A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium

PREFACE

Years ago one of my Cornell students told me, I am not interested in theories; I am interested in learning how the world works. My answer to how the world works is this: Think of the world as regions organized by America’s imperium. Although a growing number of scholars see merit in region-focused work, this is still not the way students are taught in the United States. The typical international relations textbook bypasses regional considerations in favor of extended discussions of analytical frameworks and abstract models.¹ Cross-regional comparisons are also very rare in the most widely used texts in comparative politics.² Regional comparison, linked to an analysis of the global power and processes that connect them, offers a promising way to understand how the world works.

Nuance is an important trait that distinguishes a regional perspective from those who focus on states and empires, markets and globalization, civilizations and world culture. The insights of proponents of state power and the significance of empire for security issues are limited because they belittle new forces that undercut the power of their favored constructs. The analyses of advocates of market efficiency or the transformative power of globalization on socioeconomic issues are wanting because they neglect the relevance of traditional forms of domination. Analyses of civilizations and culture in world politics also often lack nuance. Many of them create reifications to which they attribute a false sense of geographic coherence and actorhood. Alternatively, others often reduce world culture to a script that is decoupled from purposeful human action. This book articulates a regional perspective that covers security, economic, and cultural domains, one that remains sensitive to how cross-cutting forces are experienced and deployed in different contexts.

In writing this book I have unavoidably become entangled with long-standing discussions about the role of area studies in the American social sciences.³ The political and intellectual impetus for area studies came in the aftermath of World War II. A Social Science Research Council report advocated area studies as the most effective way for achieving three objectives: extending the relevance of the humanities in a rapidly changing world; linking the humanities to the social sciences; and safeguarding the U.S. national interest in what was rapidly becoming a global confrontation with communism.⁴ After the end of the cold war, the salience of foreign-language training receded in an era of shrinking budgets, the spreading of English as a lingua franca in an era of globalization, and the growing appeal of mathematics and statistics as putatively better and cheaper avenues toward knowledge about the world. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, glaring U.S. weaknesses in Arabic-language competence and knowledge of Islam and the Middle East, both in government and in the academy, have reshaped the debate about area studies once again.

Of particular relevance to this book is the emergence of an eclectic body of area-based knowledge⁵ that draws on the insights of both the social sciences and the humanities. Advances in the theories and methods of the social sciences have proved to be extremely helpful for a deeper understanding of global affairs—as long as these advances are not severed from the insights of history and the humanities. When traditional academic disciplines focus exclusively on abstract concepts there is only a superficial or speculative connection to the variegated experiences of various parts of the world. Knowledge of history, language, and place remains indispensable for an analysis of world affairs. Exclusive specialization in a particular area, however, misses connections between developments in different parts of the world. Social scientific literacy thus is now necessary in a specific area of the world and in at least one specific social science discipline.

Because it is inherently multidisciplinary, area-based knowledge is criticized from two perspectives: disciplinary-based, scientific critics who value nomothetic approaches more than contextualization; and cultural critics who work from the perspective of the humanities. From a rationalist perspective Robert Bates insisted that the use of sophisticated research designs and the rigorous testing of alternative explanations of different outcomes would make area studies, at best, a handmaiden of social scientific approaches.⁶ Critics pointed to Bates’s ideological preconceptions and excessive ambition.⁷ Yet in a more tempered restatement of his position and in implementing his research program, Bates and his collaborators illustrate the centrality of area-based knowledge.⁸ Cultural critics attack area studies from a cultural-humanistic, and at times a postmodern, stance.⁹ In taking the contemporary nation-state as its unit of analysis, area studies naturalize and reify the identity of units that have been far from stable. Yet the charge is directed at the wrong target: area-based knowledge has been at the forefront of analyzing transnational relations, the global operation of nongovernmental organizations, and social movements spanning national borders.

Area-based knowledge offers to its scientific and cultural critics an opportunity to experiment with the unavoidable shortcomings that mark their favored approaches. In a welcome change from the scholarship of the 1960s, academic rationalists now are occasionally willing to concede the limits that a foundational assumption imposes on their insights: in playing the game of politics, participants share relevant (common) knowledge. Even though they are inflected by the cultural turn, area studies at times experiment with contingent generalizations that go beyond specific locales. Area-based knowledge is a verdant middle ground, drawing its water from different sources.

