Geopolitics and Business: Relevance and Resonance (Contributions to International Relations) 3031453247, 9783031453243

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Contributions to International Relations

Čedomir Nestorović

Geopolitics and Business Relevance and Resonance

Contributions to International Relations

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research on all areas of international relations. Contributions to International Relations (CIR) welcomes theoretically sound and empirically robust monographs, edited volumes and handbooks from various disciplines and approaches on topics such as IR-theory, international security studies, foreign policy, peace and conflict studies, international organization, global governance, international political economy, the history of international relations and related fields. All titles in this series are peer-reviewed.

Čedomir Nestorović

Geopolitics and Business Relevance and Resonance

Čedomir Nestorović ESSEC Business School Singapore, Singapore

ISSN 2731-5061 ISSN 2731-507X (electronic) Contributions to International Relations ISBN 978-3-031-45324-3 ISBN 978-3-031-45325-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

The idea to write this book came from my experience of teaching geopolitics at the ESSEC Business School. When I started to teach this topic more than 25 years ago, it was not common to have geopolitics in the business schools’ curricula (B-schools), where business courses in marketing, finance, strategy, human resources, operations management, and so on were the norm. Only recently B-schools have developed courses and interest in corporate social responsibility, ethics, inclusiveness, diversity, and geopolitics. The usual caution against geopolitics was to say: “Businesspeople do not want to be engaged in politics. They want to deal with all customers and partners. Money has no color or nationality.” Even more, if a student was really interested in geopolitics, that student was told go to an institute of political science or international relations, and not to a business school. Marko Papic stressed the lack of geopolitical knowledge in MBA programs: “For centuries, success in business and investing required the skills of both long vision and sensitivity to political and geopolitical change. Yet, today the curriculum of most MBA programs—and the CFA curriculum in its entirety—ignore the latter” [1]. Therefore, my courses invariably started by explaining and justifying why we have this kind of course in a business school. Susan Strange 30 years ago pointed out the necessity for business leaders to study international relations, politics, geopolitics, history, or diplomacy: “The enterprises, too, have to learn diplomacy. . . Considerations of cost and short-term profitability can no longer always be paramount in corporate strategy. In short, those in the future with Master of Business Administration degrees should have some training in international history and international relations. Just as students of international relations really need to know and understand the processes and the problems of international business” [2]. In her time, the suggestion went practically unnoticed. The schools of international relations did not talk about business and business schools did not talk about international relations. But this was a long time ago [3]. Nowadays, the necessity to teach geopolitics in business schools is evident and there are no schools without this topic, even if geopolitics has not fully made its way to the Board of Directors in v

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Preface

corporations: “Many of the senior executives and members of Boards of Directors often do not know enough about such issues. . . Many such people have studied business or engineering and simply do not spend their time reading history or studying comparative cultures and languages. Their 24/7 schedules and social ranging responsibilities make dedicating time to deep reflection extremely difficult” [4]. When geopolitics is accepted in business circles, it is often equated with risk. Risk is something familiar to managers. They have their full plate of risks they deal with, such as economic risk, operational risk, environmental risk, and other types of risk. All these risks are analyzed and factored by business authors. As an example, Joachim Klement’s book about geo-economics studies geopolitics from the point of view of an investor, someone who assumes risk in the capital markets with an expectation of being compensated for assuming that risk [5]. Geopolitics does not mean risk only, but this is the closest thing managers and business schools have in mind when they hear the term geopolitics. ESSEC Business School provided me with the opportunity to be based in France first and then at our campus in Singapore. I have been living in Singapore for the last 13 years and this allowed me to confront and appreciate the differences between Europe and Asia when it comes to geopolitics. I also had the opportunity to be a visiting professor at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur and Yonsei University in Seoul while developing a close relationship with Waseda University in Tokyo. At roughly the same time as I moved to Singapore, I was asked by ESSEC to launch a collaboration with the Arabian Gulf University in Manama for an MBA, which is rather unique because we did not copy-paste our curriculum from France. We developed a completely new program with the participation of ESSEC professors, together with the help of local professors coming from the region. The participants in the program came from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. When I came to Singapore, ESSEC tasked me with the launching of the ESSEC & Mannheim EMBA Asia Pacific track. ESSEC & Mannheim Business School have a longlasting cooperation in managing a double-degree EMBA where students from France and Germany spend time in both locations with professors from both schools. Launching an EMBA track in Singapore was not easy because of the completely different competition map and expectations of participants. During the first 10 years the program run, we had students from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, China, Azerbaijan, and many other countries outside of Asia. Finally, as my name suggests, I come from a country which does not exist anymore: Yugoslavia. My PhD is from the Institute of Political Science in Paris in the department of Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and I was the President of the Council of Diaspora with the Government of Serbia and Montenegro for two years. Dealing with four million members of the diaspora worldwide gives one a pretty good idea about the global spread of a given population and its contribution to the economy of its homeland through remittances they send regularly.

