The threat of geopolitics to International Relations: obsession with the heartland

Abstract

This is a rant. Rants can be refreshing and thought-provoking, and this book is certainly thought-provoking. Most of the time, rants are also irritating, as they tend to overstate their case, contain sweeping assertions, lack nuance and bear a grudge. This applies to this book also. William Mallinson and Zoran Ristic begin their book with a delightful reckoning with International Relations theory and its unhelpful reduction of complex realities to monocausal explanations. But the main popular view of the world challenged by it is that of geopolitics. The term is defined by the Penguin dictionary of International Relations as ‘a method of foreign policy analysis which seeks to understand, explain and predict international political behaviour primarily in terms of geographical variables … Political identity and action is thus seen to be … determined by geography’ (quoted on p. xiii). As an alternative approach to this, the authors propose ‘geohistory’, which they see as revolving around lasting ‘human characteristics’. It takes some effort to work out what they mean by this (and the vagueness of this alternative approach is quite unsatisfactory). It includes, say the authors, the human proclivity to have an instinct for survival, to feel insecure, to join groups, to turn to larger protectors, or to resort to aggression, not least preventively. They point to greed, atavism, faith, but ‘advocate ideology-free geohistory as [an analytical] method’ (pp. 26–9). On top of such general human characteristics, they home in on national characteristics which they apparently think are immutable (pp. 29, 120).