Table of contents
Prologue (pp. 1 – 10)..............................................................................................................................6
Ratzel’s organism: promoting a new state..........................................................................................6
Mackinder’s heartland: saving an old empire and much more...........................................................6
Haushofer’s geopolitik: reviving a defeated state..............................................................................7
Hartshorne’s functionalism: creating a moribund backwater.............................................................7
Chapter 1 – A world-systems approach to political geography (pp. 11 – 47).........................................8
World-systems analysis......................................................................................................................8
Historical systems...........................................................................................................................8
The basic elements of the world-economy.....................................................................................9
Dimensions of a historical system....................................................................................................10
The spatial structure of the world-economy................................................................................10
The dynamics of the world-economy...........................................................................................11
A space-time matrix for political geography.................................................................................13
Power...............................................................................................................................................15
Types of power.............................................................................................................................15
Power geometry...........................................................................................................................15
The politics of geographical scale.................................................................................................16
Scope as geographical scale: where democracy is no solution.....................................................16
Ideology separating experience from reality................................................................................16
Power and politics in the world-economy........................................................................................17
The nature of power: individuals and institutions........................................................................17
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................19
Chapter 2 – Geopolitics rampant (pp. 49 – 89).....................................................................................21
Geopolitical codes and world orders................................................................................................21
Cycles of international politics......................................................................................................22
Cycles of world hegemony............................................................................................................22
British and American centuries: the paired Kondratieff model....................................................22
The geopolitics of the hegemonic cycle........................................................................................23
Cycles and geopolitical world orders............................................................................................23
Turmoil and stability: geopolitical codes, orders and transitions.....................................................24
The Cold War as a geopolitical transition and world order...........................................................24
Contemporary geopolitical transition and new world order............................................................25
The structural geography of the War on Terror............................................................................25
China as an emerging institutional power....................................................................................26
, New political geographies of war: networks and volume.............................................................26
Critical geopolitics: representations of the War on Terror...............................................................27
Captain America: defender of hegemony.....................................................................................27
Art and war: disruptions of geopolitical assumptions...................................................................28
Intimate geopolitics, feminist scholarship and the interrogation of security...................................28
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................29
Chapter 3 – Geography of imperialisms (pp. 91 – 128)........................................................................30
A world-systems interpretation of imperialism................................................................................30
Formal imperialism: the creation of empires....................................................................................31
The two cycles of formal imperialism...........................................................................................31
The geography of formal imperialism...........................................................................................32
Hegemony and the British Empire................................................................................................33
Informal imperialism: dominance without empire...........................................................................34
The international relations of informal imperialism.....................................................................35
Informal imperialism as a structural relation................................................................................36
‘Empire’ and infrastructure in the 21 st century.................................................................................38
One logic of contemporary imperialism.......................................................................................39
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................39
Chapter 4 - Territorial states (pp. 129-173)..........................................................................................40
The making of the world political map.............................................................................................40
The origin of territorial states: a topological model.....................................................................40
Territory and sovereignty.............................................................................................................41
Boundaries and capitals................................................................................................................44
Federalism and partition...............................................................................................................46
The nature of the states...................................................................................................................47
Looking one way only: theories of the state.................................................................................47
Looking both ways: theory of the states.......................................................................................51
Territorial states under conditions of globalization..........................................................................54
Cities and states: different morals and different spaces...............................................................55
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................56
Chapter 5 – Nation, nationalism and citizenship (pp. 175 – 215).........................................................57
The doctrine of nationalism..............................................................................................................57
Synthesis: the power of nationalism.................................................................................................57
Beyond the institutional vortex....................................................................................................58
Nation-state: the territorial link....................................................................................................58
The everydayness of nationalism..................................................................................................58
, Nationalist uses of history: the ‘modern Janus’................................................................................58
Poetic landscapes and golden ages...............................................................................................58
Nationalism as ‘double Janus’.......................................................................................................59
Nationalism in practice.....................................................................................................................59
Varieties of nationalism................................................................................................................59
The transformation of nationalism in the nineteenth century.....................................................60
State and nation since 1945.............................................................................................................61
Nation against state......................................................................................................................62
The rights of indigenous populations...........................................................................................62
Renegotiating the nation?................................................................................................................63
Is a new European identity emerging?.........................................................................................64
Competing collective commitments? Religion, ethnicity and nationalism...................................65
