much time we have spent around the notion, or around other notions related to it. The being of benign hegemony accommodates the subjectivity of those who care to learn about it, by existing as a certain schema that one takes up consciously when uttering the phrase “benign hegemony.”

Being then, unlike a concept or an object, is not so easily fixed in place. Both the question of what and the question of where target a kind of location. The former targets a location in a conceptual space whereas the latter targets a location in a geometrical space. In this we radicalise a Heideggarian understanding of Being to be applied to what is conventionally considered a political notion. The being of benign hegemony is an opening that invites phenomenological descriptions. In simpler terms, to those who are curious enough to look into this, the notion must first be opened up before anything else can be said about it. To unpick what “benign hegemony” means, or to attempt to (pro)offer examples or counterexamples of it, are merely some of the ways in which one can approach the notion. Even people attempting these will still have their own comportments within the philosophical and scientific institutions that serve as supposedly “clean” laboratories for unadulterated investigations, except the philosophers’ and the scientists’ subjectivities will never make it to the paper proper because it is unauditable. What I want to accomplish by the end of the post is just a set of descriptions which keeps open the discussion for as long as possible without collapsing the investigation into some mundane version of an -ism, or some causal factor that still needs weighing against a whole basket of the same. My blog post will always be subjective insofar as I am the person writing it. I do not take this to be a prima facie negative.

The futility of a bare conceptual or objective method can be easily intuited. If I play God for a moment and “keep the objective space constant,” then what I end up with is an arbitrary conceptual space that tells me next to nothing about the concept (without projecting the conceptual space onto another one equally as arbitrary), or its relationship with its geometry. For example, if we take the geographical Europe as a constant hegemon that could be plausibly described as “benign”, and compare the Jus publicum europaeum with the “halfway” economic hegemony that Europe exercised post-WWII via differential bilateralism, we find that we are unable to validly compare one form of benign hegemony (principle of sovereignty, balance of power) with the other (defensive realism, moral leadership) without anachronistically projecting both forms of benign hegemony onto a value plane which conforms to our 21st century standards. Martti Koskenniemi argues convincingly in Peace of Utrecht (1713) and the “Crisis” of European Conscience that the 18th century balance of power was nothing but a cold Enlightenment platitude to foil over the rampant moral transgressions of the era (total warfare, slavery, mercantilism). Meanwhile the role the European Union plays in the Mediterranean and north- and sub-Saharan Africa, e.g., economically inducing partners to “embrace” the rule of law and human rights, enlargement, and foreign investments, could not have been achieved without some measure of centralisation, a notion proposed by Fénelon in the 17th century only to be endlessly derided as utopian by thinkers such as Voltaire, Leibniz and Kant. The coherence of benignity is irretrievable amidst the noise of history. Furthermore, it is unclear which Europes are actually responsible (if at all) for the two respective forms of benign hegemony, given until Versailles the whole region from a developmental perspective was still deeply fragmented: On the one hand you have the continental powers which were still dynastic and to a large extent absolutist, and in Britain there was parliamentarism, the birth of public finance, the blue-water strategy, and the industrial revolution. Differential development was the norm until convergence was achieved by the raw destructive power of WWI. The objective space cannot simply be “kept constant” without significantly distorting the resultant analysis. Why are we comparing two largely different political systems when Europe pre-Versailles had in some ways more in common with the Warring States in imperial China than with modern Europe?

This problem recurs even if we take the opposite approach, and adopt a bare objective method, by “keeping the conceptual space constant.” Consider the following typology, which occurs in Sandra Destradi’s Regional powers and their strategies – empire, hegemony, and leadership:

Legitimising / Method	Hard-realist	Rationalist	Post-structuralist
Legitimising	/	./	Discursive hegemony
Non-legitimising	Might makes right	Defensive Offensive	Discursive hegemony

The table maps out the terrain of hegemony as a notion along two axis – the positive axis of method (Does the hegemon rely on force, mutual-interest, or intersubjective consensus?), and the normative axis of legitimacy (Is the hegemon’s authority legitimised by its method?) The result is a neat typology wherein various existing international theories on hegemony fall into place. Various hegemonic stability theories (which argue that the role of hegemons is primarily the provision of public goods, such as developmental aid, institutional know-how, and military support, in the international economy), power transition theories (which argue that the role of the hegemon is primarily the provision of private goods to allies) and rule-based international orders can be seen as describing defensive, non-legitimising and rationalist forms of hegemony. Meanwhile advantage theories which argue that hegemons are strategic affiliates who open up access to markets and new material in exchange for weaker states’ acquiescence to their ideological diffusion, describe what appears to be a form of offensive, non-legitimising and rationalist hegemony. Discursive hegemonies cover a wide range of possible scenarios, complex socialisation processes (e.g., diplomacy, cultural exchanges) can redefine weaker states’ national interests in terms of the hegemon’s ideology, or states can form overlays due to a general perception of a more urgent external threat. These forms of hegemony are then legitimising and broadly post-structuralist due to their more ad hoc nature.

