Knox Hegemony PDF

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22. Hegemony
Robert Knox
1. INTRODUCTION
In 1979, the General Assembly (GA) passed a curious resolution. In the ‘Inadmissibil-
ity of the policy of hegemonism in international relations’ resolution, the GA defined
hegemonism as a ‘manifestation of the policy of a State, or group of States, to control,
dominate and subjugate, politically, economically, ideologically or militarily, other
States, peoples or regions of the world’. Explicitly linking hegemonism to ‘imperial-
ism, colonialism, neo-colonialism [and] racism’, the GA condemned ‘hegemonism in
all its manifestations’ and called for ‘strict respect for the right of all States to
determine their political and socio-economic systems’.1
The invocation of the term ‘hegemonism’ in a GA resolution is quite unusual. Yet in
many respects this resolution was typical of the 1970s GA, when the radical Third
World bloc was in the ascendancy – hence the typical denunciations of imperialism and
neo-colonialism. The year 1979, of course, represented the last gasp of the radical
Third World project. The class forces that would come to implement neoliberalism had
already made significant advances, and the more ‘moderate’ elements of the Third
World coalition were ascendant. A decade later, the Third World was dead, and this
critique of ‘hegemony’ died with it.2
It was not until the turn of the millennium that the language of hegemony reappeared
(in English) in international law. But whereas the 1979 resolution was the product of
(ultimately false) confidence in the ability of international law to combat ‘hegemony’,
more recent invocations have been framed by the opposite concern, namely that
international law is failing to restrain the hegemony of powerful states. This reached its
apogee with the ‘War on Terror’, and the United States’ apparent determination to
remake international law in its own interests.
Although ‘hegemony’ is a term that has been frequently invoked in international legal
scholarship, it has not been subject to any sustained investigation. This chapter attempts
to remedy this, by critically reconstructing the conceptual history of hegemony and
pointing out its limits.
Section 2 of this chapter examines the early history of the term, situating it within
the context of Ancient Greek historians, who contrasted hegemonia – concerned with
achieving rule with consent – and arkhe – concerned with achieving rule through force.
1
Inadmissibility of the policy of hegemonism in international relations, UN General
Assembly, GA Resolution 34/103, UN Doc A/RES/34/103 (14 December 1979).
2
V. Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso 2012).
328
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Hegemony 329
It argues that the meaning of the term bifurcated along these lines, with an ‘inter-
national relations’ version of the term referring to the dominance of a powerful state,
and a Marxist version concerned with how ruling classes achieve consent. Section 3
traces how these two concepts fared during the twentieth century. It demonstrates that
international relations scholars interpreted history as a succession of powerful ‘hege-
monic’ states who were able to stabilize the world order. It also charts how the Marxist
understanding of hegemony morphed into a discursive theory, whereby hegemony
refers to the strategy of casting particular interests as universal. Section 4 explores how
international lawyers in the early twenty-first century deployed these two understand-
ings of hegemony. Section 5 traces the limits of these understandings, showing that
both ultimately imply an idealist understanding of the world, which is unable to explain
how hegemony changes over time. Section 6 draws on the Marxist tradition to suggest
what a materialist theory of hegemony might look like.
2. THE MEANING(S) OF HEGEMONY

2.1 Hegemony in Ancient Greece
‘Hegemony’ is generally understood as originating from the Greek word hegemonia.3

In Ancient Greek, hegemonia denoted ‘rulership’ or ‘leadership’ and was deployed by
Ancient Greek historians to denote the leadership or rule of one society over another.4
Hegemonia was first deployed by Herodotus and Thucydides to refer to the leadership
role exercised by Sparta against Xerxes’ invading Persian Army in 480 BC.5 Sparta
served as the leading power in organizing the alliance of various Greek city states, thus
exercising ‘leadership’.
This hegemonia was achieved in part because of the strength (or dunamis) of Sparta,
but power alone could not achieve this. Instead, in making a claim to hegemonia, the
‘claimant’s dunamis is balanced against how much the others would mind taking orders
from him’.6 Consequently, the Ancient Greek notion of hegemony did not simply
signify notions of ‘dominance’, but rather ‘was associated with time – the gift of
honour’.7 Crucially, then, hegemonia was associated with the consent of those who
were governed.
For the Ancient Greeks, hegemonia was contrasted with arkhe. In arkhe, ‘dunamis
[power] is the chief means and goal’.8 Arkhe – understood as referring to ‘empire’ –
denotes a notion of ‘political control’ without the need for consent.9 The two concepts
3
R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev sub, Oxford University
Press 1985) 144.
4
ibid.
5
J. Moore Wickersham, Hegemony and Greek Historians (Rowman & Littlefield 1994)
1–77.
6
ibid 9.
7
R.N. Lebow and R. Kelly, ‘Thucydides and Hegemony: Athens and the United States’
(2001) 27(4) Review of International Studies 594.
8
Wickersham (n 5) 20.
9
Lebow and Kelly (n 7) 594.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

330 Concepts for international law
had a complex interrelationship. Hegemonia clearly could aid in the achievement of

arkhe – yet both could also exist without the other.
Initially, arkhe referred almost exclusively to the relationship between Greek and
non-Greek societies, but this was to change.10 As the alliance against the Persians broke
down, rivalry between city states returned; henceforth, any attempts at securing rule
over Greece as a whole could not be achieved through consent. In particular, the
Athenians were accused of having ‘gone beyond hegemony to empire’,11 organizing
their ‘Delian League’ (a rival to the Spartans’ alliance) on the basis of pure dunamis.
These tensions gave rise to the Peloponnesian War, which was famously chronicled by
Thucydides,12 in a text that was to become one of the key reference points in the
discipline of international relations.
2.2 Predominance and Leadership
Following the end of the classical period, the term ‘hegemony’ lost much of this
complexity. Through the 1500s and 1600s it was invoked in English to ‘indicate
predominance of a more general kind’.13 It was in the sense of ‘predominance’ that the
word survived into the 1800s and 1900s. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth
century, ‘Continental classical scholars revived the ancient study of hegemony’
examining the role of Spartan hegemony; the term ‘hegemonie’ soon slipped into more
general usage in the German context.14
Here, however, the term tended to be shorn of the more subtle meanings ascribed to
it by the Greeks. Instead, hegemony was taken to simply indicate predominance,
usually of a particular state over other states. The term was often used to describe the
control that Prussia exercised over other German states, and the attempt by Germany to
dominate Europe.15 It was in this vein that, for instance, Marx and Engels used the
word.16 As such, the term hegemony looked a lot more like the term arkhe, capturing
something very close to the notion of empire. Thus, during the 1800s and 1900s –
particularly in the context of Germany – hegemony was understood as referring
primarily to the domination that one powerful state was able to exercise over others.
However, at the same time another understanding of hegemony was emerging,
closely linked to Russian Marxism. This understanding continued to think of hegemony
as referring primarily to predominance but understood that predominance as internal to
particular societies. Russian Marxists, organizing in a society that had not yet achieved
10
Wickersham (n 5) 20.
11
ibid 34.
12
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (M.I. Finley ed, R. Warner tr, rev edn
Penguin Classics 1972).
13
Williams (n 3) 144.
14
D. Wikinson, ‘Hêgemonía: Hegemony, Classical and Modern’ (2008) 14(2) Journal of
World-Systems Research 120.
15
A.R. Colquhoun, ‘The German Hegemony of Europe’ (1909) 190(645) North American
Review 241–49.
16
C. Brandist, The Dimensions of Hegemony (Brill 2015) 26.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

Hegemony 331
a bourgeois revolution, argued that the strategy of the proletariat would have to be one
of achieving ‘hegemony’ over the democratic revolution.17
Against the notion that the bourgeoisie would be the leading class in that revolution,
the Russian Marxists argued that the proletariat could ‘fight for the liberation of every
oppressed class and group in society’ and so acquire hegemony (gegemoniya) in the
struggle against the Tsar.18 In this way, the working class would become the most
important agent of the struggle against Tsarism, enabling it to push that movement
beyond simple bourgeois demands.
The Russian Revolution inspired probably the most influential theorist of hegemony:
Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s approach will be discussed more generally in this chapter,
but in essence, he took the approach developed in the Russian context and elaborated a
more general theory of class rule.
Gramsci argued that ‘the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as
“domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership”’.19 In the former case, a class
dominates antagonistic groups through the use of violent coercion or state power. In the
latter case, a group is able to exercise ‘effective leadership’ over other groups and thus
win their consent.20 The former was ‘dominance’; the latter was ‘hegemony’.
In this way, Gramsci echoed the Ancient Greek division between arkhe and
hegemonia, with hegemony involving the exercise of moral and political leadership
over other social groups or classes. As a result, ‘[l]eadership-hegemony and domination
are … conceived … as strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power:
hegemony is the form of political power exercised over those classes in close proximity
to the leading group, while domination is exerted over those opposing it’.21
For Gramsci, this distinction was echoed in the institutional arrangement of capitalist
societies: domination was associated with the state, whereas hegemony was associated
with civil society. Crucially, this meant that hegemony extended far beyond the direct
propagandistic tools of a government; instead it was articulated through the very
structures and practices through which individuals conduct their daily lives in ‘civil
society’. In particular, the aim of hegemony is to constitute a ‘common sense’,22 a
‘conception of the world’ that fundamentally structures the actions of all participants in
a particular society.23
Thus, in the early to mid-twentieth century there were two distinct notions of
hegemony. On the one hand, there was a notion of hegemony rooted primarily in
international relations, in which hegemony referred to the dominance of one particular
state over the international order. On the other, there was an understanding rooted in the
revolutionary experiences of the Marxist tradition. Here hegemony was understood as
17
A. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony (Brill 2014) 201–49.
18
P. Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ (1976) 1(100) New Left Review 16.
19
A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith eds,
International Publishers Co 1971) 57.
20
ibid 58.
21
P.D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Historical
Materialism 2011) 163.
22
Gramsci (n 19) 134.
23
ibid 327.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

