Mastering Space

Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy

John Agnew, Stuart Crobridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134869084
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For over two hundred years the domination of some countries by others has been intrinsic to international relations, with national economic and political strength viewed as essential to a nation's survival and global position. Mastering Space identifies the essential features of this "state-centredness" and suggests an optimistic alternative more in keeping with the contemporary post-Cold War climate. Drawing on recent geopolitical thinking, the authors claim that the dynamism of the international political economy has been obscured through excessive attention on the state as an unchanging actor. Dealing with such topical issues as Japan's rise to economic dominance and America's perceived decline, as well as the global impact of continued geographical change, the book discusses the role of geographical organization in the global political economy, and the impact of increasing economic globalisation and political fragmentation in future international relations. The authors identify the present time as crucial to the global political economy, and explore the possibilities of moving the world from mastering space to real reciprocity between peoples and places. John Agnew is a Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Stuart Corbridge is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.

1
INTRODUCTION

The term ‘geopolitics’ has been popular at times of dramatic global political change and then has tended to recede from use. The term was first used by the Swede Rudolf Kjellen in 1899. It became associated with the formal model of geographical influences on global conflict proposed by the British geographer Halford Mackinder in the early twentieth century in his efforts to promote the field of geography as an aid to the practice of British statecraft. During the 1920s and 1930s Mackinder’s model of a Eurasian ‘heartland’ rising to global dominance if not held in check by cohesive reaction from the (British-dominated) ‘outer or insular crescent’, was adopted by certain German geographers who used it to justify Nazi expansionist designs on Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the term suffered from guilt by association. After the Second World War the term ‘geopolitics’ fell into disuse because of its Nazi connotations and its reliance on ideas of environmental determinism from which professional geographers were in retreat.

In recent years geopolitics has undergone another revival, but this time with little agreement as to its precise meaning and influence. Contemporary usage ranges from classical concepts of seapower versus landpower in the distribution of power among states, to the ways in which political leaders name places as more or less important strategically, organize foreign policy accordingly, and operate militarily. A more anodyne formulation refers to geopolitics as the equivalent of political geography, in the sense of a real variation in political phenomena at all scales, including the global. The range of usage illustrates an important feature of the contemporary world situation: the collapse of agreement about terms that previously had meanings that (seemingly) were self-evident. It is in this context that we are proposing a ‘new geopolitics’. The world has changed significantly over the past twenty years. We believe that this change has been so profound that it is necessary to change the way in which we think about the geography of international relations.

We believe that in redirecting the orientation of geopolitics we can also offer an important new perspective on the field of international relations in general and international political economy in particular. One of the boasts often made by the mainstream social science that was institutionalized in Europe and North America during the course of this century is that its claims about ‘order’ in human society held for all times and in all places. In no field has this point of view been more popular than ‘international relations’. One version of the conventional wisdom is put forward with his usual directness by Samuel Huntington. Referring to the need for the United States to remain the most powerful state in the world lest other less benign states assume the mantle of leadership, he claims, matter-of-factly, that ‘No reason exists to assume that what has been true for millennia will cease to be true in the next hundred years’ (Huntington 1993a, 70). In direct counterpoint to this claim, this book is designed to provide an historical-geographical introduction to international political economy.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

During the 1950s and 1960s international relations as a field of study was concerned primarily with security, or the military threat posed by states to one another’s territories. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the writings of intellectuals and the agendas of political leaders, particularly in the United States where international relations was most strongly entrenched as a field of academic study. International economic issues attracted little sustained attention, except insofar as they engaged with questions of military policy or alliance politics.

Since the 1970s this has changed. Many new developments, such as the growth of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the demands of poor countries for a New International Economic Order, the abrogation by the US government of the post-war international monetary system based on the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, and the international debt crisis, have stimulated a sense that the study of international relations was sorely lacking in its ability to address fundamental ‘global’ issues. The field remained locked into perspectives on strategic security and international organization that were incapable of addressing the ‘new’ questions of the day. For its part, mainstream economics provided models of trade and money that had little relevance for understanding the political determinants of international economic relations. If the world of international relations was peopled mainly by hard-boiled, male Machiavellians, the dismal world of economics was increasingly populated by the ‘social morons’ so devastatingly lampooned by Amartya Sen (Sen 1978).

The end of the Cold War has reinforced the sense of a need for new perspectives on international relations. Not only have old enemies suddenly been transformed into supplicants, but a new world economy is now in the making. A market-based world economy that in the mid-1970s involved only two-thirds of the total world population at best—including some African countries on the margins of involvement—has since gained more than twobillion new members with the opening up of China, the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, and the decline of protectionism in India and Latin America. If the 1890s was the decade when almost the whole world was finally divided into states and colonial territories, the 1990s promises to be the decade when almost the whole world is finally incorporated into the modern world economy. In this context it is not surprising that no consensus has yet emerged about how the workings of the international political economy should be explained.

SPACE AND GEOPOLITICS

There is now something of an impasse in international political economy. The main perspectives are imprisoned, in our view, by a conception of space and ‘geography’ that emphasizes fixity over fluidity, stasis over change. In this book we want to outline an alternative that breaks with all of them in identifying the centrality of a dynamic geopolitics to the working of the international political economy.

