Drawing on recent geopolitical thought, the authors argue that the dynamism of international political economy has been obscured through excessive attention to the state as an immutable actor. With the end of the Cold War, the dominant discourse is about a world that is becoming increasingly economically interdependent. This book is primarily concerned with how the conduct of international affairs can only be understood in the context of the Great Stories of particular historical periods.
Mastering Space is a metaphor for the character of the international political economy of the past two hundred years. The first part of the book provides a framework for understanding the mastery of space, an appropriately masculinist metaphor for the process it represents.
INTRODUCTION
In this context, it is not surprising that no consensus has yet emerged on how the operation of the international political economy should be explained. In this book we want to outline an alternative that breaks with everyone in identifying the centrality of a dynamic geopolitics to the operation of the international political economy. Fourth, and finally, along with the changing ways in which the international political economy functions (new patterns of flows, transfers and interactions) come new representations of the division and patterning of global space.
But a decision was made to represent the former ally as a threat to the spatial practices of the "free" world economy (representative space). We hope that this narrative will be illuminated by the theoretical exegesis in the first part of the chapter.
GEOPOLITICAL ORDER
In the third period, a Cold War Geopolitical Order emerged from the ashes of World War II. His focus is on the political economy of the Pax Americana and its dissolution in the 1960s. In the nation-state identity, territorial sovereignty became fused with the nation's destiny.
It was the US's participation in the First World War that proved militarily decisive. Ultimately, the Cold War geopolitical order was also undone by the collapse of the Soviet Union, not America.
GEOPOLITICAL DISCOURSE
Famously, Hegel in the Philosophy of Right (1821), on the basis of the extent of the absolute. But it was expressed in the significant geographical differences that are characteristic of all modern geopolitical discourse. This geopolitical discourse was at its height of influence in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Only this time, social harmony had to be realized in the connection of the nation with the territorial state. Another element in the view of the state as an organic entity was the idea that a state had 'natural boundaries'. In the wake of the exploration of Africa, conquest and colonial rule came about quickly and devastatingly.
Firms and individuals were held to be subordinate to the larger needs of the nation-state. Naturalized geopolitics characterized the representations of the war itself in the film and the cartographic propaganda in which both sides engaged. In the period after the war, a fundamental question was about how Western Europe should be organized politically and economically.
As the 'leader' of the West, the US president played a key role in giving meaning to the Cold War. Containment, first coined by Kennan, referred to the military and economic sequestration of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union played one of the biggest gambles in history at minimal cost.
THE TERRITORIAL TRAP
A second part provides an overview of the position taken on the territorial state in the 'mainstream' of international relations. The merging of the state with a clearly defined territory is the geographical essence of the field of international relations. The importance of the territorial state, and the similar ontological roles (including a fixed identity) it fulfills within different theories, can be seen in the recent writings of two influential but distinctive theorists: Kenneth Waltz (1979) and Robert Keohane (1984) .
No spatial unit other than the territory of the state is involved in international relations. The concept of 'security' is closely associated in the field of international relations with the defense of the integrity of the state's territorial space. Thus politics, in the sense of the pursuit of justice and virtue, could only exist within territorial boundaries.
In the context of the general economic stagnation of the seventeenth century, this perspective had some credibility. It also fixed the geographical scale of important economic and political activities as that of the territorial state. This reinforces the totalizing power of the territorial state as a primary force; everything depends on it.
This sense of the territorial state as the container of (modern) society has been reflected in the mainstream of international relations. The merging of the territorial state with society is therefore not necessarily an intellectual illusion. The third geographical assumption is of the territorial state as existing before and as a container of society.
HEGEMONIC’ INSTABILITY AND THE RELATIVE DECLINE
OF THE UNITED STATES
The first of these involves a systematic exaggeration of the US economy's dependence on international trade. The final profit squeeze perspective draws attention to the peculiar relationship between the US economy and the world economy since World War II. But rather than just a sinister government or flawed economic ideology, the 'bankrupting of America' (Calleo 1992) relates to America's changing position in the world economy.
But these only make much sense in the context of the changing relationship between the US and the global economy. The first response claims that there has been no deterioration in the US position (e.g. The incredible power of the United States is particularly evident in relation to global finance.
More generally, the US is not exempt from the increased interdependence and velocity of the global financial system. But it increased American perceptions of the Soviet Union as a threat to the territorial United States itself. This was at the heart of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union.
Some of the major problems of the US financial system in the 1990s date from this time. If the United States can come to terms with the burdens of the Reagan years—the twin deficits—it could yet surprise its competitors in the advanced industrial world. Taking these points into consideration, we still believe that the relative decline of the U.S. territorial economy has implications for the position of the United States as an economy.
HEGEMONIC’ PRETENDERS
The demise of the Soviet Union left the United States as the only leading power with a. The nature of the collapse is perhaps as remarkable as the fact of the collapse itself. However, less optimistic views were reinforced by the success of the far right in the 1993 parliamentary elections (see for example Laqueur 1993).
The United States, Japan and other industrial countries provide many of the markets for Chinese exports. As a result, it is seen as the most likely of the current Great Powers to challenge as a hegemonic successor to the US. One is the diminution over time of the territorial claims that served to fuel so much passion in the past.
Being excluded from these regional connections increasingly means being excluded from the growth areas of the world economy (Economist 1991). However, of the three, the EC (European Union) is the only real trading bloc, which started in 1957 with six members (France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy) and expanded to a total of twelve members from 1972 onwards. Member States in 1993 (add Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Portugal). This is without taking into account the depth of the economic gradient that separates the US and Mexico.
In the 1980s, intra-regional trade in East Asia grew more slowly than the region's trade with the rest of the world. Finally, memories of the Second World War are still alive in East Asia (Grant 1993). The next chapter offers an alternative perspective on the geopolitics of contemporary international political economy.
TRANSNATIONAL LIBERALISM
These concerns were greatly amplified in the 1970s and 1980s as the world economy itself ran into trouble (Brett 1985). When deterritorialization first became a topic for discussion in the 1970s, attention was focused primarily on the activities of multinational (or transnational) corporations in creating a new international division of labor (Murray 1971). About 55 overseas subsidiaries of American corporations were formed each year between 1946 and 1952, double the average rate recorded in the intervening years.
We have already documented this in the case of the USA (see Chapter 5), but such geographical disparity is also evident in the cases of the UK and the Netherlands, and increasingly in Germany and Japan. With the development of Euromarkets in the 1950s and 1960s, this principle of monetary sovereignty was gradually nullified. In the early days, demand for euro loans arose as a result of increased activity in Europe by the US. One of the first borrowers of Eurodollars was IBM Europe.
Inevitably, most of this movement still takes place between high-income countries in the global economy. It is now possible to make direct calls anywhere in the world from Table 7.2 International telephone traffic, selected countries, 1990. Some commentators have linked a recent increase in the size of dowries in India (technically illegal but often on the order of $40,000 for a higher price). middle-income families) to the rampant consumerism unleashed in India (as in East and Southeast Asia) by the global communications media (Rao 1993).
The global village that Marshall McLuhan envisioned in the early 1960s (McLuhan 1966) is becoming a reality for some families in wealthier parts of Asia (and Latin America and Africa). An estimated 6 million slaves were taken from Africa between 1700 and 1810 to work on New World plantations, fields, homes, and mines. At the time of the Gulf War, some 600,000 migrant workers from South Asia were stranded in the region.