the ensemble of techniques and relationships deployed by the ruling class to produce
and secure ‘consent’ for their rule.
2.3 International Law and Hegemony between the Wars
In general, international lawyers did not draw on the above conceptions. The Marxist-
inspired notion was quite far from the minds of most mainstream international lawyers,
and those lawyers who were part of revolutionary movements were more concerned
with other matters.
International lawyers did draw on the ‘international relations’ version of the term in
a limited sense to describe the dominance of Great Powers. Oppenheim, for instance,
argued that the ‘political hegemony exercised by the great powers’ did not undermine
the legal equality between members of the ‘Family of Nations’.24 Others argued that
great power hegemony played a key role in the formulation of new international laws.25
The term played some role in attempts to criticize the actions of the United States in
Latin America, with Alejandro Alvarez declaring that ‘hegemony or leadership is
simply a rule of a rule of policy of the United States which consists of imposing
the opinions of her State Department upon America at large … and of intervening in
the internal and external affairs of any country of Latin-America in order to protect the
interests of the United States’.26
However, in all of these instances, hegemony was not deployed systematically. It was
instead used in a rather scattered way, substituted at will for the term imperialism. The
exception to this was German scholarship, which turned towards the concept of
hegemony during the interwar period. The term hegemonie had entered into the German
political lexicon quite extensively. More importantly, Germany – as a late blooming
colonial power and loser of the First World War – had had its political climate
fundamentally shaped by rivalry between European powers. Issues of hegemony
became of crucial importance to the politics of Germany.
The public lawyer Heinrich Triepel authored his book Die Hegemonie in 1938. The
book drew on a mixture of the international relations notion of hegemony and the
classical Greek tradition. Triepel considered ‘hegemony as a form of power situated on
a continuum reaching from mere influence to domination’; for him hegemony was
closely related to empire,27 but was a particular form of empire marked by ‘a high
degree of self-restraint on the part of the hegemon’.28 In essence, Triepel argued that
‘hegemonic ambitions by the great powers were common in all ages, and that one could
24
L. Oppenheim, ‘The Science of International Law: Its Task and Method’ (1908) 2(2)
American Journal of International Law 347.
25
A. Henry Snow, ‘The Law of Nations’ (1912) 6(4) American Journal of International
Law 897.
26
A. Alvarez, ‘The Monroe Doctrine at the Fourth Pan-American Conference’ (1911) 37(3)
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604.
27
H. Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United
States (Polity Press 2007) 43.
28
S. Destradi, Indian Foreign and Security Policy in South Asia: Regional Power Strategies
(Routledge 2011) 16.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

Hegemony 333
resort to a rich instrumentarium of constitutional and international law in pursuit of

such imperialist “acts of leadership”’.29
More famous than Triepel’s work was that of Carl Schmitt, particularly his book Der
Nomos der Erde im Volkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (translated into English
as The Nomos of the Earth).30 Schmitt argued that global history was shaped by ‘the
constitutive process of a land-appropriation’, in which peoples and societies claim
particular territory.31 The overarching form this takes is a nomos – a ‘spatial structure,
the unity of order and orientation’.32 For Schmitt, global history consisted of the
struggle of powers within a particular nomos for dominance and the rise and falls of
different nomoi that were a consequence of these struggles. International law responded
to these nomoi and played a key role in constituting the unity of order and space.
Schmitt argued that empires in this world would necessarily claim Grossraum, a
‘sphere of spatial sovereignty beyond its borders’.33 It was here that Schmitt made use
of the concept of hegemony. For him, hegemony was specifically concerned with the
idea of balance, where ‘the hegemony of a greater power holds the order of many
medium and smaller powers in check’.34
In Germany, then, some of the complexities of the concept of hegemony could be
found in the writings of international lawyers. Beyond this, though, international
lawyers only drew on the more general ‘international’ sense of the term, using it as a
synonym for empire or imperialism.
3. HEGEMONY AFTER THE WARS: BETWEEN DOMINANCE

AND UNIVERSALISM
Following the end of the Second World War, the division between the ‘international
relations’ view of hegemony and the Gramscian account remained. During the course
of the twentieth century, however, these two understandings were to undergo transform-
ations. The international relations concept of hegemony as dominance was deployed to
attempt to think through the superpower rivalry of the Cold War. Eventually, its usage
went beyond an explanation for the Cold War and became a more general explanation
of global social change.
By contrast, the Gramscian account of hegemony as the ensemble of techniques used
by the ruling class to secure consent became closely associated with the fate of the
European Communist movement. As the Communist focus on the centrality of class
shifted to other social antagonisms, hegemony came to be understood as a more general
strategy of universalism.
29
M. Stolleis, A History of Public Law in Germany, 1914–1945 (Oxford University Press
2004) 417.
30
C. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum
(Telos Press 2003).
31
ibid 45.
32
ibid 186.
33
ibid 281.
34
ibid 130.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

3.1 Hegemony as Superpower Dominance
It was only with the onset of the Cold War that hegemony really took off as a concept
for thinking through international relations. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR
both claimed leadership over swathes of the world. Both also claimed the right to
intervene militarily within their respective ‘spheres of influence’.
During this period, then, hegemony began to take on a more politically important
role. Many of the political uses of hegemony came from the nonaligned movement,
which sought – at least rhetorically – to distance itself from both sides of the Cold War.
In this respect, it is interesting to note that the term was often used by the government
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to denounce the actions of the USSR, which
– following the Sino–Soviet split – it viewed as ‘social imperialist’.35 For the PRC,
hegemonism replaced – to some degree – imperialism as the polemical attack of
choice. In this way, ‘hegemony’ served a different role from the classic invocations of
imperialism and neo-colonialism, denoting the specificity of global superpowers
striving for their sphere of influence.36
In light of this changed context, hegemony as a concept became hugely important in
the discipline of international relations. In particular, international relations scholars
used the concept of hegemony to account for the stability of the global order following
the end of the Second World War. The concept was especially important in the school
of thought known as Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST). While HST was initially
articulated to understand the particular context of the twentieth century, its advocates
soon deployed ‘hegemony’ as a more general and wideranging concept to explain
global history.
The text usually considered as the founding work of HST is Charles Kindleberger’s
1973 The World in Depression. Published during the 1973 oil crisis, the book was
ostensibly an analysis of the causes of the Great Depression. In actuality, Kindle-
berger’s analysis of the past was a proxy for an analysis of the failing American
capitalism of the 1970s.37 Thus, the first theory of ‘hegemonic stability’ was articulated
in a period of deep instability on the part of the supposed hegemon.
Kindleberger rooted the Great Depression in the United States’ failure to exercise
hegemony over the world economy. For him, Britain had been the premier hegemonic
power in the lead-up to the First World War, overseeing and directing the world
economy. With the decline in British power, he continued, the world economy was
destabilized. Kindleberger believed the US could have stepped in and assumed
responsibility for saving the global economy.38
35
Communist Party of Soviet Union, ‘The Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU to
the Central Committee of the CPC’ in The Polemic on the General Line of the International
Communist Movement (Foreign Languages Press 1965) 495–525.
36
R. Aron, ‘From American Imperialism to Soviet Hegemonism’ (1979) 2(3) The Washing-
ton Quarterly 8–22; Y.H. Park, ‘The “Anti-Hegemony” Controversy in Sino-Japanese Relations’
(1976) 49(3) Pacific Affairs 476.
37
A. Carlo, ‘The World in Depression’ (1975) 24 Telos 173–78.
38
C.P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939 (University of California Press
1986) 290–309.
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Hegemony 335
For Kindleberger, this illustrated a more general trend. Drawing on game theory,
Kindleberger argued that ‘international economic stability is a public, or collective,
good, since all countries benefit from it’.39 However, as a collective good, it suffers
from the problem of ‘free riders’: smaller and medium-sized states gain the benefits of
economic stability without making any contribution.40 In a world composed primarily
of such states, all participants in the international economic order would be incentiv-
ized towards free riding, fatally undermining international stability. It was only through
the existence of a hegemon which could compel small states that stability could be
achieved. As Kindleberger famously put it, ‘for the world economy to be stabilised,
there has to be a stabiliser – one stabiliser’.41
Ultimately, Kindleberger’s account narrowly focused on the role of political
economy. It was for this reason that he was able to argue that hegemony was
automatically benevolent, since it would be of net economic benefit to all. By contrast,
later IR scholars stressed a more conflictual vision of hegemony. In ‘State Power and
the Structure of International Trade’, Stephen Krasner insisted that in any hegemonic
system ‘[t]he costs and benefits of [economic] openness are not symmetrical for all
members of the system’.42 The hegemonic power will benefit from free trade because it
can take advantage of its size and outcompete its rivals, while suffering none of its
disadvantages. Similarly, smaller states – who are likely to be weak regardless – will
opt for whatever the hegemon chooses. For Krasner, ‘middle states’ stand to lose out
from hegemony, and so struggle against it.
In going beyond the notion of an economic harmony of interests, Krasner opened up
the idea that HST could explain more than just the global economy. For him, the
struggle for and against hegemony was a crucial explanation for state behaviour in
general. This became the key motif of HST’s explanation of the international relations.
The most systematic account of the role of hegemony was put forward by Robert
Gilpin. For Gilpin, global history was marked by a succession of dominant powerful
societies. The premodern era, he argues, was organized around ‘the rise and decline of
powerful empires, each of which in turn unified and ordered its respective international
systems’.43 Empires would decline when their economic surpluses were no longer able
to keep pace with rising economic costs.44 In the modern era, a world characterized by
independent nation states and unified by a world economy, empire – the formal
institutional governance of the globe – no longer made sense. Accordingly, the modern
era signalled the end of the cycle of empires and the beginning of a succession of
hegemonies – a system of ‘leadership’ in which powerful states seek to ‘organise
political, territorial, and especially economic relations in terms of their respective
39
M.C. Webb and S.D. Krasner, ‘Hegemonic Stability Theory: An Empirical Assessment’
(1989) 15(2) Review of International Studies 184.
40
C.P. Kindleberger, ‘Dominance and Leadership in the International Economy: Exploit-
ation, Public Goods, and Free Rides’ (1981) 25(2) International Studies Quarterly 249–51.
41
Kindleberger, The World in Depression (n 38) 304.
42
S.D. Krasner, ‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade’ (1976) 28(3) World
Politics 322.
43
R. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press 1983) 111.
44
ibid 115.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

