The EU and Its Neighbourhoods: A Textual Analysis on Key Documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Over the last twenty years, European Union (EU) actorness at both regional and global scales, has become a fruitful topic of analysis in the field of political science, and more specifically in international relations and political geography. Critical geopolitics dedicated many substantive papers on EU discourses and representations. Our paper aims at providing a complementary way to study texts issued by the EU and to question EU actorness by adopting an approach based on textual analysis. The corpus examined includes the seven communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) issued between 2003 and 2013. These communications provide essential information regarding relations between the EU and its immediate neighbours. The textual analysis allows several relevant characteristics of discourses to be highlighted: stability and changes, actors, spaces and scales mentioned. The outcomes of the analysis confirm previous research on the subject: The ENP appears as a bilateral state-centric policy, missing global scale, and neglecting the role of regional powers like Turkey or Russia.     

A Return to ‘Civilisational Geopolitics’ in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era

The prevalence of the discourse of ideological geopolitics during the Cold War meant that both Turkey and the EU belonged to the West by virtue of their ideological orientation. In the absence of this prevalent geopolitical discourse, both the EU and Turkey have spent the 1990s trying to locate themselves geographically. Drawing on the literature on critical approaches to political geography and international relations, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the EU's post-Cold War security discourse on the Mediterranean in general and on relations with Turkey in particular point to a return to the earlier discourse of civilisational geopolitics. The article also presents a reading of Turkish policy makers’ attempts to resist EU's representation of Turkey in ‘non-Europe’ (as with the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Mediterranean’) as boundary-producing practices which have served to underline the boundaries between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’.     

No man's land: ‘gender and the geopolitics of mobility in west Belfast,northern Ireland

It is the intent of this article to deconstruct the practices of border crossers, whereby the political identities of women have been relegated to the domestic/private sphere rendering them political innocents. However in West Belfast, women's designation to the home is what facilitated their ability to not only to transcend the borders of West Belfast but also to transgress women's confinement to the home. By contrast, taxi drivers are perceived as unrespectable wild men, cowboys and societal misfits who have been tainted by their border crossings. Interestingly, these groups would never be considered political subjects, as would an IRA volunteer, or resistance protester. However by way of their everyday practices of shopping and driving a taxi, these individuals are not only destabilising the boundary lines of West Belfast but also those of the nation. To this end, the sociospatial practices of these border crossers, which constitutes the expansion and restriction of public and private space, raises the possibilities of a new form of geopolitics determined between gender, politics and mobility.     

Japanese nationalism and geographical thought

There has been simultaneous emergence in many countries of the world of political disputes over aspects of national history in the 1990s. Geographical knowledge has political implications. Hence it is concerned with the formation of national identity as well as historical knowledge. This paper examines the relationships between Japanese modernisation and geographical thought, the characteristics of school textbooks and geopolitics in Japan during the Asia Pacific War, and recent disputes about views of history and the meaning of views of geography in the post‐Cold War era. Consequently, it is shown that the view of geography promoted the formation of national identity in the same way as that of history through geographical education and geopolitics. Taking the roles of geography into consideration, it can be said that an imaginative geography based on an ethnocentric view plays an important role in the time of rethinking national history. We should be aware of such an ethnocentric view of geography and make an effort to overcome differences in views between nations.     

Extraction in Four Dimensions: Time,Space and the Emerging Geo(-)politics of Deep-Sea Mining

ABSTRACT

Despite the truism that less is known about the deep-sea than outer space, deep-sea mining (DSM) is being promoted as the next frontier of resource extraction. In 2019, Nautilus Minerals hopes to become the world’s first company to mine the deep seabed in the waters off Papua New Guinea (PNG). DSM thus stands at the threshold of becoming a matter of politics; it has provoked a wide range of geopolitical imaginaries variously relating to ‘resource security’ and ‘progress’, on the one hand, and environmental disaster and precaution on the other. However, these accounts do little to address the specific ‘nature’ of the deep-sea, seabed and their extreme location and materialities, and are instead framed by classic geopolitical concerns with interstate relations. Against this background and illustrated by examples centred on PNG, this paper argues that future engagements with the geopolitics of DSM are more accurately conceptualised by an engagement with time as well as three dimensional space. This includes the multiple spatial and temporal registers through which both the geology and ecologies of seabed and seawater operate. By highlighting the importance of resource temporalities, it suggests that the geopolitics of both DSM and extraction in extreme places more generally is not only spatially complex, it is also a matter of time.     

