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Article Excerpt
Early in his academic career, Donald Meinig published an article and several book reviews about global geopolitics (1953, 1956, 1957). Although I would not contend that these have a great deal to do directly with much of what he wrote later on the historical geography of North America, they do have some relevance to recent writing on global geopolitics; specifically, that which advertises itself as "critical," They also speak more generally to Meinig's critical intellect as a scholar whose early writing on geopolitics has never received the attention it deserves. From this viewpoint, Meinig's writing on geopolitics from the mid-1950s offers an interesting starting point both for reevaluating that time as a uniformly "barren" period in the history of geopolitical thinking and for responding to contemporary anxieties about how global geopolitics is best construed (Agnew 2002, 85-135). In this article I am primarily concerned with the latter.
In the publications in question, Meinig displayed two characteristics that are fundamental to today's "critical geopolitics" but that were entirely lacking in most conceptions of geopolitics during the period in which he was writing: exposing the fallacy of a timeless physical geography that directs world politics and arguing that the geographical labels often innocently introduced into geopolitical analysis have demonstrable political consequences. After picking out these attributes from Meinig's writing, I spend most of the article developing my own argument based on these premises. My main focus is on how political leaders, scholars, and the media recycle geographical terms or names in order to familiarize unfamiliar situations in vocabulary drawn from some seemingly salient prior geopolitical experience. This can be called "the discursive process of domesticating the exotic."
Given the relatively important roles of the European countries and the United States in recent world politics, it is no coincidence that many of the most popular geographical analogies in current circulation derive from the edges of Europe. This is the near-abroad where the Western powers focused much of their foreign policymaking during most of the twentieth century. As a result, terms such as "Finlandization" (neutralization in the face of a hostile and more powerful neighboring state), "beyond the pale" (referring initially to the area inhabited by the native Irish beyond a fenced district conquered by the English around Dublin--the Pale of Dublin--and later to the area within the Russian Empire to which most Jews were confined), "Dutch disease" (the macroeconomic consequences of a sudden resource bonanza), "the Switzerland of [this or that world region]" (a country whose once-severe internal ethnic conflicts have been resolved institutionally), "Macedonian syndrome" (the prospect of irredentism and subsequent unstable borders leading to intractable ethnic conflict), and "balkanization" (the fission of a multiethnic empire in southeastern Europe into successor national states) have come into a certain linguistic currency among politicians and scholars alike to refer to and putatively explain situations well beyond the original context of use. Their loaded meanings expose the specificity of their origins as political terms based on geopolitical stereotypes. To complicate matters, some of these--"beyond the pale," for example--are also used more abstractly or as turns of phrase to refer to mental states, modes of thought, or intellectual divisions of one sort or another.
In this article I focus on the latter two--the Macedonian syndrome and balkanization--as not only drawing from the same well of analogies but also profoundly illustrative of the process of geographical naming and political blaming. When they "travel" or are applied around the world, they conjure up a particular vision of conflict as akin to that associated with the region from which they are taken: atavistic and intractable ethnic conflict. The term "ethnic conflict" is itself often vague yet all-inclusive, covering everything from religious and linguistic to nationalist conflicts but equally often without reference to external sponsors and interventions whose roles are thus completely obscured by the analogies and research/policies that emanate from them (Wimmer and others 2004). If the first analogy has a largely academic application, the second has been applied more broadly and by a wider range of commentators and actors in Europe and North America.
This critical analysis of geographical naming reflects a recent trend toward understanding global geopolitics as an active process of naming, blaming, and acting on the basis of geographical labels and the meanings they encode (O Tuathail and Agnew 1992; O Tuathail 1996; Agnew 2003; Bialasiewicz and Minca 2005). To tie this back to Meinig's writing in the 1950s, one general inspiration for the article is a critique of the "clean-break" hubris that finds nothing much of merit in the prior history of the field before "my" or "our" intellectual tribe came along; another is the more specific "critical attitude" that Meinig takes to the claims he examines. The 1950s were not quite so intellectually fallow after all.
MEINIG'S CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
The basic tenets of Meinig's conception of how "geography" enters into world history and politics can be found in one article and two book reviews he published in the 1950s, when he was employed at the University of Utah (1953, 1956, 1957). In the article, Meinig makes it clear from the outset that he is challenging the idea that "'geography' is an inherently stable foundation for the assessment of the problems of mankind" (1956, 553). More specifically, he counters the notion that some timeless global physical geography governs world politics. The details of physical geography, the distribution of oceans and mountain chains, the dimensions of river basins, and the course of rivers matter only in the context of a given global political-strategic balance or epoch. Consequently, for example, the language of "heartland" and "rimland," drawn from the writings of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman and the primary focus of the article, must be used very carefully in order that "casual and simple assumptions as to the 'natural' orientations of peoples and nations be rooted out of our thinking" (Meinig 1956, 568). Meinig has in mind such ideas as the infamous Russian "urge to the sea."
But the point is more general. The danger to which Meinig is drawing attention is that of outdated geographical models guiding understanding and policy long past their due date. Though "exceedingly handy and attractive terms" that "have worked their way into the common vocabulary of both academic and journalistic circles," "heartland" and "rimland" have become "loosened from their original context" and can become "mere tools of the propagandist who seeks to delude the public" (Meinig 1956, 555). The bulk of the article is then taken up with developing appropriate usage of the terms in the geopolitical context of the mid-1950s, paying particular attention to the cultural and functional/economic orientations of places as plausibly classified at that time by the language of heartland and rimland. With all due deference to Mackinder's famous adage, it could be said that Meinig was advocating the view that "Whoever controls the means of geopolitical representation and its enforcement shapes the world to their desires."
This dual critique of conventional wisdom--that global geopolitics does not have a timeless guiding physical geography behind it and that geopolitical terminology is inherently problematic--also infuses the reviews. The earlier of the two is a review of a 1952 book--John Kieffer's Realities of World Power--that predicted an imminent World War III unless the United States organized the non-Communist world into a "cohesive force" against the Soviet Union (Meinig 1953). To do so would require "a geopolitical program" loosely based on militarization of the Eurasian rim. While excoriating the author for his obsession with military force and lack of real geographical knowledge, Meinig scornfully observed: "It would seem that the only possible result of Dr. Kieffer's program would be to offer the bulk of the world's peoples the choice of absolute domination by either the United States or the USSR. Dr. Kieffer states that for us, 'survival without self respect is intolerable,' but he is unwilling to admit that might hold true for others as well" (1953, 160). The American nationalism of the author, who presented himself as an unbiased observer of global "realities," was thus openly skewered.
The other review is of the French geographer Yves Goblet's 1955 book, Political Geography and the World Map (Meinig 1957). Goblet was criticized...
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