impact of these developments in a more passive way,an instance of what Gramsci described at the national level as a passive revolution.This effect comes when the impetus to change does not arise out of'a vast local economic devel- opment ..but is instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery. The group which is the bearer of the new ideas,in such circumstances,is not an indigenous social group which is actively engaged in building a new economic base with a new structure of social relations.It is an intellectual stratum which picks up ideas originating from a prior foreign economic and social revolution. Consequently,the thought of this group takes an idealistic shape ungrounded in a domestic economic development;and its conception of the state takes the form of'a rational absolute'.21 Gramsci criticised the thought of Benedetto Croce,the dominant figure of the Italian intellectual establishment of his own time,for expressing this kind of distortion. Hegemony and World Order Is the Gramscian concept of hegemony applicable at the international or world level?Before attempting to suggest how this might be done,it is well to rule out some usages of the term which are common in international relations studies. Very often 'hegemony'is used to mean the dominance of one country over others, thereby tying the usage to a relationship strictly among states.Sometimes 'hegemony'is used as a euphemism for imperialism.When Chinese political leaders accuse the Soviet Union of'hegemonism'they seem to have in mind some combi- nation of these two.These meanings differ so much from the Gramscian sense of the term that it is better,for purposes of clarity in this paper,to use the term 'dominance'to replace them. In applying the concept of hegemony to world order,it becomes important to determine when a period of hegemony begins and when it ends.A period in which a world hegemony has been established can be called hegemonic and one in which dominance of a non-hegemonic kind prevails,non-hegemonic.To illus- trate,let us consider the past century and a half as falling into four distinguish- able periods,roughly,1845-1875,1875-1945,1945-1965 and 1965 to the present.22 The first period (1845-75)was hegemonic:there was a world economy with Britain as its centre.Economic doctrines consistent with British supremacy but universal in form-comparative advantage,free trade and the gold standard spread gradually outward from Britain.Coercive strength underwrote this order. Britain held the balance of power in Europe,thereby preventing any challenge to hegemony from a land-based power.Britain ruled supreme at sea and had the capacity to enforce obedience by peripheral countries to the rules of the market. In the second period (1875-1945),all these features were reversed.Other countries challenged British supremacy.The balance of power in Europe became destabilised,leading to two world wars.Free trade was superseded by protection- ism;the gold standard was ultimately abandoned;and the world cconomy frag- mented into economic blocs.This was a non-hegemonic period. In the third period,following the Second World War (1945-65),the United States founded a new hegemonic world order similar in basic structure to that 170 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10.2010Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10, 2010