security and economic interests’.45 This was achieved partially because powerful states
‘have imposed their will on lesser states and partially because other states have
benefited from and accepted their leadership’.46
For Gilpin, hegemonies eventually find their limit ‘once an equilibrium is reached
between the costs and benefits of further change and expansion’.47 This leads to
external and internal pressures which undermine the dominant state. Rising states will
seek to challenge the prevailing system and since the relative cost of doing so will
decrease, this disequilibrium can only be resolved through ‘hegemonic war’, which
‘involves a direct contest between the dominant power … and the rising challenger’.48
Gilpin is here representative of the more general role that hegemony came to assume
in this scholarship. While it was initially deployed in limited circumstances, HST
advocates came to use hegemony as a concept to explain world history more broadly.
In their accounts, historical epochs are marked by the dominance – or hegemony – of a
particular power, providing stability to the world system. In HST, world history was
marked by a cycle of hegemonic powers – the Portuguese in the 1500s; the Dutch in
the 1600s; the British between 1700 and 1945; and the US following the end of the
Second World War.49
In such accounts, the division between arkhe and hegemonia from the original
Ancient Greek, or dominance and hegemony in Gramsci’s formulation, is somewhat
blurred. The major exception to this general picture of ‘hegemony’ in international
relations was the critical work of Robert W. Cox and the ‘Neo-Gramscian’ school,
who explicitly linked international questions back to Gramsci’s wider conceptual
apparatus.50
In HST, international institutions play an important role. Institutions are the
mechanisms through which the world is (re)made in a hegemon’s image. At the same
time, the stability of international institutions is fundamentally dependent upon the
existence of the hegemonic state to secure compliance.51 Insofar as international law
entered into these theories, it was simply analysed as being instrumentalized by
hegemonic powers, with almost no attention paid to its specific internal dynamics. A
logical corollary of this understanding was a view of the discipline of international law
as incurably idealistic. For their part, international lawyers felt international relations
45
ibid 146.
46
ibid.
47
ibid 156.
48
ibid 199.
49
George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (Springer 1987) 40.
50
The ‘founding texts’ of the approach are: R.W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World
Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’ (1981) 10(2) Millennium – Journal of
International Studies 126–55; R.W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in
the Making of History (Columbia University Press 1987). The literature taking a ‘neo-
Gramscian’ approach is rather extensive, but for a more modern approach see A.D. Morton,
Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy
(Pluto Press 2015).
51
Keohane’s disagreement on this point was an important counterthrust against HST: see
R.O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
(Princeton University Press 2005).
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Hegemony 337
scholars failed to take seriously the particulars of international law. This mutual
antipathy explains – in part – why hegemony as a concept did not feature strongly in
international legal scholarship.
There were three major exceptions to this. First, there was a group of international
legal scholars who drew on concepts from international relations. The work of Myres
McDougal and Harold Laswell, for instance, focused on ‘world public order’ and drew
on concepts from political science.52 Scholars writing in this tradition, such as Richard
Falk, would deploy the idea of ‘hegemony’ to describe the actions of the United
States.53
Arguably, Falk also belongs to the second camp of international lawyers who
deployed the term ‘hegemony’: those who were influenced by the Third World
movement. This could be found in the work of prominent Third World jurists such
as Mohamed Bedjaoui,54 and in the work of those international institutions – such as
UNCTAD and UNESCO – that had become bastions of Third Worldism. In both of
these instances, however, ‘hegemony’ was largely used coterminously with the concepts
of neocolonialism and/or imperialism.
Once again, it was only in Germany that international lawyers thought systematically
about the concept. In particular, in his magisterial Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte
(The Epochs of International Law) Wilhelm Grewe argued that international law was
characterized by a succession of hegemonic states who reshaped the international law
in their image, providing an international legal version of HST.55 This conception of a
hegemonic international order was to prove hugely influential in later years.
3.2 Hegemony as Universality
In some respects, the fate of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony mirrored that of the
concept in international relations. It served as a central concept both in political
organizing and in a series of academic debates. However, Gramsci’s formulation of
hegemony arguably carried much more weight. Aside from being a ‘theorist’, Gramsci
was a prominent figure in the Italian Communist Party (PCI). As such, his influence
was felt in ‘real’ Italian politics.
Much of Gramsci’s analysis was built on a series of metaphors likening political
struggle to military warfare. In particular, Gramsci distinguished between a ‘war of
manoeuvre’ and a ‘war of position’. The former referred to a ‘frontal assault’ involving
a direct military confrontation between opposing forces and the latter to a situation in
52
A. Bianchi, International Law Theories: An Inquiry into Different Ways of Thinking
(Oxford University Press 2016) 91–109.
53
R. Falk, ‘A New Paradigm for International Legal Studies: Prospects and Proposals’
(1975) 84(5) Yale Law Journal 969.
54
M. Bedjaoui, Towards A New International Economic Order (UNESCO 1979).
55
M. Byers, ‘Introduction: The Complexities of Foundational Change’ in M. Byers and
G. Nolte (eds), United States Hegemony and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge
University Press 2003) 1.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

which both sides were attempting to gain the advantage before the decisive confron-
tation, as in the long slog of trench warfare.56
The political equivalent of the ‘war of manoeuvre’ was the direct seizure of state
power, that is, a revolution. By contrast, the ‘war of position’ represented those struggles
within an already constituted society that attempted to win ‘leadership’. For Gramsci,
civil society is ‘a very complex structure’ which is ‘resistant to the catastrophic
“incursions” of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.)’. As a result,
‘[t]he superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare’.57
Accordingly, the war of position involves struggling within civil society with the aim of
undermining the existing hegemony and articulating a competing hegemony.
Crucially, this distinction was mapped onto a ‘geographical’ (and sociohistorical)
divide. Gramsci argued that in ‘the East’, where the Russian Revolution had occurred,
‘the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous’.58 It was for this
reason that the Bolsheviks could seize state power in a war of manoeuvre. However,
civil society in ‘the West’ looked very different; here there was ‘a proper relation
between State and civil society’, with the state serving as ‘only an outer ditch, behind
which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks [of civil society]’.59
In the West, therefore, the appropriate political alignment was the ‘war of position’.
In this reading of Gramsci, therefore, the primary task of the revolutionary
movement in the advanced capitalist West could not be to prepare for the immediate
seizure of state power. Instead, it was necessary to contest and challenge hegemony,
building an alternative (or counter-) hegemony. What did this look like politically? In
‘The Modern Prince’, Gramsci distinguished between three levels of political organ-
ization. The first level was the ‘economic–corporate’ level, which referred to the
solidarity between members of a particular professional group. The second level is
what we might call – following Lenin60 – trade union consciousness, in which ‘all
members of a social class’ become aware of their common economic interests.61
Hegemony – that is, exercising ‘leadership’ over a particular social formation – is to
be found at the third level, where one
becomes aware that one’s own corporate interests, in their present and future development,
transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the
interests of other subordinate groups too. This is the most purely political phase, and marks
the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the
phase in which previously germinated ideologies … come into confrontation and conflict,
until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the
upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society – bringing about not only a unison of
economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions
around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a ‘universal’ plane, and thus
56
Gramsci, Notebooks (n 19) 234.
57
ibid 235.
58
ibid 238.
59
ibid.
60
V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Foreign
Languages Press 1973).
61
Gramsci, Notebooks (n 19) 181.
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Hegemony 339
creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups …
[T]he development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as
being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the ‘national’
energies. In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general
interests of the subordinate groups.62
In Gramsci’s vision, then, a social group could achieve hegemony to the degree that it
was able to posit its own interests as ‘universal’. In the wake of the Second World War,
the Italian Communist Party seized upon these formulations to articulate a new strategy.
Following on from Gramsci’s East–West division, Palmiro Togliatti (General Secretary
of the PCI) articulated an ‘Italian Road to Socialism’. In this strategy, the role of the
Communists was to promote ‘national unity’ by building a ‘progressive democracy’ in
Italy. The aim was to bring ‘into existence those subjective-cultural and objective-
material elements from which Socialism could progressively emerge as the result of
social consent’.63 In this way, the PCI was to ‘engage in a longterm strategy of
collaboration with progressive and democratic forces, aimed at the gradual hegemon-
isation of these social and political’.64 Invoking Gramsci enabled the PCI to argue for
radical social transformation while respecting the norms of a parliamentary democracy.
In the late 1960s and 1970s such a conception proved attractive to a number of
Communist parties within Western Europe, who sought to burnish their democratic
credentials. During this period, Communist parties became increasingly wary of
aligning themselves with Moscow, especially after its suppression of the 1968 Prague
Spring. The period also saw a host of other antagonisms become increasingly important
to social struggle, especially antiracism, feminism and gay rights.
The Italian version of ‘hegemony’ seemed to offer a way out of these conundrums
for the European Communist parties. By understanding their task as achieving
hegemony within civil society, they were able to affirm their commitment to democratic
values. At the same time, they could recast the mission of the Communist party as
articulating a ‘universal’ position which would involve fighting for the rights of other
oppressed groups, such as women, racial minorities and LGBTQ people. Under the
banner of ‘Euro-communism’, a number of Communist parties adopted such lines,
jettisoning their commitment to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.65
Euro-communism was highly controversial. While many accepted the need to
embrace the interests of various oppressed groups, they argued that the reformism of
Euro-communism and its denial of the centrality of the economic logic of capitalism
meant it was a fundamental break from the revolutionary Marxist tradition.66 In
particular, they argued that Euro-communism ultimately reduced Communist parties to
simple pressure groups, without any wider political mission. There was arguably some
truth in such accusations. With the fall of the USSR, most Euro-communist parties
62
ibid 181–82.
63
G. Vatalaro, ‘Togliatti’s Conception of the Italian Road to Socialism: Hegemony or
Pragmatism?’ (2011) 31(1) The Italianist 91.
64
ibid 94.
65
E. Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Verso 1977) 157–211.
66
E. Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One
Country’ (1st edn, Verso 2016).
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either recast themselves as social democratic parties or, as in the case of Britain,
became non-political pressure groups pursuing particular campaigns.
The academic reception of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony quite closely mirrors
its political fate. Although there were scattered translations of Gramsci in the 1950s and
1960s, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that interest really sprang up. In
1971, Lawrence and Wishart translated Selections from the Prison Notebooks into
English, sparking the birth of a minor Gramsci industry. By the 1980s, Gramsci was
one of the most widely cited figures in the social sciences. Gramsci was important in
academia for a number of reasons.
First, his concept of ‘hegemony’ was far wider and more sophisticated than
‘traditional’ Marxist notions of power and ideology.67 In this respect, the rediscovery of
Gramsci complemented an explosion in thinking about ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’ within
the academic left – as exemplified in the work of the Frankfurt School, Althusser and
Foucault. Second, the focus on hegemony was able to draw attention to other forms of
oppression outside of traditional Marxist ideas about class.
At the same time, the political context in which Gramsci was received was also
important. Many of the academic interpreters of Gramsci were themselves political
activists to whom the democratic conception of hegemony was evidently attractive. For
example, Alan Hunt, the British Critical Legal Studies scholar whose work drew on
Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, was a member of the Euro-communist wing of the
Communist Party of Great Britain.68
Hunt’s engagement with the concept is indicative of a wider reception of Gramsci
within the critical legal studies movement. The intellectual shifts in the academic left
were important for critical legal academics, as they sought to move away from a notion
of law as merely coercive. Accordingly, Gramsci had an influence on many critical
legal scholars, particularly in Britain.69 However, this influence was not generally felt
in international law – particularly because the main development in critical inter-
national legal theory occurred somewhat later.70
It is arguable that a certain understanding of Gramscianism served as the ‘gateway
drug’ to enable Communist parties to adopt a more liberal or social democratic politics.
67
On ideology and international law more generally, see the chapter by Walter Rech in this
volume.
68
A. Hunt, ‘Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!’ (2004) 31(4) Journal of Law
and Society 595.
69
See, eg, A. Hunt, ‘The Ideology of Law: Advances and Problems in Recent Applications
of the Concept of Ideology to the Analysis of Law’ (1985) 19(1) Law & Society Review 11;
A. Hunt, ‘Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies’ (1990) 17(3) Journal of
Law and Society 309; Bob Fine, Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory
to Marxism (Hutchinson 1979); K. Klare, ‘Law-Making as Praxis’ (1979) 40 Telos 123;
D. Kennedy, ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Legal System’ (1982) 6 ALSA Forum 632; D. Litowitz,
‘Gramsci, Hegemony, and the Law’ (2000) Brigham Young University Law Review 2515–52.
70
There is no mention of Gramsci, or a Gramscian notion of hegemony, in the original
editions of Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia or David Kennedy’s International Legal
Structures; both are much more concerned with French structuralism, poststructuralism and
deconstruction. See M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International
Legal Argument (Cambridge University Press 2006) 7–13.
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Hegemony 341
The same might be said of Gramsci in academia. In particular, Gramsci served as an