In writing this book I have come to appreciate the virtues of eclecticism. The promise of new insights is sustained by an intellectual tension between different approaches. In the 1960s, for example, a chasm divided proponents of traditional area studies from advocates of modern behavioralism. Disagreement typically centered on the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of analysis. Renewed debate in the 1990s focused instead on the proper calibration of social science and area studies approaches that creates the stock of area-based knowledge. Empirical anomalies give credence to the strategy of relying on complementary sources of insight. For example, between the 1960s and the 1990s East Asian states produced noteworthy successes in combining rapid economic growth with development, defying many of the expectations derived from the putatively universal model of neoclassical economics.¹⁰ At the same time, the growth of East Asian welfare societies has been defined by demographic, economic, and political factors that are not simply area bound. Those who construct abstract theories dream of a future in which polities all over the world are alike; academics in the field of area studies dream of a past when each locale in the world was largely isolated.¹¹ Area-based knowledge is multidisciplinary, and those in the field readily accept both general and area-specific insights, as I do in this book.

This project started in the late 1980s with a set of memoranda eventually yielding the outline of a book that Bruce Cumings, Peter Evans, and I were planning to write under the auspices of the Committee on States and Social Structures of the Social Science Research Council. We were eager to learn more about types of states in different world regions. That project never materialized, as the end of the cold war sent us off in different directions. In the mid 1990s I organized two collaborative projects that looked at Germany in Europe as well as at Japan and Asia.¹² In the end, so many interesting questions were left unasked and unanswered that I decided to write my own book. My longtime editor and friend Roger Haydon insisted from the outset that the United States had to be a central part of that book. In principle, I agreed. But learning about Asia and Europe was for me of greater intellectual interest than searching for a simple American hook on which to hang my regional stories. Reflecting on the meaning of 9/11 made me think harder about the nature of American power and search out deeper connections linking the United States with different world regions.

In writing this book I have benefited greatly from fellowships at several institutions, supporting my research and offering that most precious commodity, uninterrupted time devoted to thinking and writing. An Abe Fellowship (1998–2000) permitted me to travel in Asia and Europe to collect data and interview officials. A fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (1997–98), permitted me to conceptualize cross- and interregional comparisons and to write early drafts of some of the empirical cases. A fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation (2001–2) gave me a chance to develop my argument about the nature of the American imperium and its relation to world regions. I put the finishing touches on this book while a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2004–5). Apart from the generous financial support that I have received, I have benefited enormously from my many talks with an outstanding group of scholars. Having discussions with people doing cutting-edge scholarship in diverse fields was a source of unmitigated intellectual pleasure. They reminded me that learning more goes hand in hand with knowing less.

Between these oases I taught at Cornell University, a wonderful home for my entire academic career. Surrounded by challenging students and colleagues I was always kept on my toes and too often away from this manuscript.

I have incurred a large number of personal debts in accumulating, sifting through, and checking a massive amount of research material. For their wonderful research assistance with various parts of this project, extending in some cases over a period of years, I thank some very bright, hard-working, and energetic Cornell students: Brian Bow, Rachel Gerber, Richard Hedge, Reyko Huang, Angela Kim, Ulrich Krotz, Daniel Levin, Kevin Strompf, and, at the Russell Sage Foundation, Becky Verreau.

I have been invited to give so many lectures and seminars in the United States, Asia, and Europe on different parts of this project that there is no room to list them. Yet I do want to acknowledge how important the criticisms and suggestions of various audiences have been in shaping my thinking. Trying out inchoate ideas in front of different audiences, and in different formats, was indispensable in helping me develop clearer arguments. I thank all those who invited me, and those who came to listen and argue, for giving me the opportunity to become less muddled.

