The Control of Space and Power

Abstract

This fourth session focused mainly on control over geocultural space and geopolitical power, rather than over energy resources and the interplanetary regions. The key theme which underlay this session, negatively determining it and, indeed, placing it at the heart of the entire conference, was that of hegemony — the predominant control exercised by one or more foreign powers over the principal forms of the social life of a nation. The reader will have noticed that during the previous sessions criticism was repeatedly levelled against Eurocentric conceptions of the world; Drs Lefebvre, Štambuk and Mori, in particular, each formulated important objections from their own points of view. These objections were later to be further developed by several detailed expositions in the fifth session. Now, Eurocentrism can perhaps best be viewed as a particularly acute articulation of hegemony in the ideological sphere, and its force can be gauged by the extent to which it even penetrates mentalities about such supposedly ‘objective’ subjects as science and technology. Criticism of Eurocentric notions is undoubtedly an essential part of the struggle against hegemonic relations in the world today. However, a part should not be taken for the whole. Quite apart from the fact that many peoples within the European cultural area itself continue to be held in a state of dependence and poverty, how illusory it would be to think that the inequalities in the world are simply the results of narrow prejudices, misconceptions and ungrounded ideas. These inequalities are rather grounded in and embody a system of power relations, and hegemonic power lies at the heart of this system.