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The end of geography: are references to 'primal fears' and 'primal ambitions' adequate to understand contemporary security issues? Geoff Sharp argues for a different framework for understanding geopolitics.

Article Excerpt
In Arena 76, Hugh White drew attention to the heightened sense of insecurity pervading social life. He believes that it is more marked now than during the height of the Cold War. He goes on to link an exaggerated and excessively personalised response to the events of 9/11 to that insecurity. It was as if people felt that they and their children were in immediate danger instead of that risk really being of about the same order as being killed in a road or air accident. White's approach presents the terrorist threat as framed within a moralising and radically dichotomous distinction wherein we are good and they are evil. That moralising helps form the context for an overly militarised response. While arguably justifiable in the case of the Taliban as a home base for terrorism, Hugh White suggests that the military response, as extended to Iraq, is not simply a matter of the invasion being poorly executed. The project as such is deeply flawed in conception; to a significant degree it was irrational.

In its independence of mind, its readiness to question current policy and even, from a certain point of view, its lucidity, White's interpretation is something of a breath of fresh air. But however welcome that may be as a step aside from the predominant line of the press, it is not enough.

Compatible with White's interpretation is a geopolitical point of view that, I will argue, is all the more influential because most people take it to be a sophisticated version of plain common sense. But common sense, along with contemporary geopolitics, depends upon certain long-standing assumptions about the relations of nation states and the integrity of their borders. George W. Bush and especially advisers such as Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld directly question these assumptions. They assert--and certainly this is a widely held point of view--that the norms of mutual respect for national borders stemmed from the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Although often violated, such norms have framed international law and it is critically important to recognise the persuasiveness of the Wolfowitz/Bush argument that they may be outmoded or at least subject to radical amendment.

That argument depends upon the new situation wherein the security of nation states can no longer be guaranteed by the defence of their borders. Intercontinental missiles can reach over them and just one or a few individuals supplied with suitcase nuclear weapons or the biological agents of disease can produce effects equivalent to those once produced by mass armies deployed on battlefields. The issue now is not the partial or complete validity of the new claims that are now so clearly affecting the foreign politics of nation states. Rather, it is to consider the appropriate way of responding to a changed situation and a new order of threats.

The still widely influential geopolitical perspective is no longer an adequate framework for discussion of these issues. It relies on assumptions that are losing their significance. At their centre is the presumption that aggression across and defence of borders is an expression of 'human nature'. Hugh White reminds us of that particular version of common sense by grounding his analysis in what he speaks of as primal fears and ambitions, and the way irrationality, as grounded in those fears and ambitions, can constrain rational policy.

What is Geopolitics?

A preliminary word on geopolitics is a necessary first step towards a response. This is a term that...

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