I single out for special thanks groups of doctoral students and faculty members who took the time to discuss a full draft of the book manuscript at special meetings convened at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (May 2003), the Cornell Government Department (September 2003), Dartmouth College (January 2004), the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto (February 2004), and the Australian National University (March 2004). Exploiting intellectual opportunities inside and outside the United States allowed me to become more self-conscious about the bias that comes from thinking about the world from an American vantage point. These discussions, which varied in length from half a day to two full days, confirmed my expectation that my arguments resonate differently in different parts of the world. Workshops held in Dartmouth and Ithaca, for example, had no problem with the opening sentence of a draft chapter claiming that the United States played the central role in world politics. By insisting that I should rephrase that sentence to read that the United States played a central role in world politics, my hosts in Berlin, Toronto, and Canberra suggested a small modification with large implications. This is a telling illustration of the very noticeable differences in intellectual sensibilities and political intuitions that distinguish the work of scholars in different parts of the world. Intensive discussions of my manuscript and the different reactions it provoked are a unique and unforgettable intellectual experience. Equally important, they helped me to nail down the final form of the book’s core arguments.

I gained much from the criticisms and suggestions of experts who were kind enough to comment on individual chapters: Peter Andreas, Giovanni Arrighi, Brett de Bary, John Borneman, Dominic Boyer, Victor Cha, Peter Evans, Richard Friman, Gregory Fry, Oka Fukuroi, Albrecht Funk, James Goldgeier, Marie Gottschalk, Chris Hemmer, Leonard Hochberg, Stephanie Hofmann, Aida Hozic, Kathryn Ibata, Mizuko Ito, Alastair Johnston, Atul Kohli, Ulrich Krotz, David Leheny, Wolf Lepenies, David Levi-Faur, Andrei Markovits, John Matthews, Gil Merom, Andrew Moravcsik, Jacinta O’Hagan, John Ravenhill, Richard Samuels, Fred Schodt, Mark Selden, Saya Shiraishi, Tetsuya Tanami, Jun Wada, and Susumu Yamakage. Each of these scholars corrected mistakes and, based on their reading of one part, often shared with me shrewd insights about the whole.

Central to the work of any scholar is getting a full reading of one’s work, tough and honest criticism, and suggestions on how to improve a flawed product. I acknowledge my debt here with gratitude. I benefited enormously from the unfailing generosity, acute insights, and trenchant criticisms of Rawi Abdelal, Allen Carlson, Tom Christensen, Matthew Evangelista, Peter Gourevitch, Derek Hall, Peter Hall, Wade Jacoby, Mary Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, Jonathan Kirshner, David Laitin, Henry Nau, Lou Pauly, T. J. Pempel, Janice Stein, Sidney Tarrow, Michael Zürn, and two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press.

My prose was much improved by Sarah Tarrow and, subsequently, by John Raymond. But my writing owes everything to Roger Haydon’s incomparable mastery. Roger’s editorial skills are legendary among scholars involved in academic publishing. I feel deeply grateful for the care with which he edited this book.

I dedicate this book to Mary, Tai, and Suzanne—a trinity that centers my life.

PETER J. KATZENSTEIN

Ithaca, New York

1. E.g., Gordon et al. 2002.

2. Huber 2003.

3. The following is adapted from Katzenstein 2001, 2002a. See also Rudolph forthcoming; Szanton 2003; Roundtable 2002; Biddle 2002, 67–86; Hall and Tarrow 1998.

4. Hall 1948; Rafael 1994, 92–98.

5. Prewitt 1996a, 1996b, and 2002.

6. Bates 1996.

7. Johnson 1997; Elster 2000.

8. Bates 1997, 1998.

9. E.g., Rafael 1994.

10. Kang 2003–4, 166–68.

11. Kasza forthcoming.

12. Katzenstein 1997d. Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997a.

CHAPTER ONE

American Power in World Politics

How should we think about world politics after the end of the cold war, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, after the September 11 attacks, with the onset of the war on terror? My answer is simple: ours is a world of regions, embedded deeply in an American imperium. A generation ago, Hedley Bull imagined a world without the cold war as a more regionalized world system.¹ What was pure speculation then is now becoming a reality.

