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 II

POSTMODERN GEOPOLITICS: THE VERTIGO OF A GLOBE IN A SPIN.

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard treats postmodernity as a condition of knowledge and as an historical period. As a condition of knowledge, the postmodern represents incredulity towards metanarratives. It is a crisis in the language of the universal and the absolute, a loss of confidence in the grand narratives of progress and truth. Speaking in particular about art, Lyotard observes that the "postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." Joyce, for example, is a postmodernist for Lyotard as are Nietzsche and Montaigne, because they wage war on totality.

While not particularly contemporary, Lyotard generally associates the postmodern condition with the reconstruction of knowledge in computerized societies since the 1950s, the transition to informational capitalism and the rising power of multinational corporations. As a result of technological changes, informationalization and globalization, scientific knowledge has lost its traditional credibility and is now legitimated by perfomativity not truth. Knowledge is not produced for itself but instrumentalized to generate the best input/output equation.

Both of these senses of the postmodern are useful in specifying a postmodern geopolitics. It must be remembered that it was a growing incredulity towards the traditional British imperial metanarratives that motivated Mackinder's geopolitics at the beginning of the twentieth century. He decried the disintegration and decay associated with international capitalism and modern urban life. His global qua total geopolitical vision was asserted amidst the tumult and confusion of the early twentieth century, a response
to the weaknesses exposed within the British Empire by the Boer War. More generally, Mackinder's geography qua geopolitics was conceptualized, as he once wrote, "a standing protest against the disintegration of culture with which we are threatened." For geographically-minded strategists like Mackinder, Haushofer and, in the post-war period, Kennan, Kissinger, Brzezinski and others, geopolitics was a method of establishing order and securing vision in the midst of the decay and chaos that always
threatened.

While the postmodern as the shadow of vertiginous anxieties has always haunted geopolitical visions, these anxieties have become significantly amplified over the last three decades with the dissolution of the Pax Americana constructed after World War II. Beginning with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of pegged exchange rates in the early 1970s, the disintegration of the world order that American hegemony built has intensified with the globalization of communications, production and finance in the 1980s, and the collapse of the Cold War as a defining metanarrative for the West in the early 1990s. Our contemporary condition appears to be, as New Perspectives Quarterly put it, one of "geopolitical vertigo." Impacted by informationalization, globalization and deterritorialization, global
space appears less perspectivalist, more hybridized, and moving in multiple, decentered flowmations beyond the power of sovereign states.

First, electronic communication and accelerated modes of transport have provoked an intensified round of time-space compression, dramatically shrinking our experience of geographical space and planetary expanse. Technologies for envisioning global space have proliferated greatly in the last few decades, transforming the conditions of possibility of producing global space. Within the state apparatus, a planetary watching machine comprising orbital "keyhole" intelligence satellites, global positioning systems, geostationary weather monitors, and high altitude flight by aircraft and robotic drones offer perpetually updated technoscientific visions of global space to national security technicians, intelligence officers, state bureaucrats and political leaders. Whether it be electromagnetic scans of battlefields, remote sensing of the earth's vegetation, weather photoreconnaissance images of hurricanes, or bomb's eye video from a cruise missile, the imagining of the globe is no longer the sole purview of the cartographer. Once a cartographic lantern slide show, geographical knowledge has become cyberneticized and informationalized as the bit stream of geographical information systems, database
visualization software programs in the hands of the technological classes. More profoundly, the very activity of visualization is transferred to the video screens and electronic optics of machinic systems. The imperial eye is now a cybercosmic electronic eye.

Beyond the state, global telecommunication and mass media networks offer real-time coverage of global space twenty four hours a day. The spinning globe, the logo of CNN International, has produced a globe that is perpetually subject to CNN's spin. The everyday experience of geography is now also a collective experience of the virtual geography of global media events as the world-making and world-disclosing vectors of the television, telephone and tele-satellite uplinks make telethesia -- perception at a distance -- an integral part of late twentieth century "human" faculties and capabilities. Indeed, it can be argued, such teletechnologies are producing terminal subjects, cyborg entities defined not by where they live but by the telematic flows they receive and emit.

