Hegemonic Project Research Articles

Acid house and Thatcherism: Contesting spaces in late 1980s Britain

From 1987 to 1990, hundreds of Acid House parties were held across Britain. These parties became the subject of an intense moral panic. The scale of the measures taken against these parties can be understood in terms of the disruptive presence they presented to Thatcherism—the hegemonic project built around Margaret Thatcher's leadership of the Conservative Party. The successive Thatcher governments held jurisdiction over the territory of the UK and it was over this national space that Thatcherism attempted to assert its hegemony. This paper analyses the way in which the disruption presented by Acid House to the organisation of spaces within contemporary Britain contributed to the threat it was perceived as presenting to the Thatcherite project.

Structural change and neoliberalism in Mexico: 'Passive revolution' in the global political economy

This article examines an enduring context of 'passive revolution' in the making of modern Mexico by developing an account of the rise of neoliberalism during a period of structural change since the 1970s. It does so by analysing and understanding both the unfolding accumulation strategy and the hegemonic project of neoliberalism in Mexico since the 1970s as emblematic of the survival and reorganisation of capitalism through a period of state crisis. This is recognised as a strategy of 'passive revolution', the effects of which still leave an imprint on present development initiatives in Mexico. Therefore, through the notion of 'passive revolution', the article not only focuses on the recent past circumstances, but also on the present unfolding consequences, of neoliberal capitalist development in Mexico. This approach also leaves open the question of 'anti-passive revolution' strategies of resistance to neoliberalism.

Critical Realism and Hegemony

This is a recent contribution to the Routledge series Studies in Critical Realism. Jonathan Joseph, its author, aims to develop Gramsci�s celebrated analysis of hegemony in a critical realist direction by distinguishing analytically between �structural hegemony� and hegemonic projects and then connecting them dialectically. He develops this approach through a critical engagement not only with Gramsci�s work but also with other positions and debates within classical Marxism, Western Marxism, and post-Marxism. The intended result is a �theory of hegemony [that] combines the political moment of agency with the structural nature of social reproduction� (161). He illustrates his arguments with observations on a range of historical conjunctural analyses drawn from classical Marxism (i.e., Lenin and Trotsky) and Western Marxism (notably the Anderson-Nairn thesis on the peculiarities of British development) and, for his contemporary analyses, from the development of Fordism and the state in post-war Britain in the context of globalization. And he concludes with the view that the Leninist theory of the vanguard party can be grounded in a critical realist understanding of the heterogeneity and complexity of capitalist social formations.

Masking and Veiling Protests

This article argues that certain representations of protests ideologically aid the hegemonic project of globalization. Using Merquior's distinction between ideology as mask and veil, it considers, first, the question of how consent to globalization's power is produced even within non-benefiting groups, and next, the related question of how and why some intellectuals produce ideological representations. It answers the first question by discussing the typical frameworks that represent protests against globalization as irrational, immoral, unnecessary, or non-existent, thus masking power and sectional interests. It answers the second through an examination of John Tomlinson's argument against `cultural imperialism' and claims for `cultural loss' as the real meaning of protests, and argues that the concept of `culture' operates in his arguments in a peculiar way to veil protests. Finally, this article makes a claim for the continued relevance of the term `cultural imperialism' to account for particular protests against globalization.

Roma: A Challenge and Opportunity for a New EU Paradigm of Enlargement

The hypothesis: for all the relative improvements in the economic and political situation of the Central and Eastern European countries, CEE countries could hardly become members of the European Union without finding solutions to the so-called “Romany problem”, from EU and CEE countries perspective. From the European Civil Society’s perspective, in the mirror, for all the progress in the economic and future political integration of European Union, European Civil Society (resistance against the coercive European Political Society) cannot accept “the embedded neo-liberalism” (the EU’s actual hegemonic Project) without finding solutions for the so-called “social fracture”(including the “Roma problem1 ”). This research is based on two theoretical perspectives: the integrative, and the neo-Gramscian one. The question is: can Romany Civil Society participate to the anti-hegemonic Project of European Civil Society, able to face the hegemonic project of European Political Society, “embedded neo-liberalism”? After examining the Romanian case study the answer is affirmative because this is one example of the efforts of the Romany Civil Society to understand their social situation and the possibilities to change it in alliance with other social forces of the Social Democratic Party. This study of the Roma’s EU integration was made from two perspectives: as a challenge but also as an opportunity for the EU enlargement, by shifting from a paternalistic policies paradigm of coercion2 or mimicry for Roma (hidden structural discrimination) towards a new and more enlightened policies paradigm3 , based more on socio-economic rights and legal status for Roma in Europe.