In support of this answer, and with specific attention to Asia and Europe, I develop a four-part argument. First, through actions that mix its territorial and nonterritorial powers, the American imperium has been having a profound effect on regions. Second, these regions differ in their institutional form, type of identity, and internal structure. Some regions, such as Asia and Europe, have core regional states, in these cases Japan and Germany, that over decades have acted as supporters of American power and purpose. Other regions, such as Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, lack such intermediaries connecting them with the United States. Third, spurred by U.S. policies that reflect its nonterritorial and territorial powers, complementary processes of globalization and internationalization are making this a world of porous regions. Its dynamics differ dramatically from those of the closed regions of the past. Finally, regional porousness is enhanced politically by vertical relations that link core regional states to America, regions to subregions, and America to regions. The American imperium is not only an actor that shapes the world. It is also a system that reshapes America.

This argument alters our understanding of the American imperium, Europe, Asia, and the connections among them. Imperium and region have been strong pillars for democracy and the welfare state in Europe, and for economic growth and democratization in Asia. They impose a desirable limitation on America’s expansive dynamism, rooted in a comfortable coexistence of polities that the United States helped create rather than the risky confrontation with powerful adversaries that it seeks to contain or defeat. Recognition of the magnitude and character of American power, and of its limitations, is as necessary in the United States as it is in Europe and Asia. For the compatibility between imperium and region provides a modicum of political order and a loose sense of shared moral purpose that permits political struggles over well-being and justice to be settled in national and local politics.

America and Regions

Imperium is a concept I use for analytical rather than historical reasons. Its meaning has shifted historically. As Roland Axtmann notes, in ancient Rome, imperium referred to nonterritorial power. By the time of Augustus, imperium had come to be understood as power exercised over Rome’s newly acquired lands.² This is how I use the concept here: the conjoining of power that has both territorial and nonterritorial dimensions.

Regions have both material and symbolic dimensions, and we can trace them in patterns of behavioral interdependence and political practice.³ Regions reflect the power and purpose of states. They are made porous by two sets of factors: the fusion of global and international processes, and a variety of relations that link them to political entities operating outside and within regions. I think about globalization as resulting from processes that emanate from the world system in which regions are embedded. Global processes transform states and the relations between them. And I talk about internationalization as resulting from processes that are shaped by the system of states that make up different regions. International processes flow across existing state borders that are more or less open. Finally, regions are also made porous by links to the American imperium, to core regional states as well as to smaller state and nonstate actors in the regions, and to subnational areas.

American Imperium

Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia offer prime vantage points for exploring how regions operate in the American imperium. In the interest of containing the Soviet Union and preventing future wars through liberalizing the world economy, U.S. postwar policy anchored Germany and Japan securely in the American imperium. Other world regions mattered less. In both South Asia and Africa, for example, the United States failed to establish close partnerships with key regional states. In South Asia, containment of Soviet influence in Afghanistan drove U.S. policy to engage Pakistan, especially in the 1980s. The inevitable result was poor relations with India. In Africa, no core state emerged as a possible regional leader. Apartheid prevented South Africa from translating its economic and military strength into regional leadership. Nigeria remained hobbled by civil war, military rule, and economic failure.

In sharp contrast, Germany’s and Japan’s unconditional surrender and occupation by the United States created two client states that eventually rose to become core regional powers. Although it is of vital interest to the United States, the Middle East resembles South Asia and Africa in lacking regional core states that are both consistent supporters of the United States and central to regional politics. In the Middle East, Saudi oil and Israeli security have engaged vital U.S. interests. Yet no porous regionalism has emerged. The overwhelming importance of territory, claimed by three monotheistic religions, has voided the nonterritorial dimensions of American power. The political values of the Saudi regime are antithetical to America’s; and Israel’s central position in American domestic politics has stopped the United States, in the eyes of Arab states, from curtailing Israeli power. This is in sharp contrast to the political restraints that NATO, the U.S.-Japan security treaty, and international economic institutions imposed on Germany and Japan, thereby reassuring their nervous neighbors.

The United States has had vital interests in the Americas for much longer than in the Middle East. Yet here too no viable regional intermediary state or group of states has emerged. In its own backyard American power and influence has been too direct and too strong. Thus although the United States has had strong strategic interests in these four areas—the Americas and the Middle East, South Asia and Africa—none has developed stable regional intermediaries. Even though no one region defines the norm against which we can measure the performance of any other, we can already state two preliminary conclusions. Regional intermediaries are relatively rare; and so are porous regions.

