Which geopolitics?

Stefano Guzzini came with an Erasmus+ exchange to the University of Belgrade where he gave one public lecture (21 January) and conducted a two-day workshop in research design (22-23 January), in which doctoral students and postdocs presented their research.

His lecture drew on his research on the geopolitical tradition which he presented in front of an audience living in a country that had seen some of the bloodiest civil and territorial war Europe has known after the end of World War II.

He argued that the geopolitical tradition has not been able to develop a consistent theory. Classical geopolitics is based on the ideas that

(1) the world is total and interconnected,

(2) the world is finite and conflicts can no longer be exported to an (alleged) terra nullius,

(3) politics is characterised by Neo-Malthusianism where ever diminishing resources meet an ever increasing demography and hence a zero-sum vision of politics, which leads ultimately to (4) conflicts that correspond to a version of Social Darwinism, be it the organicist 'survival of the fittest', or the liberal market version of 'creative destruction'.

When classical geopolitics was revisited, points 3 and 4 are eliminated in science, but not necessarily in political discourse. Yet, this does not overcome a dilemma. The more geopolitics merely refers to the importance of geographic factors, physical or human, it is trivial and does not even take the recent development in geography into account. When it however gives explanatory primacy to such geographic factors, as if they had causal effect on their own, it commits the fallacy of environmental determinism, which even its defenders recuse.

And yet, if taken seriously, geopolitical thought has two fundamental political effects. Theories are not innocent. For one, it reverses Clausewitz. Rather than seeing war as the prologation of politics with other means, it sees politics as the prolongation of war, i.e. as the default position of politics. It hereby produces the self-fulfilling prophecies of worst case thinking, classical realists (Aron, Wolfers) had warned us against before. Moreover, such thought by definition needs to essentialise physical and human geography in which, for instance, 'civilisations' become homogeneous and purposeful, forgetting that it is not only that identitarian differences can provoke conflict, but that conflict creates identitarian differences, as has been shown in former Yugoslavia.

In the two workshop days, Guzzini discussed and suggested changes to improve the research design of doctoral and post-doctoral students. This aimed at improving their research, but also their presentation technique for their papers that are going to be presented at the forthcoming joint convention by Central and East European International Studies Association and the (US) International Studies Association that will take place in June at the University of Belgrade.