Stefano Guzzini (ed), The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy Identity Crises, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, 342 pages, $36.99 paperback, ISBN 9781107676503.

See James Sidaway's most recent Society & Space contributions: Shadows on the Path: Negotiating Geopolitics on an Urban Section of Britain's South West Coast Path, Rebuilding Bridges: A Critical Geopolitics of Iberian Transfrontier Cooperation in a European Context, Geopolitics, Geography, and ‘Terrorism’ in the Middle East, The (Geo)Politics of Regional Integration: The Example of the Southern African Development Community, and ‘The Tears of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’, and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives, Subprime Crisis: American Crisis or Human Crisis?

The fact that six of the chapters in this collection of eleven chapters are by the editor makes this book fairly unusual amongst edited collections. The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? is partly the product of panels at a series of conventions, including International Studies Association meetings and EU-funded workshops. The five chapters (plus introduction) by the editor offer a book within the book, developing an argument about the social basis of revivals of geopolitics in Europe. Stefano Guzzini’s introduction notes a post-Cold War revival of geopolitics in parts of Europe and sets out three claims that will be investigated. The first is the importance of national contexts. The second is “that the revival of geopolitical thought is best understood in the context of several foreign policy identity crises, a kind of ‘ontological insecurity’ that foreign policy elites encountered in Europe after 1989” (page 3). The third claim is that geopolitical thought filled this gap, through anchoring claims about national interests in an allegedly objective geopolitical frame. The focus is therefore neoclassical geopolitics; the various revivals and reworkings of a set of approaches that first developed in interwar Europe.

There is much useful reflection in the first three chapters that rewards a close reading. This includes a consideration of the relationship of neoclassical geopolitics to realism in international relations. Guzzini argues that the answer lies in the “symbolic function” (page 44) and power of geopolitics. What enables this? Geopolitics posits a world-wide analysis. Guzzini (page 27) mentions the ways that Mackinder’s writings develop this (a theme that has long been studied by others, including a key paper that appeared in Society and Space by Kearns, 1984), citing Geoffrey Parker (1985) who “sees in this ‘Ganzheit’ (totality or wholeness) geopolitics’ ‘ultimate object and justification’” (page 27). What might usefully have been considered here too is the centrality of cartography to geopolitics (Boria, 2008); indeed, one of the case study chapters adopts van der Wusten and Dijkink’s (2002) definition of geopolitics as “a policy-orientated discourse about a state inspired by its position on a map” (page 80). Yet the book contains not a single map – except the one that adorns the cover, which is never mentioned in the text itself.

The case studies that follow are a significant strength of the book. There are examinations of the Czech Republic (Petr Drulák), Germany (Andreas Behnke), Italy (Elisabetta Brighi and Fabio Peito), Turkey (Pinar Bilgin), Estonia (Merje Kuss), and Russia (Alexander Astrov and Natalia Morozova).

Petr Drulák’s chapter on Czech geopolitics is particularly fascinating. His chapter is a study of a non-tradition or as he puts it an “anti-geopolitical tradition” (page 80). He notes that after 1989 there was no significant revival of geopolitics in Czechoslovakia and the two successor states. This is not to say there were none, for a brief presence of geopolitical arguments after 1989 is noted. But they did not endure. Drulák attributes this to “a strong anti-geopolitical tradition arguing that anti-geopolitics has been the mainstream of Czech political thinking since the nineteenth century when modern politics comes into being” (page 80). This is a grand claim. By this, Drulák seems to mean that maps and mapping was not central to the work of a series of key Czech public intellectuals and politicians and/or that their writing focussed on freedom and agency rather than geopolitical concerns. The Czech geopolitical writing that did emerge after 1989 is briefly described. It is also compared with that accompanying the foundation of the state in 1918 and its destruction at Munich in 1938. It could have been rewarding to say more about those earlier periods and writings, since so little about them has been scrutinized by other critical works in English. I found the chapter tantalizing, in so far as it left me wanting to know more about those earlier moments of Czech geopolitical writing and their relationships to wider European interwar traditions of geopolitics in German, French and other languages. Comparisons with Rumanian and Hungarian cases could also have been rewarding. There is no detailed consideration of either of these, or the proliferation of geopolitics further east from Ukraine in the book: although there is an excellent chapter on Russia. Indeed one of my concerns about The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? is that some countries where the revival have been significant, such as Hungary (see Antonsich and Szalkai, in press) are barely considered (there are some fleeting details on page 63, in one of the introductory chapters). The chapter on the Turkish case too might have been enhanced by contrast and comparison with geopolitical writings from Central Asia (Megoran and Sharapova, 2013). There are some commonalities too with the circulation of geopolitics in Brazil and the southern cone of Latin America, where, like Turkey, the role of geopolitics has been fostered by periods of military rule following political polarization to which the military offer a ‘solution’. These similarities are not explored. Bilgin however notes that in Turkey there was little of the post-World War Two ‘Nazi science’ stigma that was attached to geopolitics in most of the West and communist countries. To have not explored the parallel with South America and Spain and Portugal (where fascist governments remained into the 1970s and geopolitics thrived) seems a missed opportunity therefore. Here the overall European focus and framework to the book shows its limits. How useful is it to consider geopolitical returns in Europe in relative isolation from the rest of the world?

