Until recently, most geographers and other social scientists would have been satisfied to have identified and offered evidence for geopolitical order and then embarked on an analysis of particular geopolitical conflicts or ‘incidents’
(e.g. the Anglo-German naval rivalry of the early 1900s, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the OPEC oil price increases of 1973 and 1979, the Falklands/
Malvinas War of 1982). Geography would have been seen as a set of external facts entering separately into the origins and course of each conflict or incident, e.g. Cuba’s closeness to the continental United States, the increased
‘dependence’ of the industrialized world on ‘imported oil’, the prospect of oil in the waters adjacent to the Falklands/Malvinas. What would be missing, however, would be an understanding of the nature and origins of the geographical attributions that are implicit in the reasoning of those who brought about the conflicts and incidents. This is now changing as scholars attend to the processes whereby the geopolitical order is represented in the practices of foreign policy.
The purpose of this chapter is to outline a perspective on geopolitical discourse and show how each period of geopolitical order has had associated with it a specific type of geopolitical discourse built in part on understandings first established in Europe during the Renaissance. Even though each discourse is distinctive there are thus textual continuities as old themes are recycled in new contexts. The three discourses or modes of representation we discuss are referred to as civilizational geopolitics, naturalized geopolitics, and ideological geopolitics respectively. Security and economic policies in each of the periods of geopolitical order have been organized around the characterizations of space, places, and peoples defined by these modes of representation.
GEOPOLITICAL DISCOURSE
The term geopolitical discourse refers here to how the geography of the international political economy has been ‘written and read’ in the practices of foreign and economic policies during the different periods of geopolitical order. By written is meant the way geographical representations are
incorporated into the practices of political élites. By read is meant the ways in which these representations are communicated.
Before turning to a review of these representations of space in each period it is important to describe the way in which the term ‘discourse’ is being used.
We do not have in mind the typical idea of ‘textuality’, whereby a set of texts or documents is scrutinized not for what it may say about practices or behaviour but for its peculiarity, style or ‘performative’ aspect. Rather what we intend, what could be termed ‘discursivity’ in general, is related to context (Barrett 1991, 126). What is said or written by political élites comes about as a result of the unconscious adoption of rules of living, thinking and speaking that are implicit in the texts, speeches or documents that are produced. But the rules are also constituted in this form as ‘epistemological enforcers’ (Said 1988, 10) or signifiers to people in general of how they should live, think and speak. The consensus-creating aspect of hegemony in its Gramscian sense, discussed in the previous chapter, is essentially equivalent to this meaning of discourse. But the geopolitical discourses discussed in this chapter are only one part of the complex tissue of discourses (economic, institutional, etc.) making up each of the hegemonies intrinsic to the three geopolitical orders.
There is a danger common to much usage of the term discourse to see it either as a manifestation of thought prior to practice (or activity) or as synonymous with ideology. In the former it is equivalent to an idealism which sees thought as giving rise to practice. Ontology (what there is or what is the case) is confused with epistemology (the limits of human cognitive capacity) to produce a ‘world’ that is thought rather than both made and thought (Norris 1992). In the latter it is seen as a set of ideas either determined by practice or functional to its reproduction. Our usage implies a more tenuous and contingent relationship between thought and practice: that 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.
Another way of putting this would be to say that a discourse is equivalent to a theory about how the world works assumed implicitly in practice by a politician, writer, academic or ‘ordinary person’. Even when actors deny they subscribe to a given discourse, careful textual analysis can reveal persisting themes, tropes and a linking genealogy that provides evidence of a discourse that both enables and constrains their practice.
To use the vocabulary adopted in Chapter 1, geopolitical discourse involves the deployment of representations of space (Lefebvre 1991) which guide the spatial practices central to a geopolitical order. At times of geopolitical disorder alternative representational spaces vie as candidates to displace currently
‘hegemonic’ representations of space. In all cases, however, the practical geopolitical reasoning of political élites is the link between the dominant
representations of space and the geopolitical order of dominant spatial practices.