inspiration to go ‘beyond Marx and Marxism’ and adopt a position of post-Marxism.71
Perhaps the most famous expositors of this conception of hegemony, and certainly
the most influential in international legal terms, were Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Although Laclau and Mouffe
did not explicitly identify with the Euro-communist tradition, they shared a number of
its key starting points.72 Writing in the mid-1980s, they argued that there was a crisis of
‘a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the
working class … and … the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary … collective
will’.73 This theoretical crisis was triggered off by the emergence of the ‘new social
movements’.74
The key question for Laclau and Mouffe was that of the relationship between class as
an economic category and political mobilization. They argued that orthodox Marxism
reduced this to a mechanical relation, in which the ‘objective interests’ of the working
class would compel them towards political action. However, in the years following
Marx and Engels’ deaths, reality did not bear this out. Classes were socially and
politically fragmented, and did not seem to be ‘objectively’ compelled towards
revolution.
Laclau and Mouffe argued that, following the deaths of Marx and Engels, numerous
Marxists had attempted to solve this conundrum. All recognized that class unity – and
thus politics – was not a given. However, the problem for Laclau and Mouffe was that
these authors all ultimately returned to an account in which class was the central and
essential reference point: thus politics was made subordinate to ‘economics’.
For Laclau and Mouffe, ‘hegemony’ emerged to deal with these problems. They
argued that the original formulations of hegemony in the Russian Revolution were
flawed, since ‘hegemony involves political leadership within … [a] class alliance’.75
Accordingly, in such a conception of hegemony, class identity remains determined by
an objectivist notion of class in which ‘their identity is constituted around “inter-
ests”’.76 This ‘objectivist’ account of hegemony is doubly problematic for Laclau and
Mouffe. First, it fails to recognize the contingent character of ‘class interests’ in the
political sphere, and the way in which other interests may become more important.
Second, they argued that such thinking quickly led to authoritarianism. Insofar as a
class has objective interests, it becomes possible for an authoritarian party to ‘repre-
sent’ these interests.77
According to Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci broke with this conception. The idea of
hegemony as ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ went beyond the notion of a ‘class
71
S. Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (Routledge 2013).
72
G. Boucher, The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler
and Zizek (re.press 2009) 66.
73
E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (Verso 2001) 1.
74
ibid 4.
75
ibid 55.
76
ibid 55.
77
ibid 57–65.
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alliance’. Instead, hegemony involved actively constructing a political project whereby

the working class ‘abandon[s] its class ghetto and transform[s] itself into the articulator
of a multiplicity of antagonisms’.78 In this way, class politics was no longer a given, but
instead was constructed ‘through articulatory projects’.79
However, for Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci could not let go of the working class.
Against this, they proposed an account of society rooted in the insights of poststructur-
alism.80 Essentially, for Laclau and Mouffe, ‘[t]he symbolic – i.e., over-determined –
character of social relations … implies that they lack an ultimate literality which would
reduce them to necessary moments of an immanent law’.81 In this way, social relations
are essentially discursive; and these discourses have no ultimate fixed meaning.82 As
such, ‘class’ cannot be the ultimate referent for the construction of hegemony because
nothing can be an ultimate referent for anything.
Accordingly, the social world is a ‘system of differences’ in which different –
singular – agents coexist. In such a social world, ‘meaning’ can only be imposed by
‘partial fixations’ (through the ‘articulation’ of ‘nodal points’) which make the social
momentarily intelligible.83 Hegemony is one particular form of this articulation.
According to Laclau and Mouffe, the particular form that social difference takes is that
of antagonism. Different social actors, will, for different reasons, relate to each other
through antagonistic opposition, whereby one ‘subject position’ seeks to nullify
another.84 Such antagonisms could include race, gender, class and sexuality.
If the various different antagonisms can be constructed as equivalent, ‘the differences
cancel one other out insofar as they are used to express something identical underlying
them all’.85 The aim of a hegemonic project is to construct ‘chains of equivalence’
which are able to unify various antagonisms into an overall project.86 In this way, for
Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is intimately linked with universalism: in a hegemonic
project ‘a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality’.87 A
hegemonic project is one where ‘a particular element … [assumes] … a “universal”
structuring function within a certain discursive field’.88
It was not for nothing that Laclau and Mouffe characterized their position as one of
‘post-Marxism’. As a result, their work has been heavily criticized by a number of
scholars who identify with the Marxist tradition. Their approach has been challenged
on its own terms,89 as well as for its infidelity to Gramsci’s political and intellectual
78
ibid 58.
79
ibid 69.
80
ibid xi.
81
ibid 97.
82
ibid 112.
83
ibid 112–13.
84
ibid 131.
85
ibid 127.
86
ibid 131.
87
ibid x.
88
ibid xi.
89
Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’ (1987) I(163) New Left Review 40; Boucher (n 72)
77–126.
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Hegemony 343
formation.90 Notwithstanding these criticisms, Laclau and Mouffe’s particular formula-

tion of hegemony has proved hugely influential on the social sciences. In particular,
they have exerted a central influence on how (critical) international lawyers have
understood the concept of ‘hegemony’.
4. HEGEMONY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

