and professionals. Its origin is in Greek historical thought but the concept, and
indeed the specific word, has occurred frequently in the history of political
thought, in a variety of intellectual traditions. At one level it is a relatively
simple idea—a hegemony occurs when one country, for example the USA in
the West during thecold war, is massively dominant over other actors in the
relevant sphere—members of NATO, in this case. However, hegemony
becomes more complex when one asks about the nature of this dominion,
because hegemony cannot rest simply on force, or even on an implied capacity
to do great harm to any challenger. Rather, a system is hegemonic when the
domination of one actor is taken for granted and unchallenged by those over
whom it holds sway. At the least this requires that other actors, not only the
hegemon itself, put pressure on any challenger from within the sphere. The
extent to which the Soviet Union was hegemonic with respect to Eastern
Europe during the cold war, is demonstrated more by what happened to
Czechoslovakia in 1968 than Hungary in 1956. In the latter case Hungary’s
attempt to liberalize its economic and political system was stopped by a brutal
invasion of Soviet forces. But in 1968 the Soviet Union orchestrated what
came to be known as ‘the fraternal invasion’, because the forces that entered
Czechoslovakia came from several of the Eastern European states, not only the
Soviet Union.
The major route to hegemony is to arrange that the other actors in the
system, or their e ́lites at least, share an ideology with the hegemon, so that its
considerable, actual power is enhanced by the fact that most actors think that
what is in the hegemon’s interest is in theirs as well—certainly if no obvious
alternative arrangement seems even remotely plausible. Thus, returning to the
example of the USA and Western Europe, the single major source of the USA’s
hegemonic status was probably Europe’s early dependence on development
funds under theMarshall Planin 1947 and its later dependence on the dollar
as an international currency, rather than the US nuclear weaponry.
Helsinki Process
The Helsinki process is a portmanteau way of referring both to the original
‘Helsinki’ conference (some sessions of which were actually conducted in
Geneva) of 1973–75, which led to the Helsinki Final Act covering European
security, economic andhuman rightsaffairs, and to the subsequent confer-
ences and agreements arising from the first meetings. The most important part
of the Helsinki process has been the increasing institutionalization of the body
it set up, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe
(CSCE, renamed theOrganization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe—OSCE—in December 1994), which has had a secretariat based in
Prague since 1991. The inspiration for the Helsinki process was the short
Helsinki Process