Page 36 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

24 Communication, Commerce and Power

society, ... a world society composed of states and non-state
corporate entities. In a hegemonic order these values and
understandings are relatively stable and unquestioned. They
appear to most actors as the natural order of things. They are the
intersubjective meanings that constitute the order itself. Such a
structure of meanings is underpinned by a structure of power,
in which most probably one state is dominant but that
state's dominance is not sufficient by itself to create
hegemony. Hegemony derives from the ways of doing and
thinking of the dominant social strata of the dominant state or
states insofar as these ways of doing and thinking have inspired
emulation or acquired the acquiescence of the dominant social
strata of other states. These social strategies and ideologies that
explain and legitimize them constitute the foundation of the
hegemonic order. Hegemony frames thought and thereby
circumscribes action. 19

Unlike non-Gramscian international political economists - who
either focus on conflictive and essentially Hobbesian inter-state rela-
tions as the essence of international relations or the role of complex
institutions and regimes of inter-state interdependence- Cox, Gill and
others also consider international and domestic consent to be both
extraordinarily difficult to explain and, in particular locations · at
certain historical junctures, the most important component of world
order. As indicated by Cox, cultural conflicts constitute the loci of
essential power struggles precisely because their outcome will define
the parameters of individual and collective values and understandings
that, in tum, shape the very parameters in which policy options are
imaginable or unimaginable, feasible or not feasible.
In both the quotation above and elsewhere, Cox associates the
capacity to naturalize 'the way things are' with hegemonic struggle
generally and cultural development more particularly. Periods of
relative cultural stability - a shared 'structure of meanings' - are
directly but problematically associated with 'a structure of power.'
States here are the necessary mediators of such structures both do-
mestically and internationally. For Cox, culture is a central concept in
the process of hegemony and in world order writ large and it is
through the state - perhaps the core arbiter of setting or unraveling
the political, economic and legal structures shaping cultural condi-
tions - that its ongoing development is directly shaped rather than
determined.