Anthropocene Geopolitics

Globalization, Security, Sustainability

Simon Dalby

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780776631189
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We now find ourselves in a new geological age: theAnthropocene. The climate is changing and species are disappearing at a rate not seen since Earth's major extinctions. The rapid, large-scale changes caused by fossil-fuel powered globalization increasingly threaten societies in new, unforeseen ways. But most security policies continue to be built on notions that look backward to a time when geopolitical threats derived mainly fromthe rivalries of states with fixed boundaries. Instead, AnthropoceneGeopolitics shows that security policy must look forward to quickly shape asustainable world no longer dependent on fossil fuels.

A future of long-term peace and geopolitical securitydepends on keeping the earth in conditions roughly similar to those we haveknown throughout history. Minimizing disruptions that would further putcivilization at risk of extinction urgently requires policies that reflect newAnthropocene "planetary boundaries."

This book is published in English.

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Depuis la fin de la dernière période glaciaire, l'humanité a transformé sa niche écologique, modifié sa position dans l'écosystème, provoqué des changements climatiquesradicaux et affecté la diversité des espèces aux quatre coins du monde, ce quia entraîné l'apparition d'une nouvelle époque géologique, l'Anthropocène.

À l'échelleplanétaire, les activités humaines exercent un impact direct sur les frontièresqu'elles transforment durablement alors que ces mêmes frontières ont constituéle cadre naturel dans lequel l'humanité a pu prospérer durant les dix derniersmillénaires. Les changements rapides qui affectent notre système terrestreremettent directement en cause les anciennes hypothèses qui considéraient desfrontières stables comme le principal fondement de la souveraineté.Aujourd'hui, ces postulats périmés doivent impérativement être réévalués.Paradoxalement, la phase de mondialisation actuelle nécessite une redéfinitionde la notion même de frontières stables. En effet, l'élargissement des droitsde propriété et des champs de compétence pourrait en fait prévenir la mise enœuvre de mesures d'adaptation efficaces visant à répondre aux enjeux duchangement climatique. Garantir la survie d'une économie fondée sur laconsommation de combustibles fossiles demeure à ce jour une priorité politiquecomme le fait de devoir faire face aux catastrophes naturelles à l'échellemondiale – ce qui rend les objectifs de durabilité d'autant plus difficiles àatteindre dans un environnement en pleine mutation où les rivalités politiquesexacerbées façonnent la politique globale contemporaine.

L'entrée de la Terre dans une nouvelle époque géologique, l'Anthropocène (l'ère de l'homme), représente un formidable défi éthique, qu'il convient de relever en établissant une véritable politique de durabilité, et ce, au moment où l'humanité s'engage dans la dernière phase du processus de mondialisation. Dans un tel contexte, pour être réellement efficaces, les connaissances et les perspectives résultant des analyses académiques et des initiatives pratiques de toute nature devront être intégrées dans une vision globale.

CHAPTER 1

GEOPOLITICS REVISITED

The fraying thread that connects our past to our future is not limited to the flux in the natural order. The ecological shake-up wrought by climate change is also shaking up our economic and political-order. In the financial realm, as in the natural realm, the past provides fewer and fewer clues to our future. Like the migration patterns of songbirds that no longer correlate to the hatching patterns of their insect prey, or the mountain snow packs that no longer store water for the dry summer months, the economy is facing miscues born of the feedback loop between tumult in the atmosphere and tumult on the earth. Rapid changes in the weather and temperature are outpacing our traditional ideas for assessing risk, redefining the calculus for economic success, shaking up the geopolitical status quo. (Mark Schapiro 2016: xi)

GEOPOLITICS RETURNED?

Alarming headlines in recent years suggest violent rivalries are, once again, the order of the day in global politics. Discussions of migrations and boundary walls and fences, military interventions, and the use of nationalist tropes, especially by the Trump administration, have raised the rhetorical temperature in international politics, not least in the much-discussed China–U.S. rivalry (Allison 2017). But well before Donald Trump’s election, commentators and politicians were focused on rivalries, nationalist priorities, and concerns about migration, in particular in Europe and North America. Walter Russell Mead (2014) was concerned antagonistic politics between at least some great powers suggest a return of geopolitics after a period in which it was apparently absent. If the term is used to refer to territorial disputes, and the use of military force or the threat thereof, then clearly the conflicts over Crimea, Ukraine, Kashmir, Palestine, and Yemen, various islands disputed by China and Japan and by various states in the South China Sea, or Russian and Turkish actions in Syria, suggested geopolitics was indeed back. Opportunistic populist politicians frequently respond to crises with xenophobia and threats of force rather than intelligent policy. Robert Kagan (2015) was worried the “weight of geopolitics” is now reducing the role of democracy in global governance as authoritarian states flex their political muscles.