The struggle over gendered meanings in India: How Indian women's networks, the Hindu nationalist hegemonic project, and transnational feminists address gender violence

The struggle over gendered meanings in India: How Indian women's networks, the Hindu nationalist hegemonic project, and transnational feminists address gender violence

GATS and the Education Service Industry: The Politics of Scale and Global Reterritorialization

One consequence of the hype around globalization and education and debates on global political actors such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO—is that there has not been sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the development of a rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us to make sense of the profound changes which now characterize education in the new millennium. 1 This is not a problema confined to education. Writing in the New Left Review, Fredric Jameson observes that debates on globalization have tended to be shaped by “…ideological appropriations— discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other.” In this paper we start from the position that little or nothing can be explained in terms of the causal powers of globalization; rather we shall be suggesting that globalization is the outcome of processes that involve real actors—economic and political—with real interests. Following Martin Shaw, we also take the view that globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation of state forms; “…it is both predicated on and produces such transformations.”3 Examining how these processes of transformation work, however, requires systematic investigation into the organization and strategies of particular actors whose horizons or effects might be described as global.

Incommensurability, Land Use, and the Right to Space: Community Gardens in New York City1

I examine the conflict over the community gardens in New York City. I argue that this contest was an example of Lefebvre's "trial by space," and that ultimately, the struggles concerned the right to space, or "the right to the city." The city, operating from the perspective of entrepreneurial governance, claimed that the gardens represented a loss of exchange value and potential housing. I contend that more was at stake: the gardens and gardeners represented a threat to the hegemonic project of the government to maximize exchange values and to beautify and sanitize the city. I also argue that the issues of commensurability and narrative were critical to the conflict. The city used the rhetoric of a market economy paradigm to dismiss incommensurable use values, thus restricting rights to the city within a demonstration of power and "reason." In response, the garden advocates resorted to "tactics" and other persuasive arguments.

Acid House and Thatcherism: noise, the mob, and the English countryside.

This paper examines why the late 1980s youth subculture Acid House provoked a moral panic of the scale and intensity that it did. The subculture is conceived as presenting a disruptive presence to Thatcherism as an hegemonic project. The terms under which this occurred are examined through the themes of noise, the mob, and the disruption of bureaucratic authority. The presence of Acid House within the English countryside, and in particular the Home Counties, is situated as enhancing the problematic status of the subculture. The scale of measures taken against Acid House is related to Thatcherism's 'authoritarian populism'. Acid House is located in terms of a history of similar forms of popular cultural activity. The coverage of Acid House in The Sun and The Daily Mail, and the parliamentary debate around the second reading of the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act, are drawn upon throughout.

Balkanism and the New Radical Interventionism: A Structural Critique

This article presents a critique of the theory behind the new radical interventionism, both in its military disciplining form and in the form of a radical aid policy that attempts to change and control whole processes of social life by targeting mentalities and attitudes. The contention here is that the new interventionism, while appealing to moral and civil values, is as 'realist' oriented as ever. Moreover, the moralist discourse behind 'cosmopolitan policing' and 'humanitarian bombing' is shared within both the 'left' and the 'right' enabling a merger into a neo-liberal agenda with radical interventionist ambitions. This, in turn, has become possible by drawing on elements from three other discourses, thus creating a formula for a hegemonic project. These three discourses are: 'balkanism', 'universalism' and 'cultural nihilism'. We can contrast this with an alternative emphasis on how new forms of power are being worked out in the centre, as well as alternative projects developing in the periphery, each having their own logic and forms of legitimacy. This approach maintains the importance of agency and local power, while at the same time regarding them as embedded in a wider structural framework.

Viva Mexico! Viva la Independencia!: Celebrations of September 16. WILLIAM H. BEEZLEY and DAVID E. LOREY (eds.): Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2001.

