Hegemony

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: HEGEMONY A word your are most likely to encounter in articles about politics, particularly international politics, hegemony (pronounced huh-JEM-oh-nee) refers to one country's or social groups' dominance over others — the kind of word you expect to see in an article by Noam Chomsky or a formal statement of the People's Republic of China.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: HEGEMONY A word your are most likely to encounter in articles about politics, particularly international politics, hegemony (pronounced huh-JEM-oh-nee) refers to one country's or social groups' dominance over others — the kind of word you expect to see in an article by Noam Chomsky or a formal statement of the People's Republic of China.

WHAT DOES George W. Bush want to do? What is his plan for us all? His address to the American people last night notwithstanding, the question in its broader sense remains unanswered, ripe for speculation. The president's immediate aim is to destroy the government of Iraq, removing or killing Saddam Hussein. This will be Mr. Bush's second war against another sovereign state since the attack by mostly Saudi terrorists on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It is justified as a part of a continuing campaign against terrorism, for which reason it is now appropriate to ask, Who will be next?

In James Michener's novel Poland, a leftist resistance fighter is infuriated when another commando expresses misgivings about Soviet aid against the German occupation. "Do you reject the great victories the Russians are giving us?" he barks. "I shall accept the soldiers marching in," says the second fighter, "but I want them to march out again." British troops marched into Northern Ireland 38 years ago as peacekeepers. Radical elements in the province undoubtedly would see more than a passing similarity between Polish life under Soviet hegemony and life in Northern Ireland under London's rule, but others would call it differently.

WINDSOR, England -- The Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies last week brought senior American and European political and economic historians together to consider the rise and fall (if fall there has been) of modern British and American ''hegemonies.''American academic and policy circles frame discussion of America's policy choices in terms of the acceptance, rejection, safeguard or aggrandizement of American international ''hegemony.'' But what exactly is hegemony?

PARIS -- It does not at the moment look as if presidential candidate Bob Dole will need a foreign policy, but if he should be elected he will find many who are anxious to provide him with one.The lead article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs offers ''A Foreign Policy for Candidate Dole,'' which the authors characterize as ''benevolent hegemony.'' They are not alone in making such a proposal. Hegemony seems the policy of choice, in nominally conservative circles, opposed principally by the ''realists.

SOME MONTHS AGO, I expressed to a local educator the thoughtless wish that schools would return to diagraming sentences. I am, I realize, out of touch with the way things are done nowadays, and am innocent in particular of educationist theory. What is taught in the schools of education is deeper water than my small brain is designed to navigate. I hug the shore, alert for wind shifts that might carry me dangerously far from port. Still, I would not have thought teaching students the sturdy backbone of an English sentence -- the noun, the verb, the predicate -- an unreasonable expectation.

WARSAW -- The proposition that a world approaching the new millennium needs, for its own sake, hegemonic domination by America -- an idea popular in some Washington circles -- is now making its way on the summer's international conference circuit, and being received abroad with skepticism and some alarm.Even in Poland, the country most anxious for membership in American-led NATO, people are taken aback by the importance the hegemony argument has acquired in Washington. They are not entirely reassured when told that it excites think tanks and foreign policy and security bureaucracies much more than it does the citizens of Des Moines or Atlanta.

HERE'S Murray Kempton, writing in The New York Review of Books just before last November's elections:"The Democratic hegemony over both houses of Congress has been broken but twice in the last 42 years and only when a Democrat tenanted the White House. Harry Truman was president when Dwight Eisenhower brought in a Republican Senate in 1952; and Ronald Reagan doubly blessed his party with Jimmy Carter's defeat and a Republican majority of the Senate."The rule thus appears to ordain control of the Congress by the Democrats when the president is a Republican and withdraw it only when the president is a Democrat.

In James Michener's novel Poland, a leftist resistance fighter is infuriated when another commando expresses misgivings about Soviet aid against the German occupation. "Do you reject the great victories the Russians are giving us?" he barks. "I shall accept the soldiers marching in," says the second fighter, "but I want them to march out again." British troops marched into Northern Ireland 38 years ago as peacekeepers. Radical elements in the province undoubtedly would see more than a passing similarity between Polish life under Soviet hegemony and life in Northern Ireland under London's rule, but others would call it differently.

