The Geopolitics of Region Building in the Black Sea

A Critical Examination

Yannis Tsantoulis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367209582
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Offering theoretical insights on region building, this book explores the attempts to formulate a political and institutional vision for the Black Sea region in the post-9/11 era and in the context of the enlargements of the EU and NATO.

It investigates in depth these attempts, viewed as a failure by the key actors involved, in order to understand how regions emerge in international politics as well as how and why they may fail to come into being. To this end, the book explores a range of factors that impacted region building in the Black Sea, considering the role of region builders involved, their practices and the context of their actions, and the spatial representations and security discourses that were integral to the region building process. Hence, attention is paid to how these factors both enabled and constrained the discursive construction of the Black Sea region, thus identifying the elements that distinguish the Black Sea from other successful cases of region building.

Based on critical approaches towards international relations and political geography, this book both expands and deepens the scope and understanding of regions and will thus appeal to academics and students in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Political Geography, and Regional Integration.

1 A critical reading of regions and their study

Introduction

The study of regions has yielded analytical works of considerable complexity and has gained significant intellectual currency in the context of IR and PG. Various definitions, divergent theoretical clarifications, numerous categorisations, and empirical studies of different kinds have historically been a perpetual feature in social sciences, particularly in IR. In Rick Fawn’s (2009, 6) words, “the study of regions in IR offers a thriving if immensely heterogeneous literature” and according to Agnew (1999, 93) “at the moment only philosophical confusion reigns supreme in much writing about place, space and region”. Following the end of superpower competition, this (fruitful) diversity among the various approaches vis-à-vis regions became even more evident, primarily as an outcome of the linguistic turn. Regardless of the competing views on the nature and origins of regions, the regionalist scholarship that arose has since given a distinctly “regional flavour” to the post-Cold War literature. Yet, the objective of this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive literature review on regions as this would exceed the scope and the objectives of the book, but to address those questions (i.e. “What is a region?”, “Why and how regions do matter?”, “How does a region come into being?”) that can shed light on the particular case of the Black Sea region examined in the subsequent chapters. As Anssi Paasi and Jonathan Metzger point out “important questions, such as who or what it is that ‘constructs’ a region or what this construction means in terms of social practice or power relations, often remained unanswered or were answered in partial, contradictory ways” (2017, 22).

The ontologies and terminologies of regions

The starting question “What is a region?” seems rather descriptive, if not banal. Yet, observing how differently it was addressed in the various regionalist debates and how this ambiguity penetrated the questions surrounding the ontology of the Black Sea makes a thorough investigation of the term region indispensable. “Region” emerged as a ubiquitous yet ambivalent concept in post-Cold War literature, with no standard definition and many different, if not opposing, connotations and interpretations in both scholarly and policy parlance. This overproduction of concepts brought about ontological and epistemological problems in the sense that, even now, there is no consensus on what to study (ontological) and how to study it (epistemological). Scholars have proposed many attributes of “region”, each one representing a different period of time and a different school of thought. As Wippel (2003, 26) points out:

[t]he ambiguity and change of regional terms, their vague and varying definition and geographical extension show that in fact no single, consistent conception of regions exists and that the conceptions vary in accordance with social contexts and issues. In contrast to (often strategically) communicated images, they rather constitute relatively recent, heterogeneous and disputed, continuously renegotiated constructs.

Most of the studies have relied on only one case and thus their definitions cannot be generalised. What makes, however, the following definitions similar is the fact that most of them approach regions as exogenously given, fixed objects that need to be examined. Regardless of the different criteria and lenses chosen (i.e. geography, interdependence, shared social features, etc.), the underlying assumption and overarching logic has been that regions are “waiting out there” to be discovered and examined.

Starting in a chronological fashion, one of the first scholars to deal with regions was Alfred Hettner. As a prominent geographer of his time, he argued in the 1920s that a region has a unique character and is created by a combination of different aspects (cultural, physical, economical, biological, and social). The Zusammensein (gathering) of all these aspects results in the Zusammenwirken (collaboration), which is responsible for the uniqueness of a region (Hettner 1927). A few decades later, in the 1960s, Bruce Russet (1968, 317–352) – in a similar manner to Hettner but adopting a more policy-oriented approach compared to his geography-oriented thinking – used social and cultural homogeneity, political attitudes, economic interdependence, and geographical proximity as the main criteria for the definition of a region. His contemporary Joseph Nye (1968, vi-vii) adopted a more simplified approach and defined a region using only two attributes: geography and interdependence.¹ In 1970, Louis J. Cantori and Steven L. Spiegel (1970, 6) were the first to analyse regions comparatively and proposed the following definition:

A subordinate system consists of one state or two or more proximate and interacting states which have some common ethnic, linguistic, cultural, social, and historical bonds, and whose sense of identity is sometimes increased by the actions and attitudes of states external to the system.