By the end of the twentieth century, the term ‘hegemony’ had undergone a series of
transformations. These transformations were linked to profound social and political
upheavals. Schematically, two basic concepts of hegemony emerged from this back-
ground. One was an ‘international relations’ version which understood hegemony as
referring to the dominance of a powerful state. This concept viewed international life
through the lens of cycles of hegemonic dominance and decline. The other was
influenced by Laclau and Mouffe, in which hegemony refers to attempts by actors or
social groups to cast their particular interests as universal.
Most of these transformations passed international lawyers by. There was some
minor engagement with the ‘international relations’ version of the term, particularly in
German scholarship, but this did not cross over more widely. Similarly, Third World
states and lawyers used the term ‘hegemonism’ in their international legal discourse,
but this did not represent a systematic understanding. While the universalist concept
found some popularity in domestic critical legal theory, it did not resonate within the
discipline of international law.
It was only during the late 1990s and early 2000s that the international legal
discipline really began to grapple with hegemony. In part this reflected the rise of a new
disciplinary openness linking international law and international relations.91 However,
internal disciplinary considerations do not tell the full story.
With the collapse of the USSR and the US’s emergence as sole superpower,92 the
scene seemed ripe for a particular kind of hegemonism, in which the US spearheaded
‘a rebirth of Wilsonian international liberalism trumpeting a new world order, the
international rule of law, and the extension of American values of democracy, market
economy, and human rights throughout the world’.93 The US was seemingly able to do
this through the ‘normal’ mechanisms of the UN collective security system and the
Security Council. In this way, the US cast itself in the ‘benevolent role as the world’s
90
Thomas, Gramscian Moment (n 21) 11.
91
A. Slaughter, A.S. Tulumello and S. Wood, ‘International Law and International
Relations Theory: A New Generation of Interdisciplinary Scholarship’ (1998) 92(3) American
Journal of International Law 367–97; see also S. Krasner, ‘International Law and International
Relations: Together, Apart, Together?’ (2000) 1(1) Chicago Journal of International Law 93.
92
J. van der Vyver and others, ‘The Single Superpower and the Future of International
Law’ (2000) 94 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law
64.
93
J. Lobel, ‘Benign Hegemony: Kosovo and Article 2(4) of the UN Charter’ (2000) 1
Chicago Journal of International Law 1, 23.
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sole superpower’ which served as a ‘stabilising force for international peace and
security and a deterrent to terrorists’.94
Yet in the ‘latter part of the 1990s, America’s unipolar moment had passed, at least in
the political, if not the military and economic, spheres’, giving rise to a new period
‘characterised by one great superpower preferring unipolar hegemony, and several
major regional powers who would prefer a multipolar system wherein they could
restrain the superpower’.95 In this new situation, the hegemonic role of the US was
characterized by its willingness to act outside of the established legal framework. The
US increasingly abandoned intervention through multilateral means, and pursued legal
arguments premised around its ‘special’ (hegemonic) role as guardian of the inter-
national system. In the 1999 Kosovo intervention, the US advanced the arguments that
it could implicitly rely on a Security Council authorization even in the absence of a
specific authorization to use force, or that the intervention was a humanitarian one to
protect fundamental human rights values.96
The most crucial element in this story was the ‘War on Terror’ and the 2003 invasion
of Iraq. The interventions were framed very strongly in terms of a legal exceptionalism,
rooted in the hegemonic position of the US. But this was not a ‘stable’ hegemonic
position. Rather, it was one increasingly challenged by other powers. In a move that
starkly mirrors Kindleberger, it was in this unstable situation that international legal
scholars turned to the concept of hegemony.
International legal scholars found the two concepts of hegemony readymade and able
to be deployed to analyse international law. Initially, scholars turned rather directly to
the international relations variant of the term. ‘Hegemony’ seemed to capture very well
the actions of the US. In a mirror image of HST, a number of scholars took this
particular hegemonic moment and extended it backwards, rereading international law
through the prism of cycles of hegemony. At the same time, more critically minded
scholars drew attention to the way in which US action was framed in terms of
defending universal values. This presaged a turn to the universalist understanding of
hegemony.
4.1 Hegemonic International Law
The most important initial articulation of the hegemonic international law thesis was
that of Detlev Vagts in his article ‘Hegemonic International Law’.97 In Vagts’
formulation, the US is a hegemonic power because it is ‘indispensable, dominant’ and
‘pre-emiment’.98 This hegemony is rooted in the fact that the US ‘can project its
military power into any corner of the world without substantial risk of incurring serious
94
Walter Gary Sharp Sr, ‘The Use of Armed Force against Terrorism: American Hegemony
or Impotence?’ (2000) 1 Chicago Journal of International Law 37.
95
Lobel (n 93) 26.
96
R. Knox, ‘Civilizing Interventions? Race, War and International Law’ (2013) 26(1)
Cambridge Review of International Affairs 111.
97
D.F. Vagts, ‘Hegemonic International Law’ (2001) 95 American Journal of International
Law 843.
98
ibid 843.
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Hegemony 345
costs’ and ‘holds an enormous fraction of the world’s wealth’.99 For Vagts, this
hegemonic position means that the US is able to act outside of the traditional
international legal framework through the creation of a ‘hegemonic international law’
(HIL). This occasioned a shift towards intervention in the internal affairs of states,100 a
move away from treaties (which imperilled the hegemon’s freedom of action)101 and a
move towards custom. The move towards custom reflects the power of the hegemon –
its abstention will be enough to prevent the formation of a customary rule and its
breaches can be recast as the transformation of custom.102
Essentially, then, hegemonic international law aims at preserving the widest field of
action for the hegemon, while limiting the freedom of others. As José Alvarez put it:
The hegemon promotes … new rules of law, both treaty based and customary. It is generally
averse to limiting its scope of action via treaty; avoids being constrained by those treaties to
which it has adhered; and disregards, when inconvenient, customary international law,
confident that its breach will be hailed as a new rule. Substantively, HIL is characterised by
indeterminate rules – whose vagueness benefits … the hegemon – recurrent projections of
military force, and interventions in the internal affairs of other nations.103
These were all features that were strongly on display in the US response to 9/11, the
wider War on Terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Under the (in)famous ‘Bush
Doctrine’, the US purported to radically reinterpret – or transform – the existing
customary international law on self-defence. Specifically, that doctrine argued for a
wide pre-emptive self-defence, that would not distinguish between terrorists and those
states that harbour them.
Crucially, the arguments carved out a special legal space of action for the US and its
allies.104 The claims justifying military intervention – be they implied Security Council
resolutions, preemptive self-defence or humanitarian intervention – put forward by the
US are not available to all states. Instead, it is the US and its allies who – as ‘guardians
of the international legal order’ – possess special legal powers.105 It was precisely for
this reason that the initial elaboration of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ was accompanied by a
doctrine of ‘rogue states’, which explicitly cast some states as unable to use an
expanded notion of self-defence, and simultaneously cast the US as the only force
capable of removing the danger caused by rogue states.106
Of course, the War on Terror has not been a purely unilateral affair. It has also been
conducted through the United Nations, in particular through the provision of sanctions
99
ibid 844.
100
ibid 845.
101
ibid 846.
102
A. Skordas, ‘Hegemonic Custom?’ in Byres and Nolte (n 55) 317–47.
103
J.E. Alvarez, ‘Hegemonic International Law Revisited’ (2003) 97(4) American Journal of
International Law 873.
104
Vagts (n 97) 845.
105
E. Benvenisti, ‘The US and the Use of Force: Double-Edged Hegemony and the
Management of Global Emergencies’ (2004) 15(4) European Journal of International Law 677.
106
A. Anghie, ‘The War on Terror and Iraq in Historical Perspective’ (2005) 43 Osgoode
Hall Law Journal 49.
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against suspected terrorists and the operation of the Security Council’s Counter-
Terrorism Committee (CTC). Alvarez has characterized this as a ‘global’ hegemonic
international law resulting from ‘the privileged position accorded to the hegemon under
the existing rules and institutions’.107 For Alvarez, the CTC is a perfect example of
hegemonic international law because it ‘is led by experts not evidently chosen on the
basis of a need to represent all the diverse legal cultures of the world or their scholarly
qualifications in international law’; instead its responses ‘have been guided, to date, by
the United States and its closest allies’.108 These counterterrorism efforts recapitulate
the basic logic of the hegemonic position of the US by being indeterminate, intrusive
on sovereignty and – vitally – outside of the traditional framework of custom and
treaty. In this way, while not being ‘unilateral’, they enable the US to act outside of the
‘normal’ framework of international law.
As with the advocates of HST, this account of hegemonic international law did not
remain rooted in the contemporary actions of the US. By constructing an account of the
‘features’ of hegemonic international law, HIL advocates began to understand
hegemony not as an ‘accident’ of the international legal order, but rather as a
fundamental structuring principle that marked out a particular ‘hegemonic international
law’. This understanding of a distinct ‘hegemonic international law’ entailed an
engagement with ‘hegemony’ as it was understood in international relations and with
those (German) international law scholars, such as Triepel and Grewe, who charted a
link between hegemony and international law.109 On this basis, several scholars of
international law – most prominent among them Nico Krisch and Gerry Simpson –
began to develop a more general theory of hegemony in international law. Drawing
explicitly on HST, but also reproducing its underlying logic, these accounts argued that
the history of international law was necessarily characterized by the succession of
hegemonic states.
All of the general theories of hegemonic international law begin from the premise
that international lawyers have not been willing to acknowledge the role of hegemony.
This is because international law, as premised on sovereign equality, ‘is disinclined to
grant formal recognition to structures of superiority’.110 At the same time, however,
international law – lacking centralized enforcement mechanisms – is dependent upon
the powerful states for its enforcement.
This tension finds itself manifested in the interrelationship between powerful states
and international law and institutions. On the one hand, international institutions – and
international law – can be seen to constrain hegemonic power. This is because they
tend towards stability, making it ‘difficult for powerful actors to remake the inter-
national legal order’.111 Furthermore, the international legal framework tends to grant
‘weaker states greater influence’.112 At the same time, however, international law and
107
Alvarez (n 103) 887.
108
ibid 875.
109
Byers and Nolte (n 55) 1.
110
N. Krisch, ‘International Law in Times of Hegemony: Unequal Power and the Shaping of
the International Legal Order’ (2005) 16(3) European Journal of International Law 370.
111
ibid 378.
112
ibid 374.
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Hegemony 347
institutions are important to hegemonic powers, since they provide a framework of

legitimacy ‘to justify their dominance’ and thus reduce ‘enforcement costs’.113
In essence, then, international law is structured by a conflict. International law is
committed to treating all states equally. Yet hegemonic powers – which are the only
force capable of making international law effective – chafe against these restrictions.
As Gerry Simpson notes, this leads to a very particular dynamic:
Great Powers see themselves as acting in the shadow of international law. But, often, the
shadow they see is their own. They make and remake … international law. In this tradition,
the Great Powers are loath simply to step outside the law and use brute force. Instead, there
has been a practice of willing into existence new legal regimes in moments of constitutional
crisis.114
Thus, for the theorists of hegemonic international law, international law is characterized
by hegemonic powers’ attempts to navigate the problems thrown up by sovereign
equality.115 When possible, the hegemonic powers will attempt to instrumentalize
international law.116 The key aim of this instrumentalization is the attempt to ‘translate
their factual dominance into law’.117 This is what Simpson dubs ‘legalized
hegemony’118 or ‘legalized hierarchy’: in such periods hegemonic powers are given
‘superior status … giving rise to the existence of certain constitutional privileges, rights
and duties’.119 Both Krisch and Simpson trace the existence of this dynamic back to at
least the 1600s and the attempts by Spain to entrench its international position. Such
legalized hegemony has been particularly important in international institutions, in
particular the Holy Alliance and Concert of Europe in the 1800s,120 and in the United
Nations Security Council today.121
Interestingly, for Simpson, legalized hegemony requires ‘a commitment to long-term
collective action’ between Great Powers, thus differentiating it from ‘superpower
dominance’. Simpson is something of an outlier here, with most theorists of hegemonic
international law emphasizing the possibility of unilateral dominance.
More importantly, Simpson points to the fact that legalized hegemony is not the only
tactic pursued by hegemonic states. As Krisch argues, they will also sometimes attempt
to ‘withdraw’ from the international legal order in order to pioneer a new one. In
particular, hegemonic powers will seek to extend their domestic law to replace
113
ibid.
114
G. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International
Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2004) x.
115
N. Krisch, ‘More Equal than the Rest? Hierarchy, Equality and US Predominance in
International Law’ in Byers and Nolte (n 55) 135–75.
116
Krisch, ‘International Law in Times of Hegemony’ (n 110) 382.
117
ibid.
118
Simpson (n 114) x.
119
ibid 68.
120
121
Simpson (n 114) ch 6.
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international rules.122 Particularly important here are doctrines of extraterritoriality –

which are able to extend domestic jurisdiction. Hegemonic states can here leverage
their substantial economic power to allow their domestic rule to ‘function as global
rules’ even in the absence of formal legal authority.123
Almost uniformly, the theorists of hegemonic international law have relied on the
international relations concept of hegemony. Like the theorists of that concept, they
began with a relatively narrow and specific understanding of the role of the US at the
end of the Cold War, but quickly projected hegemony back as a structuring principle of
international legal history. In general, therefore, the universalist understanding of
hegemony has largely remained absent from these theories of ‘hegemonic international
law’. In all of the 551 pages of Byers and Nolte’s United States Hegemony and the
Foundations of International Law, Gramsci is mentioned precisely once.
The one exception to this is Martti Koskenniemi (the source of the sole mention of
Gramsci in Byers and Nolte’s book). In a 2003 speech entitled ‘Between Empire and
Legal Formalism’, Koskenniemi outlined the ways in which legal formalism might
have a political use in the face of the Iraq War. Drawing on a concept of hegemony
‘from Gramsci as influentially propagated in … Laclau and … Mouffe[’s] Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy’,124 he defines hegemony as ‘the logic through which the
particular tries to fulfil the space of that which is universal’.125 For Koskenniemi, the
Iraq War was a clear example of this, with the US attempting to project its war as a
universal fight against ‘evil’ terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, thus excusing
any issues of legality in its behaviour.126
4.2 Hegemonic Universals
The analysis that Koskenniemi first deployed in relation to the Iraq War has developed
into a particularly important element in understanding hegemony in international law.
Koskenniemi’s most theoretical formulation of the concept of hegemony can be found
in ‘What Should International Lawyers Learn from Karl Marx’. In that text, Kosken-
niemi – drawing again on Laclau and Mouffe – proposes that international lawyers
deploy a ‘dialectical-deconstructive’ analysis.127 As is well known, Koskenniemi argues
that international law is indeterminate.128 This indeterminacy is generated by ‘structural
dichotomies’ in the law itself,129 which mean that for every valid legal argument there
will be an equally valid – and opposing – counterargument.130 Just as with Laclau and
122
S.V. Scott, ‘The Impact on International Law of US Noncompliance’ in Byers and Nolte
(n 55) 427–55.
123
124
M. Koskenniemi, ‘Between Empire and Legal Formalism’, Talk: Recife, Brazil (18 May
2003) <www.helsinki.fi/eci/Publications/Koskenniemi/MRecife.pdf> 4 fn 3.
125
ibid 4.
126
ibid 17.
127
M. Koskenniemi, ‘What Should International Lawyers Learn from Karl Marx?’ (2004)
17(2) Leiden Journal of International Law 237 (‘International Lawyers and Marx’).
128
Koskenniemi, Apology to Utopia (n 70).
129
Koskenniemi, ‘International Lawyers and Marx’ (n 127) 238.
130
Koskenniemi, Apology to Utopia (n 70) 59.
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Hegemony 349
Mouffe, Koskenniemi understands this as denoting a ‘radical indeterminacy (or

