Rethinking Geopolitics

Simon Dalby, Gearoid O.u Tuathail, Simon Dalby, Gearoid O.u Tuathail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134692125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

Rethinking Geopolitics argues that the concept of geopolitics needs to be conceptualised anew as the twenty-first century approaches.
Challenging conventional geopolitical assumptions, contributors explore:
* theories of post-modern geopolitics
* historical formulations of states and cold wars
* the geopolitics of the Holocaust
* the gendered dimension of Kurdish insurgency
* the cold war world
* political cartoons concerning Bosnia
* Time magazine representations of the Persian Gulf
* the Zapatistas and the Chiapas revolt
* the new cyber politics
* conflict simulations in the US military
* the emergence of a new geopolitics of global security.
Exploring how popular cultural assumptions about geography and politics constitute the discourses of contemporary violence and political economy, Rethinking Geopolitics shows that we must rethink the struggle for knowledge, space and power.

1
POSTMODERN GEOPOLITICS?

The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond

Gearóid Ó Tuathail

Glocalization, it would appear, can implode geopolitics.

Luke (1994: 626)

The challenge for a mode of representation adequate to our post-modern times is . . . to articulate an understanding of world politics attuned to the need to move beyond the sovereignty problematic, with its focus on geopolitical segmentarity, settled subjects, and economistic power, that appreciates the significance of flows, networks, webs, and the identity formations located therein but does not resort simply to the addition of another level of analysis or of more agents to the picture.

Campbell (1996: 19)

A certain amount of mess is perhaps the most general characteristic of human society, past and present.

Mann (1996: 1964)

We live in complicated and confusing times, in spaces traversed by global flows and warped by the intensity and speed of information technologies. Whether we term it late modernity or postmodernity, it is a condition that is unevenly yet unmistakably eroding our inherited ontologies and fixed imaginations of ‘how the world works.’ Our conveniently conventional geopolitical imagination, which envisions and maps the world in terms of spatial blocs, territorial presence and fixed identities, is no longer adequate in a world where space appears to be left behind by pace, where territoriality is under eclipse by telemetricality, and where simple settled identities are blurring into networks of complex unsettled hybridity. The postmodern condition seems to problematize and unsettle the modern geopolitical map; its disturbs its time-worn conditions of possibility, its conventional geographical rhetoric, its traditional territorial objects, and ontological purities. Does, therefore, postmodernity give us a new geopolitics?

The need profoundly to rethink constellations of knowledge like ‘geopolitics’ on the eve of the new millennium is a consequence of everyday global practices and networks, which are regularly calling geopolitics as we have known it into question: economic globalization, global media flows, the Internet, transnational webs of crime, the hyper-real universe of information perpetually conditioning the practices of statecraft in the late twentieth century. This chapter seeks to rethink geopolitics by engaging in a critical dialogue with the theoretical schemata of John Agnew, Timothy Luke and others on the historical past, confusing present, and speculative future of geopolitics as a sign of the representations of space and the spatial practices underpinning world politics. Agnew (1998: 5) suggests that ‘the history of modern world politics has been structured by practices based on a set of understandings about “the way the world works” that together constitute the elements of the modern geopolitical imagination.’ This geopolitical imagination, which has its beginnings in sixteenth-century Europe, has structured and conditioned world politics ever since. Though the balance of power between the dominant world powers has changed down the centuries, as has the nature of the international economy, Agnew claims that the modern geopolitical imagination ‘still remains prevalent in framing the conduct of world politics’ (1998: 6). Yet Agnew himself (1998), Luke and others describe a contemporary state of affairs that puts this observation into question.

