Global Political Geography beyond Geopolitics

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
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 Global Political Geography
beyond Geopolitics
John A. Agnew

Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory,and Scale, GuntramH. Herb and

David H. Kaplan,eds. (Lanham,Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) 352 pp.,
paper (ISBN: 0-8476-8467-9), $29.95.

Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of WritingGlobal Space, Gear6id0 Tuathail

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 314 pp., paper (ISBN:
0-8166-2603-0), $19.95.

Regions and the WorldEconomy: The Coming Shape of Global Production,

Competition, and Political Order, Allen J. Scott (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998). 192 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-19-829405-0), $55.00.

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.

? 2000 InternationalStudies Association

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92 John A. Agnew

The threebooks underreview contributedistinctively to the revival of polit-

ical geography.The first insists thatpolitical identities no longer can be equated
to stable or fixed nationalones. The second argues that geopolitical claims are
implicit in the practices of foreign policy and can be deconstructedfrom the
texts and speeches of political leaders and the various "intellectualsof state-
craft,"from scholarsto popularcommentatorsandtelevision pundits.The third
suggests that the world is in a period of transitionfrom a political geography
based primarilyon a mosaic of state territoriestoward one organized increas-
ingly with reference to the network of interactions within a set of global
city-regions.
In a time of global geographicalflux, political geographyas a field of study
has acquireda differentthrustfrom its older emphasis on location and physical
environmentalcharacteristicsas the determinantsof statecraft. In particular,
statecraftitself is now problematic.Earlierin the century,political geography
had hitched its starto the wagon of the "nationalinterests"of the various states
in which its proponentswere active public intellectuals. The military defeat of
the one country in which it achieved its greatest influence, Nazi Germany,for
years almost wrote the epitaphof the field as a whole. Geopolitics, or the study
of the influence of physical geographical factors on interstate relations, was
associated by both scholars and public opinion in the United States and other
countrieswith the excesses of Nazi policy. Sadly, this meant thatthe geograph-
ical strategies and rhetoric of the politicians and their heirs, who had recently
achieved such a costly victory over the Nazis, received for many years little or
no explicit attention.
With a few isolated exceptions, such as Haroldand MargaretSproutin the
Politics Departmentat PrincetonUniversity, global political geography all but
disappearedfrom the map of higher educationin the United States. Geography
departmentsthathad served an importantfunction in WorldWarII intelligence
operationsdisappearedfrom the prestigious private universities as these insti-
tutions gearedup for their own geopolitical role in fighting the Cold War.It was
a role in which place knowledge was to count for very little, as was the now
pejorativeterm "geopolitics,"but in which identifying the structuralunderpin-
nings of the "big picture"for the Cold War was to count as very importantin
determiningacademic careers and Washingtoninfluence.
Because Americanmodels of understandingof the world were so influential
during the Cold War, it is not surprisingthat the marginalizationof explicit
political geographical thinking spread wherever American influence reigned.
In its years in the academic wilderness, political geography went in various
intellectual directions, influenced at one time or anotherby ideas from micro-
economic theory, Marxist political economy, and world systems theory. Also,
political geography studied such phenomena as the structureof local govern-
ment, the geographicalbases of ethnic conflict, and the geographicalorigins of
social and political movements. In the 1980s, a renewed focus on the world as

