HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES

Marcelo Gullo*

When we say that the mega-corporations are secondary actors in

international relationships and that commonly require the states
to act, we are not unaware that the mega-corporations, the
World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and other
international agencies with varying degrees of autonomy,
integrate a system of subordination whose reality is suffered
daily by peripheral states.

We therefore believe that the concept of "hegemonic power

structures," by Samuel Pinheiro Guimares, is most appropriate
to cover the complex mechanisms of subordination that exist in
the international system. The hegemonic structures are the
result

of

historical

process,

born

together

with

the

international system during the historical period of the first wave

of globalization that began with the maritime discoveries driven
by Portugal and Castile, whose main protagonists were, among
others, Enrique the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Christopher
Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Sebastin Elcano.
It is precisely from 1492 when the process of subordination of
the world outside starts. This process was developed in three
phases. The first one involved the subordination of the Americas.
The second one gravitated in the subordination of Asia, whose
major milestones, for its strategic and economic importance,
were the subordination of India and China. The third one, finally,
involved the subordination of Islamic countries and sub-Saharan
Africa.
The concept of the hegemonic power structure, defined by
Pinheiro Guimares, realizes that stage and international
dynamics in which the peripheral states acts, are organized
around hegemonic structures of political and economic power,

whose core is formed by the central states. These structures are

the result of a historical process, they give advantages to the
countries

that

integrate

them

and

are

aimed

its

own

perpetuation. Thus, the concept of hegemonic structures

includes, for Pinheiro Guimares, "links of interest and law,
international organizations, multiple public and private actors,
the possibility to incorporate new participants and ongoing
development of standards of conduct, but at the core of these
structures are always national states. The hegemonic structures
are rooted in economic and political expansion of Europe,
starting with the formation of the great national states. In Spain,
with the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors
(1492). In France, with the Hundred Years' War (1453), the
expulsion of the British and the creation of the unitary state by
Enrique IV, and in England, from Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603).
European expansion accelerates with the cycle of discovery, after
the fall of Constantinople (1453), which intensifies the search for
the sea route to the East and the consequent commercial growth
and wealth accumulation with the formation of colonial empires
from Cortes (1521) and Pizarro (1533) and in Brazil from sugar
cane in Pernambuco. Technological, military and industrial
revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the

steam

engine,

strengthens

European

supremacy

on

the

international stage.
The dynamics of the cycles of capitalist accumulation and the
relations between the great private capital and the state and
between technology, armed forces and society, explains, in large
part, the formation processes of the hegemonic power
structures. These processes passed, between 1917 and 1989, by
a crucial phase of dispute with alternative socialist model of
organizing society and the State, interrupted from 1,939 to
1946by the conflict emerged within the structures, with
protestant States, Germany, Japan and Italy (1939-1946). To
overcome this crucial phase, the hegemonic structures have
tried to consolidate their extraordinary ideological, political and
economic victory by expanding their influence and action around
the world, especially on the territories that were recently under
the socialist organization lately before, and on the territories of
the periphery to which they had tacitly allowed deviations of
economic and political organization in the most uncompromising
period of the dispute to the alternative socialist model "(Pinheiro
Guimares, 2005: 30).
Therefore, by following Pinheiro Guimares, we can affirm that
the hegemonic structures generate the major trends on the

international stage and the international stage itself. These

trends are, at the same time, those that influence later on the
same hegemonic structures in a dynamic process of multiple
linkages at different levels of activity of societies and states. If in
the nucleus of the hegemonic structures are always found the
national States, in the center of the nucleus are the great
powers. In the first globalizing wave, the leadership of the
hegemonic structures was conducted by Spain and challenged by
England; this, in turn, led the second phase of globalization.
Meanwhile, the British leadership was challenged first by France
and then Germany. Today, in the third stage of globalization,
leadership is exercised by the United States, "State continent"
converted into superpower and unique within the Great Powers,
whose economic, political and military interests cover all areas of
the earth's surface. This leadership - today undeniable- will quite
possibly challenged by the emerging Chinese power.
Notes:
PINHEIRO GUIMARAES, Samuel, Cinco siglos de periferia.
Una contribucin al estudio de la poltica internacional,
Buenos Aires, Ed. Prometeo, 2005.

Marcelo Gullo

www.marcelogullo.com
marcelogullo2003@yahoo.com.ar