The Geopolitics of Domination

Geoffrey Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138813328
• eBook ISBN: 9781317600268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Using the examples of the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Austria, France and Germany, this book describes the principal geopolitical features of the expansionist state. It then presents a model of the operation of the expansionist process over space and time. It goes on to apply the geopolitical characteristics of the model to the period after 1945 in order to assess the extent to which the Soviet Union might be considered as being an expansionist state, either actually or potentially. This latter question is obviously once more extremely relevant with the current events in Ukraine.

ONE

BIDS FOR SUMPREMACY: THE URGE TO EXPANSION AND DOMINATION

‘Life is a continuous sequence of dominations,’ said the President of the General Assembly of the United Nations in his speech to the Second Session in 1947’.[1] The attempts by some states to achieve and retain positions of dominance have done much to shape the outlines of the world political map. The resistance of others to such domination, and their refusal to accept its consequences, has been a factor of equal importance. The United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, was originally established after a disastrous war in which certain great powers sought to achieve positions of dominance. In essence it represented the refusal of the states of the world to accept such domination, and an assertion, in an admittedly halting and uncertain manner, of their right to freedom and self-determination.

The opposing desires to control and to resist, to dominate and to be free from domination have acted dialectically upon one another throughout modern times. Geopolitically, they have been responsible for what Henrikson referred to as ‘the neatly segmented, multicoloured world of the standard political map.’[2] Nowhere is the complexity of this more in evidence than in Europe and the Mediterranean, the western ecumene of the World-Island.[3] While the political map here is a palimpsest, retaining considerable evidences of older and largely superseded political forms, the standard units are now the ‘neatly segmented’ territorial states. Known, usually quite wrongly, as ‘nation-states’ or simply as ‘nations’, their preponderant cultural unity has been used as a basis for political unity and for the centralisation of control over a wide range of activities. As part of the process of control, qualities have been attributed to the state well in excess of those which it actually possesses. In this way popular support, sometimes of a highly emotional character, is gained for its continued existence and for the regime which controls it. This nationalism may then supply the emotional and intellectual foundations for a further enlargement of the state, and thus for the commencement or continuation of an expansionist process. Its initial object, whether consciously expressed or not, is to attain some ideal or idealised geographical territory in which the state will be in close conformity with the physical and human environment in which it exists. This entails the attainment of a territory in which there is a large measure of physical unity bounded by clearly defined ‘natural’ frontiers. Such conditions constitute the physical basis for what is envisaged as a more secure, prosperous and easily-governed state. Its ultimate justification has been expressed as the creation of that particular morphology which God, Nature or Reason was deemed to have ordained for it. Such a morphology may take the form of a homogeneous geographical area, a region of physical unity, an amorphous ‘living space’ or a shape which can be reduced to a geometrical figure, such as a triangle or a hexagon. Perhaps the most powerful factor of all underlying the search for the ideal morphology has been the myth of a national ‘golden age’ in which there was fulfilment and glory within a large and impressive homeland. Goblet saw this as ‘super-imposing maps of dreamland empires’ upon far bleaker contemporary realities,[4] a phenomenon which Kristof called ‘the shift towards an idealised past … when the fatherland and people were true to themselves’.[5] Whether it was space or time which was invoked, the central theme was what Ratzel called the ‘Staatsidee,’ a philosophical and moral conception of the mission and destiny of the state and the image of what it should become.[6] The nature of the national territory, and the natural environment occupied by the people then become woven into the fabric of the cultural heritage.

Such idealised morphologies can hardly be expected to fit together neatly like the pieces in some providential jigsaw puzzle, and the striving towards them has in practice usually brought states into conflict with one another. The possibility of armed confrontation has rarely deterred states from the pursuit of their territorial ambitions, especially when the prospect of material advantage has also beckoned. Force, or at least the threat of force, has been the method all too regularly employed in attempting to alter the frontiers of the state, and the stronger state is the one which is in the better position to attain its ambitions. While such territorial power politics has constituted the normal pattern of interstate relationships, there has also been a widespread countervailing desire to see the continuation of Henrikson’s ‘neatly segmented multicoloured world’. The ambition of particular states to promote their own territorial advantage, and in so doing to ride roughshod over the others, has been checked by alliances of the threatened states. Thus the drive towards what is conceived as being the ideal state morphology has had to take into account the ability of other states, either alone or in combination, to set limits to its attainment. In the real world, frontiers have often been truce lines which have fallen well short of the ideal. When the balance of power has been seen to change, then eventually attempts have been made to redraw the frontiers so as to reflect the new situation. The durability of the multicoloured geopolitical surface at any time thus depends on the extent to which it accords with that ‘geophysical and geosocial world’[7] which underlies it. If it does, then geopolitical stability will ensue; if it does not, even after a period of war, then further adjustment becomes necessary until the political surface conforms more closely to the other surfaces.