The notion of ‘political élites’ refers to the whole community of government officials, political leaders, foreign-policy experts, and advisors throughout the world who conduct, influence and comment upon the activities of
‘statecraft’. From the development of the modern state-system in the eighteenth century there has been a community of leaders and officials engaged in ‘foreign policy’. Until the twentieth century this community was small and insulated.
But more recently, and especially in the United States, there has been a rapid expansion in the ranks of the ‘intellectuals of statecraft’, those people specialized in military and foreign policy problem solving. They are now also involved in mobilizing public opinion behind particular strategies and their associated geographical representations.
In summary, discourse is not simply speech, texts or writing but the rules by which these forms are effected. The presence of rules is inferred from the structure, organization and content of texts and speeches. A discourse is not set for all time but adapts to practice. From this point of view geopolitical discourse signifies the rules and conceptual resources that political élites use in particular historical contexts to ‘spatialize’ the international political economy into places, peoples and disputes.
There are four specific points that follow from these comments on geopolitical discourse and political élites (O’Tuathail and Agnew 1992). First, geopolitical discourse is not simply a separate activity or the identification of specific geographical influences upon a particular foreign-policy situation.
Just describing a foreign-policy situation is to engage in geopolitics through the implicit and tacit normalization of a division and description of the world.
To identify and name a place is to trigger a series of narratives, subjects and understandings. For example, to designate an area as ‘Islamic’ or ‘Western’ is not only to name it, but also to brand it in terms of its politics and the type of foreign policy its ‘nature’ demands.
Second, geopolitical discourse involves practical reasoning rather than the deliberate deployment of formal geopolitical models; though these often capture important aspects of dominant spatial representations. Practical geopolitical reasoning relies on common-sense narratives and distinctions rather than formal models. Defining areas as modern or backward, Western or non-Western, civilized or barbarian, and democratic or despotic have been important binary oppositions around which modern geopolitical discourse revolves, irrespective of whether its purveyors are academics (disciplinary or formal geopolitics), practitioners of statecraft (practical geopolitics) or media- persons involved in representations in popular culture (popular geopolitics).
Third, the geographical knowledge displayed in geopolitical discourse is usually of a reductive nature. Information about places is filtered and suppressed in order to fit into a priori geopolitical categories. Geopolitical reasoning operates through the active simplification of the complex reality of
places in favour of controllable geopolitical abstractions. This is how places and their inhabitants can become ‘security commodities’, readily subject to invasion, control or bombing.
Fourth, and finally, not all political élites have equal influence over how global political-economic space is represented. Those in authority in the Great Powers or within the hegemonic state (if there is one) have the power to constitute the dominant geopolitical discourse. This happens not only through their own practice but also through the active adoption of the dominant geopolitical discourse by both allies and enemies. Of course, hegemonic representations do not go unchallenged but even challenges often must conform to the ‘terms of debate’ laid down by the dominant discourse in order to be intelligible or readily understood.
THE ORIGINS AND CONTINUITY OF MODERN GEOPOLITICAL DISCOURSE
Geopolitical discourse at a global scale has its origins in the encounters between Europeans and others during the so-called Age of Discovery. Imperial China and the Arab World certainly had geopolitical schemas for designating the relationship between their political-cultural influence and geographical distance from the political centre. The Roman Empire also made an important distinction between the barbarians outside the Pax Romana and the civilized inside. But in none of these cases was the geopolitical distinction seen as fixed for all time or characteristic of a geographical area as such. Conversion and incorporation led to inclusion.
All societies define geographical boundaries between themselves and others (Helms 1988). Sometimes the world beyond the horizon is threatening, sometimes it is enticing. But not all engage in portrayals of the others as
‘backward’ or permanently disadvantaged if they remain as they are. This is the singular trait of modern geopolitical discourse.