Preface

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All this is to say that my experience and exposure to students, colleagues, and political and business leaders from various countries has been translated into the teachings and observations within this book. I am very grateful to all interactions I have had with each of them. Singapore, Singapore May 2023

Čedomir Nestorović

References [1] Marko Papic, Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future, Wiley, 2021, p. 6 [2] Susan Strange, “Big Business and the State,” Millenium, Journal of International Studies, Vol. 20, N° 2, December 1991, pp. 245–250, p. 249 [3] Cedomir Nestorovic, “Why managers should learn about geopolitics,” Jakarta Post, August 8, 2018; Seb Murray, “Learning to do business in an uncertain world,” The Financial Times, October 10, 2022 [4] Mike Rosenberg, Strategy and Geopolitics, Understanding Global Complexity in a Turbulent World, Emerald, 2017, p. xiv [5] Joachim Klement, Geo-economics, The Interplay between Geopolitics, Economics and Investments, CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2021, p. x

Contents

1

2

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 What Is Geopolitics, What Is Business? A Problem of Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Money and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Business Excluded from Geopolitical Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Geopolitics Is Not Excluded from Business and Management Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Organization of This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classical Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Classical Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Geographical Determinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 Location and Distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.4 The World as a Closed System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.5 The Concept of Heartland and Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Classical Geopolitics and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Rudolf Kjellen (1864–1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 Sovereignty and the Westphalian System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.4 Classical Geopolitics and the Realist School . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.5 Is There a Thucydides’ Trap Between the United States and China? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Classical Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Messianic Responsibility, “Manifest Destiny” . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Hard Power and Soft Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.3 Cool Japan Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 3 5 8 11 12 14 15 21 22 24 28 31 33 34 36 41 47 50 53 57 58 60 68 69 78 ix

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3

Critical Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Critical Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 What Is Knowledge? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 The Origin of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Importance of Science for Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 What Is the Language of Knowledge? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.5 The Power of Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Critical Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Natural Resources and Critical Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 The Wonderful World of Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Critical Geopolitics and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Cities and Regions as a Scale for Critical Geopolitics . . . . . 3.3.2 Critical Geopolitics and the Binary World . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85 89 92 100 110 115 119 125 126 129 132 134 140 146

4

Feminist Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Specificities of Feminist Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Geopolitics Is Gendered, Individuals Are Ignored . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Feminist Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Feminist Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Identity and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 The Body as a Geopolitical Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Feminist Geopolitics and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 State Performance and Visible/Invisible Actions . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 State, Nationality, and Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Nationality, Citizenship, and Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Feminist Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Hard Power and Slow Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 Relational Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.3 Power and Relational Reciprocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.4 Relational Theory and Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

151 153 154 162 172 173 180 184 185 189 194 197 198 201 203 206 211

5

Business Geopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Economy, Geopolitics, and Business Resonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 Economy as a Natural Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.2 Economy as Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.3 Economy as Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.4 Post-positivists and Business Resonances . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Business Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 Classical/Business Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Critical/Business Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Feminist/Business Geopolitics and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . .

219 223 226 228 232 235 239 239 242 247

Contents

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5.3

252 253

6

Business Geopolitics and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Classical Geopolitics, States, and Corporations . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Critical/Feminist Geopolitics, Corporations, and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Business Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 Classical/Business Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.2 Critical/Business Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.3 Feminist/Business Geopolitics and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

261 263 263 284 288 297

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Why Business Geopolitics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Corporations Are Containers of Geopolitical Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 CEOs as Heads of State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

305 307 312 314 317

. . . . .