In response, and in stark contrast, John Ikenberry (2014) was equally convinced the liberal order of recent decades remains intact and that regional skirmishing and nationalist rhetoric isn’t undermining globalization. Geopolitics hasn’t returned apparently, at least not in the sense that force and great power rivalries are the most important matter in international politics. Nonetheless, there has been a fractiousness to international politics, and nationalist logics and increased border controls, walls, and fences are being used to try to reinforce territorial modes of power. Ominously, geographical verities are being invoked in the language of many nationalist politicians suggesting mobility and migrations are a threat to supposedly stable political entities. What really is alarming for scholars and commentators worrying about global governance is the failure of contemporary modes of governance to deal with many complex interconnected changes in a timely fashion.

These political developments also occur in the context of the persistence of formulations that invoke classical notions of geopolitics, of the world arranged in particular geographical ways that shape, if not determine, the conduct of foreign policy and strategic history (Sloan 2017). While Samuel Huntingdon (1996) gets pride of place in most such discussions with his infamous mapping of global culture regions, Robert Kaplan (2012) and others also use geographical language to suggest that context determines destiny. The classical writings of Mackinder and Mahan are back in vogue in discussions of Chinese policy in the United States.

Whether it is because of their simplicity and ease of intelligibility, or the rhetorical power of charismatic and idiosyncratic advocates, or simply their play to an audience receptive to reassurance and stasis in times of rapid change, these geopolitical visions refuse to dissipate. It is through underplaying the role of global trade and finance, a disregard for the multiple versions of sovereignty and power that exist in the world, and a denial of the possibility for alternative perspectives in world politics that have allowed Mackinder, Mahan, and Monroe back onto the centre-stage of the globalist regime. (Richardson 2015: 236)

In Europe too, classical geopolitics has undergone a revival with political thinkers invoking geographical formulations as the context for policies in the new century (Guzzini 2012).

These intellectual and political developments fly in the face of much recent scholarship and commentary emphasizing the growing interconnectedness of the global economy and the dynamism of globalization, which repeatedly changes patterns of production and trade (Agnew 2009). The revival of concerns with geopolitical matters in scholarly investigations over the last few decades, as opposed to just in the recent foreign policy commentaries, involves a more profound engagement both with the forms of geographical representation that structure policy discussion as well as with these rapidly changing geographies of global political economy.

But little of this discussion so far explicitly links up with matters of the rapid transformation of the environment, another pressing and directly related matter in global politics. This chapter argues that linking geographical representations, and the changing global political economy with discussions of the contemporary transformation of the Earth System, and focussing on the rapidly growing debate about the Anthropocene, is necessary to grapple with geopolitical change. Geological language, as in the use of the term Anthropocene, may be helpful here not least because conventional forms of environmental governance have fallen so far short in tackling global change. Relying on traditional geopolitical thinking may have some considerable political utility for populist, nationalist, and, more expressly, fascist politicians, but insofar as such notions structure policy by emphasizing separation, competition, and conflict, they are making it much more difficult to address the dangerous global transformations of our times.

THINKING GEOPOLITICALLY

In his encapsulation of geopolitics, Klaus Dodds suggests three things are key:

First, it is concerned with questions of influence and power over space and territory. Second, it uses geographical frames to make sense of world affairs. Popular geographical templates include ‘spheres of influence,’ ‘bloc,’ ‘backyard,’ ‘neighbourhood’, and ‘near abroad’. Third, geopolitics is future orientated. It offers insights into the likely behaviour of states because their interests are fundamentally unchanging. States need to secure resources, protect territory including borderlands, and manage their populations. (Dodds 2019, 3)

Geopolitics thus concerns the contextual matters shaping politics at the planetary scale, about struggles for power, and the rivalries of big states and empires which have played out over the last few centuries as the global economy grew and technologies ushered in new human possibilities (Agnew 2003). It is also about the related attempts to divide the world politically into various spatial configurations, empires, blocs, and such things as the Grossraum formulations of Carl Schmitt (Minca and Rowan 2015) used in Nazi thinking. Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth (2006) suggested various divisions of the world and the superiority of European modes of law and authority but relied on an anachronistic fixed geography and a limited view of the transformative effects of the global economy. These notions contrast with other historical modes of geopolitics, the much more obviously vitalist formulations in other writings, which viewed states as organisms struggling and competing with each other (Klinke 2019). Schmitt may have been a more influential thinker in Nazi Germany than Karl Haushofer, who frequently gets the blame for introducing Adolf Hitler to Friedrich Ratzel’s thinking on states in competition for space, and the hence indirectly the pernicious ideas of lebensraum, of living space, that informed Nazi ambitions for rearranging the map of Europe by force (Snyder 2015).

