Question/Answer

GEOPOLITICS THE GEOGARPHY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

OVERVIEW

• FOUR PILLARS OF POWER • 1) MILITARY STRENGTH AND THE WILLINGNESS TO USE IT • – This period of transition from a world dominated by superpowers to a polycentric power

system is marked by significant changes in the nature of warfare. The United States, by far the world’s strongest traditional military power, has overwhelming strength in tanks, aircraft, naval fleets, and superbly equipped armed forces. Nevertheless, it failed to attain its political goals in Iraq and Afghanistan as guerrilla warfare and terrorism has torn those two countries apart. The lessons learned from America’s military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan are twofold. First, soft power may yield greater success than warfare, and second, weapons of warfare are radically changing. In wars against guerillas and terrorists, drones– unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles, combined with special strike forces and cyber warfare, have proven more effective than traditional weapons and massed armed forces.

FOUR PILLARS OF POWER

• 2) The second pillar, economic capacity, is even more important than the military. The United States, Europe, and Japan have yet to recover fully from the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2021. This is reflected in the caution which Washington has recently displayed in responding to political and military crises throughout the world.

• 3) The third pillar is ideological leadership. Americans have taken pride in their ideals, which are a blend of the principles of freedom of expression and religion, concern for human rights, the rewards of free enterprise, and the practice of democracy in governance. Since the founding of the republic, these principles have been widely embraced throughout the world.

• 4) The fourth pillar is political cohesiveness. In the United states the recent stalemate between the two major parties has been a factor in undermining America’s ability to provide international leadership.

HIERARCHICAL ORDER OF POWER

• Instead of a world ordered by superpowers, an international geopolitical system that is emerging is polycentric and polyarchic.

• Polycentric means having more than one center as of development or control and polyarchic is a from of government in which power is invested in multiple people.

• 1) The major powers are first-order states with the capacities and ambitions to expand their influence beyond the region they are located. The United States, China, the European Union, Russia, and Japan are major powers.

HIERARCHICAL ORDER OF POWER

• 2) Regional Powers such as Iran, Turkey, Australia, and South Africa are representative examples of regional powers. While their reach currently is regional, they have the potential to become major powers.

• 3) A third order of states has also arisen– those with unique ideological or cultural capacities to influence their neighbors. Examples include Cuba and North Korea, whose military power is maintained by ideological rigor.

• 4) Fourth-order states are generally incapable of applying pressure upon their neighbors.

• 5) Fifth order states depend upon outside sustenance for survival.

IMPACT OF GEOGRAPHY

• Geography is the study of the features and patterns formed by the interaction of the natural and human-made environments.

• The importance of geographic proximity in waging war and conducting trade is reflected in many ways. For example, UN launching pads for drones are placed in Djibouti to strike al-Qaeda in Yemen, and France has developed a similar site in Niger for its operations against terrorists in northern Mali. Empty desert landscapes serve as the locale for space exploration bases, as is the case for Russia’s Baikonour Cosmodrome in northern Kazakhstan.

IMPACT OF GEOGRAPHY

• Population density is another important geographic consideration in international relations. High densities inhibit drone strikes for fear of causing many civilian casualties. Consequently, such densities provide safe havens for Afghan Taliban leadership in Pakistan’s Karachi, with a population of twenty million.

• Changes in the natural environment have profound geopolitical implications. Global warming has made possible navigation of Russia’s Artic Northern Sea Route during the summer. With continued global warming, this is likely to evolve into a full-year transit way, strengthening the economic ties between Europe and China.

GEOPOLITICAL MAP OF THE FUTURE

• The geopolitical structure of the twenty-first century will not be under the aegis of an American empire, in which order is maintained by the benign, omnipotent superpower.

• Washington’s greater focus on diplomatic soft power rather than military power reflects recognition of its new international strategy. The promotion of the Obama administration of transatlantic and transpacific free-trade pacts reflects a strategic focus on those regions which are part of the maritime realm.

• The path to a new global equilibrium is tortuous. Progress is being made as the most important equilibrial force is no longer military, but economic and cultural.

GEOPOLITICS AND GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGE

• The changes in the world geopolitical map have been more rapid and sweeping during the past century than during the previous two and a half centuries, when the modern, sovereign national state emerged and the European colonial system was imposed on much of the world.

• The clues to the geopolitical map of the future lie in the patterns of restructuring that have taken place during the past half century.

• The world map was also changed significantly by the proliferation of national states that occurred in the wake of the collapse of colonial empires.

GLOBALIZATION

• Globalization does not override geography. Rather, it adjusts to geographical settings and changes them. Its effects are selectively felt within national states and regions rather than having across-the- board impacts.

• An example of the impact of the forces of globalization has to do with global warming. The “greenhouse effect” which causes rising surface and water temperature is an accepted scientific fact, but its impact will vary geographically. Bangladesh could be inundated by rising oceans as ice caps melt. At the same time, the warming might enable agriculture to be extended over more northerly areas and for longer periods in the Great Plains of the United States.