In its most common usage geopolitics refers to a fixed and objective geography constraining and directing the activities of states. For example, fixed geographical features of the world, such as the disposition of states in relation to the distribution of the continents and oceans, or fixed processes of territorial-economic expansion relative to military strength, are seen as determining or strongly conditioning the strategic possibilities and limits of particular states. This is the geopolitics of Kjellan and Mackinder—for whom ‘man and not nature initiates [here is the domain of statecraft]; but nature in large measure controls’ (Mackinder 1904)—and of Spykman, who declared that ‘Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent. Ministers come and go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed’ (Spykman 1942, 41). Such fixed-form views of geopolitics have been joined in popularity by more recent attempts to define geopolitics in terms of fixed processes of one kind or another. Adding geographical distance to models of international conflict has been one such strategy and its logic is clearly displayed in various containment theories and models of imperial overstretch. Another strategy makes reference to the workings of some constant underlying logic to the ‘long-waves’ (or cycles) in the modern world system.

The two assumptions common to most of these perspectives are that power is (a) an unvarying ability to make others do your will resulting from advantages of geographical location, population and natural resources; and (b) an attribute of territorial states that attempt to monopolize it in competition with other states. Each of these assumptions is problematic.

Today, as at certain times in the past (for example, the period between 1500 and 1700 in Western Europe), relative economic power has begun to displace military force and conquest as an important feature of international relations.It is no longer just a means to the end of military power but an end in itself. Technology, education and economic growth have become more important than conventional geopolitical attributes of power in determining relative success in the international system. The links between economic expansion, military power and political empire upon which the classic accounts of interstate conflict rely have largely been cut. Possession of military superiority no longer translates automatically into enhanced political status. Contemporary Russia and Ukraine provide ample evidence of this.

In addition, more intangible aspects of power have become more obviously important. Relative economic vulnerability affects the conduct and outcome of bargaining between states independently of the absolute resources they have. Setting the agenda of international relations by imposing your ideas or shaping others’ preferences—what Nye (1990b, 181) calls ‘co-optive power’— can be done even if a country’s military or ‘command’ power does not outweigh that of other states. Much of Britain’s past influence and contemporary American power has rested upon the ability to persuade other states to go along with their agendas for organizing and policing the international political economy. As Nye reminds us, power is not a singular entity; it comes in several forms (including co-optive power and command power) and it has been associated with different leading states at different times in different combinations (see Table 1.1).

The work of Nye and others has helped to shape our view of geopolitics, which is quite different to the fixed-form and fixed-process views we have outlined. By geopolitics we understand the division of global space by institutions (states, firms, social movements, international organizations, armed forces, terrorist groups, etc.) into discrete territories and spheres of political-economic influence through which the international political economy is regulated materially and represented intellectually as a natural order of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, ‘friendly’ and ‘threatening’ areas. It is that set of socially constructed, rather than naturally given, practices and ideas through which the international political economy is realized geographically. In this perspective even the ‘anarchic’ world of competitive territorial states pictured in many varieties of international relations theory is the historical outcome of the mutual recognition of sovereignty among states. It is the dominance of this process of territorial identity and interest formation that in certain historical circumstances has ‘disempowered’ non-state actors and privileged interaction between states. There is nothing natural about a world simply divided up into territorial states and their interactions with one another. We share with an emerging school of ‘critical geopolitics’ the view that geopolitics is implicit in both the practice of and writing about all types of international relations; it must not be confined to a reading of a world ordered geographically into a more or less fixed hierarchy of states, cores and peripheries, spheres of influence, flashpoints, buffer zones and strategic relations.

Table 1.1 Leading states and types of power resources, fifteenth to twentieth centuries

We will come back to critical geopolitics shortly. For the moment let us be clear that four main theoretical presuppositions inform our understanding of this ‘new’ geopolitics, and distance it in various ways from most other theoretical positions in international political economy.

First, the primacy of ‘the’ territorial state is not a trans-historical given, but is specific to different historical epochs and different world regions. States differ historically and geographically in their external powers and in their ability to regulate their own territories. More generally, there have been historical periods, and there are world regions, in which the ‘sovereignty’ of any one state in relation to other states and non-state organizational actors is far from complete. This is apparent throughout the modern world economy with regard to the determination of exchange and interest rates; many ‘state’ powers have been ceded to the markets. It is also apparent in large parts of the ex-colonial world, where the imposition of World Bank and IMF-inspired structural adjustment programmes illustrates the limits of sovereignty in a so-called world of ‘nation-states’. The contemporary world economy is shaped by pension funds and transnational companies, as well as by international organizations and (often rather fragile) ‘nation-states’ (consider the fate of Yugoslavia and the status of various ‘quasi-states’ in Africa: Jackson 1990). It is a world economy marked above all by a globalization of production, exchange and information flows which has brought with it not so much spatial homogenization as a new round of geographical differentiation and uneven development at all spatial scales. Against this background the territorial state is losing its geographical primacy.