Whilst it is tempting to believe that developing a response to the conceptual question represents some kind of major progress in our understanding of hegemony as a notion, I maintain that we do not really know what any of these categories entails, or whether to place a particular situation within any one of these categories, until we have already made up our minds about the valence of the various examples along the two axis. The Belt and Road Initiative is consensus-forming for some, third-world debt trap for others. The choice of this example is not at all gratuitous, as it raises the spectre of the conceptual space which is believed to be settled. China as a state actor is not the same as its foreign policy. An argument is often made that China is a benign hegemon even if the room exists to critique the Belt and Road Initiative on its own metric of success (co-prosperity, regional stability, logistical inter-connectedness). If the actor and the policy come apart, does this not expose a fault line, or an extra dimension, even within the conceptual space thought foreclosed from further discussion? To add to the complexity of the issue, there are many international actors with hegemonic influence – the institution of international law and its various supra-national courts, the United Nations, Latin America as a region pre-Trump – which do not coincide with sovereign states. This means potentially there is nothing to legitimise, or there is no coherent method in the entity’s acquisition of influence. The two axis would appear insufficient in capturing what it is about these entities that make them hegemonic. Often times it will be tied to a geographical factor – the global south is more likely to defend international law in order to counterbalance the realpolitik of more power nations for example – which the imposition of an a priori conceptual typology simply treats as data or facts without any further signification.

To sum up, the reason why we need to describe the being of benign hegemony, and not simply to develop a workable concept or to describe it as a propertied object, is because neither a conceptual nor an objective account of the notion takes into consideration the notion’s very endogeny – the necessarily contingent character of each hegemon as a dynamic what/where pair open to change as time. If we want to invoke power in our understanding of a related issue, e.g., climate change, ongoing wars, history, what would benefit us is exactly a kind of historicised understanding of power which is both motivated by our capacity to understand it, and motivating to any further discourse in which we seek to thematise power for some other purpose.

Part I: A complex being of hegemony as a horizon

Elsewhere I have argued that the notion of a rogue state is perceptual. States are “rogued” into being through an optics of sustained unlikeability. Are benign hegemons also intersubjectively constituted?

To start, I will note that intersubjective constitution requires two states: (1) a pre-constitution state, and (2) a post-constitution state. The passage from (1) to (2) is itself horizonal. But history does not annihilate the past, it carries the past with it into the future. A rogue state which has always been rogue does not have to rewrite its histories, or revise their self-perceptions. All it has to do is stay as it is and weather unique situational challenges which come with being disliked on the world stage. In other words, a forever narrative forms around rogue states regarding their receptivity towards international norms, but not necessary regarding their essential character. After all, a large part of a typical rogue state “arc” is just its rehabilitation into the international order, or at least the vain hope that it can ever be a part of something which never existed to accommodate it in the first place.

Now contrast this to how we understand hegemons. Leaders are not situated in a horizon sandwiched between cooperative partner and rogue troubledoer. The power exercised by hegemons is recognised (perhaps retroactively) as a kind of has-always-been. In other words, hegemony is more naturalised than rougueness, because it targets the essential character of leadership, and not a specific kind of behaviour. Why is this the case? One reason could be because it aids the accumulation of power. Dial back to times of antiquity and one finds a Roman triumphalism that attempts to tie an insatiable desire for conquest to an eternal law, with all the conceit in between entirely forgotten. Machiavelli in Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius has this to say about the deceit deployed by the Romans in their expansion:

“Of all the methods…it was [deceit] of which the Romans made use most frequently; and during more than four and a half centuries they thus harassed their neighbours with constant incursions, battles, and depredations, and then by means of treaties obtained all possible advantages over them…And they always came back to this system, although they tried all the others, which they found more perilous and less advantageous. For a regular siege involves time and expense; an open assault is doubtful and fraught with danger, and the employment of fraud or conspiracy is most uncertain in its results”

p.393, Discourses

In Of Empire, Francis Bacon picked up on this positivist dimension of Roman conquest as well. In his account of Roman history, any provocation the Romans acknowledged would always be framed as an infringement of depersonalised, incontestable and legalistic principles. The necessity or prudence of Rome’s imperialistic pursuits is grounded not by a general perception of Roman greatness but by the dissolution of this perception altogether. Rome as an arbiter of justice, something which follows from its role as a regional hegemon, is affirmed without any due regard to the path that she took in getting to that role. It is as if due to some imperceptible episode Rome became an atmospheric hegemon which has always been there. For sure, one can always make the case that Rome conferred those it subjugated, such as the Volsci, the Tusculans and the Sabines, with standing. Thus, establishing quid pro quo. However, that which is in Rome’s power to give is not necessarily Rome’s to begin with. And like any other hegemon in the world, Rome benefits from a historical amnesia of its beginning. Its perception erased, leaving behind only a normative order bending to the will of the Roman emperor.