Chapter 1

Introduction

Corporations are generally reluctant to engage in geopolitics. This reluctance is strong and widespread. It is a serious obstacle that can be lifted only by pointing out the relevance and resonance that geopolitics has with business. Relevance is the first keyword in lifting that reluctance. Relevance opposes the stance that businesspeople have about geopolitics, expressed in the following form: All this is good and fine. You present us with very interesting concepts and cases on geopolitics, but all this happened a long time ago. The context we have today is completely different, so we struggle to see the relevance of something that happened 70 years ago when there was no Internet.

Another frequently expressed reluctance is: All these theories and cases are certainly of interest to military and political leaders, but we are in business. We do not want to wage wars or conquer other lands, so why is geopolitics of interest to us?

Answering these questions is not easy because practically all geopolitical authors and political and business decision-makers concur with the view that politics and business should be kept separate, and private and public entities pursue different, often contradictory, objectives. The sentence attributed to Jesus and reported in the Gospels: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,”1 works well in that sense. It can be translated as: “Render to Politics the things that are political and to Business the things that are linked to Business.” With the separation of powers, it is useless, artificial, or counterproductive to investigate a potential common ground between geopolitics and business. Because the argument for the separation of powers is simple and binary, it is easily understood by decision-makers and public opinion. The separation of business and politics is, however, an artificial separation that does not correspond to reality because corporations do not live in a vacuum; they do not live in splendid isolation from

1

Gospel of Matthew, 22–21

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_1

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Introduction

society and politics. Companies are permeable to societal and political transformations, which have a deep influence on business strategy and tactics. At the same time, society and politics push corporations to be more socially responsible. As a result, corporations multiply “Business and Society” programs, “Diversity and Inclusion” schemes, “Climate Change,” “Sustainability Awareness” workshops, and so on. If business is permeable to political and social changes, is the opposite true? Can corporations change the social and political structures in a country? If corporations were to rule countries, this would be called “corporatocracy” and society would, in general, resist such move. But what happens if the tech companies are ahead of society in terms of innovation, space exploration, metaverses, or social media control? They do not want to change politics and society, but the result might be just that. The congruence of politics and business results from the fact that corporations have more and more social and political roles while politics, obsessed with efficiency targets, wants to manage the public sector (hospitals, schools, the army. . .) like a corporation. The public and private sectors meet necessarily at some point and adopt the same discourse and vocabulary. Purely managerial terms like “Key Performance Indicators,” “Cost-Benefit Ratio,” or “Optimal Use of Resources” have entered the political vocabulary, while political/sociological/societal terms such as “Social Responsibility,” “Systemic Racism,” or “Save the Planet” have become common terms in the companies of today. Resonance is the second key word in lifting reluctance. The same terms used by politicians and corporate managers can mean the same thing. The term “disruption,” for instance, can mean the disruption of supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, or a disruption of business models of the corporation. Disruption can also mean digital disruption common to the political and corporate world. If corporations have an interest in disruption, politicians can have an equivalent interest in it. Politicians may consider that the traditional provisions in the “social contract” are not adequate to the present day, and they may seek to change the “social contract.” Terms such as “Black Lives Matter (BLM),” “cancel culture,” or “white privilege,” for instance, may resonate with the company’s history and its not-so-distant past. Many contemporary corporations have contributed to the emergence of “BLM” or “white privilege” practices because they were engaged in the slavery trade or in the mistreatment of marginalized groups at home and abroad. It is, therefore, expected that their past is investigated and made public. Sometimes the terms are the same, but they mean something different. The term “follower” can be a follower of a certain religion (faithful), or related to sociology, it can be a person following other people on social media. In the domain of corporate strategy, the term “follower” triggers the association with product or brand positioning and the choice between the position of market leader, market challenger, market follower, or market nicher.2 When businesspeople hear that states discuss geography and the intangibility of borders, there is a resonance with the internal organization of

2

The market positioning model has been proposed by Philip Kotler (marketing) and Michael Porter (strategy).

