Wiley The International Studies Association
Wiley The International Studies Association
Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale by Guntram H. Herb; David H. Kaplan;
Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space by Gearóid Ó. Tuathail; Regions and
the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political
Order by Allen J. Scott
Review by: John A. Agnew
International Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 91-99
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association
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The end of the Cold Warhas been a boon to the field of political geography.
There is now a need to understanda vast and differentiatedworld thatno
longer can be reducedto a set of overridingcategories (such as East ver-
sus West, communist versus capitalist, and so on) that drove conventional per-
spectives on world affairsfor so long. Scholarswith detailedplace knowledge are
increasinglyin demandnow thatthereis no single "bigpicture"to determinewhat
needs to be known. Not only have old certaintiesaboutinternationalboundaries,
spheresof influence, the purposesof alliances (such as the NorthAtlanticTreaty
Organization),andthe peckingorderof worldpowerscome into question,butalso
many of the establishedpremises of those who have long dominatedthe study of
internationalpolitics and the world economy in the United States have become
moot. These premises include the settled identities of states; the division of the
world into such grand regions as the First, Second, and ThirdWorlds;the pri-
macy of states over other geographicalunits (such as cities or tradingblocs) in
economic transactions;andthe supposeddeclining significance of religious, eth-
nic, and other "nonmodern"affiliations.
Oren Yiftachel has a more localized focus but a similar message about the
geographicalnesting of identities. His specific concern is with the Palestinian-
Arab minorityin Israel as a doubly marginalgroup:marginalwithin the Jewish
state because of Arab ethnicity and within the Palestiniannation because of its
Israeli citizenship. As a result of the group's regional concentrationsin Israel,
matters are even more complex. The three main clusters-in Galilee in the
north, the "triangleregion"at the borderwith the West Bank, and the Negev to
the south-have differentethnic origins (Bedouins, Palestinians),differentreli-
gions (Muslim, Christian,Druze), and different political issues.
over"in the New World,well away from the corruptinginfluence of the English.
I also particularlyenjoyedTim Unwin's evocative chapteron the ups and downs
of Estonian nationalismand Lynn and Bogorov's wide-rangingaccount of the
various contemporaryRussian political factions and their relationshipsto dis-
tinctive geopolitical "ideas"of Russia.
Critical Geopolitics is an original and timely attemptat revisiting the tra-
ditionof geopolitics in academicgeographyand showing how geopoliticalthink-
ing has remainedimportantin the understandingand practiceof world politics.
The book is a set of essays on geopolitical topics, not a conventional mono-
graphthat argues a specific point or theoreticalposition over a series of chap-
ters. Gear6id0 Tuathailis suspicious of general claims, and he wants to avoid
the charge that he is merely offering anothergeneral formulationthat is subject
to a critique similar to the one he offers here. I find this logic hard to follow
because the book does have a point of view that is consistently critical of estab-
lished conventions of writing aboutglobal geographyand its intersectionswith
world politics.
The book begins with two chaptersthatbrieflyreview andcritiquesuch "clas-
sical"geopoliticalauthorsas HalfordMackinder,AlfredMahan,andKarlHaush-
ofer. It then surveysrecentattempts,by 0 Tuathailandothers,to createa critical
geopolitics thatis focused on the modes of representationof global space in both
theoreticalformulations(such as those in the previouschapter)andthe practices
of politicians. The next two chaptersdetail, first, the geographicalideas and ca-
reerof HalfordMackinder,the Oxfordgeographerwho becamethe directorof the
LondonSchool of Economicsanda Conservativememberof Parliament,and,sec-
ond, the way Germangeopolitical discoursewas incorporatedinto Americanpo-
litical debates in the 1940s. These are strong chaptersthat show a commandof
primarysources and are writtenin a fluent and readablestyle.
Includedis a much shallowerchapteron authorscritical of geopolitics in its
classic modes, from KarlWittfogel and Isaiah Bowman to Yves Lacoste, Rich-
ardAshley, and Simon Dalby. Why these authorsare chosen and not others is
not clear. The chapterdeals with none of the authorsin enough detail to deter-
mine how they figure in the history of the word "geopolitics"and its problem-
atic status in Westernthought.
Two chapterson contemporarygeopolitical writing and practice conclude
the book. One looks at Bosnia in U.S. media and political accounts in the early
1990s; the other examines various authorswho have focused on contemporary
disruptionsof previous geopolitical "order."Here, EdwardLuttwakand Sam-
uel Huntingtonare singled out for special treatment.
Critiqueis the leitmotif of the book. For 6 Tuathail,even the pairingof the
terms "critical"and "geopolitics" merits critical attention because "critical"
indicates a suspicion of established power and state-centricthinking and "geo-
political" is intimately associated with raison d'6tat. From the outset, the terms
of geopolitics (including the word itself) are situated in a set of discourses
competition, argues that shifts in governance may follow changes in the oper-
ation of the world-space economy.
Scott does not portraythe trends in an entirely positive light. He notes the
problemsof a transitionperiod in which economic change has not yet generated
an adequate political response. The fact that regional competitive advantage
does not work equally well everywhere and for all social groups also receives
much attention.Scott proposes a multitierstructureof global governancewhere
these dilemmas can be addressed.
I am largely persuadedby much of Scott's case for the trendtowarda global
mosaic of city-regions. Yet he fails to addressseveral aspects of how this world
emerged. One is the role of geopolitics-more specifically, that of the global
superpower,the United States-in sponsoringand supportingthe weakening of
state economic regulation upon which rests the new geopolitical order that
Scott identifies. Powerful states, especially the United States, have been major
agents of the very processes that now seem to be underminingtheir own geo-
political status. Another is the importance of global businesses, such as large
banks and transnationalcorporations,in facilitating the emergence of a truly
global economy. Their mapping strategies are emerging as equal to or greater
than those of states, even the most powerful ones, in a world where economic
transactions(trade,investment,transnationalproduction)have explodednational
boundaries and have called into question the territory-securityequation that
states have used to justify their centralityto economic and political life.
The three books convey in very differentways a common theme thattotally
countersthe message thatmight be expected from a conventionalimpressionof
"geography":political boundaries,and the identities and interests they divide
and express, are much more labile and unstable than they often appearto be.
This is a seemingly mundaneconclusion, but one that is fundamentallythreat-
ening to much conventional wisdom in internationalstudies, relying as it does
on images of stable boundariesand identities so much the betterto model rela-
tions between fixed entities such as states. The irony here should not be lost: the
field that produced in classical geopolitics the most stabilized image of inter-
national studies, one with much more concrete anchorsthan Waltzianneoreal-
ism, now stands in sophisticated witness to its historical and discursive
contingency.