Burning Issues: Geopolitics

Today
States, Nations, Territories
Stuart Elden
Room B1.36
stuart.elden@warwick.ac.uk
Thu 02.10.13 What is Geopolitics?
Thu 09.10.13 States, Nations, Territories
Thu 16.10.13 Borders and Walls
Thu 23.10.13 Humanitarian Intervention and
the International Community
Thu 30.10.13 The Ongoing ‘War on Terror’
Thu 13.11.13 Environmental, Health and
Resource Geopolitics
Thu 20.11.13 Popular Geopolitics and
Resistance
 Suggested readings
Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University
Press, 2007 (also his Global Geopolitics: A Critical Introduction, Prentice
Hall, 2005).
Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss (eds.) Global Politics: A New Introduction,
Routledge, 2nd edition, 2013.
Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 (also The Birth of
Territory, University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Colin Flint, Introduction to Geopolitics, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2011.
David Storey, Territories: The Claiming of Space, Routledge, 2011.

Many readings for other modules will be relevant, and other texts will be
discussed as we go…
 The State and the Nation
The formation of states with a centralised
administration over a clearly defined geographical
territory preceded the articulation of ideas of the
nation…

Example of where this is the case – France

– French Revolution and national consciousness
Two counter-examples – Germany and Italy
– Movements for unification in the 19th Century
And then 20th century ‘nation-building’
 What is a Nation?
natio – birth
nasci - to be born, natal, native
Principles?
– Race
– Language
– Religion
– Shared Interests
– Geography
– Spiritual Principle
 What is a Nation?
“Forgetting, and, I would even say, historical error are an
essential factor in the creation of a nation”

“The Nation is an everyday plebiscite”

Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?, 1882

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1991)

 Self-Determination
The idea that people should govern themselves;
therefore that a distinct group should have their own
state.
National self-determination is especially problematic –
the people decide, but who decides who the people
are?
Role of American war of independence (American
Revolution) and the French Revolution; then Peace
of Paris after World War I.
 The State
- The State has universal jurisdiction
- The State has compulsory jurisdiction
- Its ends are broader than those of other associations which
pursue ‘privately conceived ends’
- The State has legal supremacy or sovereignty over other
associations
- The State ranks as equal with other nation-states, being ‘self-
sovereign’

D. D. Raphael, The Problems of Political Philosophy

 Raphael’s Terms

- The State has universal jurisdiction [over all activity]

- The State has compulsory jurisdiction [not elective]
- Its ends are broader than those of other associations which
pursue ‘privately conceived ends’ [i.e. business, or trade
unions – though note the Marxist account]
- The State has legal supremacy or sovereignty over other
associations [provides framework within which they operate]
- The State ranks as equal with other nation-states, being ‘self-
sovereign’ [against terra nullius idea, but note colonialism as
counter-example]
Examples of states with more than one nation?

Examples of nations with more than one state?

Examples of nations without a state?

 What is the State?

The modern state is a set of institutions comprising

the legislature, executive, central and local
administration, judiciary, police and armed forces. Its
crucial characteristic is that it acts as the institutional
system of political domination and has a monopoly of
the legitimate use of violence.
 Max Weber
“The state is that human community, which within a
certain area or territory [Gebietes] – this ‘area’
belongs to the feature – has a successful monopoly
of legitimate physical violence”

Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by

Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich, New York:
Bedminster, 1968, p. 56
 Max Weber
The state is therefore defined by four features:-

1. human community
2. territory, area, region
3. monopoly of the means of physical violence
4. legitimacy (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational)
 Territory is…
A portion of geographical space under the jurisdiction
of certain people (Jean Gottman)
A portion of space occupied by a person, group, local
economy or state (John Agnew)
The geographical domain under the jurisdiction of a
political unit, esp. of a sovereign state (Collins English
Dictionary)

Much more complicated than this!

Territory is a relation that can be understood as an outcome of
territoriality
Territory is a bounded space, with the state as a “bordered
power-container” (Anthony Giddens)

Jonssen, Tagil and Tornqvist, Organising European Space: ‘a

territory is defined as a cohesive section of the earth’s
surface that is distinguished from its surroundings by a
boundary’ (2000, 3).
Anssi Paasi: ‘boundaries, along with their communication,
comprise the basic element in the construction of territories
and the practice of territoriality’ (2003, 112).
 Jean Gottman
Although its Latin root, terra, means ‘land or ‘earth’, the
word territory conveys the notion of an area around a
place; it connotes an organisation with an element of
centrality, which ought to be the authority exercising
sovereignty over the people occupying or using that
place and the space around it.

