ABSTRACT
Structures of hegemony have always emerged out of a geopolitical struggle by dominant states and their ruling social strata to master space-to control territories and/or the interactional flows through which modern terrestrial spaces are produced. The intellectual traditions of neo-realism and neoliberalism take this as given. The first does so through its invocation of the pursuit of primacy, while the second does so through its claim that markets always reward the most efficient and punish the slothful and profligate. In practice, the end result has been a coercive hierarchy of ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ states and regions, or of ‘more’ and ‘less’ ‘developed’ economies. In neither case is there the prospect of real reciprocity (to be distinguished from that usage which posits a congruence between economic benefits and military burdens, see, for example, Denoon 1993) and majority empowerment: a counterhegemonic order based on a broad diffusion of power among a large number of actors committed to a set of universal principles of reciprocal interaction without entrenched domination. Open and competitive markets might promise a world in which space is lived rather than mastered, but today’s market idolatry belies this hope.