One clear consequence of Columbus’s famous voyage of 1492 (and other voyages of the same time) was the heightened sense among European intellectuals over the next two hundred years of a hierarchy of human societies from primitive to modern. The slow ‘mental’ discovery of America involved a number of attempts at making sense of or ascribing identity to what had been encountered physically (Zerubavel 1992). This process of assimilating the new has led some commentators to see as a founding element of ‘modernity’
the simple juxtaposition of newly discovered and primitive worlds against a familiar and modern ‘old world’ from which the discoverers came that simply reproduces itself in the same themes and tropes over the next five hundred years (e.g. Pratt 1992). But why has there been an insistence in modern geopolitical discourse on characterizing geographical difference in terms of a temporal/historical ideal type: modern or backward?
Ryan (1981) suggests one answer when he refers to European intellectuals
assimilating the exotic into their own pagan and savage past. ‘In the triangular relationship among Europe, its own pagan past, and the exotic, the principal linkage was between Europe and antiquity’ (Ryan 1981, 437). The categories of ‘pagan’ and ‘barbarian’, discovered as an inheritance from the European Ancients, were deployed to differentiate the new worlds from the Old. Thus, a conception of the temporal transition through which Europe had been transformed was imposed upon the spatial relationship between the new worlds and Europe in its entirety. The religious dimension was especially important in reading the new pagan worlds as standing in a relation to the European Christian world as that world stood in relation to its own pagan past.
This is not too surprising if it is remembered that ‘discovery’ of the new geographical worlds coincided with the discovery of Europe’s own ancient past. Indeed, as Mandrou (1978, 17) points out:
The new worlds that fascinated the intellectuals of the sixteenth century were not so much the Indies—West or even East—but those ancient worlds which the study and comparison of long-forgotten texts kept revealing as having been richer and more complex than had been supposed.
The texts themselves provided reinforcement to the emerging ‘imaginary geography’ of modern geopolitical discourse. As Said (1978, 57) suggests, much of ancient Greek drama rested on a rigid separation of Europe and Asia: ‘Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant…Rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses, those mysteriously attractive opposites to what seem to be normal values.’
As a result, an image of essential difference with roots sunk deeply in the primordial past was used to invent a geography that had few empirical points of reference (Springborg 1992). In terms of such categories as race, property, oligarchy, aetiology and economy, the Orient (and non-Europe in general) was claimed as ‘the negation of all that was being claimed for the West, by polemicists knowing, in fact, very little about it’ (Springborg 1992, 20).
As the European states emerged from the dynastic struggles and religious wars of the seventeenth century and embarked upon their schemes of empire- building, comparisons of themselves to the ancient world, and especially the
‘model’ provided by the Roman Empire, proved irresistible. Lord Lugard (1926, 618), the British High Commissioner of northern Nigeria at the turn of the twentieth century, maintained that Britain stood in a kind of apostolic succession of empire: ‘as Roman imperialism…led the wild barbarians of these islands [the British Isles] along the path of progress, so in Africa today we are repaying the debt, and bringing to dark places of the earth…the torch of culture and progress.’ Each of the emerging nation-states of the early nineteenth century could use ancient examples to advantage. Famously, Hegel in the Philosophy of Right (1821), on the basis of the extent of the absolute
sovereignty of the state and its ‘ethical substance’, the nation, divided the world into four historical realms arranged hierarchically, with the Oriental as the lowest, the Germanic as the highest, and the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, as the precursors of the Germanic, in between. State-territorial sovereignty and an associated sense of nationhood were the necessary prerequisites for a political entity achieving modern moral identity.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century the resort to classical precedent was put on a scientific footing. It became increasingly popular to see social change as a transition from one stage or level of economic development to another (Esteva 1992). But it was not until the late nineteenth century that levels of development were seen as the result of environmental conditions or superior environmental ‘fitness’. This was often allied with ideas about the intrinsic differences between ‘races’ and the correlation between the prevalence of different races and levels of political and economic development.
