Introduction to Geopolitics

participation in warfare.
A prime philosopher of the material motivations for war, V.I. Lenin (1939) was
writing at the time of the global war identified by Modelski as the end of British world
leadership. For Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and first premier
of the Soviet Union, the upcoming wars were materialist in nature, an expression of the
imperialism of the rich powers needing new markets and sources of raw materials to
feed the banks and finance groups within their borders. For Lenin, the two world wars
were the bloody component of the continuous struggle for profits. The Soccer War and
the war on Iraq could be interpreted the same way.
Alternatively, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1937) argued that war is fought over
competing values. The national humility fatally felt by Amelia Bolanios in El Salvador
in 1969 was a sign of the power of values in warfare. The impassioned speeches of
President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair regarding Iraqi liberation
frame the invasion of Iraq, and other episodes of the War on Terrorism, as a conflict
over values: values that are deemed to justify loss of life among coalition forces, human-
itarian workers, insurgents, and Iraqi citizens.
Rather than attempting to portray, and resolve, a simple debate between a “materi-
alist” and a “values” perspective on war, the aim of this section is to initiate an
exploration of the different geographies of representation that result from the material
and value interpretations of war. Representations of war that were based upon material
concerns or “interests” are territorially based, often reflecting concerns over control of
territory or boundary location in order to access key resources. On the other hand, repre-
sentations of war that resort to ideals are less bound to specific pieces of territory, and
tend to speak to visions of what is best or, “common sense”, for humanity.
1111
2
3
41
5
6
7
8
91
10
1
2
31111
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
51
6
7
8
9
40
1
2
3
4
5111
R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S   O F   G E O P O L I T I C A L   C O D E S
81
Activity
For any foreign policy event of your choice (a war, the imposition of sanctions, the
establishment of alliances, etc.) look at policy documents, speeches, or media
commentaries that portray the policy and evaluate the degree to which justification
was made through material interests or values. 
Are the relationships between material justifications/territoriality and value-based
justifications/extra-territoriality I posit evident?

---

Cultured war
Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori
(It is sweet and proper (or fitting) to die for
one’s country) (Box 4.1). It is only of late that Hollywood has begun to portray the
horror, pain, loneliness, and indignity of dying in war. Movies such as 
Platoon
told a
story of the Vietnam War. Steven Spielberg’s 
Saving Private Ryan
was technically bril-
liant in showing the terror, confusion, and slaughter of the Normandy landings of World
War II, but its main purpose was an act of remembrance and national thanks for the
I N T R O D U C T I O N   T O   G E O P O L I T I C S
82
Box 4.1
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(Wilfred Owen, 1917)

---

World War II generation: supported by the book and film 
Band of Brothers
. None of
these efforts come close to the cynicism of Wilfred Owen’s poem; for Owen juxtaposes
the brutality of individual death, with the romantic mythology of nationalism. As the
soldier Owen describes is feeling life slip away as his lungs are being corroded by gas,
is he really going to reflect on the “sweetness” of his duty to give his life for his country?
In actuality, the common cry of the dying soldier, usually a young man, is for their
mother (Fussell, 1989).
Yet, at the beginning of World War I, millions of people across the European con-
tinent and within Britain greeted the outbreak of war with unbridled joy (Eksteins, 1989;
Tuchman, 1962). People lined up to join their respective military; it seemed like a great
thing to be going off to war. Owen’s cynicism came later, and was a product of experi-
ence at the front, and a reaction to what he saw as the inhumanity of nationalism driving
young men to their deaths.
World War I is widely seen as the epitome of the modern war (Eksteins, 1989), but
it also ushered in the rise of fascism, especially Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. We
may all be familiar with the term Nazi and Nazism, but it is important to reflect on the
meaning of the name. “Nazi” stems from the full title of Hitler’s party National Socialist
German Workers Party. The “national” and the “socialist,” or the emotive and the
material combined powerfully in Hitler’s ideology to give one of the clearest, and most
reviled, expressions of nationalism in history. Nationalism is the belief in a common
culture, or people, and its connection to a particular country. The term will be discussed
in greater depth in the following chapter. Hitler’s rhetorical strength lay in his ability
to link material grievance with an ideologically based future within a portrayal of the
German national past and future glory. Though Nazism is an extreme, the extreme
simply serves to illuminate what is common in contemporary geopolitics. Representa-
tions of war and other forms of geopolitics are usually based within an understanding
of an individual’s membership in a national group, which has its particular values,
traditions, and history (Figure 4.1).
Geopolitical actions are given meaning in order to justify their prosecution.
Geopolitics is, then, a cultural as well as a political phenomenon, and usually a national
one. Culture normalizes the continuous prosecution of geopolitics across the globe. More
specifically, it paints “our boys” (and to a much lesser extent “our girls”) as heroes
fighting a valiant and necessary fight, while portraying the enemy, or “them,” as evil
and villainous (Fussell, 1990; Hedges, 2003). Increasingly, “they” are made invisible—
deaths that we need not worry about as we prosecute war (Gregory, 2004).
Me, a geopolitician? Laughable!
First, let us explore what we know without knowing, or at least without thinking or
questioning.