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 Review Essay 93

a whole began to reemerge. Only this time it involved a sustained interest in

how geographicalrepresentationsand practices (from the labels given to world
regions and their ranking in strategic hierarchies through notions of contain-
ment and domino effects to shifting patterns of trade and investment flows)
influence elite and popularapproachesto world politics.
Over the past decade, therefore,some political geographershave revived an
interestin "geopolitics."Only this time the perspective is self-consciously crit-
ical and often closely connected with efforts at rethinkinginternationalrelations
theory within political science and other fields. Prominentquestions now con-
cern how internationaland nationalgeographicalscales acquiredan intellectual
monopoly in political-economic thought;how their relative influence on prac-
tice has changed historically; how "hidden"or implicit geographical assump-
tions aboutstateterritoriesandglobal geopolitics affect bothpolitical theoryand
practice;andhow historicalchange altersunderstandingof the influence of geo-
graphical"facts,"such as therelativegloballocationof states,resourcebases, mil-
itaryandsecurityvulnerability,andconnectioninto the circuitsof global finance
as the perspectives of political practitionersand the "intellectualsof statecraft"
devoted to the study of world politics have shifted. Political geographershave
largely moved from being self-declaredcraftersof formal strategicproposalsto
critical commentatorson the actual state of world affairs and foreign policy.
Some writers have proclaimed that changes in the workings of the world
economy andnew communicationsandweaponstechnologiesportendthe "death
of geography"in termsof a decreasedimportanceof differencesbetween places
in an age of instantaneoustransglobalcommunicationand declining unit trans-
portationcosts. As speed conquerstime, terrestrialspace ceases to have signif-
icance. Whatis often meantby this is not the erodingsignificanceof just physical
geography,but geography as expressed in the territoriesof states. For contem-
porary financial markets, for example, links among the financial districts of
Tokyo, New York, and London are more significant than links between these
cities and theirrespective nationalhinterlands.Even so, these financial districts
maintaintheir own place characteristics,as do their hinterlandsand their inter-
nal divisions. The same commercial, political, or cultural messages, however
broadly disseminated, are not always interpretedthe same way everywhere.
The new weapons systems seem ineffective against cunning foes who are able
to camouflage their military assets, and their ability to coerce is limited in the
complex local wars that seem to be the wave of the future in military conflict.
The world is not yet and probablynever will be a giant pinhead, notwithstand-
ing the efforts of various intellectuals to representit as such.
The books reviewed here provide a good cross-section of the emerging
literaturein global political geography and address three prime concerns: the
role of geographical scale in establishing political, including national, identi-
ties; geopolitics as a form of power/knowledge; and shifts in the "mix" of
geographical scales at which the world economy and world politics are orga-

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94 John A. Agnew

nized. Each offers a specific contributionto contemporaryinternationalstudies

that scholars largely or entirely unfamiliarwith the revival of political geogra-
phy may find useful in their own work.
The edited collection by GuntramH. Herb and David H. Kaplanconsists of
two theoretical chapters by each of the editors and a set of case studies of
nationalistmovements and conflicts aroundthe world. The book's theoretical
originality is providedby Kaplan'schapter,which links the formationof polit-
ical identities,includingnationalones, to the "zonesof increasingextent"(p. 31)
or geographical scales (from the local to the global) with which people can
associate themselves but thatare cut across by state boundaries,migrantdiaspo-
ras, and disjuncturesin the relationships between states and nations. Kaplan
notes a growing "compartmentalization" of identitiesrelatingto differentissues
with differentspatial scope, imperiallegacies, and emergentlevels of political-
economic organization.He plausibly conjecturesthat these trendspoint to the
historical contingency of national identities ratherthan their permanence.But
in a world markedby the increasedimportanceof flows and movement, it is not
clear that the emerging characterof political identities is best thought of in
terms of territoriallevels or scales organizedin a settled hierarchy.
Three out of the eleven empirical chaptersprovide particularlygood evi-
dence to back Kaplan'sclaims about the "nesting"of identities. Alexander B.
Murphy discusses various positions on the possibilities and limitations of a
European identity, making the point that European identity is not akin to a
national identity writ large. Rather, a whole array of events and activities is
producinga sense of Europeanidentity as an addition to existing national and
local ones. These events range from the EuropeanUnion passportand rights of
residence in other member countries to trade disputes with the United States,
common attitudesto foodstuffs, and collaborationwith regions and localities in
other countries.As Murphyexpresses this trend,
In variousways... Europeanidentityis integrallywoven into the evolving
social andeconomicgeographyof late-twentieth centuryEurope.This is not
happening becausepeopleareseeingthemselvesas European aboveandbeyond
all else. Rather,it is happeningbecauseEuropehas come to meansomething
morethana collectionof states.(p. 65)

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.