In its decisive victories over fascism in World War II and over communism in the cold war, the United States has demonstrated the entwining of its political, military, economic, and ideological powers, the foundations of its preeminence in world politics.⁴ The source of American strength is reflected in the character of the American imperium, which combines two different types of power. Territorial power was at the center of the old land and maritime empires that collapsed at the end of the three great wars of the twentieth century. The far-flung network of U.S. bases that encircled the Soviet Union during the cold war, and that has spread greatly after the attacks of September 11, points to the territorial dimension of the American imperium. According to statistics released by the Department of Defense, in September 2001 the United States deployed a quarter of a million military personnel in 153 countries. Adding the civilian employees and dependents doubles that figure to more than half a million. The United States had significant military bases in thirty-eight countries.⁵ The nonterritorial dimension of American power is analyzed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who argue that Empire is not a weak echo of modern imperialism but a fundamentally new form of rule.⁶ In this view, there exist political logics in world politics that operate at levels other than that of the traditional nation-state. Nonterritorial politics is characterized by a fluid instability that manifests itself in hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, multiple exchanges, and the production of new forms of authority and coercion across boundaries. Territorial empire and nonterritorial Empire are analytical opposites or ideal types.

In the twentieth century, powerful jolts have toppled territorial empires—the Habsburg and Ottoman empires at the end of World War I, the European empires after World War II, the Soviet empire at the end of the cold war. Over time, the social and political mobilization of opponents of territorial rule in the colonies simply outstripped advances in the technologies of coercion. Collapse came in part because these empires had been undermined gradually from within after they had lost control of vital sources of nonterritorial power. The dynastic and religious affiliations that the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires commanded at the beginning of the twentieth century constituted a small and dwindling stock of nonterritorial power. In the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese empires, the erosion of their nonterritorial power accelerated greatly during World War II, as nationalist independence movements became powerful political forces. And by 1989, the Soviet Union and affiliated Communist parties in Eastern Europe had used up all of the ideological capital they had gathered in 1945 as the result of a heroic and victorious war waged against German fascism.

Nonterritorial power was also central to the British Empire. Britain’s influence stretched beyond the formal territorial control of colonies. Its imperialism of free trade⁷ extended far beyond the territorial borders of British colonies, deep into the Egyptian part of the Ottoman empire and into vast stretches of China. The absence of local lords in Argentina did not stop Britain from implanting itself deeply in that rich country. A comparable tradition marks the American imperium. At the turn of the last century, free trade and informal rule over vital markets were both ideologically more agreeable, and economically more efficient, than the costly acquisition and maintenance of colonial regimes. Open door became the principle that drove U.S. expansion, and for U.S. policymakers the informal penetration of foreign societies and control over foreign markets were the most highly valued manifestation of the energizing impulse that America’s liberal brand of capitalism was destined to bring to the world. After 1945, the growth of American multinational corporations supported both liberal arguments that national sovereignty was at bay and realist ones that a political storm was brewing over multinational corporations.⁸ Informed by the experience of the last three decades, theories of globalization now point to the decline of classical notions of sovereignty and the rise of alternative forms of governance.

Reflecting the dual sources of its power, the American imperium shares important traits with both the British empire, which it supplanted in 1945–47, and the Soviet empire, with which it competed thereafter. Even more central than for Britain is the nonterritorial character of the American imperium; and as was true of the Soviet empire, the core of the American imperium resembled a territorial and ideological bloc. But the differences are more noteworthy than the similarities.⁹ Compared to these two empires, the American imperium has greater scope and greater depth. Despite direct or proxy expeditions to Cuba, the Horn of Africa, and Southeast Asia, the Soviet empire was largely limited to its border areas, whereas the American imperium stretches all over the world. Britain’s empire had been a coalition of peripheries, for Britain’s presence was weak on the European continent, the center of great power politics. In sharp contrast, after the conquest of the fascist powers in World War II, the American imperium has ruled from the center. Only two of the world’s six power centers (Russia and China) lie outside the American imperium; four are fully integrated (the United States, Britain, Western Europe including Germany, and East Asia including Japan). In contrast to the British empire, which lasted for centuries, the American imperium has existed only since the end of the nineteenth century. There is not yet much evidence suggesting that the American imperium is beginning to weaken—unless the fearful triumphalism that has gripped the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the fiscal recklessness of President George W. Bush’s administration turn out to be early signs of U.S. decline.

