THE END OF GEOPOLITICS?
REFLECTIONS ON A PLURAL PROBLEMATIC AT THE CENTURY'S END.

Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal), Department of Geography, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA, 24061.Sept 1996.

Part I

In response to the generalized thesis of "the end of geopolitics," this paper seeks to develop two arguments. The first is that the whole question of geopolitics is much richer than these and other intellectuals have acknowledged. Geopolitics works as an illusive complexity not a manifest given, a plural problematic not a singular concept, a constellation in a Frankfurt school sense, namely, a "juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle." To critically engage geopolitics is to study how this dispersed cluster of changing elements has congealed historically into different orders of geographical knowledge and power. Second, problematic though sequences of then/now or old/new are, this paper seeks to schematically outline a transformation in its conditions of possibility by contrasting geopolitical knowledge production at the beginning of the century with geopolitical knowledge production at the end of the century. It must be stated at the outset that this contrast is a heuristic device, a metahistorical myth-structure comparing what we can describe, following Lyotard, as modern and postmodern geopolitics. Yet, the exercise is worthwhile in that its elaborates a macrohistory for geopolitics around and against which we can conceptualize specific clusters of the geopolitical problematic. In elaborating this shift in the following two sections of the paper, the complexity of the unsettled historical and philosophical problematic(s) of geopolitics should become more evident. It also allows us to elaborate a critical geopolitics agenda of research into the postmodern technoformations and megamachinic flowmations of contemporary geopolitics. Though traditional understandings of geopolitics may be obsolete, the problematic of geopolitics -- the geography/power/knowledge of the production of global space -- demands our attention more than ever. The crises that characterize this plural problematic in the late twentieth century are significant ones that students of global affairs should not neglect or overlook.

MODERN GEOPOLITICS: A SPINNING GLOBE IN PERSPECTIVE.

Geopolitics is a twentieth century concept. The term 'geopolitics' was first coined by Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish political scientist, in 1899. However, it did not come into widespread use until the 1930s when it was championed by the group of German political geographers around the retired Major General Dr. Karl Haushofer in the Department of Geography at the University of Munich. Haushofer's association through Rudolf Hess with Adolf Hitler brought the concept to the attention of the world when Hitler
consolidated power for himself and the Nazi party in Germany during 1933. Numerous scholars in the West and East (in Russia, China and Japan) developed an interest in geopolitics as a science of statecraft, a method of thinking through the supposed significance of geographical factors upon the conduct of international relations. During World War II, a small caste of advocates in academic, business and military circles within the United States pushed geopolitics as a form of spatial thinking that the U.S. should
institutionalize and actively promote. Geopolitics was considered essential if the United States was to become and think like a global power. The writings of figures like the British geographer, Halford Mackinder -- who never used and reportedly disliked the term geopolitics -- were suddenly re-discovered by the American foreign policy community at this time and represented as timeless and masterful geopolitical insights into the nature of international politics.

The strange twists of the history of the term "geopolitics" in the first half of the twentieth century are no more than glimmering clues to the problematic its appearance and subsequent role in congealing certain spatial imaginations and desires reveals. Although a twentieth century concept, geopolitics is best understood as a new field of discourse within the long established domain of geo-power, defined as the entwined historical development of geographical knowledge with state power and its imperatives of
governmentality. Pre-twentieth century doctrines and spatial ideologies like the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, or France's "civilizing mission" in Africa can be described as geopolitics avant la lettre, but they are better understood as particular historical regimes of geo-power implicating geographical visions and governmental ideals. Indeed, the distinctiveness of geo-power in general is that geography and governmentality cannot be separated. The geographical vision is itself a governmental mission.

To probe the distinctiveness of geopolitics as a twentieth century field of discourse, we should begin not with the term's origins but with a text that does not use the term but is nevertheless subsequently identified and recalled as foundational to the geopolitical tradition, namely Halford Mackinder's "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904). From this piece, we can identify the first of three structural features that I wish to argue characterize modern geopolitics.

The first is that geopolitics is an early twentieth century form of Cartesian perpectivalism, born in imperial capitals, cultivated by a caste of imperial men (who saw themselves as materialist-minded public intellectuals of empire), and fixated on how modern transportational networks, like railways and steamships, were transmutating territoriality as they knew it. In his 1904 presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, Mackinder describes a new geographical/geopolitical gaze that is made possible by the end of geography as exploration and discovery. In the new post-Columbian era of closed space, a global view is enabled. It is possible, for the first time: to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history. If we are fortunate, that formula should have a practical value as setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.

The geopolitical gaze that Mackinder helped codify produced international politics as a detached perspectival scene. The viewing subject is detached from the object viewed. The geopolitician is transcendent and objective, the unveiled objects inert and transparent. With the deployment of a trained geopolitical gaze, the everyday to and fro of a spinning globe is set in fixed global perspective. The concept of the global (which we should recall was not as common then as now) is both geographical and epistemological; a global view is not only a worldwide view but a total view, a view that enables "the real proportion of features and events" to be perceived and comprehended.