The gendered nation: feminist understandings of the nation......................................................65
Citizenship: multiscalar politics.........................................................................................................65
Types of citizenship: formal and substantive................................................................................66
Citizenship and the state..............................................................................................................66
Citizenship and scale.....................................................................................................................67
Citizenship in the capitalist world-economy: movement and morals...............................................67
Geopolitics of mobility..................................................................................................................67
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................68
Chapter 6 – Political geography of democracy (pp. 217 – 269)............................................................69
Where in the world is liberal democracy?........................................................................................69
Two interpretations of a relationship...........................................................................................69
A new geography of democratization?.........................................................................................69
A world-systems interpretation of elections....................................................................................70
Liberal democracy and social democracy.....................................................................................70
Theoretical corollary: the paradox of democratization................................................................71
Electoral geography contrasts between core and periphery........................................................72
Liberal democracy in the core..........................................................................................................72
The dialects of electoral geography..............................................................................................72
The making of liberal democracies...............................................................................................76
Elections beyond the core................................................................................................................80
The politics of failure....................................................................................................................81
Social movements.............................................................................................................................82
Social movements and the geography of power..........................................................................83
Social movements and places.......................................................................................................83
, Social movements and scale.........................................................................................................84
Transnational social movements..................................................................................................84
Political geography of social movements......................................................................................84
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................84
Chapter 7 – Cities as localities (pp. 271 – 300).....................................................................................86
Cities making hegemonies................................................................................................................86
Holland’s cities and Dutch hegemony...........................................................................................86
Northern British cities and British hegemony (second)................................................................87
Manufacturing belt (plus California and Texas) cities and American hegemony..........................87
General remarks on the hegemonies............................................................................................88
Modern territorial states tame cities................................................................................................88
Genoa-Castile before Westphalia.................................................................................................88
Venice/Italy after Westphalia.......................................................................................................89
Salonica/Greece after Westphalia................................................................................................89
Using cities to make political globalizations.....................................................................................90
Inter-stateness: cities reaffirming Westphalia..............................................................................91
Supra-nationalism: cities in global governance.............................................................................91
Transnationalism: cities beyond political boundaries...................................................................92
Conclusions on all three types......................................................................................................92
Citizens and global terrorism............................................................................................................93
Urbicide: material and rhetorical destruction of localities...........................................................93
Targeting the ‘terrorist nest’.........................................................................................................94
Representing homeland localities.................................................................................................94
Challenges of the twenty-first century.............................................................................................95
Chapter summary.............................................................................................................................95
Chapter 8 – Place and identity politics (pp. 301 – 334).........................................................................97
Theorizing political action in places..................................................................................................97
Structuration theory.....................................................................................................................97
Structural definitions of place.......................................................................................................98
Modernity and the politics of identity..............................................................................................98
Hegemony and modernity............................................................................................................98
Identity politics and the institutions of the capitalist world-economy...........................................100
Fourteen political geographies...................................................................................................100
Politics between institutions.......................................................................................................101
Place-space tensions.......................................................................................................................105
Chapter summary...........................................................................................................................105
,Epilogue: A political geography framework for understanding our twenty-first-century world.........106
The key concepts of our political geography..................................................................................106
Scale as political product and political arena..................................................................................106
Networks and the capitalist world-economy..................................................................................106
The temporal-spatial context of political action.............................................................................107
Corporate globalization..................................................................................................................107
War as a systemic phenomenon.....................................................................................................107
Climate change: the “ultimate” place-space tension......................................................................107
The final words: welcome to political geography...........................................................................108
Glossary of words not defined in this summary but mentioned in the book......................................109
,Prologue (pp. 1 – 10)
Subchapters that I considered irrelevant for the course are left out.
Ratzel’s organism: promoting a new state
Friedrich Ratzel is commonly accepted as the ‘father’ of political geography
Organic theory of state: nations1 in the world political environment have to find a way to survive and
prosper. Only the fittest will survive.
Seven laws of the spatial growth of states2
- 4: States naturally grow as the culture of society becomes more ‘advanced’ → states can
never be bounded by lines. A state’s territory at any point in time is always only a transitional
stage of rest for the fundamentally mobile organism until cultural development ends.
Two contests for the process of land-greed:
- Colonial expansion = European states expand at the expense of ‘less-civilized’ peoples as a
natural expression of their own cultural superiority.
- Crowded Europe = the world political map continues to be dynamic to accommodate the rise
of new great nations.
International peace regimes were built on the basis of sovereignty3 and the inviolability of state
boundaries so that the world political map is more stable than transient.
Mackinder’s heartland: saving an old empire and much more
Halford Mackinder is the ‘father’ of British geography.
He thought that he had discovered potential, fatal weaknesses in its geography.