In different political contexts, imperium designates both formal and informal systems of rule, and a mixture of hierarchical and egalitarian political relations. The American imperium is creating a world politics that is both enabling and constraining. The relative importance of its territorial and nonterritorial power has waxed and waned, shaped by domestic political struggles between conflicting coalitions. Victory and defeat in these domestic struggles have affected the reactions of U.S. foreign policy to porous regions in world politics.

Issues of terminology are confounding for any analysis of the U.S. role in twentieth-century world politics.¹⁰ Some use the concept of empire as a value-neutral description of a hierarchical political relation. Others rely on the term to describe a particular period in history when a powerful country formally or informally controlled the internal and external affairs of another country, as in the age of imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Still others choose special visual markers, such as quotation marks placed around the concept empire,¹¹ or qualifying adjectives, as in analog of empire or quasi-empire.¹² Or they take recourse to the concept of hegemony, often glossing over the difference between the material, territorial, actor-centric, and the symbolic, nonterritorial, and systemic dimensions of power. That hegemony, Bruce Cumings writes, is least understood at its own point of origin—what I call here the American imperium.¹³

Regions

What is a region?¹⁴ Broadly speaking there exist three different approaches to defining regions: materialist, classical theories of geopolitics; ideational, critical theories of geography; and behavioral theories. I believe that materialist and ideational theories contain important, partial insights that I merge in a perspective of regional orders, defined by their distinctive institutional forms, which both alter and are altered by behavior or political practice.

In different national and political contexts, all of the materialist theorists of geopolitics believed that interstate war over territory was inevitable.¹⁵ Some make a fundamental distinction between the strategic imperatives governing land and sea power. For Alfred Thayer Mahan, for example, naval power was the key to America’s future rise to the status of a great power. Russia was accumulating enormous defensive power through its expansion into Asia during the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The lack of access to warm-water ports demonstrated, at least in the eyes of maritime powers, a weakness of Russia’s power. Yet this very lack of access may have concentrated Russian attention and resources on territorial expansion to the east. While naval powers like Britain or the United States could not conquer the inner core of the Russian empire, they could contain Russia along its periphery. Mahan’s analysis foreshadowed Hal-ford McKinder’s notion of a pivot of history and of Nicholas Spykman’s analysis of a Eurasian heartland and its maritime rimland. For Mahan a Russian pivot of history might lead to the domination of Europe, Asia, and Africa, a connected World Island. For Spykman Russian control over the lands located at the margin of Eurasia—Western Europe and East Asia—might lead to global domination. Britain and the United States could either balance or fragment this control, most plausibly at the peripheries. In brief, space is intimately tied to strategy and the dynamics of power competition.

Other theorists of geopolitics focus exclusively on territoriality. Before World War II Karl Haushofer saw three rising powers—the United States, Germany, and Japan—challenging British world hegemony. Each was emerging as the dominant power in its sphere of influence, the United States in Latin America, Germany in Europe and by extension Africa and the Middle East, and Japan in the western Pacific. For Haushofer these emerging pan-regions were becoming the essential building blocs of world politics. After the end of World War II, with Germany and Japan defeated, progressive British theorists continued thinking in terms of a tripolar geopolitics.¹⁷ Each of the three main victors of the war, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, would dominate specific world regions. In his novel 1984, George Orwell gave a chilling description of this world of regional blocs, marked by total mobilization and perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

Events turned out differently. Bipolarity prevailed over tripolarity, in line with the analysis of American geostrategists. Western Europe and East Asia, the rimlands of Eurasia, were strategic regions of overwhelming importance for the United States, as George Kennan famously argued in 1947.¹⁸ Classical geopolitical analysis was revived—with a twist. In the implementation of America’s new cold war strategy, the meaning of the term containment was no longer restricted to geography. Instead it became a label for protecting the religious and civilizational values of an entire way of life.

