Posted by: zanshin, 2009-05-22 06:55

Story

Geographical Determinism... it's Baaaa-ack
Ben Shultz, 2009-05-02 (Saturday), Geography 2.0
It's been happening for a while, especially in the field of web-based mapping, but geography is really getting a lot more press these days. When I first started in Geography ten years ago it was on par (in most people's minds) with being a specialist in Serbo-Croat literature. Now look at us, in the mainstream media and all that. Recently there has been Richard Florida's "geography of the meltdown" in the Atlantic and the "geography of buzz" in the New York Times. Of course, there are many more examples besides those as well.

The most recent mainstream exposure for geography was in the Freakonomics blog, which has a post today called "Geography Rising." The context is this:

Most people don’t consider geography a controversial field, but that perception may change in the wake of the Iraq war and the ensuing shift toward pragmatism and realism in international affairs.
I didn't really know what to make of that statement, so I followed the link to the Foreign Policy entry called "The Revenge of Geography." When I saw the picture of the military man below, I knew what to expect: Mackinder and the Eurasian Heartland.To paraphrase, the writer states that geography used to be an important discipline in the 18th and 19th century, especially in Victorian England. A lot of people thought that as the economy, travel, communications, culture, etc. became more globalized, geography would cease to matter. The writer, Robert Kaplan, graciously points that in fact geography does matter, and probably matters even more in the globalized era.

Even though he didn't point to any of several prominent geographers who have made this point over many decades, so far I'm on board. I even consulted one of my history of geographic thought-type textbooks and the guy is thorough in his research on the intellectual development of early geography. I'm still expecting some Mackinder, but I'm on board.

And then, what do you know, there it was:

The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss.
This sounds intellectually appealing, but Kaplan is overlooking a dangerous, all-too-easy extension of this logic. Geographical determinism is a relative of environmental determinism, a devastating concept that nearly brought U.S. geography as a university discipline to its knees in the early 20th century. Environmental determinism was used to explain political greatness and power, like Kaplan does here, but it was also used to explain why certain races of people were inferior, for example. The real-life geographers who move the discipline forward have spent decades overcoming the disastrous ideas of the environmental determinists, and most would agree that we have been successful in that regard. Kaplan mistakes spatial decision making (like what the military does) with the discipline of Geography (like what serious researchers do).

Here's another unfortunate passage:

Like Pakistan, no Bangladeshi government, military or civilian, has ever functioned even remotely well. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India illegally. With 150 million people—a population larger than Russia—crammed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming. Simply because of its geography, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh could be inundated with salt water, necessitating the mother of all humanitarian relief efforts. In the process, the state itself could collapse.
Except it's not simply because of its geography. The population size and density of Bangladesh are not natural outcomes of some predetermined world order, but have been created by conscious decisions that real people have made. That Bangladesh is a state is not because of some natural sequence of events, but because of mid-2oth century politics. The physical geography of Bangladesh is indeed in danger from rising sea levels, but the fate of the people is not due to a natural outcome of pre-ordained events. The type of rapid global warming we're seeing now has nothing to do with the geography of Bangladesh and lots to do with the actions of people in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Age.

The fact that we have states with lines on maps is not a natural outgrowth of geography. It is a very European idea. If anything, the world is held hostage to the idea that states must exist as lines on maps and that property is a mutually exclusive right that each state possesses. Not every society views "property" in this way. Geography, as Kaplan intends it, is then subordinate to where the imaginary lines are drawn. The world does not have to be this way, and in the future, it probably won't be.

He continues, this time in the turbulent Middle East:

Of all the geographically illogical states in the Fertile Crescent, none is more so than Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, by far the worst in the Arab world, was itself geographically determined: Every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one just to hold together a country with no natural borders that seethes with ethnic and sectarian consciousness. The mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may prove more pivotal to Iraq’s stability than the yearning after the ideal of democracy. If democracy doesn’t in fairly short order establish sturdy institutional roots, Iraq’s geography will likely lead it back to tyranny or anarchy again.
Nothing about Iraq's geography leads to tyranny. It's people making decisions that directly endanger the lives of civilians that leads to tyranny or anarchy. I could go on, but I think the point is clear: Kaplan incorrectly reasons that humans are captive to some living manifestation of geography that they cannot control, that predetermines their fate.


