Post-geopolitics vs. Geopolitics of a Multipolar World

At the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, a branch known as “critical geopolitics” or “post-geopolitics” appeared in the Anglo-Saxon geopolitical community. This trend can also be characterized as “weak geopolitics” (an analogy with the post-modern “weak philosophy” of J. Vattimo, “weak theology” by D. Caputo; “weakness” is the rejection of binary thinking, softening of the opposition’s inherent for “classical” rationality). The school of “weak geopolitics” (G. Ó Tuathail, J. Agnew) insists that the basic principle of geopolitics is that the dualism of the Land and the Sea is not relevant to existing realities. In a global world, this duality must be removed.

As the globalization processes are based on the availability in which post geopolitics can build its own model of space arrangement, we should regard the universalization process of one local culture – the Western culture. Globalization blurs and abolishes the non-Western cultures’ identities, like the Sea erodes the Land.

A society that describes the representatives of critical geopolitics and where there will be no geopolitical poles cannot appear without the fact that one of these poles must “withdraw” from the other pole.

The geopolitical analysis of modernity shows that unipolar globalization is possible after the Sea pole’s victory over the Land pole. The revenge strategy of the Land pole is aimed at the creation of a multipolar world in contrast to universal unipolar American-centric globalization.

In fact, the objective of critical geopolitics is the hiding of the thalassocratic globalization’s character. The intellectual and political elites of the Land powers (including Russia) learnt that the Sea flooded the Land, and that the outside governance over the heartland by the Sea Power is completely established. The representatives of the Land pole offer to comprehend it as a fact of full and total domination of the Sea over the Land. That’s why post-geopolitics and weak geopolitics are used, which has the practical objective of not paying attention to the real geopolitical structure of the global world.

However, not taking into account post-geopolitical scientists, we should analyze the phenomenon of “weak geopolitics” as an attempt of the West to express new conditions of the modern world existing in the post-modern paradigm.

In particular, we should pay attention to the fact that the critical geopolitics of Tuathail and J. Agnew considers the Land and the Sea as “imperialist concepts” that are based on the projection of danger from the other figure. By analyzing this claim, we can draw an analogy with the views of the American sociologist, representative of the Social Darwinist School William Sumner. At the core of Sumner's concept are the groups “we” and “they”, and “ethnocentrism”. The relationships in the “we” group are interpreted as an agreement, and the interactions between “we” and “they” as hostile. According to O'Tuatayl and Agnew, the projection of hostility and fear on the image of the other constitutes the binary model, which affects politics, international politics, and strategy. So, post-geopolitics insists that the whole system of Atlanticist geopolitics of the Sea civilization is directed against the Land, as the Sea’s fear is projected onto the Land.

According to Tuathail and Agnew, globalization removes the opposition between the “we” group and the “they” group. It is proposed to think of the danger (formerly constituting of the image of the other, the enemy) as something internal. “It is not the others who threaten, but the same one.” In fact, it is proposed to internalize fear and move it from the outside to the inside.

O'Tuatayl and the other representatives of the “critical geopolitics” school are based on the introduction by the sociologists W. Beck and A. Giddens to the concept of the “risk-society” (Risikogesellschaft). The meaning of “risk-society” is the fact that people need to understand that their enemy is within; and they are the others.

O'Tuatayl and Agnew repeat Beck and Giddens’ “risk society” provisions in geopolitical (or rather, post-geopolitical) terms. From this point of view, fear is not a source of any external threat or a geopolitical design (“Leviathan or Behemoth”), but it is of the society itself or the state. Thus, the US’ “internal enemy” should be considered the US government itself. Changing the localization of the threat’s source and applying it to their own power allows a parallel to be made between post-geopolitical logic and the anarchist ideas of P. Kropotkin, L. Tolstoy, and F. Oppenheimer. This is the rooted destructive potential of critical geopolitics.

However, post-geopolitics should not be considered as an instrument of some kind of mass mobilization against its own government. On the contrary, it is primarily the projection of hatred towards itself. The internalization of “geopolitical fear”, the “inner geopolitical projection”, and the transformation of the Land and Sea into inter-individual phenomena actually constitute a split consciousness. Such a state as a risk-society (Risikogesellschaft) can be compared with schizophreniform disorders. The Land and the Sea (viewed as a source of order and chaos) are endopsychic categories.

Such geopolitical limits are the postmodern global society’s existence, which will be represented by the schizophreniform masses (“shizomasses” by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari). A schizo-construction of  “internal geopolitics” is unable to externalize its fear, as it isn’t tolerated, so it internalizes its fear, thus the individual is duplicated. Instead of an undivided individual, a divided figure appears.

In practice, this post-geopolitics leads to the concealing of the real strategic framework of the modern world and makes it impossible to analyze it correctly. The pragmatic side of critical geopolitics is its “demobilization” objective. We shouldn’t forget, at the same time, that O'Tuatayl and Agnew, offering the non-Western elites to abandon classical geopolitics in favor of “postmodern post-geopolitics”, can use methodology and tools of classical geopolitics, as they have repeatedly been proven in practice.