Rethinking Geopolitics
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RETHINKING GEOPOLITICS Cold War geopolitics may be dead, but struggles over space and power are more important than ever in a world of globalizing economies and instantaneous information. Using insights from contemporary cultural theory, the contributors address questions of political identity and popular culture, state violence and genocide, speed machines and militarism, gender and resistance, cyberwar and mass media – connecting each question to a generalized rethinking of the spaces of politics at the global scale. Rethinking Geopolitics argues that the concept of geopolitics needs to be conceptualized anew as the twenty-first century approaches. Critical geopolitics has emerged from the work of a number of scholars in the fields of geography and international relations who, over the last decade, have sought to investigate geopolitics as a cultural and political practice, rather than as a manifest reality of world politics. Challenging conventional geopolitical assumptions, the diverse chapters include analyses of: postmodern geopolitics, historical formulations of states and cold wars, the geopolitics of the Holocaust, the gendered dimension of Kurdish insurgency, political cartoons concerning Bosnia, representations of the Persian Gulf, the Zapatistas cyberpolitics, conflict simulations in the US military, and the emergence of a new geopolitics of global security. Exploring how popular cultural assumptions about geography and politics constitute the discourses of contemporary violence and political economy, Rethinking Geopolitics brings the ideas of a new generation of scholars to a wide audience for the first time. Gearóid Ó Tuathail is Associate Professor of Geography at Virginia Tech, USA and Simon Dalby is Associate Professor of Geography at Carleton University, Canada. RETHINKING GEOPOLITICS Edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby London and New York First published in 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 1998 Edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby The right of Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rethinking geopolitics/edited by Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Geopolitics. I. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. II. Dalby, Simon. JC319.R44 1998 320.1´2—dc21 97–50287 ISBN 0–415–17250–0 (Print Edition) 0–415–17251–9 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-05805-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20747-5 (Glassbook Format) To Mordechai Vanunu and all those imprisoned for speaking truth to geopolitical power. CONTENTS List of figures viii List of tables ix List of contributors x Introduction: Rethinking geopolitics: towards a critical geopolitics 1 GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL AND SIMON DALBY 1 Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond 16 GEARÓID Ó TUATHAIL 2 Figuring the Holocaust: singularity and the purification of space 39 MARCUS A. DOEL AND DAVID B. CLARKE 3 Fourteen notes on the very concept of the Cold War 62 ANDERS STEPHANSON 4 The occulted geopolitics of nation and culture: situating political culture within the construction of geopolitical ontologies 86 CARLO J. BONURA JR 5 Stabilizing borders: the geopolitics of national identity construction in Turkey 106 KIM RYGIEL 6 Manufacturing provinces: theorizing the encounters between governmental and popular ‘geographs’ in Finland 131 JOUNI HÄKLI CONTENTS 7 Reel geographies of the new world order: patriotism, masculinity, and geopolitics in post-Cold War American movies 152 JOANNE P. SHARP 8 Enframing Bosnia: the geopolitical iconography of Steve Bell 170 KLAUS DODDS 9 Outsides inside patriotism: the Oklahoma bombing and the displacement of heartland geopolitics 198 MATTHEW SPARKE 10 What is in a gulf?: from the ‘arc of crisis’ to the Gulf War 224 JAMES DERRICK SIDAWAY 11 Going globile: spatiality, embodiment, and media-tion in the Zapatista insurgency 240 PAUL ROUTLEDGE 12 ‘All but war is simulation’ 261 JAMES DER DERIAN 13 Running flat out on the road ahead: nationality, sovereignty, and territoriality in the world of the information superhighway 274 TIMOTHY W. LUKE 14 Geopolitics and global security: culture, identity, and the ‘pogo syndrome’ 295 SIMON DALBY Index 314 vii FIGURES 0.1 A critical theory of geopolitics as a set of representational practices 3 6.1 A late seventeenth-century map of Sweden including the eastern provinces 136 6.2 A nineteenth-century map of Finland 139 6.3 The division of Finland into 19 provinces 142 6.4 The delivery of signatures as reported in a local newspaper 146 8.1 The Bosnian peace process is all but dead 173 8.2 The disintegration of Yugoslavia continues, supervised by Presidents Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Slobadan Milosevic of Serbia 177 8.3 Revised Vance–Owen peace plan, 8 February 1993 180 8.4 Lord Owen’s mission to Bosnia to implement the Vance–Owen peace plan continues 181 8.5 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1996– 182 8.6 Intervention in Bosnia is discussed 187 8.7 Atrocities continue in the war in Bosnia 193 9.1 If it can happen here . 200 10.1 Cover of Time, January 1979: ‘The Arc of Crisis’ 226 viii TABLES 1.1 Modern geopolitics 19 1.2 Three geopolitical natures 26 1.3 Modern versus postmodern geopolitics 28 ix CONTRIBUTORS Carlo J. Bonura Jr is a doctoral student of political theory at the Department of Political Science, University of Washington. He received his B.S. in political science from Arizona State University. His research focuses on ethnic minorities and questions of nationalism along the Malaysian–Thai border. He is currently pursuing research in these areas in Thailand. David B. Clarke is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leeds and an Economic and Social Research Council Fellow. He has published on a variety of geographical topics, has edited The Cinematic City (Routledge, 1997), and is currently working on a book on the geography of the consumer society, Commodity, Sign and Space (Blackwell, forthcoming). Simon Dalby is Associate Professor of Geography at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research interests are in environmental security and critical geopolitics. He is author of Creating the Second Cold War (1990) and coeditor (with Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Paul Routledge) of The Geopolitics Reader (Routledge, 1998) James Der Derian is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and author of On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (1987) and Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (1992); editor of International Theory: Critical Investigations (1995); and co-editor (with Michael Shapiro) of International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (1989). His next book, Virtual War, is virtually forthcoming. Klaus Dodds was educated at the University of Bristol and is now a lecturer in Geography at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He was previously a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are critical geopolitics, war and the media, and the internationational politics of Antarctica. Marcus A. Doel is a lecturer in Geography at Loughborough University. His research interests centre on the relationship between space and social theory. x CONTRIBUTORS He is the author of Poststructuralist Geography: The Harsh Law of Space (forthcoming), and the co-editor of Business, Trade and Economic Development in Pacific Asia (forthcoming) and Fragmented Asia: Regional Integration and National Disintegration in Pacific Asia (1996). Jouni Häkli is acting Professor of Human Geography at the University of Joensuu. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Tampere and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Southern California. His research deals with territory, discourse and spatial identity within geographic frameworks. His recent work has been published in Fennia, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and Political Geography. Timothy W. Luke is Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech and the author of numerous books and articles. His work engages the problematic of informationalization and how it has transformed social structures, political institutions, environmental politics, notions of art, practices of education, and the nature of geopolitics. His latest books are Eco-Critique (University of Minnesota, 1997) and Departures from Marx (University of Illinois, 1998). Paul Routledge is a lecturer in Geography at Glasgow University. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University and has held visiting positions at Harvard University and at Bristol University. He is author of Terrains of Resistance (Praeger, 1993) and has undertaken research on social movements in the developed and developing world. Kim Rygiel is a recent masters graduate in International Affairs from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. Her