Contemporary geopolitics is about rivalries of states, attempts to dominate, if not directly rule, places, and control spaces both near and far. Material capabilities matter in terms of states’ military policies and ability to shape international orders, not least such things as trading arrangements and energy supplies. Geopolitical rivalries are about, in Grove’s (2019) terms, modes of life and their often-violent imposition and extension across territories. Geopolitical rivalry is frequently a matter of geoeconomics, and influence frequently relates to economic capabilities and development strategies much more than military ones (Essex 2013). Crucially, geopolitics is now about the quest for security frequently understood in terms of how to facilitate the extension of modes of modern economy through practices of development (Power 2019).

Geographical scholarship of the last few decades often under the rubrics of post-modern or more specifically “critical geopolitics” have investigated how this geographical language has important political consequences (Toal 1996). Even a fairly limited reflection on recent history suggests geographical entities in global politics are not permanent and immutable but rather temporary, contingent, and relational: the Berlin Wall has been dismantled; Checkpoint Charlie is now a tourist destination. However, geographical representations frequently pass without this critical interrogation precisely because they are apparently obvious and appear to be permanent. This “geopolitical culture” specifies a state’s role in relation to other states both in terms of how geographical language frequently structures particular nationalist narratives of the homeland, but also in how such language shapes larger interpretative frameworks of supposed territorial autonomy, grand strategy and justifications of the use of force in international affairs (Toal 2017).

Such formulations often tie into technological fantasies of geographical control, to territorial sovereignty, and to the supposed sanctity of national boundaries (Brown 2010). Linked to the invocation of martial vigour these are a heady brew in political rhetoric, which links fear to the necessity of strength to provide security in troubled times. Invoking external threats to supposed internal stabilities is a powerful mode of geopolitical discourse that is repeatedly used in American politics (Dalby 2013a), notably in Donald Trump’s rhetoric of wall building as a solution to the supposed problem of migration. At more or less the same time, in the Brexit referendum, the rhetoric supporting the leave side emphasized fear of the influence of immigrants on the British state. Once these cartographic entities become the hegemonic assumptions of how the world is organized—frontiers appearing as “natural” and permanent features (Fall 2010)—then these geographical categories become powerful tools for policy makers anxious to emphasize differences and dangers on a variegated planetary surface.

Benjamin Ho’s (2014) examination of Chinese exceptionalism points to the risks of assuming permanent fixed identities in geopolitical thinking there, too, and making assumptions that geography presents eternal verities. In a world of rapid change and globalization, this assumption is likely to be misleading in many ways. The relations between places are crucial and have been changing rapidly due to the processes of globalization that involve changing geographical patterns of manufacturing and trade linkages. These are much more important than the military rivalries that usually get so much attention in geopolitical thinking related to foreign policy. Yes, military conflicts matter, and Second World War-era technologies were key to setting in motion the contemporary acceleration of globalization first in the period of the Cold War and then subsequently (Farish 2010). But military matters have been a minor factor in the overall pattern of the global economy although some regional industrial strategies were clearly involved in the cold war period on both sides of the iron curtain.

John Agnew’s (2015) more recent discussion of geopolitics and globalization is analytically helpful in explaining these important but much wider formulations. As with other scholars who have been back over the history of geopolitical thinking of late (Kearns 2013), Agnew notes that the early twentieth-century formulations of geopolitics in terms of naturalized assumptions of spatially autonomous competing geographical entities obscured a larger body of historical thinking that emphasized the interconnections between places, the flows of resources from colonies to imperial centres, as well as larger concerns with geographical settings, trading arrangements and cultural exchanges. Looking back to Montesquieu and Voltaire’s reconstruction of Alexander the Great’s imperial efforts to enhance cultural interactions and trade among the regions he conquered, Agnew (2015) crucially argues that the narrow territorial sense of competing entities in late nineteenth-century thinking obscured this larger sense of geopolitics and, in the process, set up a false dichotomy of geopolitics versus globalization.

