PUTIN: HEGEMONY AND DOMINATION *

by Fernando Mires (March 11, 2022) **

[Nos hemos permitido traducir (sin autorización) al inglés este artículo indispensable de Fernando Mires sobre la diferencia entre hegemonía y dominación como conceptos clave para entender la invasión militar de Putin a Ucrania (y su consecuente derrota política hegemónica a nivel internacional), una diferencia que pareciera no captan algunos connotados comentaristas (influencers) de estos crímenes de guerra en curso...]

If we are to use the concept of hegemony in political language, we cannot do so without mentioning Antonio Gramsci. It is his central concept, the axis where he articulates his entire conception of politics. Hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, cannot in turn be explained without using the word "consensus" which, in order to be such, has to emerge from differences. There can be no hegemony without differences, and this is what links the concept of hegemony to politics.

1.

Politics is a struggle for power. On this point, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt were right, each in his own way. But they both failed to add the two key words: hegemonic power. Without an appeal to the hegemonic, the struggle for power ceases to be political. Much closer to Gramsci than to the two authors cited above, Hannah Arendt differentiated between power - a political concept for her - and violence - an anti-political concept. According to Arendt, where violence reigns there is no struggle for power.

The use of violence - and we are inevitably thinking of the most violent being of our era: Vladimir Putin - is the negation of politics. Expressed in Gramscian terms, in the struggle for power there is a hegemonic struggle between politics and violence. Where violence reigns, politics disappears. This is what Arendt emphasized.

According to Gramsci, it is a matter of opposing the power of politics to the power of violence. This is the reason that led Ernesto Laclau to discuss the impure (diffuse, opaque) character of hegemony. To be hegemonic, or leading, politics needs to be orchestrated, and its musicality has to emerge from diverse instruments. Without heterogeneity and antagonism, there is no politics. Democracy, seen from this perspective, is the field of encounter and confrontation between diverse demands, interests and ideals, and for this to take place, it needs institutions, among them those of the representatives and those of the represented. In other words: politics, even without parliaments, must be parliamentary (spoken, discursed, grammatised). This is how Gramsci led us to think about the difference between the ruling class and the dominant class. Democratic politics would be the struggle for leadership (hegemony) and not domination. The former is the aim of the political, the latter of the military.

2.

The social struggle, as understood by Gramsci, is not a brutal confrontation but, above all, a cultural struggle. Without cultural hegemony there can be no political hegemony, this is how his dictum can be summed up. However, as he did not live in the era of globality, his references only pointed to the internal politics of each nation. It was an American political scientist and politician, Joseph Nye jr., advisor to Clinton and Obama, who would explicitly attempt to extend the Gramscian concept of hegemony to the plane of international confrontation.

Nye developed his well-known theory of "soft power" as opposed to "hard" power based on military domination. Needless to say perhaps, Nye's writings were warnings and then consequences of the military and anti-political atrocities committed by Bush Jr, especially in Iraq. Thanks to Bush Jr. the US lost enormous hegemonic (deterrent) power over vast areas of the globe. Today, Joe Biden is trying to regain it, with difficulty.

In his most popular book The future of Power (2011) Joseph Nye posits that soft (or hegemonic) power is a complicated instrument: first, many of its vital resources are outside the control of governments and, second, it tends to "work indirectly by shaping the environment for policy, and sometimes takes years to produce expected results". The book identifies three broad categories of soft power: "culture", "values" and "politics". Addressing the first point, that of culture, Nye contradicts Samuel Huntington who sees between cultures only a clash or collision. According to Nye, the cultural struggle - here he draws on Gramsci - takes place through persuasion, argument, and convincing.

Like Gramsci, Nye tries to return international politics to its original Greek conception: verbal antagonism, no longer in the public square but in the space of the global polis, virtual and real at the same time. Politics must be convincing, if not for all, then for the majority. In this sense, the 141 nations at the UN that condemned the aggression against Ukraine inflicted on Putin one of the most thunderous political defeats that any ruler in the history of international politics has ever experienced. A political defeat that has not dampened the despot's fury at the martyred Ukrainian people. On the contrary, it seems to have fueled it. That is why it has been written so often that not despite, but because of Putin's likely military victory in Ukraine, he will only win a moral, cultural and political defeat whose enormous consequences are still hard to mention.

It would certainly not be the first time that a victory of dominance over hegemony resulted in a heavy political defeat. In Sparta's wars against Athens, Sparta annihilated Athens. But who talks about Sparta today? The ideas of Athens, on the other hand, illuminate the cultural horizon of all times.

Joseph Nye, discovered where the West's main strength lies: in its ability to hegemonize. The very waves of migration to Europe prove it: which migrants want to go to Russia? Naturally, the vast majority are driven by the possibility of prosperity, but between doing so freely or not, they choose the former. The West remains, whether it wants to or not, a shining beacon that attracts young Muslims, Chinese, Russians and others. That is why the West is a danger to autocracies and dictatorships. As West Germany was for East Germany. As democratic and prosperous Ukraine was and is to militarized and despotic Russia.

