What nation does not have a “policy or practice of aggressively expanding its influence over other countries?” What nation does not have policies to expand its export markets and sell its goods into the markets of other countries? What nation does not attempt to establish trade conditions with other countries in order to obtain the best trade terms possible? What nation does not seek to maximize the comparative advantage of its own economic strengths in trading with other nations?
All nations do these things. A nation that does not have policies to foster trade in favor of its own interests eventually ceases to exist. The same rule applies in business. Altruism resulting in financial loss eventually results in bankruptcy and the cessation of business operations.
The quotation marks in the first sentence above are from Webster’s definition of hegemony. Wherever I’ve seen it employed, hegemony is a dirty word used to imply wrongful conduct on the part of a nation. Hegemony connotes a dark, if not downright evil, intent to dominate and control innocent other parties in order to serve one’s own interests. Writers use hegemony as a pejorative against a nation, a people, and a culture.
The use of hegemony, however, says more about the writer than it does any subject.
First, it indicates the writer’s belief in the existence of a collective mentality, as opposed to individual minds. Attaching a moral quality to hegemony means that a collective choice between right and wrong alternatives can be isolated such that the collective mind can be held guilty of a moral wrong.
How can men make collective choices? Not easily. It requires application of a voting infrastructure to assemble individual choices about a specific moral question into a collective outcome. Even if a vote was taken and some machinery of government acted on that vote, there is no collective entity one can hold accountable apart from the individuals who participated in the collective outcome. But it would be unjust to hold individual participants in a vote responsible for a collective outcome over which they had virtually no causal control.
Moreover, the types of grievances labelled under hegemony are never the product of a distributed decision process such as a vote. Nor are the grievances named with much specificity. Expressions of hegemony are presumed to exist when U.S. firms interact with foreign markets, because the U.S. is capitalist and oriented to the free market, and is therefore a presumptive enemy of the people represented by socialist political systems in much of the rest of the world.
Hegemony is a theoretical presumption, not a conclusion drawn from observed causation. Any theory, however, must be capable of disproof. Hegemony can no more be proved than it can be disproved, so it doesn’t even rise to the level of a theory.
As such, hegemony is an empty vessel for writers to load with any meaning or implication that suits their broader purposes. And the purposes with hegemony always involve a negative connotation. Conversely, the alleged victims of hegemony are always portrayed in the right.
In computer programming, words that function like hegemony are called variables. They get instantiated at run time by whatever they’re connected to in the surrounding code. You have to read the code to figure out the limits. The code one finds around hegemony generally involves a writers prejudice against capitalism, and against the U.S.
But when you look into the actual economic transactions with the U.S. that cross international boundaries, you find firms represented by individuals making voluntary buys and sells in what all parties perceive to be in their own best interests. They are not the outcomes of democratic processes. Each individual buyer or seller satisfies some element of the comparative advantage they represent to realize a profit on their side of the transaction. The price point they agree upon is somewhere in the middle of their two interests.
The fact that comparative advantage is unique to each place, and different from other places, sets a pre-condition for trade, and consequentially for profit by both buyers and sellers. Two parties with identical capacities have no need to trade.
Disequilibrium of comparative advantage enables trade, trade enables profit, profit enables capital formation, capital formation enables investment, investment enables the concentration of technology, technology improves efficiency, efficiency lowers unit costs, etc.
A world where everything is equal, where no comparative advantage exists, or where no one is allowed to act on their comparative advantage, is a place where nothing will change, and nothing will get better.
An equality of condition is a utopian ideal we should all hope to never achieve. Profitable trade is the natural response to economic dis-equilibrium. Socialists wouldn’t have to negatively frame international trade relationships as hegemony if socialism worked.