As if his point were not already clear enough, here's another line for good measure:


In this century’s fight for Eurasia, like that of the last century, Mackinder’s axiom holds true: Man will initiate, but nature will control.

In the colloquial words of so many a college student... whatever dude. A great rebuttal that illustrates how "geography" is not some the prison that Kaplan claim is this response to yet another Foreign Policy article on the Congo (for background, the original FP article is entitled "There is No Congo):


Nevertheless, what is equally dubious, is the misdiagnosis of the root causes of the current situation. The authors of this article repeatedly, and I believe questionably, confuse causes and consequences, to support and justify a desire, long-held in certain circles, for the balkanization of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authors point out the weakness of the Congolese central state in governing the vast country, without fully and honestly addressing the international geo-strategic reasons why that reality came to be. The authors point out the various secessions and minor uprisings during the past 40+ years to justify their diagnosis of the Congo. Yet they fail to shine a light on the multiple foreign state and corporate backers that participated in those early attempts at derailing the Congo. The authors claim that " the Congolese government's inability to control its territory has resulted in one of the world's longest and most violent wars", without actually addressing the reasons why the government was - and still is - not able to control its territory in the first place.... I contend that it is not so much that there is No Congo; nor is it that the Congo as a country is not possible. I contend that since 1959, it was deemed too much of a potential threat to several world and regional powers, and to the coffers of their corporate acolytes, to allow the rise of a strong, large, potential Brazil-type power, in the heart of Africa."
There you have it. Congo, or anywhere else, is influenced by geography, but the political and economic outcomes that emerge through that geography are not predetermined historical accidents; they occur because of calculated decisions that real people make. Sorry Foreign Policy, the discipline of geography disagrees with your account of what of we're all about.

Comments


zanshin on 2009-05-22 07:12

This is a comment on Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography
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Africa,   Anarchy,   Arab,   Bangladesh,   Britain,   China,   democracy,   Democratic Republic Congo,   Economy,   Eurasia,   Europe,   Fascism,   Halford Mackinder,   Heartland Theory,   India,   Iraq,   Kurdistan,   liberalism,   military,   Mongolia,   North Korea,   Pakistan,   Politics,   USA,   War,  