un-decidability) of the social’.131 In such a world, legal concepts figure ‘not as carriers
of fixed meanings but as surfaces or, to follow Ernesto Laclau, floating signifiers, on
which social conflict would become visible, and receive meaning and shape’.132
Political struggle lies in connecting these floating signifiers to particular meanings.
In this context, ‘[l]aw is a surface over which political opponents engage in
hegemonic practices, trying to enlist its rules, principles and institutions on their side,
making sure they do not support the adversary’.133 For Koskenniemi, all international
law involves a ‘hegemonic contestation’ in which ‘international actors routinely
challenge each other by invoking legal rules and principles on which they have
projected meanings that support their preferences and counteract those of their
opponents’, with the aim of making ‘their partial view of that meaning appear as the
total view, their preference seem like the universal preference’.134
Importantly, this hegemonic contestation cannot be confined to one particular set of
legal doctrines. Rather, it applies throughout the international legal field; it is a
necessary feature of international legal argument. However, it reaches a particular
intensity and pitch in the case of the fragmentation of international law.135 The central
problem of fragmentation is the idea that international legal institutions all make claims
to govern particular areas or regimes of the law. Yet any situation can plausibly fall
within more than one of these regimes. Given that these regimes have conflicting legal
priorities, there will be a struggle over which one should govern a particular situation.
For Koskenniemi, these regimes are not just ‘legal’; rather, they represent ‘deviating
preferences held by influential players in the international arena’.136 The attempt to cast
a particular situation as falling within a particular regime, therefore, is an attempt to
resolve it on a particular political basis. To take the most obvious example, an
environmental regulation may be looked upon much more favourably in international
environmental law than by the World Trade Organization. Crucially, the various
regimes do not explicitly claim this; rather, ‘[e]ach institution speaks its own profes-
sional language and seeks to translate that into a global Esperanto, to have its special
interests appear as the natural interests of everybody’.137 In other words, fragmentation
encourages institutions to make hegemonic claims, translating their particular interests
into universal claims.138
As Beckett has argued, even supposedly ‘neutral’ attempts to impose ‘coherence’ on
a fragmented system are hegemonic moves. In practice, ‘coherence represents not a
131
132
ibid 240.
133
Martti Koskenniemi, ‘International Law and Hegemony: A Reconfiguration’ (2004) 17(2)
Cambridge Review of International Affairs 200.
134
ibid 199.
135
ibid 206.
136
Martti Koskenniemi and Päivi Leino, ‘Fragmentation of International Law? Postmodern
Anxieties’ (2002) 15(3) Leiden Journal of International Law 578.
137
ibid.
138
D. Kennedy, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political
Economy (Princeton University Press 2016) 82–86.
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natural confluence of interests, but the unequal compromise of competing world-

views’.139 The move to make one body of law ‘coherent’ with another must always take
place within a particular regime, which presents the other regime as ‘coherent and
authoritative’.140 In this way, ‘the desire for “openness” leads to a hegemonic or
imperialistic claim’ whereby a particular regime will examine another regime and
incorporate that regime based upon its own ‘universal’ logic.141
Beckett here also alerts us to an important final point, namely the fact that law itself
is a hegemonic system which recasts other social systems as falling within its
‘universal’ logic. In this way, then, law is particularly useful for actors seeking to
advance hegemonic projects, as it allows them to cast their interests as ‘legal’ (and thus
universal), as against the interests of others (which will be ‘just’ political, economic,
and so on).
5. MANY HEGEMONIES?
5.1 Between Materialism and Idealism?
In international legal terms, then, hegemony has tended to manifest itself in two basic
concepts. On the one hand, there is an idea of hegemony drawn from international
relations (the ‘HIL thesis’). Here hegemony concerns the way in which the interests of
powerful states are translated into particular legal outcomes. The key feature of HIL is
that hegemonic states carve out special rights in the international legal framework, and
constrain the actions of other states. This is a concept of hegemony that focuses
primarily on institutions and practices. One might argue, therefore, that here, hegemony
is something of an ‘external’ matter which then intrudes on international law.
Contrasting this is the concept of hegemony as the attempt by actors, regimes and
institutions to frame their particular interests as universal. Here, hegemony figures as
primarily a discursive practice, which operates at the symbolic level. In this instance,
hegemony appears internal to legal discourse. Hegemony is not associated with any
particular actor; instead, all actors must – by virtue of inhabiting the international legal
field – advance hegemonic claims.142
It would be tempting, on this basis, to argue that the former conception of hegemony
is a materialist conception, being as it is rooted in the practices and institutions of states
and their power relations. One might then argue that the latter conception is an idealist
one, which recasts social relations as symbolic ones.
It would be wise, however, to resist such temptations. In practice, both approaches
arguably suffer from certain fundamental problems which might be dubbed ‘idealist’.
139
J. Beckett, ‘Fragmentation, Openness and Hegemony: Adjudication and the WTO’ in
M. Kolsky Lewis and S. Franke (eds) International Economic Law and National Autonomy
(Cambridge University Press 2010) 44.
140
ibid 53.
141
ibid 62.
142
M. Koskenniemi, ‘Hegemonic Regimes’ in M.A. Young (ed) Regime Interaction in
International Law (Cambridge University Press 2011) 305–24.
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Hegemony 351
The HIL thesis suffers from a lack of historical specificity: it simply posits that
powerful states exist and these states instrumentalize the law. It cannot explain how
these states become powerful, or how forms of hegemony might change. It is also
unable to explain why law is so amenable to hegemonic claims. The universalist
account can explain the connection between law and hegemony – but it too is
ultimately unable to account for hegemony’s specific place in history, or to differentiate
between different hegemonic regimes.
5.2 Historical Specificity
It is striking how ultimately ahistorical most accounts of HIL are. By arguing that
hegemony is a persistent feature of international law – since at least the 1600s – they
give the appearance of historicity, but in so doing they sacrifice any notion of historical
specificity. Hegemony is simply posited as an enduring fact. There is little to no
reflection on why certain states become powerful at certain points and what the source
of their power is. Accordingly, theorists of HIL are unable to account for the very
different features of ‘hegemonic international law’ in different historical periods. Why,
for instance, do we see a transition from formal colonial domination to more
contemporary forms of formal equality coupled with ‘special rights’ for hegemonic
states?
5.3 Why Law?
Perhaps more importantly, in these accounts we have very little sense of why law
specifically is a vehicle for the consolidation of hegemonic power. While Krisch is
surely correct to stress that resort to the law to ‘justify their dominance’, he does not
expand on why law is particularly efficacious at doing so. Without such an
explanation, we are left wondering why hegemonic states do not simply abandon the
juridical sphere altogether and rely on ‘brute force’, or engage in open forms of
juridical domination. This is worsened by the fact that international relations theories
of hegemony as ‘predominance’ collapse the previously outlined distinction between
arkhe and duanamis.
It is in this sense that the universalist concept of hegemony is much more specific.
By understanding hegemony as a specific rhetorical strategy organized around univer-
salism, it is possible to explain why international law proves so attractive for
hegemonic claims. International law takes abstract universality as one of its key starting
points. Thus, any project attempting to legitimate its rule as ‘universal’ will find law a
particularly fertile ground.
5.4 Whose Hegemony?
Although the universalist concept of hegemony is able to account for the connection
between law and hegemony, it ultimately falls foul of the same problems of historical
specificity as the HIL thesis. As previously noted, Laclau and Mouffe’s own theory was
seen as problematic because it appeared to recast the social field as an indeterminate
discursive one. As such, it becomes almost impossible to explain how and why
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particular hegemonic projects are able to succeed at particular historical moments, or to

explain the changing forms of hegemony in different historical periods. Moreover, in
treating hegemony as simply a matter of discourse, it becomes ahistorical. There is not
– and indeed cannot be – an account of why, in a certain historical moment, ‘universal’
arguments became politically persuasive and necessary; that is to say, there can be no
historical explanation for the phenomenon of hegemony itself.
Ultimately, then, we might characterize both concepts of hegemony as ‘idealist’
because they are unable to explain specific hegemonic ‘moments’. Moreover, both
positions simply assume hegemony as a social fact, without inquiring into the historical
conditions for its emergence. The political consequences of this are important. Absent a
wider historical and social framework, it is impossible to distinguish between
hegemony and counterhegemony, or between progressive and reactionary bids for
hegemony.
5.5 Whither Hegemony?
To some degree, proponents of the hegemony as universality have attempted to preempt

