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The Eurasian Politician - October 2003
Anssi Kullberg, 20 Sept. 2003
Geopolitics is politics taking place in regard to geographical circumstances, territorial relations and aspirations of political entities. It derives from the spatial settings of polities as well as from territoriality as a universal dimension of human (and animal) behavior. Only in the recent times there has existed power and politics that have shifted from the physical territories to "virtual" forums, most significantly to the media, but even this development is largely limited to the West. Elsewhere, territorial control continues to rule also over the media.
The spectrum of geopolitical action is very wide, consisting of rhetoric, military, subversive and conspiratorial activities. However, geopolitics is never just derived from "geographic imperatives", as the geopoliticians themselves often rhetorically express their case. There are always underlying motivations, constructions and lines of thinking behind geopolitics, whether we speak of geopolitical theories or geopolitical action. The school of "critical geopolitics" is utterly dedicated to the "deconstruction and reconstruction" of these underlying motives and ideas, but is too often limited to ironical deconstruction of Western policies and certain historical constructions only. This has led to self-satisfied, isolated and intra-Western, politically biased criticism, and general blindness towards most of the planet, especially the majority of the world, where geopolitics is still understood in a much more traditional way.
Yet in the contemporary times, there is a crying need for analyzing what is behind the geopolitical ideas, and not only those of the West, in order to find out why they do not seem to match, and why it seems so impossible to find commensurable criteria to study them. To understand the relational and proportional settings of contemporary geopolitics it is necessary to construct some kind of a picture of the asymmetric "geopolitical ideologies", which influence the underlying motives and ideas behind the geopolitical activities of various states and other political actors.
I completely agree with the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto that sometimes frontier regions have to be paid more attention than the great centers, and frontier and border zones, where civilizations and empires encounter each other and struggle in "great games", "tournaments of shadows", "cold wars", and open military conflicts, can often reveal us more, and more relevant, issues about hegemons and the cores of world politics than reading official speeches and statements. Perhaps comparative and historical analysis on the geopolitical actions of various players on selected frontier regions - especially the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Southeast Asia etc. - can give us the tools to construct a picture of the "geopolitical ideologies" of these players in a historical perspective.
That is what I did in my recent thesis, with the limited example of the Caucasus region, and this article is a very rogue simplification of the conclusive chapter, in regard to this. Comparing their attitudes and policies in regard to the revealing border regions, four mutually conflicting geopolitical ideologies can be outlined.
1) Globalist policy of stability, which prevails in the West, sees the Caucasus as a problem region, where the prevalent problem, instability, should be solved, but yet the policy is bound to absolute respect at territorial status quo, which includes the sanctity and unchangeability of existing internationally recognized borders and sovereignties. The favored mode of understanding the situation is that of seeing a cautiously positive development trend, but it is rejected that the change would take place in territorial terms, but only in qualitative terms, such as economic growth and democratization.
2) Imperialist policy of territorial dominion, which prevails most of all in Russia, observes the Caucasus from the point of view of classical geopolitics. Both the already achieved independence of the states of the South Caucasus, and the existing and imagined independence aspirations of the North Caucasus are unambiguously seen as territorial threats to the greatness of the Russian empire. The territorial bondage is so strong that Russia easily sees even economic growth and democratization from the territorial point of view, which turns them into threats, increasing the influence of the West and Turkey in the region. As geopolitics, in the Russian point of view, is seen as a zero-sum game, anybody else's influence is seen as a loss of Russia's own influence, and therefore also as a loss of Russia's imperial greatness.
The geopolitical idea of the Caucasus is constructed in a very territorial way: The region has been seen either as a platform for Russian expansion towards the mystified geopolitical goals, the "warm seas", Constantinople and Jerusalem, or as "soft underbelly", through which the mystified Western, Turkish and Islamic conspiracies, constructed by massive disinformation, intrude to disintegrate the holy Russian Derzhava (empire or "reign", a term very similar to the German "Reich" as understood with the connotation of the Third Reich period). Russia understands both its own potential expansion, and the threats targeting the Derzhava and its greatness, in territorial terms. Both the interests and the threats are geopolitical.