Outlining first Agnew’s reading of the modern geopolitical imagination, this chapter seeks to complement Agnew’s categorization of modern geopolitics using Luke’s (1994, 1995, 1996) speculative writings and those of others to suggest the outlines of a postmodern geopolitics that disturbs yet, I wish to suggest in the conclusion, has not fully transcended the modern geopolitical imagination. Like the works it engages, this chapter is inevitably historically sweeping and theoretically speculative. It reviews and clarifies the historical schemata and ideal constructs that have been used to explain and understand our contemporary geopolitical conjuncture. As heuristic abstractions and ideal types, these schemata and classifications are far from perfect. They tend to smooth out the messy historicity and complex spatiality of geopolitical discourses and practices, attributing a deep logic and underlining coherence to these that they may not necessarily have. Nevertheless, these schemata have an undeniable heuristic and pedagogic value, provocatively clarifying yet also doubtlessly simplifying the dense history, confused present, and possible future forms of geopolitics. While the contrast between a modern and a postmodern geopolitics can lead to an unnecessary and misleading logic of dichotomization, it is nevertheless incumbent upon critical geopoliticians to theorize how the modes of representation and conditions of practice of geopolitics are changing on the eve of the twenty-first century. Geopolitics, as I have suggested elsewhere, is best studied in its messy contextual specificity (Ó Tuathail 1996). Engaging that contextual specificity today requires speculative theorization of the condition of postmodernity and the multiple transformations it is inducing in the contemporary forms and practices of geopolitics.

Modern geopolitics

The term ‘geopolitics’ dates from the late nineteenth century but has become in the late twentieth century a widely used signifier for the spatiality of world politics. John Agnew, on his own and together with Stuart Corbridge, has sought to give the concept some rigor and specificity, offering what is perhaps the most comprehensive historical and materialist theory of modern geopolitics in recent years (Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Agnew 1998). Blending the Marxian political economy of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and the idiosyncratic writings on space of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre with a qualified anti-textualist critical geopolitics, Agnew provides a general theory of geopolitics that treats it both as practices and ideas, as a materialist world order and as a discursive set of understandings and enframing rules. The result is what both Agnew and Corbridge once termed ‘geopolitical economy,’ a hybrid of geopolitics and political economy (Agnew and Corbridge 1989).¹

From Lefebvre, Agnew and Corbridge take the distinction between spatial practices and representations of space (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39).² Spatial practices for them ‘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’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 7). Spatial practices are the everyday material practices across space that help to consolidate worldwide orders of political economy. Representations of space ‘involve all of the concepts, naming practices, and geographical codes used to talk about and understand spatial practices.’ Implicitly, spatial practices are a pre-discursive materiality, while representations of space are ideology and discourse. Haunting this schema, of course, is the longstanding and unsustainable Marxist distinction between practices and discourse. Aware of this yet nevertheless dependent upon it, Agnew and Corbridge stress the ‘dialectical relations’ between the categories as a means of handling this recurrent divide.

Building on these distinctions, Agnew and Corbridge make a crucial distinction between geopolitical order and geopolitical discourse, the first a worldwide political economy of spatial practices, while the second is a congealed hegemonic organization of representations of space. Their notion of hegemony, derived from Gramsci and supplemented by the work of Robert Cox (1987), places great emphasis on the ensemble of rules and regulations enmeshing and conditioning actors in world politics. They specify a geopolitical order thus:

In our usage ‘order’ refers to the routinized rules, institutions, activities and strategies through which the international political economy operates in different historical periods. The qualifying term ‘geopolitical’ draws attention to the geographical elements of a world order. . . . Orders necessarily have geographical characteristics. These include the relative degree of centrality of state territoriality to social and economic activities, the nature of the hierarchy of states (dominated by one or a number of states, the degree of state equality), the spatial scope of the activities of different states and other actors such as international organizations and businesses, the spatial connectedness or disconnectedness between various actors, the conditioning effects of informational and military technologies upon spatial interaction, and the ranking of world regions and particular states by the dominant states in terms of ‘threats’ to their military and economic ‘security.’

(Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 15)

Emphasizing the historical emergence of a ‘society of territorial states’ and modern rules about ‘power politics’ after the Napoleonic Wars, Agnew and Corbridge specify three different geopolitical orders: the British geopolitical order (1815– 1875), the geopolitical order of inter-imperialist rivalry (1875–1945), and the Cold War geopolitical order (1945–1990) (Table 1.1). There is a certain slippage in Agnew and Corbridge’s schema between historical periods, geopolitical orders, and the condition of hegemony, a function, I have argued elsewhere, of the imprecision of the Gramscian notion of hegemony, when a condition of hegemony does or does not exist (Ó Tuathail, 1995). They note that ‘a geopolitical order is always partial and precarious’ (p. 19) but nevertheless specify their geopolitical orders as permanent, discrete, identifiable periods of time. While they allow a geopolitical order without a hegemon (a dominant state), they do not conceive of a geopolitical order without a condition of hegemony. Geopolitical order is hegemony. A non-hegemonic geopolitical order is not admitted as a possibility. The current post-Cold War epoch is described as a hegemony without a dominant state hegemon, a geopolitical order dominated by powerful countries like Germany, Japan and the United States, integrated by worldwide markets and regulated by transnational institutions and organizations like the European Union, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 193). The hegemonic ideology of this epoch is transnational liberalism, the belief that universal progress lies in the expansion and extension of capitalist markets across the globe.