A more contemporary example, oddly enough, can be found in Brazil. In Consensual Hegemony – Theorizing Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War, Sean W. Burges makes the following comment about Brazil’s role in Latin America:

“The reality in Brazilian foreign policy is that power was rarely directly applied or explicitly visible; influence was instead sought by disseminating ideas or by attempting to create situations where it became implicitly too costly for other countries to deviate extensively from the Brazilian position. The coercive element is implicit, coming in the costs and lost opportunities attendant on exclusion from the project.”

p.66, Burges (2008)

The argument is that Brazil’s hegemony stems from its position as the champion of the principle of sovereignty and the facilitator of regional economic cooperation. These are relatively uncontentious values and so cost very little to defend. By working to create various dependencies, e.g., energy, trade, and diplomatic, Brazil is able to secure a central, albeit invisible role, in the Latin American region. Not only was it able to maintain relationships with successive regimes in more tumultuous states such as Peru and Ecuador, it was also able to resist American influence using the soft power that a more self-sufficient Latin America engenders. The notion that Brazil simply stands for common sense, and is itself not a hegemon, paradoxically gives it massive leverage in the region.

A more enactive approach to hegemony that relies on an intersubjective process of co-constitution between leader and follower also becomes the more unconvincing the farther we advance towards limit cases of empire or domination. When Britain took over the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the Spanish empire in the early 18th century, or when the Soviet Union sent troops into Prague to quell dissident voices, the visual signification of these events – one transactional and one political – creates a situation. A situation does not give a clear leader, but merely creates opportunities for various types of action. It would not be until racism became the official doctrine of the British Empire and the industrial revolution propelled it to pre-eminence that British power, as something which was able to settle the narrative and blend into the background, became hegemonic. And in the case of the Soviet Union, its hegemony was never fully accomplished due to the perceptual character of its relationship with the various satellites. Hungary was keenly aware of its role in the Eastern bloc relative to Czechoslovakia’s. Therefore when the failure of the planned model became inevitable, the political fallout arrived a decade later in Czechoslovakia. That there was struggle at all, in Hegelian terms, preserves the master-slave dialectic, and ensures that hegemony will forever be visible and hence unattainable – just over there.

To uncover hegemony, and hopefully also of a benign sort, then, requires piercing the atmosphere of power, and remaining staunchly silent on the exercise of power. This apparently paradoxical dynamic (to be overpowered is to fail to see that it is so) afflicts even balance of power theories, a potential riposte to our account for contributing nothing new to the discussion. A balance of power theorist can be descriptive (analysing balance of power as a theoretical construct) or they can be prescriptive (advocating for balance of power as a policy goal). Either way, power is material and visible, and subject to either analytic or pragmatic constraints. However, we can see that power dynamics are inherent to, and thus structures, any given balance of power. Descriptivists are caught up entirely in the dynamic, and so again and again run into difficulties explaining why powers ought to be balanced but never are. The true power of the world, being invisible, forever out of its grasp. For some time now, it is believed that technological change would bring about true plurality. There is even talk now about a more proactive global south that will fill in the vacuum a more roughish America left behind. It is hard to see how all this balances in any way, given that weaker states have alternative means of leaving an impact – whether it is Iran resisting the recent American attacks by restricting the Strait of Hormuz, or in a lesser known manner, Congo hamstringing environmental conservatism that it pays lip service to. Smaller states can affect, or even dictate, the international agenda as much as larger states.

On the flipside, it is unclear that power will ever be theoretically balanced to an equilibrium. A descriptivist would have us believe that at some point along a state’s expansion, it will come to realise the benefits of being a middle power. However, this is not necessarily true. Whilst there are certainly examples of this (modern Britain comes to mind), expansionist or even imperialist ambitions are sometimes best served not by curbing expansion, but by a bit of political theatre. Shekhar Sumit in A Jurisprudential Understanding of the Hegemonic World’s Superpower surveys a variety of strategies that America adopts to justify its exploitative practices. One means is to “retreat” to the role of private individual whenever intervention becomes costly. It is easy to throw the principle of sovereignty under the bus when vying for Venezuelan oil, and to revert back to its staunchest supporter when it concerns one’s own territorial integrity. But this practice of masquerading power, thereby upsetting any theoretical balance of power, is nothing new. Sumit generalises this tendency to include most developed nations which are often reluctant to “reveal their technological secrets and in turn lose their monopoly over industrial processes.” It might just be that I am adopting an overly French (équilibre des puissances) conception of what descriptive balance looks like, whereas the British conception is happier with some measure of domination. But if descriptive balance of power accommodates eternal superpowers without securing their hegemonies, then like any empirical account of things, it satisfices and whether one is happy with an account such as this reduces to individual preference.

