World Politics

There is a current of nostalgia for the good old days when east was east and west was west and never the twain should meet. The ideological geopolitics worked because two states pretending to the mantle of modernity confronted one another globally. Neither a militant Islam nor evil drug barons provide an equally well defined, competitive, and potent substitute. Thus, the geopolitical imagination has been reconstituted. The two most obvious candidates as the basis for a new geopolitics are one that identifies those new practices and representations of the de-territorializing and transnational global economy and another that sees the prospect of culture wars between different civilization. In the first case there is the possibility of using the plurality of spaces emerging under the influence of the transnational liberalism to treat places and people as if they counted independently of their global economic and military significance. Absent of this subversion, there is likely to be a deepening of the market access regime and its commitment to a world economy in which capital will be increasingly unconstrained in moving around the globe.

A world of rich and poor zones, better accounted for in terms of the system of world cities and their hinterlands than by the world political map, will progressively replace the contemporary hierarchy of states. Which ever trend becomes dominant, there is a limited long-term likelihood of returning to the world politics as they were defined during the previous three ages of geopolitics. Ideas about relative decline, state territorial competition, plotting state strategy on a global basis, and thinking of development in terms of backwardness and modernity are so deep seated as to defy easy suppression.

The vocabulary of state cantered geopolitics is still underwritten materially by pressures from social groups reacting to increased economic globalization by reviving ethnic and local identities or attempting to resurrect state powers. Strong national identities die hard. States still provide them as opportunity structures for most forms of political activity, even as contra governmental forces increase in number and scope, govern mentality and movements/trends counter to this now exist in an unstable tension. The culture wars scenario has become particularly popular with those looking to reconstitute the ideological geopolitics of the Cold War on a multi polar basis. Cold war geopolitics rested on an essential opposition drawn between what were supposed to be two completely different types of society culture. In reality, of course, cultural differences are always relative ones and there is much in common between cultures that when isolated one from the other appear more particularistic than they really are. Both Islamic and Confucian Asian cultures, for example, combine influences from other parts of the world (above all Europe) and have changed profoundly over the years.
The image of fixed, isolated cultures should be looked at cautiously, for the ideological imposition that it is yet an increasing number of writers and intellectual of statecraft are placing stress on the importance of cultural values and institutions in the confusion left in the wake of the cold war.

For some scholars future wars are occurring between the nations and groups of different civilizations - Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox Christian, and Latin American, perhaps also African and Buddhist. The fault lines between these cultures will define the geopolitical battle lines of the future. Culture and cultural identities are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration and conflict in the post cold war world. Global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. However identifying with such a broad cultures raises question. Certainly the western category is problematic as contemporary attempts at creating a common sense of Europeanness founder on the shoals of revived and invented national and ethnic identities. On the other hand, globalization undermines cultural closure. The increasing flows of information, goods, people, and capital around certain parts of the world (particularly between Europe, north America, and east Asia) not only cause potential friction between cultures, they also tie cultures together, and increase tensions within culture areas as different social groups and individuals make different judgments about this or that external influence. Except on a super organic view which sees them as external to populations, cultures are never set in stone; they adapt over time in response to external pressures and internal shifts. Culture cannot, therefore, readily substitute for the all embracing role of ideology in the cold war.

The modern geopolitical imagination, like the configuration of global space it purports to understand, was never set for all time. The emerging binary divisions seem to be either those drawn between the information rich and poor, relative to access to global telecommunication networks and flows of information, largely in English about finance and production or those positing a continuing cultural east /west divide with respect to civilizational conflict emerging along global cultural fault lines highlighting western views versus the rest. The first of these suggests a much patchier and more localized pattern of global differences whereas the latter is indicative of a continuing global division to which local differences must be assimilated. The struggle between these two visions and the degree to which spatial practices are organized around each of them will be important along with attempts at reinstating state centeredness in determining what if any prospects the modern geopolitical imagination will have for reconstruction in the future.

Both geopolitical candidates are together transforming the meaning of sovereignty. They are fragmenting it and contributing to its reformation at a new level. As such, they are adding new layers to the already complex meaning of sovereignty. At its simplest, to be sovereign, whether as a consumer, a citizen or a nation, means to be autonomous and beyond compulsion. It means being above all other institutions or persons. This is its core meaning, shared by a range of different traditions, and present when sovereignty was first used to describe an attribute of the state. It was referred to the central monopoly within any nation, held by kings, dictators and parliaments. This idea of monopoly, first of force, second of law, and often also of culture and knowledge, defines a world system of nation-states, internally monopolist of political and legal authority, and able to negotiate with other like bodies. The model of a democratic national sovereignty has taken a long time to prevail. Indeed, it is only at t he very end of the twentieth century that the last refuges of absolutism, and the last states claiming authority beyond their national communities, have succumbed to this idea. Only now has foreign affairs been democratized in these countries and only now is it becoming impossible for governments either to carry out diplomacy without regard to the values and sympathies of their people, or to protect them from the views of others. As a result, many have interpreted the end of the cold war as the culmination of the long struggle to implement what is now an old dream of a world system made up of sovereign, democratic states. Seeing the world as potentially rule based and drawing on a sanguine view of history, they argue that this order is stable and robust which is a realistic description of the world. This view has created a new divide between opposing ways of viewing the world. It directly mirrors the way that democratic theory divides into two schools of thought, each drawing on a distinct meaning inherent in the etymology of the word. For one the essence of democracy is a set of transparent and commonly agreed rules for decision making, rules that are designed to protect minority views, and to safeguard negative freedoms. According to the second view, democracy is rule by the people, the assertion of their values and interest in order to expand positive freedoms, without external or constitutional limitation.

There are important continuities to past eras of modern world politics, the European predominance, empire of competing states with economic interest, and the competing models of modernity offered by the US and Soviet Union. These have been identified in the persisting themes of the geographical projection of backward vs. modern flowing through geopolitical discourse from its origins in Renaissance Europe, seeing the world as a single entity and territorial states as the exclusive actors in world politics pursuing strategies of world primacy.

The world can now be said to be living in post-modern times because of an increased awareness of the Eurocentric nature of this way of thinking. A key challenge is to survey and critically engage alternative scenarios for the future in as full knowledge as possible of the workings of the modern geopolitical imagination. What is needed is a geographical imagination that takes places seriously as the settings for human life and tries to understand world politics in terms of its impacts on the material welfare and identities of people in different places. This involves addressing questions of national and other identities under conditions of massive population movement and diaspora; growing global inequalities; the increased role of regions and localities in regulating economic growth; the rise of supranational on world regional and international scales; and above all, the growing impacts of globalization of production and finance on states and localities around the world. This research agenda will be subverted, however if it is addressed using the elements of the modern geopolitical imagination. After two generations of state centricity and global geographical determinism, and approaching the centennial of the first use of the word geopolitics, political geographers must finally choose whether to be agents of an imagination that has imposed manifold disasters on humanity or to try to understand geographical communalities and differences in their own right.


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T Prugh, R Costanza, H Daly; The local poltics of global sustainability, Island Press, 2000