3.

China or Russia do not fear the economy, or even the armies of the West, but they do fear the promise of freedom offered by the West. The West, which in political terms is not a geographical point but the signifier that links all nations where political plurality, freedom of thought, division of powers, and the rule of law prevail. In short: democracy.

Democracy, for criminals like Putin - in this he agrees with the most fundamentalist tendencies of Islam - is obscene. On that point, a faithful believer in the most conservative Christianity, that of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin has launched an anti-democratic crusade against the West. Ukraine is to be punished for its Westernness, that is, for not wanting to be Russian but for wanting to be Western.

Putin has become the standard-bearer of the anti-democratic counter-revolution of our time. He could even have become the hegemonic core of that counter-revolution. But that is no longer possible. Because Putin, by resorting to violence without politics against the Ukrainian people, has renounced hegemony, even among the countries that follow him. Between hegemony and domination, he has definitely chosen domination.

The particularity of Putin's domination had been, before the war in Ukraine, that of a hybrid power. To be sure, Putin falsified election results, persecuted or murdered dissidents, banned parties, and yet retained some forms of a democratic republic. But the war waged against the Ukrainian people has determined Putin's political defeat.

Outward violence has soon turned into inward violence. Russia's prisons are full of political prisoners. Freedom of opinion and freedom of the press no longer exist. Words like "war" and "invasion" have been outlawed. There was a self-coup in Russia and nobody wants to say so.

The impossibility of exerting hegemony outwards has invalidated Putin's hegemonic power inwards. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's dilemma was whether to be an autocracy or a democracy. After the invasion, Russia's dilemma is either to fall under military dictatorship or totalitarian domination. Most likely it will be more the former than the latter. In digital times it will be very difficult to exercise total control over minds as in Stalin's Russia. Putin does not even have a fundamentalist ideology like Marxist-Leninism. His ideological mentors, like Ivan Ilyin yesterday and Aleksandr Dugin today, are defenders of an atavistic, racist, patriarchal and nineteenth-century Slavism that nobody, excluding fascists (or Putinists, today they are the same thing), is attracted to in the West. In the end, everything indicates that only a new democratic revolution could save Putin's Russia. But for now this alternative is just wishful thinking. Let us say no more about it.

What is worth noting is that Putin's invasion of Ukraine has marked with deep lines the three geopolitical powers that will determine the history of the 21st century. China, as a technological and military economic power. Russia, as a military power. The West, as a hegemonic political power that does not renounce the military. The constant among these three powers is "the military".

We do not know if we are already in the third world war, as Noam Chomsky claims. So far Russia has lost the political war to the West and Putin, with an atomic bomb in each hand, is trying to win the military war by blackmail. The West, under these conditions, cannot give up, indeed it must increase the attraction of its hegemonic power. But this, however important and decisive it may be, cannot exclude its military defence. The Athens of today must not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the Spartans that beset it. The hegemony proposed yesterday by Gramsci and now by Nye, must also be defended with weapons. Unamuno's phrase, "you may win [vencer] but you will not convince [convencer]" is of no use in the midst of the war that Putin has declared on the West with his invasion of Ukraine. Today it is not just a question of convincing, but of winning.

Let us explain: we have said that there are two types of struggle, the struggle for hegemony and the struggle for domination. In the West, the former prevails. But that does not mean that in the struggle against anti-democratic powers, especially against a bloodthirsty ultra-nationalist like Putin, a scoundrel who excludes the political means of struggle, one should not defend oneself against domination. On the contrary. As Ecclesiastes (3.8) says "there is a time for peace, and there is a time for war". The important thing is not to confuse the times. Today we live in times of war.

4.

Liberal democracy cannot be liberal with its enemies when they, like Putin, have become existential enemies. In addition to military power, the West can count on an economic power that Putin does not have and a hegemonic political power that it will never have. Now, because of the predominance of the political over the anti-political, the West is in a position to agree occasionally with non-democratic nations. And it is clear that we are now talking about China, owner of immense economic and military power, but with a low hegemonic and/or political intensity.

The occasional agreement between the West and China is an alternative that cannot be lost sight of. Both China and the West have much to lose in a third world war. We will never be China's perpetual ally, and that is a good thing. But the political art, which the Chinese also know internationally, could and should lead to Putin's total global isolation. For the sake of the now immolated Ukraine. For the sake of China and the West. For the sake of Russia itself. And above all, for the sake of all the inhabitants of this land.

To put it in Gramscian terms, it is a matter of ensuring the hegemony of political peace over that of war, without the latter disappearing as a possibility. War - Clausewitz's phrase is still valid - is the continuation (but also the origin) of politics in other forms. But it is so in the same sense as death is the continuation of life in other forms. And this world, we must not forget, belongs to the living.

* From the Spanish original at: https://polisfmires.blogspot.com/2022/03/fernando-mires-putin-hegemonia-y.html

** Fernando Mires is a Chilean Prof. Emeritus at the University of Oldenburg

*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***