One answer is offered in the chapter on Russia by Alexander Astrov and Natalia Morozova. Russia’s Eurasian positioning, global roles, superpower history and civilizational self-identity mean that geopolitical debates there have a relative autonomy yet frequently return to Russia’s relationships with the West. One of the strengths of this chapter is the detail on how the Soviet period is interpreted in Russian geopolitics since the USSR’s collapse and the links to Slavophile debates of the nineteenth century. Merje Kuus’s chapter on Estonia also considers how “geopolitics is bundled up with culture” (page 175). In the Estonian case, this does not take the form of neoclassical geopolitics but an embrace of Samuel Huntington’s civilizational thesis. Huntington has also been widely debated elsewhere (in China and predominantly Muslim countries for example), and this chapter’s focus on the reception of his ideas in Estonia could also usefully be placed in comparative perspective. Whilst the chapter is fascinating, the focus on ‘Huntingtonianism’ (the term is borrowed from the British academic Timothy Garton Ash) means that it sits slightly oddly with the main focus of the book on neoclassical geopolitics.

The chapter by Andreas Behnke offers lots of detail on German narratives about security, identity and international relations. He begins by noting that “The concept of Geopolitik itself plays a peculiar role in the German foreign policy discourse of the 1990s [and since]. While the logic of geopolitics is acknowledged as relevant for policy making to speak of Geopolitik remains problematic if not prohibited” (page 102). A rich vocabulary occupies much of the space once configured by Geopolitik, in which the latter has only a subdued presence.  Behnke attributes this to the combination of the continued memory of the Nazi regime and the absence of any existential crisis for Germany.

No such luck however for Italy, where Elisabeta Brighi and Fabio Petito describe the post-1989 “revival of geopolitical thinking and practice in Italy [as]…at once a relatively uncomplicated and yet ultimately perplexing affair” (page 127). The chapter is another excellent survey in which the Italian revival perhaps emerges less as perplexing than explicable within the framework set-out by Guzzini. Italian geopolitics since 1989 is part of the disorientation after the collapse of the Cold War order that had secured Italy’s strategic roles and circumscribed its politics. The chapter also places recent Italian geopolitics in the context of a fascist pedigree, but notes how the revival has been heterodox, so that “over the last two decades geopolitics has been invoked by its own supporters and scholars in a startling variety of ways – as a discourse, a doctrine, a set of theories, or even a science – to the effect that the term itself has inevitably become both ubiquitous and exceedingly vague” (page 127). That combination seems to apply to some of the other cases and too might confound Steffano Guzzini’s aims to chart and explain geopolitical revival. If revivals have taken such diverse forms, the question of the boundaries of geopolitics becomes complex.

For readers who want a survey of classical geopolitics and some neo-classical variants (Dodds and Atkinson, 2000; Mamadouh, 1998) and their relationships to interwar realism and idealism (Ashworth, 2011) or a theoretical and historical understanding of the wider tradition (Ó Tuathail, 1996), there are better places to start. But for finer details of the cases it covers and thoughtful reflections on where and why geopolitics has been reanimated in some parts of Europe (and why it has not in others) this book is valuable. Moreover, whilst critical geopolitics and allied work have thoroughly interrogated geopolitical traditions and the assumptions on which geopolitics operates, a wider social and political theory of geopolitics remains underspecified (for two reflections punctuated by 20 years of shifts and debates, see Ashley, 1987, and Cowen and Smith, 2007). The concern with ‘Social Mechanisms’ listed in the subtitle to The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? provide bearings for those who would deepen a social theory of geopolitics. 

References

Antonsich M and K Szalkai (2014) On Great Hungary and the importance of minor geopolitical traditions. Political Geography 39: A1-A4.

Ashworth LM (2011) Realism and the spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, geopolitics and the reality of the League of Nations. European Journal of International Relations 17(2): 279-301.

Ashley RK (1987) The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics. Alternatives 12: 403-434.

Boria E (2008) Geopolitical Maps: a sketch of a neglected trend in cartography. Geopolitics 13(2): 278-308.

Cowen D and N Smith (2009) After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics. Antipode 41(1): 22-48.

Dodds K and D Atkinson (eds) (2000) Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge.

Kearns G (1984) Closed space and political practice: Halford Mackinder and Frederick Jackson Turner. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2(1): 23-34.

Mamadouh V (1998) Geopolitics in the 1990s: one flag, many meanings. GeoJournal 46: 237–253.

Megoran N and S Sharapova (eds) (2013) Central Asia in International Relations: The Legacies of Halford Mackinder. London: Hurst.

Ó Tuathail G (1996) Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge.

Parker G (1985) Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century. London: Croom Helm.

Van der Wusten H and G Dijkink (2002) German, British and French Geopolitics: the enduring differences. Geopolitics 7(3): 19-38.