Knowledge of expansion on the geopolitics of Karl Haushofer

The article deals with the intellectual history, as well as the political impact, of Karl Haushofer's concept and notion of geopolitics. It attempts to contextualise his thinking and actions in the period between the two world wars as well as during the Nazi period. Haushofer's geopolitics is perceived as a quasimaterialist ideology, which was politically directed against the stipulations of the Versailles peace treaty, but can also be interpreted as a concept with a specific German and continental ideology which opposed the abstract forms of social intercourse common to maritime and naval cultures, based on trade and exchange, as represented historically by Britain and, later, the United States. The cultural, societal and political contrast between cultures of the land and cultures of the sea are seen as one fundamental presupposition in Haushofer's thinking. The article deals with the body of knowledge he developed, his personal history under Nazism, and the impact of his thought on German territorial revisionism in the 1920s.     

Critical Geopolitics and the 1950s Bomber Gap

In this paper, I outline three main issues that divide classical and critical geopolitics and offer a critique of the latter. The three issues are (1) criticism, (2) the relative importance of discourses vs. materiality/political economy, and (3) the status of knowledge claims (universal or partial). Through this discussion I present my own view, whose central claim is that versions of critical geopolitics relying to a great extent on discursive analysis should pay more attention to political economic factors. True, most studies in critical geopolitics pay attention to the institutional affiliation of political elites, but very few discuss the workings of the political economic system within which policy is formulated. To illustrate my points empirically, I discuss the bomber gap of the 1950s; the gap refers to the alleged fall of the United States behind the Soviet Union in strategic bombers under Eisenhower, a scare that gave rise to influential discourses describing American military inferiority.     

Karl Haushofer and geopolitics — the history of a German mythos

This essay attempts to reassess the writings of Karl Haushofer, a German professor of geopolitics during the period of the Third Reich. However, this examination is not to be another historical reflection. Instead it approaches the question what different kinds of historical reflections on Karl Haushofer as a person and his geopolitics were made in Germany and how they influenced the further geopolitical research. The different interpretations of Haushofer are examined in the form of a discourse analytic study. It shows that the different judgments concerning his work are open to diverse political interpretations.     

A Popular Geopolitics of the Refugee Crisis in Europe: The Re-actualization of Identity-driven Geopolitical Narratives in Estonia

ABSTRACT

The article examines the question of how the refugee crisis in Europe re-actualizes the existing national geopolitical narratives and affects the border-(re)drawing of European political communities. I particularly refer to the Estonian experience, which I examine through two different case studies. The first one focuses on the refugee issue as seen from the perspective of fostering a less nationalistic and more heterogeneous identity in Estonia, expressed in the language of contemporary art. The second one addresses the perceptions of the refugee debate by Russian speakers in Narva who directly relate this question to their personal experiences with integration into Estonian society since the fall of the Soviet Union. I analyse both issues within the framework of popular geopolitics that tackles cultural representations of territories, spaces, and identity politics from the viewpoint of vernacular, home-grown, and routine meanings, to bring this culturally focused approach to the foreground of research into politically sensitive phenomena.     

Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds,Everyday Practices,and Food Security in Mexico

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labour in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so. This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.     

National borders,the global economy and geopolitics: A view from Yemen

The wider geographic scales of the new interdependencies called ‘globalisation’ are not new to peripheral states such as Yemen. In the colonial and post‐colonial world sensitivity to international developments has always been important in the course of local events. What is new is the particular configuration of political and economic institutions at various levels including, critically, the national level. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the new geography of economic and political ‘globalisation’ has left Yemen with distinctly ‘old’ forms of economic integration into world markets, but that, on the other hand, regional geopolitics have opened certain opportunities for Yemen's political elite to refashion itself as a strategic geopolitical player so as to maintain international flows of military and economic aid. The end result is the continued national dominance of these same elite. ‘Globalisation’ in this sense is a national political project.     

Empirical Verve,Conceptual Doubts: Looking from the Outside in at Critical Geopolitics

When critical geopolitics entered German political geography, its empirical verve helped crank up a discipline which had diminished into an academic backwater. Soon, however, conceptual doubts began to supersede the initial enthusiasm with which critical geopolitics had been welcomed into political geography. Critical voices in German geography highlight the conceptual heterogeneity of critical geopolitics which engenders clashes between different, partly incommensurable epistemologies. Our paper traces the empirical and conceptual trajectory of critical geopolitics and the multifarious critique of it in German geography, before venturing to take a fresh look at poststructuralist, postcolonialist and systems theoretical approaches which, in the German context, are discussed as conceptual avenues that might usefully inform the further development of critical geopolitics.     

Geopolitics of Affect and Emotions in a Post-Conflict City

This paper aims to advance our knowledge of the relationships between emotions, affect, and geopolitics. For, among several criticisms of affect’s non-representational theories, is the claim that it has not been used to understand problems of real social and political importance. What is crucially lacking in this important body of work on the nexus between affect and politics is empirically grounded research that examines these processes, especially in situations of geopolitical instability and conflict. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by attending to the geopolitical role of feelings in the volatile political climate of a post-conflict city. Specifically, my work examines the emotional and affective landscapes of daily life in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina which, twenty years after the war officially ended, continues to experience divisions between its Croat/Catholic and Bosniak/Muslim populations.     

