Why geoplotics matters ?

I. Why geopolitics matters?

Living in a changing world

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world in which we live is often characterized by the acceleration of time, the shrinking of space and the plurality of the political. Major political changes marked the turn of the last century. The Cold War Era was over after dominating the world for a half of century. A new category of countries has appeared on the international stage, in addition to industrialized and developing countries. It comprises countries at war or emerging from conflict in which the state has been foundering in genocide and intercommunal massacres. The Soviet Union and its satellites “disappeared” from the political map of the world, turning into the so called “transition economies”. The United States seemed to be the only one capable to run the world, its position of “global policeman” being enhanced by the new role the UN decided to play on the international arena. Old alliances broke up and new others started to be successful. The Warsaw Pact is now history, whereas NATO has recently enlarged its membership, reaching the Russian border. European integration is an on-going process aiming to give the “Old World” the place it used to have on the economic and political scene of the world. The world economy becomes more and more globalized and the hierarchy of key-players is changing permanently. China, still ruled by communism, has embarked successfully on free-market reforms. Other developing countries take advantage of the globalization attracting major flows of foreign investments, while others seem to suffer from the “erratic boat” syndrome, being unable to set a course.

The multiplication of conflict and the strengthening of differences have both gone together with momentous shifts in the geopolitical map of the world post-1989. Emerging in the wake of that specific moment, the post 1989 period bears witness to the development of a pervasive paradox. On the one hand powerful standardizing and normalizing forces are at work – the engines of finance and technology become increasingly global; new forms of economic and political co-operation bring nation states closer; images and information circulate at the speed of light, and discourses of liberal democracy are projected planet-wide. On the other hand, federations break up, weaker nation states can hardly cope with the pressure of local and regional divisions and in some cases, religious or ethnic differences are made manifest with violence.

The present world supplies the political thinking with abundant topics to be addressed:

-contrasting trends and growing inequalities – although there is strong evidence that during the last 2 or 3 decades the developed countries seem to slow down their pace of economic growth and the developing countries try to catch up, these are only global trends. If you look at particular cases or at the variation of the relevant socio-economic indicators, such as GDP per capita or human development index, you will find out that in fact the gaps in economic terms between developed countries on one side and the developing countries on the other side have been widening lately. The sharpest disparities have occurred within the group of developing countries: only some of them have been able to take advantage of the benefits of globalization – Brazil, China, Mexico, Indonesia have been attractive to international investment flows; others have experienced economic decline and stagnation, for example, in about 70 countries of the world average incomes are lower today than they were in 1980.

-social conflicts and movements of resistance – have two major origins: cultural one is based on the increasing pressure of the global forces and the local inertia trying to resist against the identity dilution (from the cultural point of view, the globalization process is considered to be a homogenization process –are we going to deal with national identities in 50 years, in 100 years or we are going to deal with the world system as a uniform cultural entity; ethnic one caused by two apparently opposing trends: both re-emergent nationalism and new supra-national identities are developing on the globe. Let’s take Europe as an example: nationalistic tensions in Northern Ireland, in Basque Region Spain, in Corsican Island in France, in former Yugoslavian space, on one side and the enlargement process of the European Union, on the other side.

-the environmental change as political subject – is due to the fact that international security is largely dependent on healthy environment; the motto frequently used is “think globally, act locally” which means that the world-system is increasingly interdependent and that there are mutual relationships between nature and society. Up to the 1970s the general opinion was that human society can place any action on the physical environment without having any feedback; after the environmental and energy crises from the beginning of the 1970s, the human society became aware of the complex, dynamic and, sometimes, unpredictable response of the nature. The scientists try to analyze the human dimension of the global environmental changes, assessing the impact of green house gas emissions, ozone-layer reduction, acid rains, loss of biodiversity on the quality of the human life.

-new forms of governance and democracy – political actors try to set up efficient coalitions and regulating modes of the economic and social life. Democracy takes a variety of forms showing the efforts to meet the civil society needs as well as the civil society struggle to be better represented by the corresponding governments. More over, rethinking the state-society relations across the national territory in different areas of the world is a vital component of the political geography.

-resurgence of ethical-political concerns in relation to human rights – there are internationally accepted human rights and international institutions monitoring the world in this respect. That is why the provision or not of human rights can be a tension source of international relations between different nation-states.

-place of indigenous people vs. new comers – the position of countries in the democratic transition process, the differences between the economic development, ethical and social conflicts stay at the root of international migration flows. The new composition of national population can sometimes be problematic. Maghreb immigrants living in the outskirts of Paris accused violently the French authorities of unequal treatment in summer of 2005. Also the displacement of peoples and the integration-segregation of the world’s refugee population are subject to geopolitical inquiry.

-global significance of gender

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