Nationalism and foreign policy identity crises

On 16 February 2017, Stefano Guzzini delivered a lecture in the seminar series of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University, where he is visiting scholar for the academic year 2016-2017.

In his lecture, Stefano Guzzini exposed his theses about the content of geopolitical thought and the reasons for its repeated return. Geopolitics, understood as a theory and not just as a vague description of world order, is a school of thought which when reflecting on the finitiude of the world in which all parts are interconnected, draws on Social Darwinism and gives primacy to geographic factors, physical of human, in the explanation of foreign policy and world order. Guzzini argues that such primacy cannot be defended, since politics cannot be read off the map. Hence geopolitics is either a mere acknowledgement that physical and human geography ‘matters’ and hence redundant, since this is something on which all theories in International Relations agree; or it insists in an objective primacy of these factors which it can however not show. For the peculiar confusion between description and explanation, a confusion not untypical in International Relations, every time world politics turns to a type of military Realpolitik, geopolitical arguments gain prominence, such as in the recent annexation of Crimea.

In the second part of the lecture, Guzzini reflected on the return of such thought during the perhaps most unexpected moment, namely in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. Here, he drew on the thesis that geopolitics does not derive territorial and cultural essences from geography, but, the other way round, conflates such ontology into geography (John Agnew). Nationalist ideologies will hence tend to mobilise such a tradition whether or not it is openly called like this. Hence, when the end of the Cold War questioned the established foreign policy identity of countries, geopolitics comes handy since it provides a ‘natural’ and determinate reference point for re-imagining the foreign policy tradition. It is exactly its non-provable determinacy which is its appeal. And although its usage cannot be theoretically defended, its effects are not innocent. It militarises foreign policy by reversing Clausewitz making politics the mere prolongation of war with other means. And it essentialises human and physical geography as in Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.