Licensed to Stereotype: Geopolitics, James Bond and the Spectre of Balkanism

Abstract

This article explores the geopolitical and post-imperial significance of Ian Fleming's famous spy, Commander James Bond RN/007. By drawing on two films, From Russia with Love (1963) and The World is Not Enough (1999), it is argued that these productions not only contest Britain's post-1945 decline in international influence but also actively subvert the binary politics of the Cold War and its aftermath. The actual location of the filming (in Turkey and Central Asia) is also significant in this representational process, however. Turkey was a vital element in NATO's containment of the Soviet Union and the unexploited oil fields of Central Asia have become a major geo-strategic concern in the post-Cold-War era. Arguably, the films (and Fleming's novel From Russia with Love 1957) also draw, in order to be politically effective, upon long-standing colonial and European stereotypes regarding the reputation of the Balkans for violence, instability and claustrophobia. In so doing, countries such as Turkey and Azerbaijan are on the one hand simply represented as security- and or resource-based commodities which the West (in the form of the UK in the main rather than the USA) have to contain or selectively exploit but also as places that have witnessed prior infiltration and intrigue. These characterisations of place deserve serious attention because as recent research in film studies and popular geopolitics has demonstrated, fictional referents such as James Bond and Rambo play their part in the cultural re-production of world politics.