Within the rapidly expanding historiography on the "invented traditions," "imagined communities," and "hegemonic" state- and nation-building projects of modern polities, a growing number of scholars have looked at public celebratory life in Mexico from the colonial period to the present. The public panoply of patriotic and religious ritual has been richly reconstructed empirically, and analyzed as state pedagogy, an appropriated festal vehicle for popular protest, a juggernaut of social and political control, deep cultural text, and so forth. Both co-editors of the anthology under review have made significant contributions to this virtual sub-genre in recent years, David Lorey with an ongoing project on secular political holidays in the twentieth century, William Beezley with similar work of his own on the nineteenth century and as co-editor of an earlier, foundational collection of essays on cognate themes, Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (1994). Beezley and Lorey have produced a fascinating volume here on public observances of Mexico's Independence day, 16 September, since the years immediately following the Mexican colony's separation from Spain in 1821. The essays are for the most part empirically rich, evocative of the eras they portray, and of more than sufficient sophisticated conceptualization to speak to ongoing debates in political and cultural history about the function of public rituals not only as instruments of elite hegemonic projects, and as venues for struggle over public memory and national identity, but also as opportunities for the expression of more exuberant popular ideas and forms of subaltern resistance.

The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation

AbstractThis article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-led transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.

New Social Corporatism: A Discursive-Critical Review of the WDR 2000/1, ‘Attacking Poverty’

The World Development Report 2000/1 is a major event for those concerned with global poverty. The References in WDR 2000/1 to ‘empowerment’ and ‘voices of the poor’ provide the point of departure for a combined discourse analysis and comparative policy analysis. The article looks at the process around the WDR as part of a hegemonic project, and the contents of the WDR are seen as a discursive act related to four different social policy discourses: Social paternalism, social liberalism, social corporatism and social radicalism. The main finding is that the report contributes to the rediscovery of social corporatism, and the communitarian and social- liberal sources of inspiration are outlined. The bearings on the report of liberal-democratic theory are identified, and these liberalist tenets are criticised. An alternative pool of knowledge and experiences in poverty reduction, social radicalism, is presented to point at several shortcomings of the report. The article concludes that WDR 2000/1 represents a discursive innovation, challenging the current neo-liberal hegemony from within along the lines of New Social Corporatism.

Yerushalayim and al-Quds: Political Catechism and Political Realities

Israel's insistent portrayal of "Yerushalayim" as "united and indivisible" and as encompassing not only all of Arab al-Quds but vast surrounding areas had a crucial political purpose: to block any negotiated settlement with the Palestinians by creating a taboo against even discussing any separation. The campaign was successful in some ways but ultimately failed as a hegemonic project. This failure is reflected in the Barak government's willingness to re-imagine the city's future. This article examines four misconceptions about Israeli attitudes toward Jerusalem and its status in Israeli law. In so doing, it documents the potential for Israeli flexibility on the issue.

A Realist Theory of Hegemony

A new approach to understanding hegemony is developed based on the method of critical realism. Breaking from the traditional interpretations that emphasise inter‐subjective, superstructural and cultural aspects of hegemony, this article looks at hegemony's structural context and the conditions for its possibility. A realist conception of hegemony relates hegemonic projects to structural reproduction and transformation via Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity. In doing so this model is itself modified to incorporate hegemony as the political moment of social reproduction. A distinction is made between hegemony in its structural aspect, and specific hegemonic projects as emergent possibilities.

Sterilizing vaccines or the politics of the womb: retrospective study of a rumor in Cameroon.

In 1990 a rumor that public health workers were administering a vaccine to sterilize girls and women spread throughout Cameroon. Schoolgirls leapt from windows to escape the vaccination teams, and the vaccination campaign (part of the Year of Universal Child Immunization) was aborted. This article traces the origin and development of this rumor. Theories of rumor and ambiguous cultural response to new technologies shed some light on its genesis and spread, but explain neither its timing nor its content. For this task we need to examine the historical context of Cameroonian experience with colonial vaccination campaigns and the contemporary contexts of the turmoil of democratization movements and economic crisis, concurrent changes in contraceptive policy, and regional mistrust of the state and its "hegemonic project." Drawing on Bayart's politique du ventre and White's thoughts on gossip, we explore this rumor as diagnostic of local response to global and national projects. This response, expressed in this case through the idiom of threats to local reproductive capacity, reveals a feminine side to local-global relations, a politics of the womb.