Mackinder's gaze upon the spinning globe of 1904 revealed what he termed the "Natural Seats of Power" (displayed as a lantern slide of an oval shaped Mercator map at the original lecture). This geopolitical map/picture was held to be transparent and natural, yet it was not a pure visual scene, stamped as it was by macro-geographical labels designating the revealed seats of power as "pivot area," "inner or marginal crescent," and "lands of outer or insular crescent." Though geopolitics was about seeing not
writing, Mackinder was inevitably forced to fall back upon writing. What Mackinder produced (made visible) in his lantern slide show and address was an understanding of international politics as a spatial spectacle, as a theatrical drama ("the stage of the whole world") to be explained by the unveiling of the geographical regions and laws beneath the surface of world affairs. For Mackinder, the elemental plot in the theater of international politics is the eternal struggle between Man (sic) and Nature. Following a geographical determinist version of what Latour calls "the modern constitution," Mackinder helps create a discourse on the human/nonhuman relation which purifies (certain things are natural and certain other things social) and translates (it permits hybrids that contain both like "landpower" or "seapower") this relation at the same time. Thus declarations like: "Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls." From this premise, Mackinder creates (con)fusions of the human and the social which are projected as quasi-natural categories in opposition to each other -- East and West, landpower and seapower, the continental heartland and the maritime world -- and as the pivotal binaries of politics. Each is a natural geographical entity yet also a socio-political identity.

The operation of this discourse of essential geographical entities qua identities in perpetual conflict as an interpretative system which makes sense of international politics is the second distinguishing feature of modern geopolitics. Modern geopolitical discourse privileges the synchronic over the diachronic. It is a visual form of thought, a spatial mode of reasoning which evokes real timeless essences and natural laws not mere historical conjunctures and social tendencies. Mackinder's essential entities in perpetual struggle transposed easily onto the USA-USSR conflict after World War II. The Soviet Union was the innately expansionist heartland that needed to be contained least it dominate all of Eurasia. Whether echoing Mackinder's rhetoric or not, Cold War geopolitics is characterized by its emphasis on the permanent struggle of essential geographical blocs and identities. It was an overdetermined struggle between a free, trade-dependent maritime West and a totalitarian, continental Eurasia. The zone of conflict between the two was the Third World, a zone which comprised a number of shatterbelts like Central America, the Middle East, South East Asia, the horn of Africa and southern Africa.

The third distinguishing feature of modern geopolitics is one that became significant as geopolitical discourse spiralled beyond it European and imperial places of birth. Married to the political realism of many emigres in post-World War II America, geopolitics came to describe a perspective on international politics that treated the state as an irreducible monad. The game of geopolitics, most famously for Henry Kissinger, was to survey international politics with an imperial eye to the changing weight of these
fixed monads, the object of the game being to try to establish and maintain conditions of equilibrium between competing monads and so secure an international peace and order favorable to the United States. Geopolitics, as Kissinger conceptualized it -- an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium -- was projected as neutral and rational, yet it concentrated all of its power to determine "the requirements of equilibrium" in the figure of the geopolitician as master (over)seer in international politics. A central assumption of this type of reasoning, of course, was that global space was unambiguously mastered by the politics of sovereign territorial states. Global space was held to be a fully in-stated space.

So specified, modern geopolitics can be thought of as a regime of power/knowledge which produced international politics as an objective global spatial drama, a ceaseless global struggle between pre-determined geographical entities, and as a vision of territorial states dominating global space. It is modern in Lyotard's sense of the modern in that it is complicitious with a series of Western grand narratives (though which state best exemplified these -- the British Empire, France, the German Reich or the United States -- was certainly in dispute until 1945). Its Cartesian perspectivalism normalizes a transcendent Western subject as the god's eye geopolitician, a detached and disembodied imperial subject who can decode the surface of international affairs and produce total(izing) views of its hidden essences. Its essentialist reading of international politics reveal the hubris of Western scientific myths about uncovering timeless essences and determining universal causation. Its naturalization of an idealized version of the European state system, projecting this upon the world, and representing global politics as balance-of-power politics, reveal the operation of an ethnocentric grand narrative wherein history has realized itself as European conceptions alone. In sum, modern geopolitics is a condensation of Western epistemological and ontological hubris, an imagining of the world from an imperial point of view.

Obviously, these three features of modern geopolitics are no more than a quick snapshot of a much more complex and messy history involving the decline of the British Empire, the challenging rise of the German Empire, and the emergence of the United States as hegemon after World War II. Nevertheless, they serve as a useful contrast to the contemporary situation where as we approach the end of the twentieth century, all three features of modern geopolitics are in crisis and under erasure.