The Duality of Political Geography in China: Integration and Challenges

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the genealogy of ‘Chinese’ political geography, which, to a certain extent, can be read as a national report of the status of political geography in Chinese scholarship. It begins by outlining the short duration of the development of political geography in China, compared to the longer history of western political geography. Looking at the extant studies related to political geography in China, this paper suggests an existence of a duality in this field. One strand of scholarship is termed ‘exogenous political geography’, which is largely influenced by western scholarship with a particular focus on theories and vocabularies from classical geopolitics and geo-economy. The other strand is termed as ‘endogenous political geography’, which covers rich topics, including, yet not limited to, political and geographical views of inter-state relationships, central-local relationships and emperor-people relationships. Such a duality is important for understanding the condition of current political geography in China. The dualised understanding, however, seems to have undermined the comprehensiveness of political geography in China. In this regard, this paper calls for a more complete, integrated and critical agenda for political geography in China.     

Rethinking strategy and geopolitics: Critical responses to globalisation

Rethinking geopolitics is a key feature of those disciplines concerned with rearticulating the site and nature of political space and political community in an age of globalisation causing much social protest and concern. The article focuses upon how social movements challenging globalisation are rearticulating and rethinking, through their objectives and strategies, the practices, meaning and site of state sovereignty and ‘the (geo)political’. The article focuses upon the way critical movements such as the Emiliano Zapata (Zapatista) Army of National Liberation (EZLN) are engaging with new ways of thinking about, representing and constructing political space and the relationship between the local and the global whilst cultivating an inclusionary national community project(s). The article argues that the EZLN engages in a struggle which may provide an insight into the possibility of cultivating alternative and genuinely democratic civil societies and inclusive political communities that transcend the exclusionary cartography and institutions of the neoliberal state.     

In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South

ABSTRACT

Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East – those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematises the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorising.     

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europe's maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.     

Geopolitics of the Cosmopolis

Through an analysis of a speech held by Finnish Minister of Defence Jyri Häkämies at CSIS in Washington in 2007, the article scrutinizes the new emergence of “geopolitics” in international politics. Although its novelty is debatable, in this new geopolitical discourse the main focus is not related to the spatial borders of a nation state but instead to securing territory beyond these borders. It seems that “common values”, basically undefined but allegedly including such ideas like democracy, are related to this new form of “geopolitics”. In contrast to traditional geopolitics and identity politics, the global or cosmopolitical “us” defending common values seems to be a changing coalition and other countries appear only as objects of its operations. Only Russia, waking from its decade-long hibernation, emerges as a potential challenge to “us”. Curiously enough, its awakening also brings geopolitics back. The analysis of the speech reveals that the “new situation” requires choosing friends and enemies that are not clearly defined in the classical geopolitical sense. Even in the traditional sense of protecting the borders etc., the geopolitical security of Finland is best protected through acting for the geopolitical security of the whole world, no matter where or when that might require our presence. But from where does, for instance, the legitimacy of the operations of “us” derive? In the speech of minister Häkämies, many of the classical themes of political theory reappear, though in a new form. It is guided by geopolitical concerns, but the geopolitics it entails is rather different from the traditional way of thinking about it. This also creates a need to rethink some central concerns of political theory.     

The ‘West’ against the ‘Rest’: Geopolitics after the end of the cold war

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that we had reached the ‘end of geopolitics’. Since the mid‐1990s, however, the term ‘geopolitics’ has experienced a revival, and even regional groupings which have so far abstained from any kind of power politics, such as the European Union, have started to claim geopolitical interests for themselves. But it is not clear what constitutes this kind of power politics in the 1990s and what drives ‘the West’ to pursue geopolitics, directed against what Huntington has labelled so plainly and provocatively the ‘Rest’. The article addresses this question by analysing Western capital's need for access to markets in the South and the EU's and US’ growing dependence on oil imports. The article will argue that a Western geostrategy based on Huntington's civilisational model would be counterproductive in the long run, manoeuvring the Western states into a situation where these geopolitical goals would have to be enforced by military means instead of being pursued through a strategy of political and economic support.     

A Critique of Critical Geopolitics

Comparisons between classical and critical geopolitics are made with the suggestion that both versions, although different in most respects, are equally legitimate for study and perhaps may be brought closer together, at least in ways that may complement each other, after inspection of their comparative approaches. The classical version deserves consideration as a contribution to international relations theory and to foreign policy making. The critical approach provides a needed and necessary critique of the classical, exposing its weaknesses and suggesting an emancipatory alternative. Accordingly, the author has selected a variety of associated characteristics that show the primary variations between the classical and the critical, illustrated by appropriate quotations and examples, with again the conclusion that both versions of geopolitics, the classical and the critical, merit credibility, and that a possibility exists where certain connections may be located between the two that could mutually clarify and strengthen their unique contributions to geopolitics as a whole.