Neo-Gramscian Analysis on US Foreign Policy at the Age of Accelerated Globalisation

Gramsci is not the first person that uses the concept of hegemony. Marxists such as Lenin uses the concept to describe the political leadership of proletariat by using the means of violence and coercion. In contrast to Marxist understanding of hegemony, Gramsci underlines that not only coercion, but also consent is the means of political control. Consent is created ideologically through hegemonic culture, whereby, the values of the hegemonic social groups are constructed as ‘the common sense’. Therefore, hegemony is the ability of a class or social group to exercise a function of political and moral direction in society. According to Gramsci , "to further reinforce the solidarity of the historic bloc and go beyond it to extend the hegemony of the leading social group to the popular masses , it must ensure economic development. Without capability to ensure economic development, ideologically of the dominant class does no more serve as the common sense to create consensus in the society.

Gramscian understanding of hegemony provides us valuable tool to analyze the declining hegemon of the US. Since the early 1970s, it has become evident that the US has been losing its relative economic power to other core capitalist countries. Along with the abolishment of Bretton-Woods regime, Regan revolution has marked that Wall-Street regime will become the main determinant of US dominance over the mode of production. However, Wall-Street regime's capability through ' Washington Consensus' to ensure economic development is limited as Latin America crisis in 1980s and Asia Crisis in 1997 have revealed. From a Gramscian perspective, globalisation is a hegemony project to establish a global consensus around the hegemon’s culture of neo-liberalism or so called ‘ Washington Consensus’ . Thus, the US has been losing her power to ensure economic development at the global scale, whereby, her historic block formation has begun to crack while her liberal ideology to create ' common sense' has been subsiding.

In sum, Wall-Street regime does not have the capability to ensure global economic development, whereas, it has been worsening economic problems in developing countries. Without ensuring economic development, there is no historical block solidarity, where there is no common sense to establish consent in the society. What only has left is pure coercion.


Emre Iseri