What of prescriptive balance of power theories? One issue is that they unduly limit the scope of a nation’s foreign policy. It is almost a truism to say that a state acts against other states. But as we shall go on to describe, policy based on marginal changes in a state’s relative power to another is often susceptible to miscalculations and overestimations. There are other considerations that go into a foreign policy. To want to preserve standing is not a uniquely balance-of-power notion. The worry here is that balance of power signifies this with a model that does not enter consciously into how we think about state behaviour, and so is essentially a model that overfits and underexplains.

To conclude let us return to the power dynamic on the world stage. Previously we have described it as “atmospheric” and “invisible.” Let us now pin down this notion with greater precision. What we are dealing with here is a horizon, more specifically, a particular view of and from power which actively represses the raw exercise of power. Powerful entities are not doing anything to others that they are not already doing in a vacuum. Make no mistake, in the existence of power dynamics as such, intersubjectivity is still an incredibly pertinent dimension, and hence we can distinguish between rogue states from normal states, developed states from failed states. Nevertheless, to appreciate hegemony and from a concrete grasp of hegemonic behaviour, as a finite human being such as you and I, the notion itself must be rendered complex by becoming this opening from which a honest description of how power behaves can emerge. Only then can one begin to get a sense of whether this behaviour is benign or not. It may even turn out that benignity is a poor metric to measure behaviour but I am getting ahead of myself by making such a suggestion at this point. What my account strives for is not unlike what some realist accounts strive for, which are descriptions of power and its exercise on its own terms unmediated by the demands of a dialogical other. This is not to say that any such other, e.g., religion, strategy, institutions, material distribution, etc. is unimportant, merely that treating them will get us farther from grasping hegemony itself. This we do not want.

Part II: Dwelling in the complex being of hegemony and various strange entities

The next step we are going to take will involve a reorientation in thinking towards entities that scale differently from humans or ordinary consciousnesses. When I speak to another human being, coordinate my movements with my neighbour’s cat, or interact with an object right in front of me, my body enters into a situational challenge for which there exists a solution that I intuit and enact. Pragmatics allows me to map out the contours of the situation via living it. And in so doing, the problem of the dialogical other is subsumed under the problem of human action. If I can act, then there is a dialogical other. It feels almost silly and certainly pedantic to insist that despite me so acting there is still no dialogical other, or that the dialogical other is still somehow threatened with non-existence as some kind of metaphysical Damocles’ sword.

One way to bridge the self-world gap when one moves from the dialogical other to “larger” entities such as states, is to distinguish between what is bodily present and what is co-present in the world: I can see the manifestations of power and the sources of power at the same time if I accept that the latter stick to the back- or under-side of the former like a chewing gum. And in many ways, this is not merely a fancy phenomenological framing of our experiences of the social world, but a necessary one as well. Hegemonies are lived, every day, every moment, in a million different ways, by billions of people: I feel bored, I open my Chinese-manufactured Apple laptop, I open a tab on Safari engineered by people out of sight, and I type in a URL that is composed of letters I reintend from ancient memories of an English language education. Then YouTube pops up, and the network of interweaving intentionalities is complexified by yet a further embodied situation of me “clicking on” images, images that signify so much more than what thumbnail creators had in mind. At the core of this experience is an organising principle – the flow of time – that makes every single perception appear inevitable. Every and anything I can consciously thematise leaves something out to be made aware of, and in a lot of ways, hegemonies like this are more pertinent to our day-to-day lives than say the United States’ and China’s chokehold on the world.

But notice how a perception of hegemony as such does not actually target hegemony as much as it explicates a general perception. The generality is deepened, or signified by, the overtly political. And this transition can be quite imperceptible as well, as one moment I am just munching on toast being keenly aware of an ulcer in my mouth, and the next I ponder on the origins of the food I consume and all the hands and labour and sweat and makes it possible in the first place. The sting on my inner mouth becomes the sharpness, acuity, or mercilessness of the capitalist grind mill. Notice however, that a general perception forgets the moment before it is fulfilled. Before I can visualise, or even poetically or metaphorically describe exploitation in terms that are eligible to those who are prone to chronic pains, and just human suffering in general, I must have undergone an aporia, or a sustained period of pure discomfort. The imperceptibility of the transition between one horizon and another simply means that when I attempt to recall or describe this experience, I get a nothing, or as already described at the beginning of this post, a kind of void. It is a position from which we are beckoned away, because dwelling there engenders a kind of paralysis, or even aphonia, in which our ability to perceive and to describe what we perceive becomes something we have but do not know how to accomplish. My proposal then, is that for entities of a certain scale, states and the power they wield included, our perception of them is sharpened from this position of radical uncertainty. If we are able to hold ourselves there, then we overcome the phenomenological necessity of infusing our subjective narratives into the world which only goes towards fulfilling a general perception already constituted. Instead what will become describable will be a certain kind of capacity to act which remains necessarily contingent, never quite fully actualised.