3) Nationalist policy of national existence, which prevails in Turkey and the Caucasian countries, aims either at the preservation or at the achieving of a sovereign nation-state. Geopolitics is defined along the lines of a historically constructed nation, and nation is defined primarily in linguistic and historical but also in religious terms. There are no considerable differences in geopolitical thinking between the Christian and Muslim nations of the region. The differences are more connected with the historically constructed ideas of "friends and foes", especially with the attitudes towards the great neighbors, Russia, Turkey and Persia. Even in these attitude differences, religion or "civilization" does not play a decisive role, but rather the relative geopolitical position and history, as well as historically constructed, but often surprisingly new, national myths.
Both imperialist and nationalist geopolitical ideology adopt quite double-faced approach to the problem of separatism:
For Russia, any such separatism that challenges Russia's own territorial greatness, or the unity of its allies (like Serbia, Iran, or India), is understood unambiguously as a threat. Thus, Russian propaganda aims at labeling all separatism of the Chechens, Kosovar Albanians, Iran’s Azerbaijanis, or Kashmiris, as terrorism per se. Yet Russia has generously supported and armed all such separatist movements, which have appeared to disintegrate and destabilize states, whom Russia sees as its enemies or rivals, as well as states, which are subject to Russia's interests for territorial expansion of dominion or influence: For example, the communist groups among Turkish Kurds, the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia, the separatists of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Javakhetia, the Armenians of Karabagh and the Lezgin rebels in Azerbaijan, the separatist rebels of Moldova's Transnistria, mutually hostile groupings in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and so on. Both historical and contemporary Russia has extensively employed the old Roman wisdom of "divide and rule".
Also nationalist approach adopts a double-faced attitude to separatism. For those, who have already achieved national sovereignty, separatism is a danger, which threatens the fragile national unity, and therefore the national existence, because empires in the vicinity would be eager to use such internal disunity for "dividing and ruling". For those nations, which still lack national sovereignty, separatism is a tool for achieving the goal of founding a nation-state on their own. To some extent, newly independent nations show solidarity towards those, who are still struggling for their national existence. This is shown for example by the wide sympathy that the Chechen independence cause enjoys in Georgia and the Baltic countries. In Georgia (where speeches are famous for lasting endlessly), it is common to hear praises for the Chechens' heroism as a frontier defenders of civilization against the Russian yoke, but in the same sentence complaints for the treacherous activities of Abkhaz, Armenian and Ossetian "terrorists".
4) Islamist revolutionary internationalism and missionary policy, which has influenced in the region among Sunni Islamists, their Arab sponsors, and the Shi'a theocracy of Iran, but in the Caucasus only since the latter half of the 1990s, forms a fourth distinctive geopolitical ideology. Its approach is not predominantly territorial like Russian imperialism and Turkish-Caucasian nationalism, but rather emphasizes qualitative change. The characteristics of Islamist geopolitics include social radicalism, proselytizing mission (among Muslims), and internationalism. In all these characteristics it shares clear similarities with Marxist socialism.
Islamism should not be equated with Islamic conservatism, because Islamism is, quite the contrary, a radical movement. Neither should it be equated with fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is a theological conception, while Islamism is a political conception. (These can, of course, coexist, which indeed is the case in many movements.) It should be remembered, too, that like different nationalisms and different imperialisms are rivals to each other and often confront each other, also different Islamisms have often been hostile at each other, and they have tended to split up into sectarian movements. The Sunni extremist Wahhabi Islamism, deriving from the conservative Arab states of the Gulf, has traditionally been hostile at the Shi'a Islamism represented by the Iranian theocracy. Only recently, Al Qaida has effectively managed to combine a network of radical Islamists, which include Shi'ite extremists such as the Hizbollah, while the network itself remains Sunni-dominated. The uniting factor they have used is characteristically modern: anti-Americanism. In this sense, a full circle has elapsed in radical Islamism taking over from radical Marxism in inspiring terrorism and combating Western interests in the Middle East and South Asia - a development that began as early as in mid-1980s.
Iran's radical theocracy since 1979 is extraordinary in many senses, as the main line of Persian geopolitics used to be imperial, although less aggressive and expansive than Russian geopolitics. By the Shi'a revolution of the young Shah Ismail in 1501, it was spiced with missionary ideology, too, although it mainly targeted the population within the empire. Reza Pahlavi's military coup, which overthrew the Safavi dynasty that had ruled Persia for 400 years, changed the name of the state into Iran. The Pahlavi Iran was following reformist nationalism, and would be categorized here to the field of nationalist geopolitics. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran's geopolitical ideology has been more clearly a radical and missionary one, although it remains loyal to the interests of Russian imperialism.