A major problem in bringing about adjustment is that the geopolitical surface tends to harden rapidly and then to assume the role of a given, a phenomenon as enduring as those natural features which are woven into its polychromatic patterns. The state exists in both space and time, and not only does it aspire towards the ideal morphology but also towards a rock-like permanence. The thought of decline and fall is altogether too painful to be contemplated with equanimity. Far too much has been invested in success by all classes of society for the retreat from greatness to be shrugged off as being part of a normal and inevitable process.

The geopolitical surface consequently possesses two particularly unstable characteristics. One is that since it is in the nature of the state to behave as though it were a permanent phenomenon and to put up considerable resistance to all changes which might be disadvantageous to it, pressures will tend to build up beneath the hardening political surface. These will then periodically erupt and in so doing cause severe damage to the demographic, economic and social surfaces constituting that ‘geosocial world’ which lies beneath it. The second unstable feature results from this disruption. Taking advantage of the disruption, certain states may then attempt to change the system definitively so as to promote their own particular advantage. Rather than working for peaceful change within the system, they choose to operate outside it and eventually to replace it with one constructed after their own image. In this way what may have started out as being an attempt to secure frontier rectifications and limited territorial gains may be transformed into the establishment of a regional hegemony. In some instances it may not stop there, and the expansionist state may then seek to establish a position of supremacy over a wider area. This constitutes domination, as it is understood in this book, and it is a phenomenon which has been frequently identified and variously explained. To Lord Acton it was a ‘law of the modern world that power tends to expand indefinitely’ and in so doing to transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until itself met by superior force.[8] Braudel talked in vaguer terms of that ‘hunger for the world’ which was characteristic of expansionist states[9] and Martin Wight of the aspiration ‘to become a universal empire’.[10]

What exactly is the cause of such ‘hunger’ on the part of certain states, this desire for expansion and universality? O’Sullivan has recently described it quite simply as being the consequence of that ‘aggressive spirit’ which has always been a fundamental driving force in world affairs. History, he asserts, ‘is a striking record of the persistent desire of some people to lord it over others’.[11] But such an ‘animus dominandi’ relates not only to populations, but to territory as well. Since there is a historical distinction between ‘regnum’ and ‘dominium,’ the former implying rule over people and the latter over territory, the territorial imperative has always been a built-in feature of domination. The acquisition of territory, and ipso facto of everything on it, is the ultimate expression of the will to control. Unlike other more specific forms of control it constitutes what Sack has termed an ‘open-ended’ method of exercising control. Territoriality ‘offers a means of asserting control without specifying in detail what is being controlled’.[12]

If it is to be more than simply a Vandal-like whirlwind conquest of brief duration and leaving little legacy, the exercise of such control must be based on something more substantial than either the ‘aggressive spirit’ or a ‘hunger for the world’. To give it durability, it requires both a justification and an organisation to put it into practice. In Wight’s words it must ‘appeal to some design of international unity and solidarity’.[13] Justification has usually been provided by the state’s invocation of noble and universal ideals, what Niebuhr called harnessing ‘religious impulses and philosophies as instruments of its purposes’.[14] The object of organisation has been the creation of a centralised and uniform political structure through which control may most effectively be exercised. By placing its firm imprint on its conquests the expanding state aspires to a durability it would otherwise be unlikely to attain. An overall structure of this sort is what constitutes an empire.

