Reordering The World

Geopolitical Perspectives On The 21st Century

George J Demko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974373
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Using an integrative approach to international relations, the second edition of Reordering the World returns the?geo? to geopolitical analysis of current global issues. The contributors focus on key emerging world issues, such as spatial data technology, IGOs/NGOs, gender and world politics, boundary disputes, refugee flows, ecological degradation, and UN intervention in civil wars. They also assess the redefinition of international relations by instantaneous, worldwide financial and telecommunication linkages and explore the struggles of new multinational and nongovernmental organizations to define their roles. Using current real-world examples, this group of eminent geographers challenges the reader to rethink international relations and reorder the world political map.

Part One

Political Geography: Recurring Issues, New Perspectives

Chapter One

Introduction: Political Geography for the Next Millennium

WILLIAM B. WOOD AND GEORGE J. DEMKO

Political geography is on the ascendance in part because traditional approaches to understanding and tackling a broad range of current problems have failed. The international community is now constantly paying for our weak understanding of the linkages among socioeconomic, environmental, and political forces at local and regional levels—most governments and international organizations still ineffectively react to recurring crises rather than investing in anticipatory analyses and initiating preventive measures. This chronic shortsightedness may be the result of a lingering Cold War legacy that fostered a simplistic world view among diplomats, corporate executives, journalists, and academics—but that excuse becomes less tenable with each passing year. The international community is now well into the “post post–Cold War” period, with leaders around the world claiming to be less focused on various “isms” and more interested in the harsh reality of maintaining viable economies and polities. Political geography, as this volume amply demonstrates, has important insights to offer them.

Geography, of all the disciplines, has most consistently emphasized the fallacy of cookie-cutter social theories and the importance of understanding place- and region-based relationships between societies and the environments they create. These political, economic, cultural, and spatial processes require multidisciplinary approaches if we are to better understand their underlying causes and transnational consequences. Significantly, many of the most pressing political geographic issues are not simply abstract academic concerns. They concern a very fractious world facing the next millennium with such serious and persistent dilemmas as competition among “independent” states within an “interdependent” global economy; widening economic inequities within and among the world’s states; widespread human rights abuses; conflicts over natural resource degradation and depletion at local and global scales; tensions and conflicts generated by electoral abuses and ethnic distribution changes; and pressures arising from population growth and distribution. On a more positive note, there are creative roles for new political actors, such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and for innovative new geospatial technologies, particularly for sustainable development applications.

What Is Political Geography?

Although the range of essays in this volume is deliberately broad, the essays are united by a political geographic framework. Political geography is the analysis of how political systems and structures—from the local to international levels—influence and are influenced by the spatial distribution of resources, events, and groups, and by interactions among subnational, national, and international political units across the globe. Such a definition includes group decisionmaking, organization, and implementation activities that affect natural resources. Political geography focuses, on one hand, on how groups interact—particularly the ways they manipulate each other—in the pursuit of controlling resources and, on the other, on how these social, economic, and political activities determine the use of, and thereby modify, the resource base. The resource most often directly implicated in international conflicts is land, whether for intrinsic (it contains minerals or a fresh water source), strategic (it straddles a key trade route), or nationalistic (it embodies a “homeland”) reasons. The discipline also assesses the political effects of information and resource flows that change spatial distributions and balances of power.

The political geography of international relations, then, often comes down to control over key resources and flows—be they a commodity such as oil, a specific border crossing, or the “global commons”—and who is best connected in the global system in terms of communications, trade, and idea flows. Apart from territorial and boundary disputes, other less apparent foreign policy issues are also directly influenced by this perspective. For example, the measure of a “regional power” is its exploitative capability, both militarily and economically, over domestic and foreign resources. Many of our humanitarian crises are the result of the tragic inability of different ethnic groups to share resources and the forced displacement of one group by another, setting up flows of refugees and even “brain power” from one polity to another. And, on the global front, much of our concern over population growth, environmental protection, and sustainable development comes down to the fear that our descendants will be living on a smaller, dirtier, and less exploitable region of the earth’s surface.