Jean Gottman, The Significance of Territory,

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973, p. 5.
 Edward Soja
Conventional Western perspectives on spatial organisation are
powerfully shaped by the concept of property, in which pieces of
territory are viewed as ‘commodities’ capable of being bought,
sold, or exchanged at the market place. Space is viewed as being
subdivided into components whose boundaries are ‘objectively’
determined through the mathematical and astronomically based
techniques of surveying and cartography.

Edward Soja, The Political Organisation of Space, Commission on

College Geography Resource Paper No 8, Washington:
Association of American Geographers, 1971, p. 9.
 David Storey
Most usually used in reference to the area of land
claimed by a country. However territories exist at a
variety of spatial scales from the global down to the
local. Territory refers to a portion of geographic space
which is claimed or occupied by a person or group of
persons or by an institution. It is, thus, an area of
‘bounded space’.

David Storey, Territory: The Claiming of Space, London:

Prentice Hall, 2001, p. 1.
 ‘The Territorial Trap’
John Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap: the Geographical Assumptions
of International Relations Theory’, Review of International
Political Economy, Vol 1, 1994, pp. 53-80.

-States as fixed units of sovereign space

-That there is a strict distinction between domestic and foreign
politics (between political science and international relations)
-That the state acts as a ‘container’ for society
 Land, Terrain, Territory
Land is a relation of property, a commodity to be bought, sold
and exchanged, a finite resource that is distributed, allocated
and owned; a political-economic question.

Terrain is a relation of power, with a heritage in geology and the

military; the control of which allows establishment and
maintenance of order. As a ‘field’, a site of work or battle,
terrain is a political-strategic question.

Territory must be approached in itself rather than through

territoriality; and in relation to land and terrain.
 Territory beyond Land and Terrain
1. The political-legal
Questions of power/authority; notions of sovereignty
• Disputes in the Middle Ages concerning temporal
and spiritual power
• Territorium as an object of political rule
• Jus territorialis
• Leibniz on the distinction between sovereignty and
majesty
• Modern notion of territorial integrity
 Territory beyond Land and Terrain
2. The political-technical
Techniques, based on calculation
• Advances in geometry (especially coordinate or
analytic geometry)
• Cartography and land-surveying
• Latitude, time and longitude
• Military technologies
 Territory
No longer merely the economic object of land; nor a
static terrain; but a vibrant entity, “within its
borders, with its specific qualities” (Foucault,
‘Governmentality’).

A rendering of the emergent concept of ‘space’ as a

political-legal category.
Territory as a political technology: techniques for
measuring land and controlling terrain…

Measure and control – the technical and the legal –

alongside land and terrain

Territory as a political question

– economic, strategic, legal, technical
 Africa
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2
012/sep/06/africa-map-separatist-movements-i
nteractive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/gall
ery/2012/oct/02/africa-maps-history
 France

“The modern conception of France as a tightly

bounded space within which the French state was
sovereign was opposed to an older conception of
power as varying bundles of privileges related to
different groups and territories”.

John Breuilly, “Sovereignty and Boundaries: Modern State Formation and

National Identity in Germany”, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histories
and European History, London: University College London Press, 1993, p.
108.
 Les limites naturelles
Cardinal Richelieu, Testament Politique – “les limites
naturelles” of France: Rhine, Alps, Pyrenees.
To promote security of territory (which might require
further conquest) and the consolidation of territory.
Could work both ways: France’s aim of a straight line
instead of the random South Netherlands border –
adjoining territories assimilated and absorbed; the
geographically isolated were lost.
Pursued following the French Revolution – attempt to get
rid of anomalous areas; consolidate France’s rule.
 Germany
Internal boundary disputes (whether part of a state
was in the confederation or not)
External boundaries more or less secure depending on
who that boundary was with:-
– France – fixed with political-administrative precision
– South – simply a line drawn on the map of Austria
– North – disputed province of Schleswig-Holstein, a
‘boundary’ dispute which arose via the question of
‘national sovereignty’.
Key Changes

1. Gain of Schelswig-
Holstein
2. Removal of Austrian
Power
3. Defeat of France and
incorporation of
Alsace-Lorraine
region
 Germany
Only with the Weimar Republic did Germany actually become a
state – under Bismarck it had been a Reich, an Empire.
“the tragedy was that this state was also the product of defeat –
its boundaries were seen as artificial and its constitution as
imposed”.
Breuilly, “Sovereignty and Boundaries”, p. 132.

So with Germany it was well into the nineteenth century before

some territorial issues were resolved, and its boundaries have
been redrawn since – crucially in 1919, 1945 and 1989.