The ‘maius imperium’ was originally the authority bestowed on its officials by the Senate of the Roman Republic for the discharge of certain specific commissions in its name. Its object was the furtherance of the ‘res publica,’ the general good, but in time the purpose of the authority bestowed tended to become less specific and to encompass broader objectives. Thus, well before the Roman Empire came into being, the imperium had come to possess a territorial sense, and the specific commission of the Senate had given place to the creation of a territorial state within the boundaries of which the exercise of authority was curbed by ever fewer restraints. From the time of Augustus the head of state was also given the title of imperator, the bearer of the authority of the imperium. Later, by assuming the additional title of dominus, he asserted complete authority over the territory of the empire. ‘Regere imperio populos’ implied absolute authority over all the people living inside the imperial frontiers. Rome thus assumed the position of hegemonial state of the Mediterranean, so achieving for the first time control of a region which had for long been an economic and cultural unit but, until then, never a political one. The impressive edifice was further extended to become the ‘imperium orbis terrarum,’ in effect the universal state of the western world. At its maximum territorial extent during the reign of the emperor Trajan it stretched from the north of Europe to the Sahara and from the Atlantic Ocean to Mesopotamia. While it centred on the Mediterranean coastlands, it embraced within its extended frontiers a variety of contrasting geographical environments. With the divine Imperator at its head, it was able to exercise virtually unlimited and ‘open ended’ control within these vast territories.

Long after its fall, the idea of the universal state continued to be a force in the western ecumene. It was kept alive both in the spiritual form of ‘respublica Christiana,’ deriving its authority from the Pope in Rome, and the political one of ‘renovatio imperii Romanorum’ – the reinstitution of the Roman Empire – embarked upon by Charlemagne’s German successors. Along with the Byzantine Empire in the east, both sought to legitimise their existence by reference back to the imperium of the universal state of the ancient world. Following the failure to secure the longed-for unity, vernacular versions of imperium and Imperator were adopted by successor states possessing ever more tenuous links with Rome. During the nineteenth century the terms were again reactivated to indicate the ascendancy of the European powers over the rest of the World-Island. Such has been the impact of Europe’s bid for world supremacy that the term ‘imperialism’ has since come to be closely identified with this particular phenomenon rather than with the far longer lineage of the attempts to establish a universal state within the western ecumene itself.

Lichtheim defined imperialism as ‘the relationship of a hegemonial state to peoples or nations under its control’.[15] There are many different degrees of control, ranging from the Procrustean, seeking to impose absolute uniformity, to a loose ‘primus inter pares’ situation which may be relatively benign and tolerant by comparison. All, however, have the effect of removing rights and freedoms from the subject peoples and vesting them instead in the controlling power. The degree of control exercised will depend on the relationship of the process of expansion to the characteristics of the area in which it is taking place. The nature and strength of the expanding power will influence the extent to which it is able to sustain the process of expansion. The physical and human characteristics of the area will then either impede or stimulate the process. If process and territory sustain and stimulate one another then the expansion is likely to be successful and swift; if they do not it may be difficult and protracted. According to Modelski, the acquiescence and even the active support of the subject people is an essential prerequisite for the maintenance of supremacy. ‘Global power’, he said, ‘carried by a ruling nation cannot in the long run be supported solely by the people of that nation…In its relations with other peoples such power must satisfy them and give them an interest in the continuance and stability of the whole’.[16] Grenier, as quoted by Braudel, went even further than that by asserting that ‘to be conquered a people must have acquiesced in its own defeat’.[17] By so doing, and at the same time accepting implicitly their own inferiority, the conquered people become the unwitting agents in the transformation of a hegemony into an empire.

Throughout the Europe-Mediterranean region, according to Stoianovich, there has been ‘a force that was inimical to the very principle of universal monarchy, namely a strong tradition of opposition to territorial bigness, and to power without limits’.[18] This has led to considerable ambivalence on the matter of the optimum size of political structures, and of how all-embracing they should be. On the one hand there was the aspiration to the re-creation of an ‘imperium orbis terrarum’ in some form appropriate to the times. The Renaissance then gave birth to the idea of a united Europe founded upon the system of fairly equal and balanced territorial states. One of the more notable of such schemes was the Duc de Sully’s ‘grand dessein.’ By the nineteenth century, with the sovereign states in the ascendant and the notion of a united Europe having been reduced, in Bismarck’s phrase, to ‘une fiction insoutenable’ there s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• One Bids for Sumpremacy: The Urge to Expansion and Domination
• Two Empire and Domination in the Mediterranean
• Three Empire and Domination North of the Alps
• Four A Geopolitical Model of Dominance
• Five From Ostrog to Empire: The Territorial Expansion of Russia
• Six The Soviet Union: Socialist Commonwealth or New Imperial State?
• Seven The Silent Castle: A Case of Geopolitical Uniqueness?
• Eight Decline and Fall: The Retreat from Dominance
• Epilogue Gods, Men and Territory
• Glossary of Geopolitical Terms Used in This Book
• Index