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 Review Essay 95

Yiftachel notes an increasingcoherence among Israel'sArabsin challenging

the singularlyJewishcharacterof the stateandits geographicalcentralizationwith-
out necessarily fitting themselves into a simple Palestinian alternative.Recent
north-southdivisions within the Muslim movement in Israel suggest that iden-
tities may be even more fragmentedthanYiftachel claims. The story he tells is a
fascinatingone for understandinga situationalmost invariablyreducedto a con-
flict between an entity called "Israel"and a groupcalled "thePalestinians."
George W. White's chapter on Transylvania offers an even more long-
standingexample of the geographicalcomplexity of political identity construc-
tion. The region's historic status"between"Hungary,on one side, and Romania,
on the other, has led to a long struggle to expropriatethe region and its history
for the purposes of the two nation-states.As an unintendedconsequence, the
region has acquiredits own identity, built upon its distinctive history and reli-
gious traditions.Its contested status has turnedit into a region distinctive from
those with more settled and stablepositions withinHungaryor Romania.Though
this status does not portend a separatestatehood for Transylvania,it does sug-
gest thatthe region and its populationhave an identity thatcannotbe reducedto
reflections or derivativesof the two nationalidentities thathave long contended
for dominance over it.
The book as a whole is not up to the theoretical originality of Kaplan's
chapter.It is organizedpeculiarly and many of the chaptersdo not engage with
the general theme of the nesting of political identities. The breakdownof the
chaptersinto "macro-scale,""meso-scale,"and "micro-scale,"representingdif-
ferent geographical scales of identity construction, could make sense if the
studies categorized in this way actually adopted distinctive theoretical frames
of reference that reflected the perspective of a specific scale in the "nesting
process." Unfortunately,the studies do not usually fit well into their slots. Most
authorssimply write aboutpolitical identity at a single scale, and their chapters
could often fit into other categories as well as the categories where they are
placed. Examples of political identity at a single scale would be Gary Elbow's
chapteron the Caribbeanand Anne K. Knowles's chapteron Wales. Examples
fitting different categories are ChelvaduaiManogaram'schapteron Tamil sep-
aratism in Sri Lanka (under meso-scale) and White's chapteron Transylvania
(undermicro-scale), whose allocations could be equally justifiable if reversed.
Only Murphy,Yiftachel, White, Nicholas Lynn and ValentinBogorov on Rus-
sia, and Rex Honey on Nigeria deal clearly with the question of nested identi-
ties and the historical contingency of national identities in relation to other
geographical scales.
Still, many of the chapters are interesting, despite their often problematic
connection to the theme of the book as a whole. For example, Elbow gives a
fascinating account of failed attempts at creating a wider sense of regional
political consciousness in the Caribbeanregion, and Knowles offers a well-
informedaccount of attemptsby nineteenth-centuryWelsh nationaliststo "start