Because of its entanglement with the Nazi concept of Lebensraum or living space, classical geopolitics was largely banished from the social and policy sciences after 1945. Yet starting in the late 1970s, and especially since the end of the cold war, it has regained credence in France, Germany, and other European countries.¹⁹ In the 1980s, for example, a pitched battle among German historians focused on Germany’s geographically central position (Mittellage). Conservatives saw it as a curse that had led Germany astray. Liberals rejected the reductionism of this geopolitical argument and insisted on the social and political causes of German exceptionalism. Despite the acrimony of the debate about the German past, both groups agreed that the cold war had given West Germany the opportunity to establish firm and durable Western ties. Historical hindsight suggests that Germany’s territorial partition and NATO’s security guarantee permitted West Germany to develop close and cordial ties with the dominant Atlantic powers—the United States, Britain, and France.

After the end of the cold war geopolitics once again came into its own as pundits and political scientists tried to make sense of an entirely new and different world. John Mearsheimer offers a contemporary application of geopolitical reasoning. In his way of thinking, the stopping power of water makes global hegemony a goal that is virtually impossible to achieve for any state, including the United States. The principal impediment to world domination, Mearsheimer writes, is the difficulty of projecting power across the world’s oceans onto the territory of a rival great power.²⁰ In his view, insular states like the United States and Britain are no less ambitious or more prone to peace than others, but simply more constrained by geography. Playing the role of offshore balancer, they will intervene and then withdraw. Great powers can become regional hegemons at most, and while others have tried and failed, the United States in the Americas is the only regional hegemon in modern history.

Mearsheimer’s argument is rigorously reductionist and highly implausible in its elegant parsimony. Water is certainly an impediment to the projection of land power. But not every empire has been a land empire. The Mediterranean, for example, was not an impediment to perhaps the most important and longest-lasting empire in the West. Rome found it relatively easy to project its power overseas. Once it had conquered the entire littoral, the Mediterranean became a Roman lake.²¹ Furthermore, mountainous terrain can pose formidable obstacles to the geographic expansion of land power as Joshua Epstein showed with specific reference to a possible conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States in the Persian Gulf.²² Imperial Japan’s drive onto the Asian mainland in the 1930s and 1940s was not stopped by water, but rather was invited by the weakness of opposing states.²³ And what stopped the United States from conquering Canada and Mexico after 1850 was not water but something much more important in world politics: the forces of nationalism and social mobilization of the targets of imperial conquest.²⁴ Mearsheimer’s application of classical geopolitical reasoning bypasses critical factors: relative capabilities, costs and benefits of the control over territory, alliances, nationalism, institutions, and domestic ideologies.

In a similar fashion Zbigniew Brzezinski has built geopolitical reasoning into his analysis of the relations between American hegemony and Eurasia as the world’s geopolitically central continent.²⁵ While his analysis incorporates a liberal theory of America’s power assets, including its soft, cultural power, its most important contribution lies in its revisionist geopolitical argument. After the end of the cold war Brzezinski called for a French-German-Polish-Ukrainian alliance to balance Russian power in Europe, thus advocating a dramatic reversal from a maritime to a continental orientation of the European rimland. His inclusion of geopolitics matches the renewed popularity of geopolitical theory in Russian political debates. Once believing that Russia’s return to greatness was preordained by the laws of history, Russian nationalists, including such leading politicians as Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Gennady Ziuganov, now put their hope in geography—in space rather than in time. At the end of the Marxist or nationalist tunnel, it seems, there is always the promise of reassertion of Russian preeminence. Eurasianism, writes Charles Clover, has succeeded in reconciling the often contradictory philosophies of communism, religious orthodoxy, and nationalist fundamentalism. Eurasianism…has become an umbrella philosophy, absorbing all that is radical in the bubbling cauldron of post-Soviet political thought.²⁶

Such geographic umbrella philosophies illustrate the central point of ideational, critical theories of geography: regions are politically made.²⁷ This theory has different strands. Its political economy strand views regions as spatial manifestations of capitalist production processes that separate cores from peripheries; its cultural strand focuses on regions as collective symbols chosen by groups to dominate specific places in the natural world.