Political geography uses an integrative, regional, and spatial framework that pulls together contributions by both physical and social sciences—it is the one traditional discipline that explicitly bridges the two realms of research. This approach is required to understand and adequately respond to the intertwined trends that underlie most current intrastate crises—often rooted in poverty and income inequality, ethnic intolerance, chronic human rights abuses, and local territorial disputes—which do not lend themselves to grand geopolitical theories. Rather, they require a careful reading and integration of disparate lines of inquiry about local and regional conditions, including long histories marked by conflict and occasional atrocities; modernizing but inequitable economies; dwindling access to arable land; degraded natural resources and polluted environments; territorially complex ethnic distributions; and, perhaps most importantly, the evolving relationships between several thousand ethnic “nations” and the 184 United Nations members that have internationally recognized jurisdiction over the territories they occupy. These nations are groups with a common historical/cultural bond, usually tied to language and/or religion—such as the Sikhs, Miskito Indians, and Kurds—who aspire to internationally recognized sovereignty, or at least political autonomy, for their “homelands.” Some states may also be either physically (Bhutan) or politically (N. Korea) isolated, which can impede flows of technology, capital, ideas, and natural resources that make the rest of the global community increasingly interdependent.

A brief review of political geography’s role in shaping geopolitical notions of the past century demonstrates that the discipline is not new to debates over foreign policy. Sir Halford Mackinder, member of the British Parliament and political geography’s most famous practitioner, revised his famous “heartland” thesis during World War II (“The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 21, July 1943) after first publishing his world regional concept almost a century ago. Although the merits of his arguments about land-based versus maritime-based military powers and the role of the “geographic pivot” in history are beyond the scope of this discussion, he unquestionably played a pioneering role in modern international relations theory. His work is still cited by many political analysts and can serve as a springboard for more refined regional models. Despite his contribution, today’s foreign policy makers would be less surprised by the acuity of Mackinder’s geopolitical theories than by the fact a geographer was engaged in such thinking at all.

What has kept geographers relatively less involved in the international relations debate for the past half century? Perhaps the biggest single factor is that many post–World War II “human geographers” (those concentrating on socioeconomic and cultural processes as opposed to those studying physical systems) considered “geopolitics” a pejorative term, thanks to another pre-war political geographer, General Karl Haushofer, who played a key role in justifying Nazi Germany’s territorial aggression. Indeed, with the notable exception of Mackinder, the roots of modern political geography came from German geographers, with Friedrich Ratzel generally acknowledged as the father of the subdiscipline. His “organic state” theory, now almost a century old, likened the behavior of national governments to that of organisms competing fiercely for resources and lebensraum (living space); ominously, his concept of lebensraum is again being distorted by a new generation of nationalists intent on redrawing political boundaries (for example, the Serbs in Kosovo and Iraq in Kuwait). Thus, although these theories set the intellectual framework for much of this century’s “geopolitical” debates, the link between geopolitics and fascism repelled several generations of geographers from the study of political geography at the international level.

The creation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations has apparently done little to dispel the belief that relations among governments are based primarily on distrust and competition. Despite forty-eight years of near universal membership in the UN, numerous wars, fractious alliances, and vast sums spent on military forces seem to confirm that the primary function of a state is to improve its position in the global pecking order or to intimidate potential rivals, with other responsibilities occupying lower priority levels. Although George Kennan’s containment theory was directed at the political and economic realms of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon quickly adopted it as a geomilitary strategy because it fit so well into a worldview shaped by the legacies of Ratzel’s “organic state,” Mackinder’s menacing Eurasian “heartland,” and Nicholas Spykman’s vulnerable “rim-land” thesis (another fifty-year-old geographic concept).