As populist politicians have recently being suggesting—forcefully in some cases—the promise of sovereignty, the geographical logic of supposedly-separate spaces, should be the ordering principle of world politics. Invoking globalization as the danger to this order, and foreign economies as threats to domestic prosperity, plays well with xenophobic fears and simplistic place-based identities. Contemporary populism is in part about mobilizing the economic fears of numerous people whose jobs have been eliminated, or whose aspirations have been thwarted, by rapid innovation in the global economy (Derber and Magrass 2019). Blaming others, rather than economic change or corporate behaviour, works. The neat coloured boxes of nation states in political maps of the world belie the complexity of these interconnections; both economic and ecological processes are now about connections across these supposedly separate spaces.

Agnew’s (2015) analysis shows that the processes of geopolitics are part and parcel of the growth of globalization over the last half century. U.S. efforts to promote trade and investment in at least some parts of the global economy, a “geopolitics of globalization,” interacts with the very different colonial histories of various forms of statehood, a “geopolitics of development,” and most recently with the rising new international agencies in what he terms a “geopolitics of regulation,” something loosely akin to the processes Zurn (2018) summarizes in terms of global governance. These processes have shaped how world politics operates. In Panitch and Gindin’s (2012) terms, American foreign policy has made the world safe for capitalism and, in the process, greatly advantaged American-based industrial and agricultural interests. American “soft power,” in terms of its ideological appeals of freedom and the attractions of a modern consumer lifestyle, has also helped extend this mode of life to many parts of the world.

The Anthropocene formulation makes it clear that these globalizing forces of state, along with economic development, are also geomorphic and environmental forces responsible for rearranging landscapes, damming rivers, and moving huge amounts of material to build roads, railways, and cities—all done with the intention of connecting the state into a global economy. The scale of the biosphere’s transformation, caused by the history of the expansion of European power over the last half millennium, has only become clear in recent decades. Humanity has been remaking its planetary home on a more drastic scale than has been understood until very recently (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016).

Dodds’ (2019) third facet of geopolitics—his suggestion that states have permanent interests—has long been assumed to be case by people invoking geographical language in politics but, as the critical geopolitical literature emphasizes, rapid technological change, economic development, and shifting alliance structures frequently make this a dubious assumption. Instead, the rapid scale of the transformation of the biosphere and the increasing importance of the novel technosphere in the Earth System (Haff 2014) are dramatically shifting many states’ interests. In the long run a relatively functional biosphere is essential for all states; having access to such things as petroleum or coal supplies is no longer in their long-term interest in a future post-carbon fuel world.

This transformation, and the struggles over how it will play out, is the new context for geopolitical thinking even if its profound consequences have been slow to challenge contemporary geographical imaginations (Dalby 2018). In part, this may be because spatial assumptions about the world are frequently divorced from discussions of economy and, in turn, from issues of environment and nature. These distinctions obscure crucial interconnections that now are key to the trajectories of global change. As Neil Smith (1984) made clear, the uneven development of global capitalism is about the production of nature and space simultaneously. Anthropocene geopolitics is now much more a matter of the unfolding consequences of production decisions made by the dominant states and corporations in the planetary system than it is just a matter of territorial rivalries in a supposedly stable geographical configuration.

Rapidly changing climate, rising sea levels, and the melting of Arctic Ocean ice are only the most obvious symptoms of change, and they have yet (despite progress in Paris in late 2015) to be seriously tackled by the processes of global politics. All this has made it abundantly clear that classical geopolitical thinking that once suggested that climates in various parts of the world determined the fate of human communities is now backwards; geopolitics is now shaping future climates, not the other way around (Dalby 2015a). Thus, it no longer makes sense to see the world just as an external backdrop to the human drama, or a source of resources and a sink for wastes. The Anthropocene brings an end to these distinctions of nature and humanity. We live in an increasingly artificial world in which the choices are between a reasserted politics of dominance with increasingly militarized borders, or comprehensive attempts at economic innovation which recognize that policies of separation, and the invocation of sovereignty as a rationale for evading responsibilities across borders, are untenable.

REINTERPRETING GEOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

The point about the Anthropocene and why it matters to geopolitics is that humanity is now shaping its context on the global scale much more profoundly than modern formulations emphasizing technology, the promise of development, and supposedly the domination and control of nature have traditionally encompassed. Modernity has been about rapid change, and n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Geopolitics Revisited
• 2 Scaling up the Human Niche
• 3 Planetary Boundaries
• 4 Territory, Security, Mobility
• 5 Bordering Sustainability
• 6 Securing the Global Economy
• 7 Environmental Insecurity
• 8 Geopolitics and Globalization
• 9 Anthropocene Discourse
• 10 Political Geoecology
• References
• Index
• Back Cover