Their attempt to devise a comparative framework for the study of regions grew too cumbersome and there was no significant follow-up in the IR discipline as in the context of the Cold War priority was given to neorealist and neoliberal explanations of world politics. In 1973, William Thompson (89–117) identified twenty-one features which are often used in the literature to describe regions, including elements such as geographical proximity, internal and external recognition as a distinctive area, number of members, and shared social features, among others. Although these geographical and interactive attributes helped scholars to narrow their understanding of a region, Thompson’s definition also led to inconsistencies. For instance, even if most regions consist only of states, others may consist of sub-state regions belonging to different states which engage in cooperative behaviour towards each other and towards other states. Furthermore, some regions consist of members which are not geographically contiguous, but which share other similarities (e.g. Francophonie).

Including security in his approach in the early 1980s, Karl Deutsch (1981, 51–93) highlighted interdependence over a broad range of dimensions. Even more importantly though, by including security, an intriguing coagulant that in the case of the Black Sea was both a source of legitimacy (security as a concern) and a root for suspicions (security as a field for antagonisms), the very perception and understanding of the region changed. From a Marxist perspective, Peter Taylor argued that “[r]egions are constructed and as such they contribute to the creation of the zones which in turn are part of the making of the whole world-system. This argument may be constructed through a range of regional scales to generate a hierarchy of regions” (1991, 185) thus placing regions within a three-zone division of core regions, periphery regions, and semi-periphery regions. However, by granting a core or a peripheral status to a region, Taylor was making a choice reflecting a particular understanding of the organisation of political space; one privileging centre over margins and peripheries. Barry Buzan’s definition stressed the “relations among a set of states whose fate is that they have been locked into geographical proximity with each other” (1991, 188) thus highlighting the importance of geography. Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 221) noted that the very etymology of the term “region” (from Latin regere: to rule) suggests that regions refer to a particular and different dimension of political and spatial power. Even more comprehensively, Andrew Hurrell (1995, 38) argued that regions can be differentiated in terms of social, economic, political, and organisational cohesiveness.

On the basis of the abovementioned definitions, it is clear that focusing on either interdependence or geography or any other aspect – be it cultural, political or economic – “the attempt to tackle region across the whole agenda of international relations, and to set up a detailed comparative framework, proved too complex and cumbersome to establish a generally followed understanding of region” (Buzan 1991, 189).

In the case of the Black Sea, the question of its definition was a product of that definitional diversity/ambiguity and revolved around four main distinct conceptualisations (i.e. regional security complex (RSC), geopolitical entity, a product of culture and geography, discursive construction). All these ontological debates stemmed from the considerable difficulty of applying a single theoretical notion to any empirical case, or more generally of using empirical referents in order to develop conceptual categories such as “region”. Even more importantly, as it will be shown throughout the book, the various definitions, based on different understandings had performative functions and produced policy implications.

Regions and their effects

The significant core regionalist approaches that emerged in the post-Cold War era chose regions – or other similar concepts – as the preferable level of analysis and research focus. For certain theorists, regions were valuable organising entities in the sense that they provided scholars and analysts alike with an appropriate framework of analysis and testing of their assumptions.² Yet, for others they represented the international system but on a smaller scale; while for a third group, regions – or regionalism(s) of various kinds – provided a comprehensive understanding of international politics, and for politicians in particular, the necessary incentive for the reorganisation of the political space in regional terms.

Understanding regions and their importance is a difficult endeavour as there are fundamental differences, in terms of ontology and epistemology, not only between the positivists, as expressed by the works of Peter Katzenstein, David Lake, Patrick Morgan, Louise Fawcett, Andrew Hurrell, and the post-positivists, as expressed by the works of Anssi Paasi, Alexander Murphy, Iver Neumann, and Christopher Browning among others, but also and equally importantly within these two camps.³ In this chapter, when referring to the so-called core regionalist approaches, the focus is primarily on two categories. The first follows the positivist tradition and refers to security as the key coagulant, whereas the second refer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A critical reading of regions and their study
• 2 Towards a genealogy of regions
• 3 The narrative(s) of a “Black Sea region”
• 4 Region builders and the unraveling of the BSEN
• 5 Practices as tools of region building
• 6 Writing space and the cartography of the Black Sea
• 7 Different logics of security, clashing region building visions
• Conclusions
• Index