The peculiarity of this method is only truly prejudicial to itself if the method is discussed or evaluated in the abstract. So let us put it into practice post haste:

Here I attempt to engage with a notion which is hegemony. I find that either I have nothing to say about it, or what I have to say is too closely intertwined with the context from which these utterances are made to constitute a complex being of, or a genuine experiential access to, hegemony (by this I mean utterances tend to locate concepts or objects within a situation). So I turn towards this confounding experience itself and I am instantly able to exclude certain knowledge which I can easily withhold from my understanding of hegemony: For one, I do not have to buy into the distinction between global and regional hegemonies, even though I might know the difference between Zimbabwe and China in terms of their material power relative to their respective neighbours. I also do not have to subscribe to a definition of hegemony based on the comparative advantage a state holds relative to its neighbours or other states, even though I know that a case can be made for the difference between Russia and China in terms of the amount of dependencies they possess as leverage. These knowledge I possess, which takes the forms of possible inference I could draw from further data, is something hegemony, as something I attempt to experience, expressly suppresses. If I motivate myself to argue for any of these theses, I will have to account for my motivations for doing so which already brings me beyond the being of hegemony.

Does the foregoing means that data-driven and empirical research on hegemonies is entirely fruitless? No. It simply means that more care needs to go into sourcing data points if empiricists truly wish to capture faithfully the phenomena they purport to study. Crude metrics such as a country’s GDP, or its trade data with partners, gives us little insight into what kind of hegemonic influence it has over what area. Whilst we do not want to buy into the first thing that comes to mind, e.g., hegemony is how we live it in day-to-day life, we must also guard against the artifice of models and frames which do not take into account the social scientist’s subjectivity in the equation. This is why the test is not what is knowable from inference, but what is had from the perspective of one who is still ignorant. This latter I do not have to account for, since what I have is also an I-can, or a motricity, which is binary (factive) but not bivalent (justifiable): One thing hegemonies have is their capacity to be labelled as such. We have already discussed why it is often not in their interests to be labelled as hegemonic. This is not an empirical generalisation based on some correlation between ideological codification and regime longevity, but a feature of our understanding of hegemony. I can label hegemonies, and I can also not, this makes hegemonies binary. However, this does not make them bivalent as it is not either true, or false, that hegemonies are labelled, given that they can be. I might know whether it is appropriate to label hegemonies under certain data contexts, but this knowledge has nothing to do with my capacity to do so. In this hegemonies resemble other “large” constellations or network entities, such as celebrities, brands, cultures and psychologies. Our capacity to label them is much more certain than our knowledge of them. This fundamentally reorients any empirical question one can raise from a version of “How can we locate hegemonies from measurements of states’ self-labelling?” to something more specific, such as “Are states less willing to self-label as hegemonies more likely to accumulate significance power?” This aligns with realism’s priority of examining political gamesmanship as something organic, something worth looking at on its own terms.

What are some other things that hegemonies have as a horizon with nothing sensible to have been known about them? I am going to list a few below. This is not meant as an exhaustive list and I always stand corrected:

Themes (signified as various desires) – What happens when I have no acquaintance with something? I can always just thematise it. The network of intentionalities that is constantly structuring can be broadly characterised as having a theme. The terminology may vary from domain to domain. When it comes to music we designate it as “having a genre,” or “having a vibe.” In my confrontation with hegemonies, or states in general, I can always designate them with a kind of aboutness. This is not the same as saying that hegemonies have various objective properties because here all I have is an encounter and its contours sketched out by a subjective capacity to signify. The kinds of stories I can tell about hegemonies are numerous. Signification can, and usually for many, occur along the lines of various desires. Hegemonies desire to be first – the first to industrialise Europe in the late 19th century, the first to harness the full power of DOTCOM in the late 1990s, and the first to launch general-purpose AI. They also desire to be “still,” “significant,” and “the one to close the deal on history.” Charles V, Florentine republicanism, Jacksonian America – history is full of endings proclaimed by “great men”. Hegemonies might also desire continued relevance, as prolonged inaction or non-interference could result in a kind of self-perceived reputational damage. Louis XIV’s overtures against the Grand Alliance between Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Holy Roman Empire, and Russia’s campaigns in Crimea and Ukraine against the European Union and NATO in general were both rationalised as necessary and pre-emptive responses befitting great nations when pressed by aggressors. Finally hegemonies almost always desire autonomy. Externally installed hegemons will always break ranks. Post WWII Japan took just 30 years before it started to threaten America’s interest in Asia, and both Saudi Arabia and Isreal have proven to be unreliable American proxies in the middle East by engaging with unilateralism whenever it suits their interests. Only half of what is said here belongs to my capacity to thematise hegemonies. Yet the other half is all too often mistaken for genuine insight. If I can thematise hegemonies as desiring such and such, this becomes the starting point, and not the end point of any further empirical investigations. In other words, data should not be used to establish any of these desires, rather, desiring states should be clustered with an open mind and an open algorithm – Does the data tend towards singularity, or plurality? What implications does this have on policy, diplomacy, and national strategic planning?