He proposed a world model of political order based upon the worldwide distribution of land and sea
in relation to available transport technology. He identified a ‘pivot area’ as a ‘natural seat of power’
consisting of central Siberia north of the central Asian mountains beyond Britain’s ‘gunboat
diplomacy’ (= military reach). Land-based power could be fully mobilized by railways. Incursions by
states that dominated the pivot area into zones dominated by naval powers would become relatively
easier than incursions from naval powers in the direction of the pivot area. The road to world
dominance then opens up for the political power that dominates the pivot area, which were the
Russians at that time. Mackinder feared a Russian-German alliance dominating a slightly larger area
(= Heartland).
1
Nation = a group of persons who believe that they consist of a single ‘people’ based upon historical and
cultural criteria and therefore should have their own sovereign state.
2
State = defined by their possession of sovereignty over a territory and its people, states are the primary
political units of the modern world and together constitute the inter-state system.
3
Sovereignty = the ultimate power of the state, the legal source of its unique right to physical coercion within
its territory. Sovereignty is not just proclaimed; it has to be recognized by other members of the inter-state
system.
,The success of the USSR in WW24 and its expansion of power 5 encompassed the Heartland, as
Mackinder feared. In the Cold War6, Mackinder’s model was used to guide to the British Empire’s
survival. The UK failed.
Haushofer’s geopolitik: reviving a defeated state
Karl Haushofer incorporated Mackinder and Ratzel’s ideas to analyze and describe the German
position (friends & foes) and justified territorial expansion. He maintained and developed a German
interest in the colonial world.
He divided the world into three horizontal environmental zones called pan-regions and thereby
encompassed the whole range of Earth’s natural resources in each pan-region. Since every pan-
region could be economically self-sufficient, there would be no resource wars.
To realize this, empires7 of the old imperialists had to be swept away.
Haushofer’s ideas were used by Hitler, so he became known as Hitler’s Geographer in America.
Pan-region = a large division of the world, relatively self-sufficient and under one dominant state.
Hartshorne’s functionalism: creating a moribund backwater
Richard Hartshorne was the major figure in the building of political geography. He took the
functionalism approach.
Functionalism is an argument that you can understand an institution through analysis of what it
does, as in functional theories of the state.
His unit for study was the territorial state and its spatial integration was deemed to be the primary
function of any state. The success of a state was the result of two sets of forces:
- Centrifugal (pulled the state apart). These processes contribute to the disintegration of the
state.
- Centripetal (kept the state together). These processes contribute to the integration of the
state.
It is the balance between these forces that determines a state’s long-term viability.
The general problem with functionalism is that there is a conservative8 bias toward treating the
status quo as a given so that conflict is marginalized.
For Hartshorne, there are external relations of states but these are reduced to the boundary and
strategic issues facing individual states. Further, he explicitly leaves out vertical (social) differences
within states to focus on horizontal (spatial) differences thereby eliminating most of the domestic
politics that occurs in all states across the world.
4
WW2 = a major war (1939-1945) pitting Germany, Italy and Japan against Britain, France, The Soviet Union
and the United States.
5
Power = the ability to be successful in a conflict; this may be overt through force or the threat of force, or
covert through non-decision making or structural advantage.
6
The Cold War was a geopolitical world order that lasted from 1946 to 1989. It pitted the communist world led
by the Soviet Union against the United States and its allies.
7
Empire = A political organization comprising several parts, one of which is the center of power to which the
rest are subordinate.
8
Conservative = originally a political ideology against social change, now a general term for right-wing politics.
,Chapter 1 – A world-systems approach to political
geography (pp. 11 – 47)
World-systems analysis
World systems analysis9 is a theory formed by Wallerstein, which can be used for approaching
political geography. It is about how we conceptualize change. The world systems approach includes
both longue durée and development of underdevelopment10. It is characterized by the single-society
assumption.
- Longue durée by Ferdinand Braudel represents the long-term materialist stability underlying
political volatility (=wisselvalligheid). It facilitates the contextualization of events in long-term
historical processes. Ferdinand Braudel’s concept of the gradual change through the day-to-
day activities by which social systems are continually being reproduced.
- Frank’s development critique = development of underdevelopment = poorer countries are
impoverished to enable a few countries to get richer.
- The single-society assumption is the direction that the world-systems analysis uses. It is the
current capitalist world-economy11. Looks at the world as a whole. Opposes the multiple-
society assumption.
o The multiple-society assumption includes having to deal with over 200 different
societies (states), it is generally accepted by orthodox social sciences. This is instead
of looking at the world as a whole.