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96 John A. Agnew

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

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 Review Essay 97

about statehood, state sovereignty, and the geographicaldivisions of the world

upon which the practices of internationalrelations depend for their meaning
and significance. Languageis defined as the expression of collective meanings
invested in terms that, ratherthan being understoodas constructedfrom partic-
ular sites, are typically seen as representingessential features of an external
reality with universal scope. Drawing in particularon Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault, 0 Tuathailsees the mapping of the world by academic theo-
rists and political practitionersas involving a "geo-graphing"in which meaning
is never completely mapped, even as this is the claim that they all make. The
goal of the book is to analyze the ways in which conventional geopolitical
writing can be called into question or "displaced"from its intellectual and
political pedestal.
Three main approaches,which flow across all of the chapters,are taken to
the task at hand. The first is to open up the traditionalterminology of geopoli-
tics by exposing it as anything other than self-evident and innocent. In partic-
ular, terms such as "international"and "security"are questioned as insecure
and unstable signifiers ratherthan fixed and reliable concepts. Yet silence can
be as meaningful as citation. For example, the denial of the word "geopolitics"
because of its putative links to imperialism and Nazi ideology, even as the
practiceof geopolitics continuedto be integralto internationalrelationsin theory
and practice, is read as a means of pretendinginnocence of politics or geopo-
litical views.
A second approachis to define geopolitics as a type of "governmentality,"
a term coined by Foucault to refer to a means of organizing population, secu-
rity, and territory.In this perspective, geopolitics is how global politics is made
visible and meaningful to both political leaders and national populations.Crit-
ical geopolitics troubles this linkage by calling into doubt the essential identi-
ties upon which geopolitics relies, its strategies of mapping the world, and its
interpretationsof the maps so constructed.
The thirdand most importantapproachexplores the techniques of "seeing"
that make global political mappingpossible. Ratherthanfunctioning as mirrors
of nature,maps select and orderinformationaccordingto authoritativesources
at sites of global power. Consequently,attentionfocuses on the institutionsand
people producinggeopolitical knowledge and the correspondingtypes of knowl-
edge produced. First is the disciplinary (i.e., geography) site, or the particular
ways of seeing the world that have been sponsored by academic geography.
These privilege eyewitness and travel accounts, as well as cartographicpor-
trayals that survey and monitor the place characteristicsof the world. The sec-
ond set of sites arethose occupiedby foreignpolicymakers.Places areconstructed
to fit into global schemas of security interests and commitments that inform
day-to-day global "problemsolving." The final site complex is that of popular
culture. Films, magazines, and video games produce and reproduce colonial,
ideological, and other geopolitical images.

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98 John A. Agnew

Overall,the three-prongedattackdisplaces the logic of geopolitics by point-

ing to how it is discursively produced.Geopolitics does not simply "happen."It
is practicedby agents at discrete sites of knowledge production,from where it
is disseminatedandenforced.Criticalgeopolitics is notjust an alternativetheory
to that of geopolitics because it refuses the drive to certainty and objectivity
that such a theory requires. Crucially, it denies the need for any ontological
commitments.Yet it rests on a series of ideas about sites, technologies, power,
and identities that are not simply textual.
In my opinion, this denial of ontology is the Achilles' heel of the enterprise.
In fact, implicit ontological commitments pervade the book but are unexam-
ined as such. In particular,questions about the materialorigins of the sites of
geopolitical knowledge, the origins and nature of the technologies that make
mapping possible, and the interests at stake in constructingspecific maps are
left as silences in a text that implicitly reduces them to terms without materi-
ality. In otherwords, deconstructingthe terms and strategiesof geopolitics tells
us how but not why geopolitical knowledge is constructedwhere it is and by
and for whom.
It is precisely the changing characterof the global context for geopolitical
knowledge that is the theme of Allen Scott's Regions and the WorldEconomy.
His key claim is that althoughtremendousimprovementsin transportationand
communications have brought the world "closer together," many social and
economic transactionsremain extremely dependent on face-to-face or local
proximity.At the same time that there is a vast "geopolitical shift in conditions
of production,competition, and interdependenceinvolving an as yet uncom-
pleted (indeed, incipient) transitionfrom an internationalto a global economic
system" (p. 7). Regional economies within states, particularlyones associated
with cities and their hinterlands,are startingto challenge the existing system of
states as the singular source of political orderwithin the world economy.
Scott marshalspersuasive empirical evidence for his case by moving from
chapterson "The National Economy and the Sovereign State"(chapter2) and
"The Coming Break-upof National Economies?" (chapter3) to ones on "The
Global Mosaic of Regional Economies" (chapter4), "The Regional Founda-
tions of Economic Performance"(chapter5), "Collective Orderand Regional
Development: Social and Cultural Regulation of Local Economic Systems"
(chapter6), "Prospectsfor Poor Regions"(chapter7), and "AWorldof Regions"
(chapter8).
Chapter5 is particularlycrucial to the argumentbecause it provides a pow-
erful theoretical perspective on the trade-offs in different economic sectors
between minimizing transactioncosts and maximizing access to positive exter-
nalities, pointing to a changing historic balance in which regional agglomera-
tion today is resurgentat the expense of nationaleconomic organization.Chapter
4 presentsmuch evidence supportingthis interpretation,and chapter6, drawing
from the ideas of Karl Polanyi about the social construction of markets and

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 Review Essay 99

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.

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