Introduction to Geopolitics

Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori
? (See Box 4.1.) Can people be motivated to kill
and die for a government bureaucracy? It is hardly a sense of attachment to the Ministry
of Defense or the State Department that inspires people to fight. Instead, the ideology
of nationalism has equated national well-being with control of a state, the state and
nation become synonymous, and the sense of identity is focused upon the nation rather
than the state. Nationalism is the belief that every nation has a right to a state, and,
therefore, control of a piece of territory. The ideology of nationalism claims that a nation
is not fulfilled, the geopolitical situation is perceived to be unjust, if a nation does not
have its own state. The geopolitics of nationalism has resulted in millions of deaths, as
people fought to establish a state for their nation, and defend their states, in the name
of national defense, against threats, real and perceived (Figure 5.1).
The state is equated with the nation through another term, the nation-state: the notion
that each state contains one nation. Hence, the Australian nation-state, for example,
refers to an Australian nation contained within the Australian state. Such is the ideology.
The reality is much different, and the potential for conflict is large. Nearly all states
have a diverse population of cultural groups: some of which may define themselves as
separate nations (Gurr, 2000). In some situations, a national identity may take prece-
dence over an ethnic identity (Arab-Americans or Italian-Americans, for example). In
other cases, a group may demand a degree of autonomy, especially in terms of cultural
practices such as the use of language in schools. When a cultural group defines itself
as a nation, often there are demands for a separate state for that nation, the politics of
nationalism. We will look at the politics of creating nation-states in two ways: top-down
and bottom-up.
Top-down nationalism refers to the role of the state in creating a sense of a singular,
unified national identity (Mosse, 1975). The United States is, perhaps, the best example
of this process. The history of the United States defines its national identity as an
immigrant nation: a collection of individuals from national groups across the globe. 
The practice of the state has been to ensure a centripetal political force: that such a
collection of nations does not create conflict, but is “a more perfect union,” an American
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nation. Education is the vehicle for this continual process of creating a nation-state.
Children pledge allegiance to “the flag” at the beginning of each school day. The
American nation is celebrated in song, dance, and study—the mythology of the nation,
the sense of unity, and the child’s place within it is created in a “banal” or everyday
manner (Billig, 1995). The celebration of the American nation (and also the Australian
and Canadian national histories) illustrates that there are positive interpretations of
nationalism as a collective identity that transcends ethnic differences.
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Figure 5.1
World War I telegram to next of kin.

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Ironically, the dominant mythology of the United States as an immigrant land of
opportunity rests upon a history in which different cultural groups have suffered at the
hands of the state: racist immigration policies targeting Chinese, such as the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, the near genocidal Indian Wars of the 1800s, as well as the
enslavement of black Africans and the African-Americans’ struggle for civil rights that
continues today, and the contemporary harassment of Arab-Americans at airports and
other security points in the name of the War on Terrorism. However, the power of the
United States national identity is that despite the discrimination that successive waves
of immigrants have experienced, and still do, the desire to be part of the American nation
is still strong, and the degree of assimilation is high, compared to other countries.
The top-down nationalism of the United States illustrates the way the state apparatus
has been brought to bear to create a nation. It is a form of nationalism; it promotes the
ideology that the state is the natural and obvious political geographic expression of a
singular nation. Funnily enough, it is not the type of politics we usually think about
when we label a politician a “nationalist”: such terminology is usually a form of epithet
referred to “monsters” such as Slobodan Milosevic or Adolf Hitler, for example.
The geopolitics of nationalism 2: the process of 
“ethnic cleansing”
Let us turn to the politics of violent nationalism, or bottom-up nationalism, now: the
type of nationalism that makes the headlines (Dahlman, 2005). Nationalism, in this
sense, is the goal to create a “pure” nation-state, in which one and only one culture or
national group exists. This geopolitical perspective views a nation-state as somehow
tainted, weak, a geopolitical anomaly, if it contains multiple nations or ethnicities.
Instead of the politics of assimilation, the geopolitics here is of expulsion, and eradica-
tion. Bottom-up nationalism is what has become known, almost nonchalantly, as ethnic
cleansing. Though it is the bloody actions of ethnic cleansing (the killing and rape) that
is the “sharp-end” of this form of nationalism, the way the term has become readily,
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Activity
How and where did you learn your national history? 
• Think of the settings (home, school, etc.) where you were exposed to this history
and the form the history took (books, films, lessons, etc.). 
• Write down two or three of the key ingredients of the history and what “moral”
or story they may say about the particular national character. 
• Write down two or three key historic events that are usually ignored or played-
down in the national history of your country. 
• How do these lesser discussed events contradict the portrayal of the national
character you identified from the dominant narrative?

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and quite uncritically, adopted by mainstream media as a handy phrase to “make sense”
of an event also shows that we are implicated too. As viewers, the pervasive ideology
of nationalism makes the goals of “ethnic cleansing” understandable: it is, simply, the
most extreme form of the politics of exclusion that underlies discussion of immigration
and refugee policies in “civilized” debates in the British parliament, for example. The
politics of otherness related to particular territories is the underlying geopolitics.
The process of “ethnic cleansing” can be illustrated schematically. In the first diagram
(Figure 5.2), two neighboring states are both multi-national: Triangle State is populated
mostly by people 
with a scattering of people 
near the border, and Circle State
displays the opposite pattern. Also, there are both 
and 
people living outside the
borders of these two states. The existence of people of different nations does not
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