Trajectories (signified imperfectly as institutions or class struggles) – Even should a thing afford no understanding, I may still gear into it, and possess a geometry of its existence in so doing. A similar approach is often adopted in developmental psychology, complexity economics and chaos mathematics. Look closer and I discover in hegemonies various anchors that I can grip onto to broadly describe what it is that I am dealing with. The most immediate anchor is a kind of repulsion, or brute noticeability. Hegemonies are not visible, but they cannot be ignored either. Like a schizophrenic whisper, it presents me with a choice – Do I accept it or do I reject it? My capacity to do so is then thematised as the various forms of hegemonies (e.g., coercion, overlaying, accumulation, path-dependent inevitability), each gesturing towards further intentionalities that enrich the overall figure of hegemonies as a trajectories. Do they end? As when institutions are installed to govern (think the Roman Senate or the great British joint-stock companies such as the East Indian Company)? Or when internal class dynamics, coupled with diseconomies of scale, put a hard limit on what is imaginable (think the ignominious end to the Mongol Empire)? The unignorability of hegemonies is factive in a way that our modelling of it is not. It is arguable that even a trajectorial framing is flying too close to substantial knowledge which has no place in a complex being of hegemony. Nevertheless, the starting point is clear: We want empirical questions to be raised with an austere metaphysics. Trajectories do not obey data, nor are they reconstituted by data. Instead data and trajectories are equimordial, and both come to embody the fundamental unignorability of the phenomenon. As for how creative the metric can get in expressing or signifying this, the sky is the only limit. My suspicion is that neither an institutionalist nor a structuralist account will be exhaustive if the theorist does not work into the geometry hegemonies’ capacity to vanish or disappear alongside the theorist’s capacity to ignore the unignorable. After all, this is how elimniativist accounts such as rational choice theories get entertained in the first place – as moments of hegemonies’ non-existence, or reduction to pure aggregation. In Part III I will propose a certain geometry of hegemonies that will potentially allow us to evaluate its benignity.

Illusions (signified as an eternity, immediacy or bokeh) – I previously described hegemonies, as opposed to rogue states, as having always been. The great depth of their existence is contrasted with an equally compelling intuition that all things must begin somewhere, and so hegemonies cannot really be atmospheric (as having infinite depth). This contradiction is part of what it takes to thematise an invisible horizon, and also the voidness which preoccupies when we think about states, or just about anything of a sufficiently large scale (think the universe, natality and mortality, destiny etc.), in a world. The forceful colonisation of time as an unbounded expansion of certain mass (e.g., capital in hegemonies, material in physics, oblivion in life, and possibilities in modality) results in a flattening of the world. What was previously, in a general perception, a messy but ever-forward motion of time, becomes a blob of everything there is to experience. It is a great trauma that is structured as an illusion, meaning the trauma is precisely the “impossible” encountering of a magnificent thing as a meagre being. There is a religiosity to it which Merleau-Ponty touches upon but quickly moves on to the articulation of what comes next as a general perception. If we linger in the religiosity for a moment longer, we see that it actively dissolves worldly boundaries. In a way it is an erosion of objectivity. Our words slur, commit mutiny, and conventional categories give way to an originary faith in their universal lack in validity. The lines between political hegemony, cultural hegemony, and sexual hegemony are therefore not at all clear in a complex being of hegemony. This facilities what in empiricist circles might be termed as “multi-modal” or “transversal” studies: Citizens in the Anglosphere can be part of a hegemony that transcends national borders. Artisanal traditions in rural Japan can contribute to a political hegemony that gives rise to more militant language in foreign policy. These “socio-cultural” factors are not to be weighed against more foundational “material” factors in a linear model. Rather, the endogeny of hegemonies requires qualitative descriptions of forces that may or may not be legible in a political or international relations parlance.

In summary, then, I encounter hegemonies as a bundle of phenomena that can be studied empirically, but only after I have excised from my “field of vision” an epistemology which seeks to justify itself along propositional lines. Instead, a firm grasp on hegemonic behaviour, one involving invisible power dynamics, requires precisely targeting certain capacities within ourselves to notice when a whole “hegemonic field” is “shifting,” and how we are during these moments of trauma. Our capacities pick up on signals during these moments do not contribute to familiar epistemological models aimed at building an informational picture of hegemonies, encoding such data points as their relative wealth, the types of institutions that embody them, or any “extraneous” factors which might shape them to be what they are. Instead, these capacities are factive and always in motion, already deployed, environed in a world where power is not just theoretically exercised, but actually operative. All we need to do is switch off general perception, and place our focus on the very invisibility or unapproachability of power.