Increasingly, thus, the space of international politics has become a post-perspectivalist (s)pace. Zbigniew Brzezinski in a book revealing called Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty First Century, articulates a general feeling of geopolitical vertigo in writing of "the notable acceleration in the velocity of our history and the uncertainty of its trajectory..." "History has not ended," Brzezinski observes, "but has become compressed. Whereas in the past, historical epochs stood out in relatively sharp relief, and one could thus have a defined sense of historical progression, history today entails sharp discontinuities that collide with each other, condense our sense of perspective, and confuse our historical perceptions."

Second, the end of the Cold War and the (con)fusions of hybridized globalization, has provoked a generalized crisis of strategic discourse in the West. The geopolitical discourse of essential geographical entities in perpetual conflict is difficult to sustain in a world where geographical entities appear less solid, fixed and pure than they once did. Once a monolithic red space in the American mind, the territory of the former Soviet Union is now perceived as the wild east, an anarchic zone of warring ethnic groups,
upstart capitalist entrepreneurs, parasitic criminal syndicates, and disintegrating military infrastructures. Attempts to re-map the surface of international politics in comfortingly essentialist terms, nevertheless, persist in the Western foreign policy community. Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, for example, was a Mackinder-like attempt to assert -- in the guise of uncovering -- the existence of fundamental civilizational blocs beneath the "boomin' buzzin' confusion" of the present. Other ambitious attempts to re-draft global space to some unveiled underlying essence will, no doubt, continue but so also has what David Campbell describes as "the globalization of contingency, the erasure of markers of certainty, and the rarefaction of political discourse."

Finally, the emergence of a condition of postmodernity over the last three decades has coincided with a dramatic materialist and ideological deterritorialization of the geopolitical world order established under American hegemony after World War II. A new spatiality of flows is provoking the development of un-stated space, networks and webs which are not simply beyond but which overwhelm the jurisdictional power and territorial control of sovereign states. Previously national capital, equity and bond markets are becoming untethered from national territorial space. The bound market of the Bretton Woods era has given way to an "unbound" global capital market which is, according to McKinsey and Company consultants Bryan and Farrell, "only now beginning to flex its muscles," "just now discovering its own strength and potential."
"Individual national financial markets are loosing their separate identities as they merge into a single, overpowering marketplace." As a consequence, states can no longer control their own economic destiny as financial power has gravitated towards global capital markets and networks. For neoliberal ideologists, this change is overwhelmingly positive and is discursively constituted as a contest between accelerating progress (globalization and transnational corporate capitalism promise a cosmopolitan world of abundance) and reactionary national resistance (governments offer only bureaucracy and deadening regulation). In Bryan and Farrell's terms: "As the market becomes unbound from the constraints of national governments, it is creating the potential for a tidal wave of global capitalism that could drive rapid growth and highly beneficial integration of the world's real economy well into the next century."

The political and cultural wash from this tsunami of transformation is already finding expression in renewed efforts to reterritorialize identity around remythologized fixities of kin and country. Postmodernity, according to Zygmunt Bauman, is about living with the experience of absent totality, dealing with the erasure of tradition, with detraditionalization. Postmodernity is an age of contingency which inspires dreams of missing totalities: "Totality in space: a framed composition that would allow every brush stroke to bask in the glory of meaningful design. And totality in time: an unbroken thread of time that would keep every bead in place, and in its right place, as it is strung on the thread of time just after the one before and before the one that will come after." The vertigo of the postmodern renders the absence of perspectivalist visions of space and time, place and tradition all the more acute, engendering a politics of impossible returns and contradictory positionality, and unleashing desires for the very ordered unities and totalities of space/time the capitalist global market is shredding.

In sum, the certainties and fixities of modern geopolitics are disintegrating in complex and plural ways as global space become conditioned by telecommunicational dromologies, strategic discourse struggles to keep pace and up to speed, and state sovereignty reels from its disintermediation and dis-instatement by what Timothy Luke terms "un-stated sovran potentates." Is this condition, then, adequately described as the end of geopolitics?