LEADERSHIP AND HEGEMONY IN GEOSTRATEGY OF INFORMAL NEO-EMPIRES

The article analyzes the controversial issues of the relationship between leadership and hegemony in international relations, especially in the context of geostrategy of the informal neo-empires. Ideally, leadership of the certain actor means that other actors voluntarily accept its proposed values, norms and rules, recognize its authority to implement a policy for the realization of common goals. Hegemony is the dominance of a particular actor (hegemon) over other actors, establishing his controls over them, imposing its political, economic and cultural values. Hegemony in international relations is carried out usually covertly and often presented as a leadership. Leadership and hegemony are possible at various levels of the geopolitical organization in the world. We treat leadership and hegemony as mechanisms of implementation of a geostrategy of powerful actors of international relations, particularly of informal neo-empires. Each of the contemporary informal neo-empires develops and implements geostrategy, aimed at ensuring its hegemony, usually covert, within a certain geospace and realizes it as a means of a both “hard” and “soft” power. The USA, which is the main “center” of the Western macro-empire, trys to maintain its world leadership, and at the same time secure a covert hegemony over the strategically important regions of the world. The EU is a neo-imperial alliance and has geostrategy of “soft” hegemony. Russia opposes the hegemony of the West and advocates the formation of a multipolar world order with the “balance of power”.The RF carries in the international arena neo-imperial geostrategy in the international arena directed to increase its role in the world and ensure its hegemony in the post-Soviet space.