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)
***