After World War II, political geography as a subdiscipline became increasingly irrelevant to most geographers, resulting in few new contributions to international relations debates. Instead, geographers focused on “scientific” research and became intolerant of geopolitical speculations and model building that could not be tested with empirical data and the then fashionable quantitative methods. In the 1980s, political geography was revived, primarily by scholars working within a neo-Marxist paradigm that emphasized spatial patterns and historical processes of inequality at local, national, and global scales. It has been most influenced by social theorists, particularly those exploring the contradictions between an increasingly integrated “world economic system” and the political system of “independent” states. Although this geopolitical systems modeling is insightful, a new generation of political geographers is contributing to international relations through fieldwork-based multidisciplinary research and new tools, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and new spatial models.

Back to Basics

A fundamental lesson of the New World Disorder is that the international community is a much more complex and troubled set of place-anchored peoples than the Cold War and related geopolitical models led us to believe. With the states of the former Soviet bloc caught up in myriad, territorially based economic, political, and ethnic crises, geostrategic containment models lose most of their compelling logic. Rather than the Cold War nightmare of a bilateral military conflict exploding outward toward a global nuclear holocaust, the trend over the past few years has been a geopolitical implosion of internecine atrocities —nation against nation (Bosnia), nation against state (Sri Lanka). Containment is now no longer used to justify preventing the spread of communist ideology but to keep brutal ethnic, national, and territorial conflicts from “spilling over” to neighboring states, as if international boundaries form the rim of a pot holding a bubbling, poisonous brew of hatred.

The imperative for reintroducing political geography into foreign policy after an effective absence of half a century was the collapse of the Cold War. The simple East versus West dichotomy obscured many below-the-surface evils suppressed in the name of empire. Although racism and ethnic intolerance, abject poverty, and environmental contamination were prevalent throughout the Cold War era, their rapid climb up the hierarchy of post–Cold War global problems and their sudden and stark appearance in Europe has confounded the United Nations and its members. Post–Cold War “geopolitical crisis” management seemed firmly under control following Iraq’s miscalculated invasion of Kuwait. The U.S.-led coalition’s restoration of Kuwaiti sovereignty prompted much speculation on a new era of active UN intervention within, between, and among sovereign states. Just as quickly, however, bold multilateral actions are now being discouraged in light of bogged-down peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and nation-building efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Rwanda. Many of these crises have relatively weak immediate national security implications for UN Security Council members but have dramatic consequences on affected regions, the future role of the UN, and the international political order. The failure to quell genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda exemplifies this new multilateral timidity. The saber rattling and international stress over who may have weapons of mass destruction and how to control and monitor them presents another “crisis” for the international community.

Political geography can contribute to this new era of multilateral, multiscale intervention dilemmas by demonstrating how socioeconomic, demographic, political, cultural and environmental factors weave together—or unravel—within and among regions via spatial process and flows and how a negative synergism can lead to a severe humanitarian crisis. Frequent crises, occurring mostly in developing countries, may not lead to nuclear holocaust or send the global economy into a crisis, but they will clearly dominate the UN’s agenda and may burst an already strained budget. If political geography is to be of use in grappling with these strategies, it must be applied in an anticipatory manner and in the context of conflict mediation, when noncoercive measures have the best prospect for restoring peace.

Rethinking Regions, Nations, and States

The cliché “think globally, act locally” might be slightly modified by political geographers to read “think and act regionally.” A “region” to a geographer is a flexible concept and may encompass any scale and whatever territory is appropriate for a given purpose; depending on the problem at hand, it can be a group of countries or an area within a country. A region, though, must be defined by a common element that ties it together; these ties—that can either pull together or strangle the groups inside it—are at the heart of political geography. The size of a region in this context is important because it determines the parameters of the problem. Regions, whether defined in political, economic, or multiple variable terms, are complex, dyna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• PART 1 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: RECURRING ISSUES, NEW PERSPECTIVES
• PART 2 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF PEOPLE AND RESOURCES
• PART 3 INTERNATIONAL PROCESSES OF GEOPOLITICAL CHANGE
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index