Second, the forces driving the international political economy are by no means static and unchanging. Nor do they derive clearly from some hidden or essential inner dynamic. Historic shifts back and forth from territorial (autarkic) to interactional (open) strategies of economic development have long been apparent and deserve our closest attention. They demand an approach to geopolitics—or geopolitical economy—that is diachronic (or historical in its conceptions of causation in global affairs) rather than synchronic (cross-sectional or timeless). Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of war, the favourite topic of a more traditional international relations community. The classical theorists invoked to legitimize the long-standing nature of territorial-state centrism—Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Clausewitz—can be given either ‘alternative readings’ or dismissed in the light of present trends. Clausewitz, for example, is famous for his statement that war is always subordinate to political will. But much recent warfare around the world has no connection to politics or the state in Clausewitz’s sense, or to disciplined armies and high-tech weapons. Bandits in Somalia, genocidal murderers in Cambodia and Bosnia, and murderous children in Liberia, represent the movement of war beyond the mobilizing spaces of the territorial state into a do-it-yourself mode whose only requirements are a rifle, a death-wish and a hatred of some group that is readily targeted. Even the new high-tech warfare exemplified by the Gulf War in 1990–1, though ostensibly about the violation of the state boundaries of Kuwait, appeared to many spectators as a contest in video-space on behalf of a state whose assets were largely held outside the country, that was financed by an international consortium, and that was toiled for by hundreds of thousands of labourers imported from South Asia and elsewhere. The warfare itself excited more interest (in some places) than the putative causes advanced for why the war was necessary. In the USA the war almost became one of the sports metaphors used by military experts to describe it. The venerable distinctions between politics and war, and civil (or internal) and international war lose much of their intellectual meaning in a new context of DIY warfare and New World Order sport-war. As the world map recasts itself at some remove from the stable spaces of nation-state identities we can either pretend that nothing really important has happened, or we can begin to think diachronically about the geopolitical workings of a dynamic international political economy.

Third, the relative success or failure of different localities and regions in the international political economy at any particular time is due to their historical accumulation of assets and liabilities and their ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and not the result of ‘natural’ resource endowments. The recent rise of a resource-poor Japan is testimony to this view. It also confirms that such geographical ‘path-dependence’ as there is is subject to reversal—as witness the relative economic rise of Germany and Japan post 1945 when compared to the relative decline of a ‘victorious’ United Kingdom. At the level of the international system, too, there have been various geopolitical orders, including the Cold War Geopolitical Order that lasted from about 1945 to 1990, that have been constructed by thinking political actors and not just called into being by ‘natural’ or evolutionary factors.

Fourth, and finally, along with the changing ways in which the international political economy operates (new patterns of flows, transfers and interactions) come new representations of the division and patterning of global space. Lefebvre (1991) makes an analytical distinction between ‘spatial practices’, ‘representations of space’ and ‘representational spaces’ that is helpful in understanding the nature of the connections between geopolitical orders and the discursive representations of space implicit in the practices of foreign policy. Spatial practices refer to the material and physical flows, interactions, and movements that occur in and across space as fundamental features of economic production and social reproduction. Representations of space involve all of the concepts, naming practices, and geographical codes used to talk about and understand spatial practices. Representational spaces are the scenarios for future spatial practices or ‘imagined geographies’ that inspire changes in the representation of space with an eye to the transformation of spatial practices. We see these three sets of ideas and practices as dialectically related. Each is implicated in the nature of the other, so that no one concept can be given causal primacy over the others. For example, after the Second World War the US government could have continued to regard the Soviet Union as the ally it had been during the war (representation of space). But a decision was made to represent the erstwhile ally as a threat to the spatial practices of the ‘free’ world economy (representational space). Now the relatively stable representations of the Cold War are up for grabs again, and with them comes the possibility of new spatial practices that will have to have regard for a new era of globalization and deterritorialization. Our point, of course, is that as the ‘production of international political-economic space’ changes, so do the dominant models of how it works and, also, visions of alternatives to it. A critical geopolitics refers, then, not only to the material spatial practices through which the international political economy is constituted, but also to the ways in which it is represented and contested. Successive discourses of geopolitics take shape—sometimes uneasily and always unevenly—against the backdrop of an international political economy experiencing periodic crisis and restructuring.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The rest of this book is written with every regard for these four theoretical presuppositions, but it is not organized in such a way that successive chapters are given over to each assumption in turn; the presuppositions confront the text at all points along the way from here to the Conclusion, and in each of the three Parts that follow.

In Part I we reflect further on some of the organizing concepts that structure both our view of geopolitics and the traditions of geopolitics we are concerned to critique. Chapter 2 is focused on questions relating to the historical geography of geopolitical orders. In the first part of this chapter we examine various spatial ontologies that are apparent in existing conceptions of order, dominance and hegemony in the field of international relations. We also outline and defend our own, more Gramscian, ontology of spatial order. In the second part of the chapter we present a narrative account of the three geopolitical orders that we believe best correspond to our spatial ontologies of order and hegemony. These are (1) The Concert of Europe—British Geopoli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Mastering Space
• Part II: Hegemony/Territory/Globalization: the Geopolitics of International Political Economy
• Part III: The Elements of a New Geopolitical Discourse