Every time I read another angst-ridden column about the joy that the rest of the world has been taking in our Olympic failures, I can't help but wonder if anyone is old enough to remember anything that happened before the first day of the Iraq war. Spanish fans cheering the loss of the U.S. basketball team to Argentina? Greek radicals protesting the visit of Colin Powell to Athens? General anti-Americanism in Europe? Resentment of the United States in the major non-English-speaking countries in Europe dates to the 1950s, soon after America saved the continent from Adolf Hitler.

AT FIRST GLANCE, computer scientists and plant researchers don't have much in common, but these days, they're both talking about the dangers of a monoculture. The term comes from the world of biology, where it refers a single species of vegetation that covers a large area. A pine forest is a monoculture; so is the "perfect" lawn, or a county planted with one type of cotton. When everything goes right, monocultures can be efficient. A farmer who grows only one crop has to buy one type of seed and fertilizer, one type of pesticide.

WASHINGTON - As President Bush meets other world leaders this week and tries to patch things up between America and the rest of the planet, I find myself looking back and asking: What's been going on here? After 9/11, people wondered "Why do they hate us?" speaking of the Muslim world. After the Iraq war debate, the question has grown into "Why does everybody else hate us?" I've sketched out my own answer, which I modestly call "A Brief Theory of Everything." I offer it here, even more briefly, in hopes that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine it, turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter's college tuition.

WHAT DOES George W. Bush want to do? What is his plan for us all? His address to the American people last night notwithstanding, the question in its broader sense remains unanswered, ripe for speculation. The president's immediate aim is to destroy the government of Iraq, removing or killing Saddam Hussein. This will be Mr. Bush's second war against another sovereign state since the attack by mostly Saudi terrorists on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It is justified as a part of a continuing campaign against terrorism, for which reason it is now appropriate to ask, Who will be next?

IN THE ANCIENT land of Muscovy, two mileposts were recorded this week: former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who presided over the Soviet Union's dissolution, celebrated his 70th birthday and the former Soviet republic of Moldova returned Communists to power. Tiny Moldova exists today largely as a legacy of Hitler's and Stalin's World War II treachery. Much of its territory was snatched from adjoining Romania. In fact, more than 64 percent of Moldovans are ethnically and linguistically Romanian.

SOME MONTHS AGO, I expressed to a local educator the thoughtless wish that schools would return to diagraming sentences. I am, I realize, out of touch with the way things are done nowadays, and am innocent in particular of educationist theory. What is taught in the schools of education is deeper water than my small brain is designed to navigate. I hug the shore, alert for wind shifts that might carry me dangerously far from port. Still, I would not have thought teaching students the sturdy backbone of an English sentence -- the noun, the verb, the predicate -- an unreasonable expectation.

WASHINGTON - As President Bush meets other world leaders this week and tries to patch things up between America and the rest of the planet, I find myself looking back and asking: What's been going on here? After 9/11, people wondered "Why do they hate us?" speaking of the Muslim world. After the Iraq war debate, the question has grown into "Why does everybody else hate us?" I've sketched out my own answer, which I modestly call "A Brief Theory of Everything." I offer it here, even more briefly, in hopes that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine it, turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter's college tuition.

The United States must cope with problems in every part of the world in this new year, without a theory for explaining them that is acceptable to most Americans or that dictates obvious solutions. The Cold War, and the doctrine of containing Soviet communism, offered a psychological protection. We always knew where we stood. Now that odd comfort is gone.The world is improved in many respects. Most of it is friendly. Democracy is growing where it was recently unknown. Intellectual freedom is asserted where heretofore it could only be dreamt.

WARSAW -- The proposition that a world approaching the new millennium needs, for its own sake, hegemonic domination by America -- an idea popular in some Washington circles -- is now making its way on the summer's international conference circuit, and being received abroad with skepticism and some alarm.Even in Poland, the country most anxious for membership in American-led NATO, people are taken aback by the importance the hegemony argument has acquired in Washington. They are not entirely reassured when told that it excites think tanks and foreign policy and security bureaucracies much more than it does the citizens of Des Moines or Atlanta.

MAJ. JOHNNY PAUL KOROMA shattered the 1996 accord ending five years of anarchy in Sierra Leone. On May 25, he deposed the elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who fled. Major Koroma's troops are children with assault rifles and rebels who launched civil war in 1991.The coup undoes the progress that the poor country of 4.5 million people in West Africa was finally making. It repudiates the 53-nation Organization of African Unity's (OAU) slow march toward stability and democracy in Africa.