Part III: Where is the benignity in hegemony?

At this juncture, two questions remain outstanding in order for my account to be somewhat coherent: (1) Does it still make sense to speak of a something which we are aware of as hegemonies? (2) Within this something, is benignity possible? The two questions are differentially motivated: (1) by those who are still dissatisfied with the above account of hegemony which is essentially a non-representational one, and (2) by those who want to get me to answer the question I first set out at the beginning of the post. It will turn out that the answer I give to these two questions will be one and the same.

Throughout my writing process, I have been dogged by my suspicion that the account given above will strike one as wildly implausible, if only on the grounds that it leaves nothing sound in its wake. It could almost seem like I am paring down our understanding of hegemonies so much that all that remains is just our capacity to invoke the notion, or notice that it exists. No epistemic gains are made from doing so, and so it is unclear why a conceptual or an objective account, as flawed as they may be, should not be preferred.

In Mikael Hörnqvist’s Machiavelli and Empire, Machiavelli was described as being confronted with a similar dilemmas when he was authoring The Prince: On the one hand, he had to renounced knowledge of what he was describing, perhaps for fear of reprisals from a prickly, recently returned-from-exile Medicean reader; on the other hand, he spoke with such conviction as he deftly navigated the highs and lows of Roman aggrandisement, that one cannot help but pay attention. But what is it? Did he know what he was talking about, in which case he was worth heeding; or did he not, in which case The Prince would be a complete waste of anyone’s time?

Before cynicism becomes us, let us hear what Machiavelli himself has to say on the nature of his discussion:

“In my desire…to offer to Your Highness some humble testimony of my devotion, I have been unable to find among my possessions anything which I hold so dear or esteem so highly as that knowledge of the deeds of great men which I have acquired through a long experience of modern events and a constant study of the past”

p.3, The Prince

“…it must be concluded that wise counsels, from whoever they come, must necessarily be due to the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince to the good counsels received”

p.89, ibid.

The grovelling tone notwithstanding, the two passages quoted clarifies the epistemic status of Machiavelli’s wisdom which is in no way internally inconsistent – He was drawing lessons from history, lessons that he attributed to actors beyond himself but would nonetheless be effective only if they are properly acted upon further to his particular manner of instruction. In other words, the knowledge resides outside of him but he is indispensable in its expression. The grovelling is as much towards the princely reader as it is towards himself as the conduit of knowledge. In Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty refers to the expressive act as an “ingratiation” of the expressive situation – If we are to “truly” express without having expression be contingent on another carrying our gestures forward, and avoid being hypocritical, then we would be forever silent.

What hegemony is under my account is therefore something which is necessarily beyond anything conceptual or objective that I can directly reflect or refract in the “mind of the reader” by composing a blogpost that targets them. Rather, my descriptions of hegemony constitute an ongoing project that is participated by all who engage it, or even those who are unaware of it by simply keeping the notion alive in discourse. As trite, or as unconvincing as it may sound, the beginning and end of any sort of philosophical inquiry whatsoever must necessarily stay vague. Otherwise my philosophy would have failed to remain true to its purported aim of contributing to the open exploration of a notion, and become instead a proclamation which has made up its own mind before it finishes, and ignores entirely the futility of such a foreclosure.

But more can be said about the exteriority of the phenomenological descriptions given in Part II: If I am the site at which an interpretation of the world stage is given, and all that can be given here is an account of hegemony’s sustained disappearance as my bare minimum capacity to say something about it qua a nonsensical entity, then clearly there is an interface which affords hegemony with describability. Here I propose that the horizonal trajectories I discover can be thematised not just as hegemonic institutions or class struggles, but also as a kind of public spectacle, akin to a public hanging, or a meteor shower. It enters as an unignorable signal with tangible rhetorical effects. My “acceptance” of the signal motivates and is of course motivated by these effects. There is an almost a quasi-ethical demand for those who notice hegemonies to treat them as more than a bundle of narratives because once one commits to reading state behaviour rhetorically, the question then becomes “What am I to make of this?” Public spectacle as the existential make of the being of hegemony is even more likely to be the case in this day and age where heads of state trade barbs over social media, and casually appear on podcasts freely opining about their take on the state of the world. Fast, instant and unmediated communication motivates the exercise of our capacity to treat supranational forces, and contingent events on the world stage, as directly bearing on us, compelling us to comport appropriately. But of course the downside of this that the significance of the deluge of signals we receive can be grossly overestimated. This afflicts both laymen and pundits alike.