Historical systems
Systems of change
Historical systems can be classified into three major types of entity (system of change), defined by
their mode of production12.
- Mini-system13 reciprocal-lineage mode of production
o Limited specialization of tasks
Production = hunting, gathering, rudimentary agriculture
Exchange = reciprocal between producers
Main organizational principle = age, gender
o Exists for a few generations
- World-empire14 redistributive-tributary mode of production
o Many political forms
o Large group of agricultural producers generate a surplus which allows development
of non-agricultural producers
9
World-systems analysis = the study of historical systems, especially the modern world-system or capitalist
world-system.
10
Development of underdevelopment = the economic processes that occur in the periphery of the world-
economy that are the opposite of the development which occurs in the core. The phrase was coined by Gunder
Frank of the Dependency School of Development to show why poor countries were failing to catch up
economically.
11
The capitalist world-economy is the modern world-system based upon ceaseless capital accumulation.
12
Mode of production = in world-systems analysis, the overall organization of the material processes in a
historical system, including production, distribution and consumption.
13
Mini-systems = small-scale historical societies that no longer exist and that were based upon a reciprocal-
lineage mode of production.
14
World-empire = a form of world-system based upon a redistributive-tributary mode of production (a small
military-bureaucratic ruling class exploiting a large class of agricultural producers).
, → leads to a military-bureaucratic ruling class
- World-economy15 capitalist mode of production
o Criterion for production = profitability
o Basic drive = accumulation of surplus as capital
o No overarching political structure
o Competition controlled by market
By 1557, the European world-economy had arrived, over time it eliminated all remaining mini-
systems and world-empires to become truly global by 1900.
Four fundamental types of change:
1. Transition → one system evolves into another
2. Transformation → systems are conquered and thereafter reorganized
3. Discontinuity → systems at approximately the same location and the same mode of
production → one breaks down and a new one constitutes
4. Continuities → all systems are dynamic and continually changing. Types of change:
a. Linear
b. Cyclical
The error of developmentalism
Linear change = linear sequence of stages through which societies are expected to travel. Often used
in developmentalism. These modes explore societies as autonomous objects that do not have
influence from the outside world. Models following a linear sequence of stages expose the
weaknesses of the multiple-society assumption.
This highlights Frank’s development of underdevelopment, as rich and poor are part of one system
and they are experiencing different processes within that system, they cannot be seen as
autonomous objects.
The error of developmentalism is the idea that all countries follow the same path of development.
The basic elements of the world-economy
Basic elements of our historical system (Wallerstein):
- A single world market
o Capitalist
Products are commodities
Economic competition
- A multiple-state system
o Competitive state system in which a variety of ‘balance of power16’ situations may
prevail.
o International politics.
- A three-tier structure
o Material basis for analyzing the ‘persistent differences’ in wealth and power.
15
World-economy = A form of world-system based upon the capitalist mode of production (ceaseless capital
accumulation).
16
Balance of power is a theory of political stability based upon an even distribution of power between the
leading states.
, o The exploitative processes that work through the world-economy always operate in a
three-tier format. In any situation of inequality, three-tiers of interaction are more
stable than two-tiers of confrontation.
Dimensions of a historical system
The spatial structure of the world-economy
The geographical extent of the system
Wallerstein delimited the initial European world-system as consisting of Western Europe, Eastern
Europe and those parts of South and Central America under Iberian control. The rest was an external
arena. Everything happening in the external arena had little influence on the world-system and the
origin of the world-economy.
The European world-economy expanded by amongst others:
- Plunder → new settlements, old societies destroyed
- Old societies reoriented to have a purpose in the world economy, through:
o Political control;
o Opening up an arena to market forces.
Eventually the external arena was eliminated.
The concepts of core and periphery
Peripheralization: new areas did not join the world-economy as ‘equal partners’ with existing
members, but they joined as the periphery (= poor lands).
Periphery = characterized by peripheral processes consisting of relatively low-wage, low-tech
production.
Core = rich parts of the world in North America, Western Europe, and Pacific Asia. Core is one of the
three major zones of the world-economy (periphery & semi-periphery) in world-systems analysis. It is
characterized by core processes involving relatively high-wage, high-tech production.
There are core and periphery processes that structure space so that at any point in time one or other
of the two processes predominates. These processes generate uneven economic development.
Core processes:
- High wages
- Advanced technology
- Diversified production mix
Periphery processes:
- Low wages
- Rudimentary technology
- Simple production mix
The outcomes of countries do not depend on the type of product but rather on social relations.
Not all zones are easily designated as primarily core or periphery in nature.
