Journal of International Relations and Development

Volume 3, No. 1 (December 2000)

 

Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity
David Newman (ed.)

(London: Frank Cass, 1999, 203 pp., pbk. ISBN 0 7146 8033 8, hbk. ISBN 0 7146 4973 2)

Geopolitics was founded as a discipline in the late 19th century to study the relationship between space and politics and to identify law-like generalisations allowing an explanation of international politics using geographical variables. In this respect, geopolitics formed part of the Enlightenment project aimed at the total control of human reality by means of the scientific knowledge. Yet, it has often served political goals justifying the hegemonic expansion of the great powers. To name but a few examples we can look to Admiral Mahan's geopolitical advice to Theodore Roosevelt, or to Professor Haushoffer's influence on Rudolf Hess. Hence, the late 20th century brought a double denial of geopolitics, first due to its abuse by the Nazis and later within the framework of the post-modernist criticism of the whole Enlightenment project. This leads to the question of whether geopolitics can make it into the 21st century. Judging by the recent Penguin Dictionary of International Relations (Evans and Newnham 1998:197-9), its prospects are rather gloomy. Geopolitics is said to be replaced by a 'neoliberal emphasis on interdependence', the only thing left being the prefix 'geo' which accompanies other approaches to International Relations (IR) — like geo-economics or geo-information.

David Newman begs to differ. He is the editor of the journal Geopolitics whose special issue (summer 1998) was published in the form of the present book consisting of ten contributions by eleven authors. His excellent introduction sketches very recent developments in the field speaking about 'the geopolitical renaissance' (p. 2). Newman identifies five topics on which the reborn discipline concentrates — globalisation and the changed role of sovereignty, deterritorialisation of the state, the emergence of new ethnic, national and territorial identities, study of geopolitical texts, and geopolitical imagination. The last two topics are often summed up under the label of "critical geopolitics" which brings us back to the title. Out of the three keywords used there, only the first and second ones have an obvious connection to geopolitics. Yet it may not be that obvious what it is that postmodernism can contribute to geopolitics. The answer is offered by critical geopolitics, an approach adopted by most contributors to the present book. It is only appropriate that Newman's introduction is followed by a paper by one of the most distinguished scholars in critical geopolitics and the author of the eponymous book Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Tuathail 1996).

Tuathail starts by drawing a distinction between modern geopolitical imagination which sees the world as divided into 'bordered, sovereign, territorially delimited states' á la Westphalia and the post-modern geopolitical imagination which 'grapples with borderlessness, state failure, and deterritorialisation' (p. 18). However, he is unhappy with this distinction as it does not seem relevant to the present condition located by Ó Tuahtail somewhere along the border between modern and post-modern. Yes, there are "transnational threats" and "global dangers" which allegedly defy the modern, Westphalian perspective but, at the same time, these threats and dangers are considered only in relation to the sovereign state as threats to "national security" which makes them part of the modern perspective again. The author turns to the concept of the risk society as developed by German sociologist Ulrich Beck to capture the current condition of "in-betweenness", i.e. between modern and post-modern. The risk society refers to the stage of late modernity, "reflexive modernity", where the institutions of modern industrial society produce threats which they cannot control themselves and which start dominating the public discourse. Tuathail draws a close parallel between this crisis of institutions of the industrial society and the crisis of the Cold War institutions which, from the American perspective, have been in charge of national security for some decades but which no longer seem to be up to the task (facing environmental problems, transnational crime, informational vulnerabilities and other deterritorialised threats produced by modernity). His question, whether the Pentagon can be 'a credible force in addressing the problem of environmental degradation when it is one of the largest polluters in the US [United States],' is quite suggestive (p. 29). Therefore, he argues for the creation of 'new global institutions fit to address the challenges of "risk society"' and he warns against a 'counter-modern modernity' which would refuse the ambiguities of its own world.