SURVEY OF GEOPOLITICS

Geopolitics is a product of its times, and its definitions have evolved accordingly. Rudolf Kjellen, who coined the term in 1899, described geopolitics as “the theory of the state as a geographical organism or phenomenon in space.” For Karl Haushofer, the father of German geopolitik, “Geopolitics is the new national science of the state… a doctrine on the spatial determinism of all political processes, based on the broad foundations of geography, especially of political geography.” Geopolitics is defined by Saul Bernard Cohen in “Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations” as the analysis of the interaction between, on the one hand, geographical settings and perspectives and, on the other, political processes. The political processes include forces that operate at the international level and those on the domestic scene that influence international behavior.

GEOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE AND THEORY

• The earth’s two major physical/human geographical settings are the maritime and the continental. These settings provide the arenas for the development of distinctive geopolitical structures.

• Maritime settings are exposed to the open sea, either from coastal reaches or from inland areas with access to the seas. Sea trade and immigration have flourished in such settings, contributing to the diversity of their peoples in terms of race, culture, and language. They have also sped up the process of economic specialization.

• Continental settings are characterized by extreme climates and vast distances from the open seas. Such settings often suffer from lack of intensive interaction with other parts of the world because of the barrier effects of mountains, deserts, and high plateaus or because of sheer distance.

GEOGRAHICAL STRUCTURES

• Geopolitical structures are shaped by two forces– the centrifugal and the centripetal.

• The centrifugal force is the drive for political separation that motivates a people to seek territorial separation from those whom they consider outsiders, who might impose different political systems, languages, cultures, or religions upon them.

• The centripetal force promotes the drive for political unity that is reinforced by a people’s sense of being inextricably link to a particular territory.

GEOPOLITICAL FEATURES

• Despite variations in function and scale, all structures have certain geopolitical features in common:

• 1) Historic or Nuclear Cores– These are the areas in which states originate and out of which the state idea has developed.

• 2) Capitals or Political Centers– Capitals serve as the political and symbolic focus of activities that govern the behavior of people in politically defined territories.

• 3) Ecumenes—These are the areas of greatest density of population and economic activity. In today’s postindustrial information age, the boundaries of ecumenes can be expanded to include areas that are linked by modern telecommunications. Because the ecumene is the most advanced portion of the state economically as well as its most populous sector, it is usually the state’s most important political area.

GEOPOLITICAL FEATURES

• 4) Effective National Territory (ENT) and Effective Regional Territory (ERT)– These are moderately populated with favorable resource bases. As areas of high development potential, they provide outlets for population growth and dispersion and economic expansion.

• 5) Empty Areas– These are essentially devoid of population, with little prospect for mass human settlement.

• 6) Boundaries—These mark off political areas. While they are linear, they often occur within broader border zones. Their demarcation may become a source of conflict.

• 7) Nonconforming Sectors– These may include minority separatist areas within states and isolated or “rogue” states within regions.

“Soft Power”

• Soft power is a concept developed by Joseph Nye of Harvard University to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce, use force or give money as a means of persuasion. Soft power is the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. A defining feature of soft power is that it is noncoercive; the currency of soft power is culture, political values, and foreign policies.

• Joseph Nye coined the term in a 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. In this book, he wrote: “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants– might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” He further developed the concept in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The means to Success in World Politics. The term is now widely used in international affairs by analysts and statesmen.

Proliferation of National States

• The number of national states in the world has trebled in the past half-century. In 1945, there were 68 states and the UN had 51 members, including three memberships allotted to the USSR. In 1991, there were 165 states, and currently there are close to 200, including a few claimants which have not been internationally recognized. As of 2013, the United Nations’ formal membership numbered 192. The increase in the number of national states is likely to continue to slow down as central governments offer separatist areas high degrees of autonomy rather than risk the loss of important territories.

Proliferation of National States

• State proliferation is the consequence of two forces– the drive of dependent territories for independence and the division of existing sovereign states. Often, although not always, this devolution comes about after conflict. More than one hundred former colonies and territories have achieved self-determination either as sovereign states or through association with other states. There are approximately sixty remaining dependencies, many of which have small populations or provide their administrating powers with strategic military bases so that the latter are reluctant to give up control.

The Cold War and Its Aftermath

• Geopolitical Restructuring: • The memory of the Cold War has faded rapidly with the conflicts in

the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and the concerns with global terrorism. Nevertheless, it is the geopolitical restructuring that took place as a result of World War II and the Cold War that has shaped the outlines of the current world geopolitical map.

The Cold War

• Phase I: 1945-1946 • “Nuclear Stalemate and Deterrence: Drawing the Ring of

Containment” • Phase II: 1957-1979 • “Communist Deep Penetration of the Maritime Realm” • Phase III: 1980-1989 • “Communist Power Retreat from the Maritime Realm” • The Collapse of the Soviet Superpower: 1989-1991