Hegemony as public spectacle on the world stage – as a kind of trajectory which has its own vanishing point and terminal velocity – accommodates the other facets of a complex being of hegemony. It also allows us to answer question (2) above by asking, in this public spectacle, does benignity ever “shine through?”, even as an echo of rhetoric?

Aristotle distinguishes between logos, ethos and pathos in rhetoric. To persuade one can resort to reasons, to character or to emotional manipulation. We already rejected the anthropomorphisation of states as bearers of knowledge, and this includes the know-how for making rhetorical moves. Instead what we want to know is whether a specific public spectacle can be signified by a benign argument, a benign character, or a benign affect.

A event is never signified by an argument. A pre-text for war is not the event itself. The gap between what confers an event with sense and its justification is phenomenologically too wide to be bridged. Consider powers that self-represented as good – eventually words give way to deeds and the former ossify into mere formalities: The Christendom which promised security and tranquility under one banner was gradually eroded until nothing remained of it but an empty Latin clause perfunctorily included in settlements and treaties in war-torn 17th and 18th century Europe. Pax Americana had been the talk of the century ever since the Clinton and Bush eras until it came to a blistering close with Mark Carney’s speech in Davos which could very well be an epochal one. Nowadays ‘rule-based international order,’ like ‘generative AI,’ is nothing but a high-traffic search term propagated by journalists and podcasters that invoke the phrase only to add to its vacuousness in discourse.

I have already confessed to not being able to coherently imagine a state as a dialogical other, the same difficulty insists whenever I try to imagine a public spectacle as evincing a character by itself. Take the recent Spanish position on the war in Iran for example. Is Sánchez’s appearance on my news feed giving me an impression that Spain is taking the lead, or being hegemonic, in championing international law? I close my eyes and try to remember what it had felt like. Unfortunately, I feel the same void as when I try to remember my impression of Spain. I know what the right thing to say here is, but what I actually have is the same ambiguous hold over a situation which has no character in itself. If we think about the range of entities that can have a character, personified states for instance, even an account relying on them (the existence of which I cannot vouch for) is getting more and more obsolete by the minute. In a lot of ways history is going backwards. The principle of sovereignty, which marked a high watershed of human political progress when it was codified in the 1600s, is gradually being rolled back by the excesses of billionaires, American adventurism, and the emergence of generative AI. Soon we will be talking about people and chatbots whose actions we disagree with. But our character assessment will unlikely target states, as is often assumed in international relations.

The last of the three rhetorical effects is the one that I believe the most likely signification through which benign hegemony as a notion is fulfilled. Whilst we are unlikely to grasp the being of a benign hegemon by having a coherent impression of a benign public statement or a benign state, the feeling that we are in good hands is common among nationalists and patriots across the world. Mencius, the second-most famous Confucius philosopher, developed a theory of humane authority which seeks to invoke a beneficent affect in the ruled. Similarly, Hegel in Philosophy of Right develops a dialectical theory of conscience as the transcendence of the good (pursuing the correct values) and the right (adhering to the correct rules). Both locate moral authority in a state of harmony. In a lot of ways then, benign hegemony is total submission to an invisible authority which is probably the result of excellent governance but not necessarily. A state can refuse to don the cap of benignity but still be talked about favourably, obstacles in life can be lived in bliss and contentment even if one’s range of options is unjustly limited by their class, race and biology.

Conclusion: The sublimity of power as trust-in-the-world

It might strike a lot of readers as odd – where we have left things – benign hegemony as it appears now being this entirely optional and contingent call to action – to be happy with something once we have accepted it and to attribute this happiness to this thing we have accepted. This can be understood as a sublimation of power, a taking up of power from the standpoint of radical ignorance and uncertainty. I do not understand what has authority over me, I hardly have a coherent impression of it, and yet I insist on voluntarily locating what can be good about it. I am like a wandering stray cat that stumbled into a loving house and just decided to lounge there for the rest of my life, not knowing what it means to the host family, or in the grander scheme of things.

At the beginning of the research process, I was thoroughly immersed in the world of Machiavelli. It is a turbulent world full of zero-sum games and ruthless pursuits of power and domination. The phenomenologically contingent being in which he places his trust, which also supplies him with endless wisdom into human nature and the beginning of virtue in situations where being good and just seems impossible, is an impetuous one. He often speaks of man’s destiny to master Fortune even though she remains one step ahead always. What is being committed to, then, is not only a complexity that vastly outstrips our ability to comprehend it, but also the perennial struggle to rise up to the challenge, and locate what is beneficent in this complexity. This commitment for me exemplifies a kind of trust in ontological complexities that, ironically, was endorsed by a militarily-minded thinker who famously liked to just get his hands dirty. I suppose there is a lesson to be learnt here, which is to truly sublimate power and take the form of a harmonious and conscientious being, one must harbour tremendous trust in the process. And what is a man of action if not a man who is also trusting?