Even though it is not quite clear what Tuathail has in mind when formulating this warning, the American Cold War experience can offer some hints. The threat which the US identified (or constructed) as a major one in the early days of the Cold War was the communist penetration of American society and was thus by its very nature a deterritorialised threat. America's response at the time came from McCarthy. We can hardly find a better example of the "counter-modern modernity" than the witch-hunt for communists and alleged communists in a country which boasted about its modernity and its freedom of expression.

In the next contribution, Fabrizio Eva reflects on the post-Westphalian order. He offers a provocative characterisation of the Westphalian system as 'functionally hierarchical and fictionally anarchic' (p. 34). Anarchy is, according to Eva, merely a fiction because for the system to function hegemonic states are needed and there is always a clear hierarchy between the hegemon or hegemons and the rest. He thinks that the end of the Cold War provides an opportunity for a more democratic world order which would dispense with hegemons. The current transition of the world order is said to revolve around four principles — stability (keeping existing states), territorial containment of conflicts, economic globalisation and the maintenance of Western values — which means keeping the hierarchy. Eva is therefore looking for a viable alternative to the looming order of "capitalist democracy" which provides a new fiction of "supranational democracy" yet it keeps an old function of hierarchy. He believes to have found it in the intellectual tradition of anarchist thought referring to Reclus and Kropotkin. Unfortunately, he fails to develop this concept of a true anarchic order in more detail. His account is limited to a brief description of the growing role of sub-national entities, which is a favoured topic of most post-Westphalian thinkers, and "mixed governments in mixed territories" which is followed by the exhortation of the virtues of anarchism-inspired order.

Mathias Albert concentrates on the theoretical level and in so doing provides a good overview of the post-modern contribution to IR and mentions some geopolitical applications. He also rightly points out some common misunderstandings concerning post-modern geopolitics e.g. showing that 'the "end of boundaries" thesis is not particularly "post-modern"' (p. 62) and that it is rather a conclusion of the Enlightenment project. However, his emphasis on "small developments" which are said to be better at revealing fundamental changes than "radical redrawings of the maps" when studying territoriality is problematic. True it is that post-structuralist historians have shown importance of "small developments" for the later course of events but they have worked ex post. How can we identify ex ante which of the numerous "small developments" are really worth looking into?

The problem of the post-modern analysis of a boundary raised by Albert is more fully developed by Anssi Paassi. Paassi understands the boundary as a changing social process which is constructed in the discourse. The boundary fulfils several functions. It works as an institution establishing stable structures for human interactions. It produces identities and expresses power relations. Unlike modernists, he refuses to conceptualise the boundary as a fixed line. To demonstrate his case, Paassi mentions the changing functions of the Finnish-Russian border and changes in its social construction within the Finnish discourse since the 19th century. Paassi's article shows post-modern geopolitics at its very best. He proves that postmodernists can do without impenetrable jargon, that they can express their ideas with great clarity and that their conclusions can be both non-trivial and relevant even outside of the academy.

Alan Hudson picks up the issue of extra-territorial disputes in the international political economy referring among others to the Helms-Burton law and selected World Trade Organization disputes. To analyse the problem which he conceives as one 'of competing jurisdictional claims, in which multiple regulatory authorities seek to set rules of the game' (p. 102), he introduces the notion of the 'regulatory landscape'. Regulatory landscapes seem to be similar to the widely-used concept of international regimes, at least in its original meaning as introduced by Ruggie (Waever 1996:175-8), and one would expect the author to explain the similarities and differences between both concepts. It is also puzzling why Hudson fails to reflect upon hegemony as a possible solution to extra-territorial disputes and he limits his theoretical perspective to the rational choice approach inspired by Coase. Moreover, rational choice seems to clash with his vision of regulatory landscapes as 'socially constructed' (p. 91) as far as both epistemology and ontology are concerned.