these criticisms. Koskenniemi argues that such questions can only be resolved at the
concrete, ‘practical’ level of experience. He argues that ‘[i]nstead of some structure
endlessly repeating itself, everything depends on decisions to maintain or challenge it
… [i]t is the dynamism of practice … that accounts for the change’.143 On this reading,
we can judge how successful a hegemonic strategy is by its outcome in practice, and its
‘progessiveness’ by its effects.
Ultimately such a position is difficult to maintain. First, absent a wider historical
guide, it is impossible to say which ‘effects’ are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’. Indeed, the
short-term ‘effectiveness’ of a particular hegemonic configuration might ultimately
undermine its wider aims, or vice versa.144 More importantly, this seems to leave things
too open. Even if in theory any particular actor might exercise hegemony, in practice
certain groups are more effective at doing so. In particular, we know that hegemonic
contests tend to favour the already powerful.145 In order to understand why some
groups are better able to exercise hegemony we need an account of the power and
location of social agents.
To some degree, Koskenniemi acknowledges this. In the 2006 edition of From
Apology to Utopia he argued that although legal indeterminacy does – in theory – allow
any outcome, ‘the system still de facto prefers some outcomes or distributive choices to
other outcomes of choices’.146 This is because there is a ‘structural bias in the relevant
143
144
R. Knox, ‘Strategy and Tactics’ (2010) 21 Finnish Yearbook of International Law
193–229.
145
As Akbar Rasulov brilliantly put it, international legal argument is rather like ‘buttered
toast released in a free fall: although it has more than one side too, the toast, as everyone knows,
always lands buttered side down’: see A. Rasulov, ‘International Law and the Poststructuralist
Challenge’ (2006) 19(3) Leiden Journal of International Law 806.
146
Koskenniemi, Apology to Utopia (n 70) 606–07.
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Hegemony 353
institutions that makes them serve typical, deeply embedded preferences’.147 But this of
course raises the question: which ‘outcomes’ does the system prefer and why does it
prefer them?
5.6 Hegemony at the IMF
The best illustration of these issues is to examine how the two concepts of hegemony
make sense of a particular legal regime. Take, for example, the role of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) over the course of the twentieth century. As is well known,
during the 1970s and 1980s the IMF was transformed from a body whose task was to
monitor exchange rate levels and lend primarily to advanced countries into an engine
for the enforcement of austerity in the debt-defaulting Global South.148 How, from the
perspectives outlined above, might we make sense of this?
Scholars in HIL have argued that the role of the IMF is centrally connected to the
hegemony of the US.149 They have stressed the role of the IMF in promoting an
economic model which favoured the US economy, by reshaping non-European econ-
omies in ways that favour US corporations. All of this is made possible through the
structure of the IMF, which links voting rights to economic contribution, and so enables
the US to have a disproportionate influence.150
To some degree this explanation is compelling, but it runs into the problems outlined
above. First, why has the US been able to exercise its hegemony through the IMF?
Second, how does an account of simple hegemony explain the change in the role of the
IMF over the twentieth century? Third, why was the IMF in particular – and not some
other international institution – ‘chosen’ as the instrument of US hegemony? Linked to
this is the question of why US hegemony could not be opposed by invoking other
international legal arguments, particularly international human rights law.151
The concept of hegemony as universality can effectively answer this last set of
questions. In part, the IMF was chosen because the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the
birth of ‘neoliberalism’. One crucial aspect of the neoliberal settlement was the attempt
to recast the role of politics as subservient to economics. Essentially, in neoliberal
thought, the ‘role of the state in economic life … was primarily to create the
institutional conditions necessary for the establishment of well-functioning markets’.152
In such a conception, the economic figured as a hegemonic universal, through which
other spheres – politics, culture, and so on – would be filtered. Given this, international
financial institutions were the perfect vessel for a hegemonic bid.
147
ibid 607.
148
B. Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third
World Resistance (Cambridge University Press 2003) 127–28.
149
E. Kwakwa, ‘The International Community, International Law, and the United States:
Three in One, Two against One, or One and the Same?’ in Byers and Nolte (n 55) 40.
150
Krisch, ‘More Equal than the Rest?’ (n 115) 157–58.
151
As, for example, suggested in M.E. Salomon, ‘Of Austerity, Human Rights and
International Institutions’ (2005) 21(4) European Law Journal 521–45.
152
A. Lang, World Trade Law after Neoliberalism: Reimagining the Global Economic Order
(Oxford University Press 2011) 2.
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This hegemonic manoeuvre had important ramifications within the law itself. Under
its Articles of Agreement, the IMF is obliged to ‘respect the domestic social and
political policies of members’. This, of course, seems somewhat at odds with
wide-ranging economic transformations. This circle was squared by recasting the
‘economic’ as a universal category through which other aspects had to be understood.
The IMF has a legal duty to promote exchange stability and ‘sound economic growth’.
If there exists a ‘formula’ to promote stability and growth, then economic transform-
ation can be recast as nothing to do with ‘domestic social and political policies’.
This initial hegemonic move enabled the IMF to further pull other areas of law into
its embrace, mirroring the hegemonic ‘coherence’ described by Beckett. In particular,
the IMF deployed human rights language as a bridging concept that allowed it to
expand its remit. The IMF argued that human rights needed to be seen through the lens
of economic growth. Accordingly, the IMF empowered itself to intervene in political
issues that would traditionally have been the domain of human rights law.153
Utilizing both of these understandings of hegemony gets us some of the way in
understanding the role of the IMF. However, neither position is really able to explain
the transition in the IMF’s hegemonic role, which is of course tied into the particular
transformation in the US’ own position.
On a very basic level, the IMF could only be transformed after a series of personnel
changes. In the late 1970s, the Keynesians who had historically staffed the IMF were
removed and in 1978 Jacques de Larosière, a staunch monetarist, was put in charge.
Clearly, then, one driving feature in the transformation of the IMF was the proliferation
of monetarist and neoliberal ideas in the late 1970s. Importantly, these ideas did not
simply spontaneously develop. Rather, they had been quite consciously cultivated by a
group of intellectuals since the 1940s.154
However, it was only in a specific historical moment that these ideas were able to
come to prominence. The 1970s saw the beginning of the end of the Keynesian
economic consensus. That consensus had been based on a political and economic
compromise. Politically, the governments of the advanced capitalist world brokered a
deal between the workers’ movement and the capitalist class to ensure ‘social peace’.
Economically, this deal involved the creations of ‘social markets’ with high levels of
employment and wages coupled with steady economic growth and high rates of
profit.155 This was matched by the financial architecture of the Bretton Woods
institutions.
Yet this consensus began to face increased pressure. Workers were demanding better
wages and working conditions. The global economic position of the US was increas-
ingly threatened by the rising powers of Germany and Japan. This was leading to a
currency crisis in the dollar, and in response Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility
to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. This was compounded by the
1973 oil crisis, when – in response to US support for Israel – the Organisation of
153
A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge
University Press 2005) 261.
154
D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press 2005) 19–21.
155
See W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2nd edn,
Verso 2017).
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Hegemony 355
Petroleum Exporting Countries initiated an anti-US oil boycott, restricting supply and
raising oil prices. All of this led to falling profit rates.
This political–economic conjuncture fatally broke the conditions for the postwar
social peace: profit rates sufficient to corral capitalists could not be sustained. The
capitalist class thus turned to the neoliberal ideas that had long been percolating as a
way ‘to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of
economic elites’.156 Accordingly, a coalition of a specific fraction of the capitalist class
– primarily organized around finance – and governments in the advanced capitalist
states (particularly the US) drew on ‘neoliberal’ ideas as the framework of the
hegemonic project. Using their (legally sanctioned) power within international financial
institutions they were able to reconfigure those institutions.
The crucial point, then, is that we can only understand the role hegemony plays in
the IMF by embedding it within a wider political–economic story. The ‘neoliberal’ turn
was a carefully cultivated political project, associated with specific class interests,
which only found traction in the wake of a particular economic crisis. This shaped both
the hegemonic role of the US and the hegemonic character of international financial
institutions. This suggests that an account of hegemony that is able to make sense of
international law must be rooted in a materialist position, which situates hegemonic
practices within their political–economic context.
6. TOWARDS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

There is a real sense in which the idealism of the HIL thesis and the universalist
concept of hegemony stems from their conscious distance from the Marxist tradition.
Laclau and Mouffe, of course, explicitly sought to move away from Marxist analysis,
including Gramsci’s own Marxism. Similarly, when the idea of hegemony in inter-
national relations crystallized as a specific concept, it was often advanced in contrast
with Marxist accounts of imperialism.157
Although Marxists have agreed that strong states adopt a hegemonic global position,
they root that hegemony in an international division of labour brought about by the
logic of global capitalism: imperialism. Hegemonic states are able to gain their power
through their position within global imperialism. Accordingly, the rise and fall of
specific hegemons, as well the changing configuration of their rule, could be mapped
onto the changing configurations of global capitalism.
In seeking to articulate a concept of hegemony in international law that avoids the
idealist pitfalls outlined above, we would do well, therefore, to return to Gramsci’s
Marxism, and to those scholars who have deployed materialist accounts of hegemony
and imperialism.
156
Harvey (n 154) 19.
157
Even Giovanni Arrighi, the Marxist theorist, invoked ‘hegemony’ as a way of getting
away from debates around imperialism: see G. Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism: The
Limits of Hobson’s Paradigm (2nd edn, Verso 1983).
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6.1 Gramsci’s Materialist Legal Theory
Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is rooted in material social relations. Hegemony is