Geopolitical discourse, for Agnew and Corbridge, is the discourse by which intellectuals of statecraft, both formal theorists and practitioners, spatialize world politics. It refers to the reading and writing of a geography around the international political economy. It involves the ‘deployment of representations of space which guide the spatial practices central to a geopolitical order’ (ibid.: 47). Rejecting what they see as the idealism of the textualist approach and the determinism and functionalism of geopolitics-as-ideology, they stress the contingent relationship between thought and practice: ‘modes of representation are implicit in practice but are subject to revision as practice changes. Spatial practices and representations of space are dialectically interwoven. In other words, the spatial conditions of material life are shaped through their representations as certainly as representations are shaped by the spatial contours of material life’ (ibid.: 47).

Table 1.1 Modern geopolitics (after Agnew 1998; Agnew and Corbridge 1995).

Just as certain organizations of spatial practices become hegemonic geopolitical orders, so also do certain dominant modes of geopolitical representation become hegemonic geopolitical discourses, epistemological enforcers that suggest to people how they should live, think, and imagine how the world works. While acknowledging that hegemonic orders of geopolitical discourse are, like all conditions of hegemony, fluid, contingent, and perpetually shifting in response to challenge, they nevertheless identify three relatively stable and sweeping historical modes of geopolitical representation, which correspond to the three geopolitical orders already identified: civilizational geopolitics (1815–1875), naturalized geopolitics (1875–1945) and ideological geopolitics (1945–1990) (see Table 1.1). Although Agnew and Corbridge are not explicit about it, the dominant representations of space in the contemporary period could be termed, after the Clinton administration’s strategy of enlarging the community of so-called ‘market democracies’ (a questionable construct that is deeply riven by contradictions and tensions of many kinds), enlargement geopolitics (Ó Tuathail and Luke 1994). In all cases, ‘the practical geopolitical reasoning of political elites is the link between the dominant representations of space and the geopolitical order of dominant spatial practices’ (Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 48).

Enframing and conditioning all these historical and hegemonic modes of geopolitical representation are even more abstract and sweeping macro-historical principles that define ‘modern geopolitical discourse.’ In Mastering Space, the beginnings of modern geopolitical discourse are traced back to the encounters between Europeans and non-European others during the ‘Age of Discovery.’ While previous empires and social orders long had notions of ‘otherness,’ Agnew and Corbridge claim that the ‘singular trait of modern geopolitical discourse’ is its representation of ‘others as “backward” or permanently disadvantaged if they remained as they are’ (ibid.: 49). Europe’s others were fixed for all time in a state of inferiority to Europe. They were represented as Europe’s past, as the external barbarity and savagery that defined the civilization of Europe. Geographical difference was translated into a temporal schema of backward and modern. To travel beyond Europe, therefore, was to travel back in time, to earlier backward stages in the evolution of human civilization (Doty 1996; Gregory 1994; Grovogui 1996).

These ideas about an overarching modern geopolitical mentality are considerably expanded in Agnew’s Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (1998). In this work, Agnew identifies a series of meta-theoretical characteristics of ‘the modern geopolitical imagination’ that has its beginning during the Renaissance. Though he continues to emphasize the ‘singular trait’ noted above, the new ‘primary feature’ or ‘most distinguishing feature’ of the modern geopolitical imagination, he argues, is a ‘global visualization’ without which world politics would not be possible. The development of the philosophy and cartographic techniques of global visualization in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards made modern geopolitics possible, for it enabled the seeing of the world as a unitary, albeit still incomplete, whole. The technical invention of perspective made possible the consideration of the world-as-a-picture from a single-eye vantage point. Cartesian philosophy rendered this monocular eye a point of objectivity upon the world. This objective seeing of the world as a unified homogeneous whole led to its differentiation ...