Geopolitics As Theory - DEUDNEY
Geopolitics As Theory - DEUDNEY
Geopolitics As Theory - DEUDNEY
Two competing modes of protection, the real-state and federal-republic, distilled from
realist and republican (proto-liberal) security practices, entail differing forms of arm
control and patterns of institution-building (asymmetrical binding vs co-binding), and
in turn generate differing political structures (anarchy and hierarchy vs republics and
state-unions)
In order to reformulate geopolitics as a more conceptually robust and sophisticated
theory, the author employed a generalized version of the apparatus of Marxism
historical (production) materialism to construct geopolitics as historical security
materialism.
THE ARG
Material environment of geography and technology significantly shapes
security politics.
o Human beings are fragile corporeal entities in continuous, intimate and
inescapable intercourse with the material world.
o Early analysts of political made casual propositions attempting to
explain variations in human political outcome across space and in the
relation between different political societies (as opposed to deductive
natural law and natural right arguments), they relied heavily on
material, particularly geographic factors.
Material factors have a fragmentary and attenuated presence in contemporary
international and security theory.
Realism, and current version of neorealism, often castigated for its excessive
materialism and does contain one central materialist variable, the distribution
of power.
The decline of conceptual richness and theoretical sophistication of materialist
arguments in contemporary international and security theory was due to a
combination of political and intellectual developments.
o Association of the materialist geopolitics with the disaster in Nazi
Germany
o Association between Marxism and the USSR
Most contemporary usages of the term geopolitics are casual synonyms for
realist views of international strategic rivalry and interaction.
The lack of arguments in materialist geopolitics about security-political
relationships has several implications:
1. International theory now lacks the conceptual apparatus to grasp the security-
political implications of major changes in the material context (advent of
oceanic navigation, industrialism, nuclear weapons and the opening of orbital
space as terrain for strategic interaction)
2. Realist theories are able to make hypotheses about the operation of state-
systems, but not about the large and more fundamental question why there
are state-systems, and why the scope of it has changed so dramatically over
time.
3. International theorist has lost sight of the many strong arguments relating non-
statist republican and federal security-political arrangements to material
contexts.
TO SKETCH THE ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF A MORE CONCEPTUALLY ROBUST
GEOPOLITICAL MODEL FOR THEORIZING ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
MATERIAL CONTEXTS AND SECURITY-POLITICAL ARRANGEMENTS, BOTH
STATIST AND NON-STATIST
I. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM:
Materialist security arguments appear in 2 clusters:
1. Beginng with the Greeks and culminating in the Enlightenment
Before the industrial revolution the western political science (efforts to explain political
outcomes) focus upon nature in the sense of the material environment as a casual
factor.
Basic claim of naturalist political science is that fundamental difference among
human societies are the product of the different natural environments (climate,
soil fertility, resources, population, topography and land-sea interaction)
At the heart of this approach is the simple insight that material environments
produce constraints and opportunities that significantly affect the performance
of the very basic functional task of economic production and protection from
violence that are universally important in human life.
The propositions of naturalist political science encompassed variables that have
subsequently been divided among the social sciences of psychology,
anthropology, geography, sociology, economics and political sciences.
These theories rest on the simple assumption that the physical world is not
completely or even primarily subject to effective human control, and that these
realities impede or enable vital and recurring human goals.
o The various ways in which these environments present themselves to
humans heavily shape the viability of human projects.
POLITICS: occurring between two natures:
o The natural or intrinsic features of humans as biological organism
o The variable nature of the material environment.
2. Global geopolitical analysis (19th and early 20th centuries) emerges out of a crisis
and reformulation of the first. As historical change, evolution and revolution
became central topics of investigation.
Natural political science entered into a major intellectual crisis and was significantly
recast with conceptual innovations derived from the Darwinian revolution.
Two major limitations of naturalist theory precipitated these changes:
A) Early naturalistic theories of politics lacked the ability to explain historical
changes. Natural was conceptualized in either static or cyclical terms, because
nature seemed to change only rarely and slowly. WERE UNABLE TO EXPLAIN
DIFFERENCES ACROSS TIME IN POLITIES LOCATED IN THE SAME PLACE.
- There were two solutions inspired by Darwing:
o Conceptualized historical changes as the result of improved adaptation
to a static material environment.
o To incorporate changing technology into their conceptualization of the
physical environment, thus enabling them to locate the driver of change
in human arrangements in the nature exogenous to human control that
was changing via technological development. NEW HISTORICIST
MATERIALIST PROJECT OF EXPLAINING HISTORICALLY VARIABLE
POLITICAL OUTCOMES BY REFERENCE TO CHANGING MATERIAL
CONTEXT.
B) A weak understanding of how material environments shaped political
outcomes. The idea of natural selection in Darwin’s theory of biological
evolution offered a new and more plausible model of how material
environments shaped political outcomes.
- Applied to human society and politics, the idea of evolutionary change through
natural selection gave rise to functionalism as an explanatory argument. The
persistence of a particular social or political arrangement can be explained by
its superior fit with the constraints and opportunities of the context within
which it must operate.
Marx’s historical materialism is the relationship between productive forces and modes.
Forces of production: ultimately decisive material reality of human life. Composes of
nature and technology embodied as productive capability (machines and other forms
of real capital) originally very primitive.
Insights of materialism and human nature are combined with structuralist image of
human agency as a free but contextually constrained force in history, and with the
constructivist claim that political practices generate political structures.