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2008-09-02Can The War On Terror Be Won? -- How To Fight The Right War
2008-07-30Somalia: Crusade Number Four
2008-07-28Rome Diary: Italy's Leap Into The Dark
2008-07-28The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress
2008-07-28The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse
2008-07-22CSIS-SCHIEFFER DIALOGUE: OPENING STEPS FOR A DIPLOMATIC PATH BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN
2008-08-07Brzezinski’s bunker
2008-08-14European Social Forum: Meeting of a Multitude
2008-06-15Trans-Saharan Migration to North Africa and the EU: Historical Roots and Current Trends
2008-06-27President Delivers "State of the Union"
2008-06-27Daughter of the Enlightenment
2008-06-25Samson's Fate
2008-05-29Defense Issues for the Next Administration
2008-05-26The Failed States Index 2007
2008-05-27Laptop Jihadi
2008-05-31The Palestinian Refugee Issue: Rhetoric vs. Reality
2008-06-01Why NATO Troops Can't Deliver Peace in Afghanistan
2008-05-19Walker's World: Bush with the pharaohs
2008-06-06Stumbling toward Eurabia
2008-03-03President Addresses Joint Armed Forces Officers' Wives' Luncheon
2008-02-22Three blind men confront the elephant that is this globalization era’s radical extremist reaction--and surprise! They all see a different beast!
2008-02-23The Two Faces of Saudi Arabia
2008-03-14Aims and Methods of Europe's Muslim Brotherhood
2008-03-15Russia throws a wrench in NATO's works
2008-04-05Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran
2008-04-10Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny
2008-04-11Remarks on Robert Cooper’s Towards a European Army?
2008-05-14Resisting the Empire
2008-04-28Latin America: the attack on democracy
2008-04-22The March to War: Israel Prepares for War against Lebanon and Syria
2008-04-24A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy
2007-09-24Betrayed -- The Iraqis who trusted America the most
2007-09-21Why Capitalism Needs Terror: An Interview with Naomi Klein
2007-09-21While the West Loses Its Soft Power
2007-08-27Iran risks attack over atomic push, French president says
2007-08-29President Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion
2007-09-07Understanding the U.S.-Israel Alliance: An Israeli Response to the Walt-Mearsheimer Claim
2007-09-08Does independence beckon?
2007-09-09No Refuge Here: Iraqis Flee, but Where?
2007-09-08Knowing the Enemy
2007-10-19G8 must enlarge to remain relevant
2007-10-10India's Tough Choice on Iran
2007-10-12'The Trouble Is the West'
2007-11-07Drawing Borders with Other People’s Blood: A Brief Comment on Ralph Peters’s 'Blood Borders'
2007-11-04While Pakistan Burns
2008-01-11The General in his Labyrinth
2008-01-14Belgo-British Conference 2005 -- 2020 – a new horizon for Europe
2008-01-05Real axis of evil
2008-01-06Press Conference by the President
2008-01-06Concern about 'sovereign wealth funds' spreads to Washington
2008-01-21Strategic Communication
2008-01-30The two faces of Amis
2008-01-31The Power Elite's Use Of Wars And Crises
2008-02-04Going bankrupt: The US's greatest threat
2008-02-04Globalization: Stiglitz's Case
2007-12-02The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chavez
2007-11-20Whose War?
2007-12-28Benazir Bhutto, 54, Weathered Political Storm -- Obituary
2007-12-27A Conversation With Benazir Bhutto
2007-12-22Iran - Nuclear Chronology - 1957-1985
2007-12-13Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World
2008-12-22Timeline: Japan
2008-12-29The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis
2008-11-20Defining the “Post-Soviet Space”
2008-11-20Leonid Ivashov: Heartland Expanding, or The Shanghai Cooperation Organization
2008-11-27Asia pushes, West resists -- Book Review
2008-12-07Obama’s Speech in Berlin -- Transcript
2008-12-15Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil
2008-12-15New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade
2008-11-10The Eurabian Revolution
2008-11-14How the US can learn to survive and thrive -- Creative technology is the key
2008-10-26Afghanistan: the neo-Taliban campaign -- What Nato failed to understand
2008-11-03Redefining U.S. Interests in the Middle East
2008-10-11What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
2008-10-11Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
2008-10-12Operation Sarkozy : how the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic
2008-10-02U.S. Not Winning War on Terror -- Special Report
2009-05-08A Leadership Review of the Barack Obama Administration
2009-03-21The First-World Debt Crisis In Global Perspective
2009-02-02The West’s selective reading of history -- From Thermopylae to the Twin towers
2009-02-11The Myth of Grand Strategy
2009-02-08One on One: 'With no likelihood of US use of force, that leaves Israel'
2009-06-09Military spending sets new record
2009-07-19Turkey and Russia on the Rise
2009-07-16Why we must win in Afghanistan
2009-07-05'This Week' Transcript: EXCLUSIVE: Vice President Joe Biden
2006-11-18Globalization: The Long-Run Big Picture
2006-10-25US: world empire of chaos
2006-10-26Blaming the lobby
2006-10-13Regional Implications of Shi‘a
2006-10-24War in Sudan? Not Where the Oil Wealth Flows
2006-10-04The Geopolitics of Natural Gas
2006-09-29China -- PART 2: Tequila trap beckons China
2006-09-30A Short History of Neo-liberalism - Twenty Years of Elite Economics and Emerging Opportunities for Structural Change