In the modern state system, John Ruggie argues, space is not given in nature. It is a social construct that people, somehow, invent.²⁸ From this perspective, the unquestioned stopping power of water in Mearsheimer’s argument becomes for Philip Steinberg the problematic object of analysis. Steinberg unravels the politics of different understandings of bodies of water: for example, a non-territorial ‘Indian Ocean’ construction in which the sea is understood as an asocial space between societies; a highly territorial ‘Micronesian’ construction in which the sea is perceived and managed as an extension of land-space; and a complex ‘Mediterranean’ construction in which the sea is defined as non-possessible but nonetheless a legitimate arena for expressing and contesting social power.²⁹ What is true for water is also true for land. Conflicts over sacred spaces illustrate a global phenomenon.³⁰ Land is not natural and undifferentiated; it means different things to different people. The more central and exclusive holy places are to different communities, the greater the challenge facing a peaceful resolution of territorial conflicts. Thus the sacredness of place and the distances between land masses may differentiate land from sea into fundamentally different spheres for human cooperation and conflict.

Because it emphasizes the relative fluidity of spatial borders, the application of critical theories of geography to Europe and Asia yields insights in tension with classical geopolitical notions of historical regions. What, for example, has Europe meant across the ages?³¹ For the Greeks, the lands to their north and west were Europe, clearly separated from Asia to the east and Africa to the south. This classification was rethought with the Crusades and after 1500, as a Christian Europe subjugated the rest of the world. A conquering Christian Europe was transformed once more when the Enlightenment discovered Europe to be modern and thus different from all other world regions. Europe became the embodiment of progress and, as the only center of the civilized world, its values were claimed to be universal. In this world, Europe was not-Asia. The designation of the Orient presupposed Europe as an Occident that was governed responsibly not despotically, that was dynamic not stagnant, that was rational rather than prone to irrationality. After the end of World War II, renewed interest in European civilization, following its darkest decade, reflected the continent’s division by two non-European powers. Gaullist anti-Americanism was matched by Eastern European insistence on the Soviet Union as an Asian, and hence alien, presence. The end of the cold war ended Atlantic Europe: Western, democratic, liberal, and above all anticommunist. The door was now open for rival conceptions—a neo-Gaullist Europe as a conventional great power in the making; a Europe of different small neighbors eschewing attempts at domination and cherishing national diversity in an evolving European polity; a Europe for Europeans as a menacing rallying cry against a rapidly growing number of immigrants.

East Asia, from the perspective of critical theories of geography, is not reducible to a collection of states undergoing more or less similar processes of economic and social change. The intersection of local specificity and transnational structures affects the ongoing processes of region formation.³² Regions result from various forms of human interconnections. In Asia, these interconnections are hierarchical, crystallize around different urban nodes, and are based on different historical foundations—a Sinocentric tribute system in northeast Asia, a precolonial maritime system in Southeast Asia. As a concept, Asia lacks an obvious focal point or common tradition. And for some countries, especially the United States and Japan, Asia-Pacific and the Pacific Rim are concepts that denote an Asia that is inclusive. These new concepts are examples of an institutionalized language, what Bruce Cumings calls rimspeak.³³ As a term, rimspeak may be annoying as a matter of plain English, but it undoubtedly matters politically. Such language captures and reflects political, economic, and cultural processes in Asia that are creating new relations between places and peoples. This variant of critical theory stresses discursive politics as the sole determinant in how a region is defined. Referring to an extensive body of scholarship that views regions primarily as symbolic constructs, Patrick Morgan asserts bluntly that there is no way to identify regions, through geography, that enhances analysis in international politics.³⁴

This is going too far. Regions have both material and ideational dimensions. The absence of full agreement on the boundaries of Europe and Asia has not stopped political actors from invoking and politically exploiting regional terminology. In the case of Asia, for example, the definition of the region that includes Southeast and northeast Asia—essentially the Association of South