There has been a historical change in prevalent geopolitical ideology also in Turkey. Already during the Seljuk period, Turkey aspired the heritage of the Roman Empire (more precisely, that of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire). Therefore the Seljuks added to their name the word "Rum", meaning Rome and referring to Europeans. The goal was finally achieved by the Ottoman dynasty. Since the young Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople, the Turkish Empire adopted the place of its Byzantine predecessor both in territorial and administrative terms. Constantinople became the Turkish capital, and the Byzantine Greek aristocracy moved all over the Empire, from Moldavia to Cyprus, to loyally serve the Sultan. Turkey adopted the state idea (and geopolitical ideology) of the Byzantium, and its orientation was that of a European sea power, with the primary domain on the Mediterranean, not on the linguistically Turkic plains of Central Asia and the Volga. Turkey was close to conquer also the Western Rome, which at that time was a weak city state plagued by internal power struggles, but further European conquest was halted by the naval power of the Venetians on the Adriatic Sea.
Turkey and Russia were for centuries rivals and enemies - the southern and the northern empire. Both of their state ideas seemed to claim the Roman heritage, and they both considered each other as barbaric hordes, modeling their propaganda on these lines towards the decisive allies in Europe. The surroundings of the Black Sea, and the Caucasus became battlefields and playgrounds of the struggles between these two empires.
Turkish geopolitics were entirely shaken and reformed, when Kemal Atatürk abolished the Empire and Caliphate, and founded the Republic of Turkey. Capital was moved to Ankara, in the middle of Anatolia, although Istanbul is still the biggest city of Turkey. Since Atatürk's times, the geopolitical ideology of Turkey has followed Atatürk's doctrine "yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh", or "peace at home, peace in world", which meant in practice a very cautious and restrained foreign policy, and especially restraining from interventions outside of Turkey's borders. This main line of geopolitics prevailed in Turkey for the whole Cold War period, although Turkey participated the Korean War, joined the NATO, performed a humanitarian intervention to Cyprus, and participated the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After the Cold War, Turkey's geopolitical ideology has even more approached the globalist ideology of other Western countries, so that nowadays it does not considerably differ from the Western European average.
The "four geopolitics" outlined above are of course harsh generalizations, and necessary only for the clarity of conceptions, and for the construction of theory. Naturally there exist in all the countries of the region many different, and often mutually contradictory, geopolitical ideas, as governments change, political parties are struggling for power, internal policies are reflected to foreign policies and vice versa, and all the four geopolitical ideologies can be endlessly split and cut into smaller constructions. In spite of all this, I consider the distinction relatively justified:
Western globalism indeed nowadays speaks with an almost uniform voice of the stability discourse, despite differences in emphasis and in policies suggested, regardless of whether the speaker is a Conservative, Liberal or Social Democrat, a Republican or a Democrat. Russian imperialism has been preserved as imperialist, geopolitical and territorial as ever, in spite of tremendous upheavals of the political system in Czarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes. Turkish, Georgian, Armenian, and Circassian nationalists may quarrel for ever about who was first in each territory, and who fell victim to worst genocide, but the distinctively national arguments remain similar. Saudi Wahhabism and Indian Deobandism may disagree on theological questions, but their general attitude towards the world is same.
Besides, I suggest that this kind of asymmetry of geopolitical ideologies explains not only the geopolitical attitudes of states and groups towards the Caucasus region, but also their geopolitical attitudes towards all frontier regions of Eurasia. It seems to me that this kind of asymmetry of geopolitical ideologies, rather than the religiously based "civilization" that Samuel Huntington suggests, forms a defining basis of the approach that states and other political actors employ towards the questions of the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Kashmir.
More crucial than to classify states and nations by their supposed geopolitical ideologies, it is to study the contradictions and confrontations of different geopolitical ideologies in the rivalries, disputes and conflicts of the frontier regions. In the Caucasian region, Russia's imperial ideology seemed to share many common interests with the Islamists, against the nationalist field of small and mid-sized nations sandwiched in between, while Western globalism adopted the role of a more or less impartial observer. The same seems to be the case with most of the Eurasian frontier zones.