In the late twentieth century the idiom of what Guha (1989, 287) terms
‘improvement’ has come to prevail over that of ‘order’. Geopolitical distinctions no longer lay primarily in essential differences that could be managed but not transcended; they now resided in the possibility that backwardness could be mitigated or even overcome through imitation.
Modernity was conceived of as a form of society in which social interaction is rationally organized and self-regulating. In Max Weber’s influential account, the rationalization of social life involved the increased regulation of conduct by instrumental rationality rather than ‘traditional’ norms and values. The version of Weber’s theory disseminated by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons makes universal claims. It ‘dissociates “modernity” from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatially-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general’ (Habermas 1987, 2). But in practice it was the United States that provided the model to which other societies can aspire. The USA defined modernity.
The principal boost to this idiom came from the ideological combat of the Cold War in which the two modern worlds of American capitalism and Soviet communism struggled for dominion in the backward or ‘traditional’ Third World (Pletsch 1981). The geopolitical polarization of the Cold War was the outcome of a conflict over the meaning of modernity. Its roots therefore lay in competing modern ideological visions. But it was expressed in terms of the essential geographical differences characteristic of all modern geopolitical discourse. The Manichean struggle between the First and Second Worlds was premised upon the existence of a backward world in which each saw its past.
They are what we used to be like. Only by having a backward could there be a modern present and future (Fabian 1983; Duncan 1993).
There is an obvious continuity running through modern geopolitical discourse in the continuing use of a language of difference expressed in terms of a temporal metaphor (modern/backward). However, the idioms and contexts of usage have changed dramatically over time. There is considerable
intellectual danger in assimilating all geopolitical discourse into an overarching continuity flowing from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century and arbitrarily selecting themes or tropes without attention to the contexts (historical and geographical) in which they have arisen. Texts such as those by Pratt (1992) and Spurr (1993), though offering interesting thematic discussions of literary, journalistic and travel genres of writing, tend to choose their examples in a random walk through the history of European colonialism without paying much attention to either its history or its geography. We can and should be more precise.
CIVILIZATIONAL GEOPOLITICS
In the eighteenth century a civilizational geopolitics emerged as part of the reaction to the ‘struggle for stability’ in a Europe that had lost its cosmic centre at the time of the Wars of Religion. This was an element in what Toulmin (1990, 170) has termed the attempt to construct ‘a more rational Cosmopolis, to replace the one lost around 1600’. This geopolitical discourse was at its peak of influence in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its main elements were a commitment to European uniqueness as a civilization, a belief that the roots of European distinctiveness were found in its past, a sense that though other cultures might have noble pasts with high achievements they had been eclipsed by Europe, and an increasing identification with a particular nation- state as representing the most perfected version of the European difference.
The idea that the earth’s land area is divided into separate ‘continents’
was first proposed by ancient Greek geographers who identified three continents – Europe, Asia and Africa—bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the rivers Nile and Don. Although later geographical knowledge suggested that Europe and Asia were not clearly demarcated from one another by a significant body of water, the division of the world into continents persisted because the concept of Europe itself changed. From a physical-geographical region the geographical realm of Europe was transformed into a cultural region. This happened as the Christian Church abandoned its claims to universality and defined a much more narrowly circumscribed Christendom (Hay 1968). The Arab and, later, Ottoman ‘perils’ gave particular credibility to the sense on the part of vulnerable Europeans of a profound chasm between the familiar world of Christian Europe and the exotic world of the Moslem Other. At the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe The Turkish threat worked toward reviving a waning loyalty to Respublica Christiana and gave new life to the old cry for peace and unity in a Christendom subject to the pope’ (Schwoebel 1967, 23).
Imaginative maps showed Europe as a ‘queen’ among the continents, complete with orb and sceptre (Figure 3.1). This illustrates not only a sense of difference but also an emerging sense of superiority. This was reinforced