Promoting Democratic Governance in the South

Arising from a survey of critical literature, three questions are posed concerning the linkage of development aid to the promotion of democratic governance. Is democracy promotion by Northern governments restricted to a narrow, procedural version? Is a ‘Western’ model of democracy imposed? Are programmes part of a wider neo‐liberal hegemonic project of global domination? Investigation is through a comparative examination of the political aid programmes of four official donors, the governments of Sweden, the UK and the US, plus the European Union. Analysis explores two main dimensions: the major recipient countries and the main beneficiary sectors to which political aid is directed. Findings are threefold. First, some emphasis on electoral assistance was confirmed, yet fairly substantial support was provided to other dimensions of democratic development, including civil society organisations, though the latter lacked focus and overall coherence. Second, each bilateral donor tends to promote and universalis...

Legitimisation and de-legitimisation within a multilateral organisation: South Africa and the Commonwealth

Following Robert Cox, the essential function of multilateralism is seen as the institutionalisation and promotion of an ongoing hegemonic project. Yet, taken alone this understanding is unsatisfactory in explaining wholly the behaviour of international organisations and in particular the Commonwealth’s relationship with South Africa. By making use of Frederick Gareau’s notion of de-legitimisation as well as legitimisation, a fuller understanding of multilateralism and the Commonwealth as a particular organisation is crafted.

Resistance and the Arts of Domination

The ever-growing scholarly literature on resistance-closely associated with now-classic works by James Scott (1976; 1985; 1990)-has consistently focused on historical conjunctures explaining emergence and consolidation of dominant social orders and their ideological, economic, political, and cultural underpinnings, mix of coercion and consent in varying historical contexts that accounts for more or less effective state rule and hegemony, and, especially, contexts and processes within and through which social groups creatively contest dominating and seemingly totalizing power of states, elites, and other power holders. There is a growing realization that seemingly dominant ideologies' are rarely if ever as pervasive as they seem to be, that behind apparent acquiescence to state and elite rule and domination are alternative visions, hopes, and expectations and a deep questioning of existing politico-economic arrangements and their ideological underpinnings, and that power of state and dominant classes, while very real, is rarely all-encompassing and hegemonic projects are often quite fragile and fragmentary. Subordinate groups are constantly questioning and challenging the terms of their subordination, do not engage in willing, even enthusiastic complicity in that subordination (Scott, 1990: 4, 86), and have available to them opportunities and repertoire-cultural, political, economic, social, and ideological-to challenge it. The resistance literature has amply documented manifold ways that subordinate, marginalized, or otherwise disposed but not entirely powerless social groups have (more or less) successfully confronted, maneuvered around, checked, challenged, skirted, or otherwise undermined closely overlapping forms of domination (Scott, 1976; 1985; 1990; Nash, 1988; Colburn, 1989; Leong, 1992; Gutmann, 1993; Reed-Danahay, 1993; Guha, 1994; Roseberry, 1994; Ortner, 1995). My purpose in this article is not to tread over familiar terrain-either to dwell on goals and achievements of resistance scholarship or to reiterate many critiques that have been leveled at it (see especially Abu-Lughod,

Ideological aspects of hegemonic projects: Latin American civil society and cultural values in comparative perspective

A hegemonic project can be seen as the implementation of a particular social vision that links cultural beliefs and practices with the real experiences of mass society in the economic, social and political spheres.1 The attainment of hegemony suggests the ability to manufacture and reproduce consent to a given set of social relations over time. Masses, as well as elite groups, must actively consent to inequalities within society if a political system is to reproduce itself. Ideology. which is embedded in culture, acts as a glue in this process and is an essential component of any hegemonic project. This is not to say that a dominant ideology needs to remain completely unquestioned and become internalised by each individual member of the target population for it to become hegemonic. Rather. dominant ideologies set the terms and define the scope of social debates. It is also important to emphasise that dominant ideologies do not become hegemonic unless they have a close and dialectical relationship with material conditions. Hegemony is not identical to thought control. It must be based on real economic and political sacrifices being made on the part of dominant groups in exchange for the consent of mass society.2 Thus, ideology and cultural manipulation are central components of successful political projects, but must bear some relation to the real experiences of mass society. Hegemony implies more than political power based on repression softened or masked by propaganda. Rather, hegemonic projects are those that are able to integrate economic and political change with existing local cultures and mass ideologies.