Spatial Structures and the Phenomenology of Inter-National Identity

Abstract

Spatial abstractions and metaphors are not new to International Relations (IR). Particularly, when we consider the relationship of “international space” with the geopolitical narratives of the early twentieth century, we find that both the theoretical construction and political composition of space are central components of world politics. Space in this sense, as critical scholars of geopolitics have demonstrated, is less the backdrop against which international phenomena occur and more the scaffolding for a particular ordering of the world. When we consider the increasingly successful “annihilation of space by time” enacted by modernity, however, space would seem to be a moot theme for IR theorists to look at in dissecting the sociology of our discipline. Space, in one sense, is merely a terrain to be traversed. Yet such a conception of space—as a “structural,” or “structuring” phenomenon with profound effects on IR's notions of identity and security—has historically ignored the bases of self-consciousness and communal exchange on which it rests. As an existential structure, there is more to space than what IR has historically told us: space allows for meaning to take root in the world only as lived-space, as the soil for perception and action to play out a web of stories and interests on its stage. Though inherently concerned with “the writing of space” (Ó Tuathail 1996), geopolitical narratives in IR tend to occlude the facticity of space as a realm of human relations and expressions. The meaning of space is shifted from an embodied experience of the local to the global entanglements of dispersed human bodies. By digging into this inversion, not only can we draw out the personal from the inter-national (as a meeting of nations and peoples), but also derive from the global a rich source of epistemic crossings and exchange. Such an undertaking requires a fundamental re-orientation of how we experience IR, a task as simple, and ambiguously impossible, as “learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as ours” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:120).