- The Geopolitical Image: Imperialism, Anarchism, and the Hypothesis of Culture in the Formation of Geopolitics
A geography text should aim at literary form. It should present a standard of knowledge, a method, and a perspective. Supplementary ideas ought to be built round the map, not the printed page, for only so can we cultivate the visualizing habit of mind.
—Halford John Mackinder, 1908
A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law.
—Friedrich Ratzel, quoted by H. G. Wells as the epigraph to The Outline of History, 1920
[I]f you knew the threefold sorrow with which my life is barred, like those well-fortified cities one sees in Elisée Reclus’s Northern Europe volume, you would forgive me.
—Marcel Proust, letter to Suzette Lemaire, 1 November 1894
Preface: The Meaning of Geopolitics
Early in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the reader encounters an auditory image of the infantile artist’s first experimentation with language:
O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green wothe botheth. 1 [End Page 49]
The prototypically modernist linguistic play of “the green wothe botheth” establishes a problem of imagining to which the young Stephen will return, although the problem cannot be resolved: “you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could” (PA, 12–13). In its encoded contestation of national and poetic imagery (the Irish green, the poetic rose), Stephen’s “green wothe” is an exemplary geopolitical image. It posits a form of cultural and political identification whose difficulty Stephen later finds inscribed in and around the “picture of the earth on the first page of his geography” textbook (PA, 15).
The meaning of “geopolitics” as a term used to describe global political problems is by no means easy to pinpoint. Its increasing use as a keyword in critical theory and cultural studies signals a need to theorize what Homi Bhabha has recently called “the geopolitics of the historical present.” 2 As part of that critical effort a number of studies of geopolitics have appeared, including Gearóid O Tuathail’s recent Critical Geopolitics. 3 The genealogy I offer here emphasizes two features of the formation of what O Tuathail calls “classical geopolitics” (CG, 22): the suppressed importance of anarchism in the formation of imperialist geopolitical paradigms, and the fate of nineteenth-century ideas of “culture” in the formation of twentieth-century geopolitics.
The history of geopolitics may be summarized as the failure to constitute the discipline of geography as a scientific field of study, a failure on which the very success and persistence of reactionary geopolitical paradigms are premised. Most of my examples are drawn from the work of geographers, anthropologists, and social scientists, and something I emphasize is the way geopolitical paradigms took shape around disciplinary boundary crossings within the academy not unlike the interdisciplinarity that characterizes cultural studies today. 4 At issue is not only the fate of an academic field of study, but also the ensemble of residual problems and questions that come to mark the wider sense of “geopolitics.” Stephen’s problem of imagining a “green rose” is exemplary of this ensemble of questions because it offers not a definition, but a problem: “It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended” (PA, 17).
In Joyce’s novel, a geography textbook precipitates Stephen’s problem of identification, and it is to geography books that I turn to examine the emergence of the geopolitical image. In particular, I am interested in the work of three geographers: Elisée Reclus (1830–1905), the French anarchist geographer; Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), the German geographer whose theory of “living space” (Lebensraum) and political geography generally set the terms for the later development of Geopolitik; and Halford J. Mackinder (1861–1947), the British geographer who...