The ‘West’ against the ‘Rest’: Geopolitics after the end of the cold war

Abstract

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that we had reached the ‘end of geopolitics’. Since the mid‐1990s, however, the term ‘geopolitics’ has experienced a revival, and even regional groupings which have so far abstained from any kind of power politics, such as the European Union, have started to claim geopolitical interests for themselves. But it is not clear what constitutes this kind of power politics in the 1990s and what drives ‘the West’ to pursue geopolitics, directed against what Huntington has labelled so plainly and provocatively the ‘Rest’. The article addresses this question by analysing Western capital's need for access to markets in the South and the EU's and US’ growing dependence on oil imports. The article will argue that a Western geostrategy based on Huntington's civilisational model would be counterproductive in the long run, manoeuvring the Western states into a situation where these geopolitical goals would have to be enforced by military means instead of being pursued through a strategy of political and economic support.