While Hudson starts with a constructivist perspective only to end up in a rational choice, Stanley D. Brunn takes a positivist approach from the very beginning. Admiring the progress made in information technologies and being convinced that the current state is turning into a qualitatively different "Internet state", he calls for "a Treaty of Silicon" to replace (or merely amend?) the Treaty of Westphalia. Undoubtedly, Brunn is correct in spotting problems connected with expansion of the Internet like its regulation, its ownership or cyberterrorism to name but a few and his arguments for some sort of international regulation (say a Treaty of Silicon) involving both state and non-state actors are sensible, too. On the other hand, he seems to overstate the importance of information technologies singling them out as the most important issue of international relations today (see his comparison between Silicon and Westphalia) forgetting other factors like the polarity of the international system, ideologies or economic development. The period following the Westphalian Treaty witnessed several technological revolutions comparable with the present one like the Industrial Revolution, expansion of railways, electrification, weapons of mass destruction, etc. But the historical perspective suggests that these breakthroughs worked their way into international relations as a part of a broader group of heterogeneous factors without putting into doubt the Westphalian framework (otherwise references to Westphalia would be irrelevant today). The missing historical perspective also leads to some obvious mistakes like a claim that 'the world map today has many more officially recognised world states than existed in the mid 17th century' (p. 107) which is simply not true as Germany alone 'was a patchwork of some 300 small, petty states and free cities' in that period (Barraclough 1992:78).

Simon Dalby brings us back to the realm of critical theory in comparing two scenarios explaining the present global condition — an optimistic, neo-liberal narrative of globalisation and a critical narrative of global apartheid. He concentrates on the apartheid story 'to challenge the conventional epistemological practices of geopolitical reasoning' (p. 135) and to draw several thought-provoking analogies between apartheid's treatment of the black population and the current North-South relations (poor African countries being in a similar position as Bantustans under the apartheid regime, etc.). Dalby concludes that the two models provide a partly complementary understanding of the current situation while sharing several common points. It is particularly the conviction that the Westphalian framework no longer provides an adequate way of understanding the international relations of today. On the other hand, Dalby notices that the Westphalian imagination still dominates the discourse which makes the very opponents of Westphalia 'embrace the very imaginary they try to escape' (p. 147); similar problem incites Ó Tuathail to speak of in-betweenness. No doubt, this is a point well taken but Dalby unwittingly draws attention to another pitfall connected with IR thinking, namely, the trap of domestic analogies in IR. Both globalisation and global apartheid are based on analogies to a particular intra-state order, the former is inspired by the positive perception of US economic expansion, while the latter draws on South Africa. Would it not be more reasonable to follow the path proposed by e.g. the English School and to consider international society as a distinct entity in its own right?

The present book concludes with two case studies. Vladimir Kolossov and John O'Loughlin deal with pseudo-states (de facto existing states not recognised by the international community) exemplified by the Trans-Dniester Moldavian Republic. Their study is valuable due to both its detailed account of the case and for how it shows the persistence of the Westphalian imagination in practical politics, mentioned by Dalby. This is especially so when the authors argue that 'the globalisation hype has overstated the imminent demise of the territorial state' (p. 153). The second study by Mira Sucharov tackles the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. The thought provoking conclusion of hers claiming that 'exclusionary thinking might facilitate territorial compromise in the form of Israeli separation from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the formation of a Palestinian state/entity therein' (p. 193) reminds us, again contrary to the "globalisation hype", that borders, and the exclusion which they imply, may bring beneficial effects to areas of high tension. By the way, this is a useful reminder for most critical and postmodernist IR thinkers for whom 'the Westphalian system is the villain of the peace' (Evans and Newnham 1998:107). They consider sovereignty as a tool protecting tyrants terrorising their subjects and they tend to forget that it originally guaranteed freedom and stability.

The contemporary geopolitics, as reflected in the present book, seems to be a multi-disciplinary project in search for its own identity. The book shows both the possibilities and limits of various approaches while elevating none of them. Both postmodernist and positivist contributions are included and it depends on the readers whether they concentrate on the perspective of their liking or if they allow the authors to amaze them by the sheer variety of approaches. But anyone interested in the surprising resurrection of geopolitics can rely on the authorship of some of the best people in the field and on the conciseness of the contributions which make the book as a whole worthwhile and accessible reading.

Reviewed by Petr Drulák.