exercised by ruling groups who gain their power through their position within a wider
political–economic context. Successful exercises of hegemony are congruent with those
occupying roles which make them vital to the reproduction of a given society. Thus, for
example, those who own the means of production can more easily make good their
hegemonic claims. Similarly, those workers who can plausibly shut down production
can take on a similar, counterhegemonic, role.
Gramsci recognized that law played an important role in this process. For Gramsci,
everyone is a ‘legislator’ since ‘[e]very man … contributes to modifying the social
environment in which he develops … in other words, he tends to establish “norms”,
rules of living and of behaviour’.158 However, he crucially draws a distinction between
this democratic conception of a ‘legislator’ and the official, by arguing that ‘official’
legislators
not only [formulate] directives which will become a norm of conduct for the others, but at the
same time [create] the instruments by means of which the directives themselves will be
‘imposed’, and by means of which it will verify their execution … The maximum of
legislative capacity that can be inferred when a perfect formulation of directives is matched
by a perfect arrangement of the organisms of execution and verification, and by a perfect
preparation of the ‘spontaneous’ consent of the masses who must ‘live’ those directives,
modifying their own habits, their own will, their own convictions to conform with those
directives and with the objectives which they propose to achieve.159
Thus, by modifying habits, will and conviction, law has a central role to play in the
promulgation of hegemony. Transposed to the context of international law, such a
perspective is able to unite both conceptions of hegemony outlined previously, while
providing them with a firmer footing. Simply put, the ‘hegemony’ of powerful states is
rooted in their integration into a global capitalist economy. Accordingly, these states are
crisscrossed with different class coalitions and interests – which may be both domestic
and transnational.160
These forces will attempt to use international legal institutions to advance their
hegemonic projects. Given the close connection between law and abstract universalism,
law is particularly effective terrain for hegemonic claims. The shape of international
institutions – and their material dependence upon capitalist social relations – means
that they have a ‘structural bias’ towards those powerful interests. The form and content
of these claims will change as the political–economic context does.
158
Gramsci (n 19) 265.
159
ibid 266.
160
A. Rasulov, ‘“The Nameless Rapture of the Struggle”: Towards a Marxist Class-
Theoretic Approach to International Law’ (2008) 19(1) Finnish Yearbook of International Law
261; B.S. Chimni, ‘International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making’
(2004) 15(1) European Journal of International Law 1; B.S. Chimni, ‘Prolegomena to a Class
Approach to International Law’ (2010) 21(1) European Journal of International Law 57.
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Hegemony 357
Explicit engagements with Gramsci’s thought in international law are relatively rare,
but there have been some important exceptions. A. Claire Cutler has attempted to
utilize a Gramscian framework to analyse the role that private international law plays in
the consolidation of capitalist power. Specifically, she traces the way in which a ‘global
mercatocracy or an elite association of transnational merchants, private lawyers,
government officials, and representatives of international organisations’ has constructed
a unified private international law, exercising ‘a near hegemonic influence through its
material links to transnational capital and through its monopoly of expert knowledge,
thought, and institutional structures’.161 This mercatocracy has attempted ‘to represent
the communalisation of its private interests as rational and as common sense’.162
Balakrishnan Rajagopal has also paid close attention to the specifically Gramscian
conception of hegemony. Following Gramsci, he understands hegemony as ‘an active
process involving the production, reproduction, and mobilisation of popular consent,
which can be constructed by any “dominant group”’.163 International law, lacking an
enforcement mechanism, relies heavily upon consent, and thus is well suited for the
creation of hegemony. Specifically, international lawyers, as ‘intellectuals’, are a crucial
part of exercising moral leadership.164 For Rajagopal, this hegemony is organized
around the idea of development.165 The ‘development encounter’ cast the non-European
world as backwards and in need of ‘uplift’.166 Following the end of the Second World
War this view was generalized in international institutions, which were increasingly
empowered to transform the non-European world.167 In this way ‘the very architecture
of contemporary international law has been constituted by its continuous evocation of
and interaction with the category “Third World,” which has included not only states,
but also these social movements. The invocation of the “Third World masses,” whether
real or imaginary was essential to the expansion of international institutions’.168
These hegemonic ideas are so embedded within international institutions, Rajagopal
argues, that they were internalized by Third World states operating within international
law.169 In this account, therefore, the ‘universalism’ of hegemony is rooted in the
processes of imperialism and colonialism.
6.2 What’s in a Name?
What is distinct about Cutler and Rajagopal’s work is that they locate the concept of
hegemony within a wider social field. For both, hegemony is linked with particular
dominant groups who themselves are privileged by a wider set of social relations.
161
A.C. Cutler, Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the
Global Political Economy (Cambridge University Press 2003) 12.
162
A.C. Cutler, ‘Gramsci, Law, and the Culture of Global Capitalism’ (2005) 8(4) Critical
Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 538.
163
Rajagopal, International Law from Below (n 148) 18.
164
ibid 21.
165
ibid.
166
ibid 25.
167
ibid 34.
168
ibid 43.
169
ibid 82.
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Accordingly, they are some of the only scholars who self-consciously and explicitly
deploy a Gramscian conception of hegemony.170 At the same time, however, a number
of scholars have arguably engaged in a similar set of analyses of international law
without explicitly evoking the concept of hegemony.
The most obvious example here would be the work of scholars in the Marxist
tradition.171 These scholars have stressed the close connection between international
law, global capitalism and imperialism.172 Particularly important have been those
Marxist scholars who have used the concept of ‘ideology’ to analyse international legal
developments.173 Such approaches have drawn attention to the way in which inter-
national law tends to naturalize the existing order through strategies such as universal-
ization.174 Importantly, these approaches have stressed that the ‘universalism’ itself has
a material foundation in the universalizing and abstracting tendencies of capitalism,
tendencies reproduced in international law.175
One might draw similar attention to Third World Approaches to International Law
(TWAIL) scholars.176 These scholars draw our attention to how international law has
170
C. Schwöbel-Patel has adopted a similar perspective in her reflections on teaching
international law: see C.E.J. Schwöbel-Patel, ‘“I’d Like to Learn What Hegemony Means”:
Teaching International Law from a Critical Angle’ (2013) 3(2) Recht En Methode in Onderzoek
En Onderwijs 67.
171
R. Knox, ‘Marxist Approaches to International Law’ in Anne Orford, Florian Hoffmann
and Martin Clark (eds) Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University
Press 2016) 306–26.
172
G. Baars, ‘“It’s Not Me, It’s the Corporation”: The Value of Corporate Accountability in
the Global Political Economy’ (2016) 4(1) London Review of International Law 127; B.S.
Chimni, International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (Sage
Publications 1993); B.S. Chimni, ‘Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the
Twenty-First Century’ (2012) 14 Oregon Review of International Law 17; R. Knox, ‘Valuing
Race? Stretched Marxism and the Logic of Imperialism’ (2016) 4(1) London Review of
International Law 81–126; C. Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of Inter-
national Law (Brill 2005); A. Rasulov, ‘Writing about Empire: Remarks on the Logic of a
Discourse’ (2010) 23(2) Leiden Journal of International Law 449; O. Taylor, ‘Reclaiming
Revolution’ (2011) 22 Finnish Yearbook of International Law 259.
173
S. Marks, ‘Big Brother Is Bleeping Us – With the Message that Ideology Doesn’t Matter’
(2001) 12(1) European Journal of International Law 109; S. Marks, The Riddle of All
Constitutions: International Law, Democracy, and the Critique of Ideology (Oxford University
Press 2003); T. Krever, ‘Quantifying Law: Legal Indicator Projects and the Reproduction of
Neoliberal Common Sense’ (2013) 34(1) Third World Quarterly 131–50; T. Krever, ‘Inter-
national Criminal Law: An Ideology Critique’ (2013) 26(3) Leiden Journal of International Law
701; B. Bowring, ‘Ideology Critique and International Law: Towards a Substantive Account of
International Human Rights’ in C. Warbrick and S. Tierney (eds) Towards an International Legal
Community? The Sovereignty of States and the Sovereignty of International Law (British
Institute of International and Comparative Law 2006) 193–210.
174
Marks, Riddle of All Constitutions (n 173) 20.
175
Miéville (n 172) 267.
176
For a representative sample, see Anghie, Imperialism (n 153); J. Thuo Gathii, ‘TWAIL: A
Brief History of Its Origins, Its Decentralized Network, and a Tentative Bibliography’ (2011)
3(1) Trade, Law and Development 26; M. Mutua, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor
of Human Rights’ (2001) 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201; V. Nesiah, ‘Resistance in
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

Hegemony 359
facilitated the domination of the non-European world by European states. Crucial in

this respect has been a discourse of ‘universalism’ whereby international law creates
‘a gap between two cultures, demarcating one as “universal” and civilised and the
other as “particular” and uncivilised’ and then seeks ‘to bridge the gap by developing
techniques to normalise the aberrant society’.177 In this way, international law is a
hegemonic project of European states, which advances through particular forms of
universalization.
Both Marxist and TWAIL approaches, then, point towards how the concept of
hegemony can be deployed so as not to deprive it of its analytical power. On the one
hand, they insist that ‘hegemony’ cannot simply be a ‘replacement’ for the term
‘imperialism’, as this makes us unable to understand the dynamics driving the changing
forms of hegemonic contestation. At the same time, hegemony has a specific meaning
insofar as it is concerned with the creation of ‘consent’. This consent is inextricably
linked with the practices and discourses of ‘universalism’, in which a ruling group is
able to present its own interests and experiences as congruent with all. Both Marxist
and TWAIL scholarship provide an explanation of why this universalism is such a
recurrent feature in international legal argument.178
7. CONCLUSION
Hegemony as a concept has been bound up with some of the most vital moments of
modern history. It is telling that, after its initial importance in Ancient Greek society, it
only really re-emerges in the nineteenth century. At that point it becomes bound up
with two vital issues: the dominance of ‘Great Powers’ internationally, and the
construction of class rule through a language of universalism. While not always strictly
opposed to each other, these two meanings pulled away from each other, and by the end
of the twentieth century two quite distinct concepts of hegemony had emerged.
As a discipline, international law was quite late to discussions of hegemony. It was
only with the end of the Cold War and then the beginning of the War on Terror that
hegemony, as a concept, became one systematically deployed by a number of
international lawyers. In so doing, they inherited the legacy of the quite rigid distinction
between the two theories of hegemony.
This chapter has argued that this is politically important. Both of the more modern
theories of hegemony have fundamental problems with how they conceive the world. In
particular, both seem unable to set hegemony – and particular hegemonic articulations
– within a wider historical, political and economic context. Moreover, neither approach
the Age of Empire: Occupied Discourse Pending Investigation’ (2006) 27(5) Third World
Quarterly 903; Rajagopal, International Law from Below (n 148).
177
Anghie, Imperialism (n 153) 4.
178
For an account of why the Marxist approach might be the preferable explanation for this,
see R. Knox, ‘Race, Racialisation and Rivalry in the International Legal Order’ in A. Anievas,
N. Manchanda, and R. Shilliam (eds) Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting
the Global Colour Line (Routledge 2014); Knox, ‘Valuing Race?’ (n 172).
Robert Knox - 9781783474684

is able to adequately historicize the conditions under which the phenomenon (or
phenomena) captured by the term ‘hegemony’ have arisen.
This is, in part, because both approaches have focused on distancing themselves from
the older materialist accounts of hegemony and from wider theories of imperialism.
This chapter has suggested that returning to the work done in the traditions that draw
on this legacy might put the concept of hegemony on a further footing.
This is a vitally important task. The concept of ‘hegemony’ ultimately invites us to
question the complex interrelationship between law and power. By treating power as
either a brute, never-ending fact – as in the case of the international relations version of
the concept – or as a purely contingent shifting category – as in the case of the
‘universalist’ vision – we are left unable to deal with it. Either hegemony is always with
us, or the situation is so fluid that the concept provides us with no purchase for going
forward.
It is only by understanding hegemony as a specific universalist practice pursued by
dominant groups whose power is embedded within wider political and economic
structures – that is to say, the structures of capitalism and imperialism – that we can
hope to understand and contest hegemonic international law.
Robert Knox - 9781783474684


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JOBNAME: EE0 d’Aspremont PAGE: 1 SESS: 3 OUTPUT: Wed Jan 30 08:58:14 2019

2. THE MEANING(S) OF HEGEMONY

‘Hegemony’ is generally understood as originating from the Greek word hegemonia.3

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330 Concepts for international law

had a complex interrelationship. Hegemonia clearly could aid in the achievement of

2.2 Predominance and Leadership

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332 Concepts for international law

2.3 International Law and Hegemony between the Wars

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resort to a rich instrumentarium of constitutional and international law in pursuit of

3. HEGEMONY AFTER THE WARS: BETWEEN DOMINANCE

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334 Concepts for international law

3.1 Hegemony as Superpower Dominance

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336 Concepts for international law

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3.2 Hegemony as Universality

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338 Concepts for international law

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340 Concepts for international law

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The same might be said of Gramsci in academia. In particular, Gramsci served as an

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342 Concepts for international law

alliance’. Instead, hegemony involved actively constructing a political project whereby

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formation.90 Notwithstanding these criticisms, Laclau and Mouffe’s particular formula-

4. HEGEMONY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

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344 Concepts for international law

4.1 Hegemonic International Law

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346 Concepts for international law

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institutions are important to hegemonic powers, since they provide a framework of

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348 Concepts for international law

international rules.122 Particularly important here are doctrines of extraterritoriality –

4.2 Hegemonic Universals

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Mouffe, Koskenniemi understands this as denoting a ‘radical indeterminacy (or

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350 Concepts for international law

natural confluence of interests, but the unequal compromise of competing world-

5.1 Between Materialism and Idealism?

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5.2 Historical Specificity

5.3 Why Law?

5.4 Whose Hegemony?

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352 Concepts for international law

particular hegemonic projects are able to succeed at particular historical moments, or to

5.5 Whither Hegemony?

To some degree, proponents of the hegemony as universality have attempted to preempt

Robert Knox - 9781783474684