1.1

What Is Geopolitics, What Is Business? A Problem of Terminology

3

a transnational corporation. Transnational corporations have subsidiaries and branches in many countries. How do corporations identify with the geographical areas in which they operate? Would they put Turkey or Israel in the European or Middle East department of their company? Would Google put Crimea in Ukraine or in Russia on Google maps? Will corporations invent their own geographical areas like EMENA (Europe Middle East North Africa)? EMENA does not exist from the geographical point of view, but it can be useful for companies that want to put their operations in Europe, the Middle East, and some African countries together. When it comes to the intangibility of borders between states, which is a crucial axiom in international relations, corporations will immediately think about their own subsidiaries and branches. Will they follow state boundaries and establish a subsidiary in Taiwan, a subsidiary in Hong Kong and a subsidiary in mainland China, or will the corporation ask these three subsidiaries to work together? Will ExxonMobil consider its representative in Saudi Arabia to be the Prince of Arabia with a direct and privileged contact with the CEO in the headquarters of ExxonMobil in Irving, Texas, or ask its representative in Saudi Arabia to cooperate with the ExxonMobil counterparts in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, or Qatar while reporting to the regional head office? These are thorny issues in every corporation that has a presence in such countries. Terms have consequences in this case because the internal organization of the corporation will follow a specific terminology adopted by the corporation.

1.1

What Is Geopolitics, What Is Business? A Problem of Terminology

Words have power, they can lead to cooperation or confrontation. Many words trigger controversy, and the term geopolitics is among them. Geopolitics is a new name, but the practice of what is called geopolitics is as old as human organizations. From the very beginning of social life (nomadic or sedentary), geography and politics (whatever the meaning we give to these two terms) were the cornerstones of “living together.” Humans depended on geography and its vicissitudes because climate, topography, flora, and fauna used to condition their existence. Human beings also needed to organize community life and establish relationships with other human communities. Therefore, they needed to think about the geographical constraints on one side and human relations inside and outside the community on the other, and how to get the most in given circumstances. Today, humans do not depend on geography as much as they used to in the past when they were passive parts of nature. Humans can even alter their natural habitat, giving birth to a new geological epoch under the name “Anthropocene.”3 The possibility for humans to alter nature is a relatively recent phenomenon, while the influence of geography on politics is very

3

Anthropocene is a term that refers to a geological epoch where human action significantly alters Earth’s geology and ecosystems. For the relationship between Anthropocene and geopolitics see

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Introduction

old, as Michael don Ward reminds us in the opening words of his book: “For several thousand years now, geography has played a major role in strategy, and strategy has played a major role in politics” [1]. Even though the nexus of geography and politics is old, the term geopolitics did not exist until the early twentieth century. One of the reasons for this is that there is no commonly accepted definition of geopolitics, which is not the case for business. There are as many definitions of geopolitics as there are authors. What is meant by geopolitics is widely debated in academia and political space, whereas what is meant by business is not up for much debate, because business matters are regulated by the state. It is, therefore, useless to analyze what business is. It is better to analyze business regulations. Business is an activity (usually producing, exchanging, buying, and selling. . .), while a corporation is an organization or an association that is chartered by the state for the purpose of doing business. Corporations have been described occasionally as a person, private property of the shareholders, a nexus of contracts, an agent for the owners, a representative democracy, and even a religious entity [2]. In all cases, however, the state has the upper hand as described one century ago by Harold Laski: “The corporation is the creature of the state. Its will is a delegated will; its purpose exists only because it has secured recognition” [3]. Business can be formal or informal, while the corporation is formal as a legal entity. By corporation, we mean private corporation, even if the corporation can be understood in a much wider sense and include non-private entities like state-owned companies, government-linked companies, municipal companies, mutual companies, cooperatives, self-managed companies, and public–private partnerships. If the corporation is not chartered, it is an informal, sometimes illegal, entity. Selling cigarettes or alcohol, for instance, is not illegal, but only outlets licensed by the state can do so. If the corporation is not authorized to do business, it cannot legitimately buy and sell, open a bank account, and distribute dividends to shareholders. Every country has its own specificities on how it will charter, authorize, and monitor the activities of private corporations. The first corporations in the form of joint-stock companies chartered by the state appeared in the seventeenth century, but private businesses have existed for much longer. Private businesses have always been closely monitored by kings and emperors for the simple reason that kings and emperors needed money. Rulers need money to realize what they want to achieve in society and wage wars, if necessary. Charles Tilly, who analyzed the formation of states for the period 990–1990, believed that wars were critical for state formation. He observed that “relations among states, especially through a preparation for war, strongly affected the entire process of state formation” [4]. In other words, wars do not happen occasionally, they are structural parts of state formation. War situations should, therefore, be understood as normal situations while peace is a long armistice between two wars. Wars can be financed in various ways. The ruler can exercise coercion on its own population (confiscation, heavy taxes) or punitive extraction

Simon Dalby, Anthropocene Geopolitics, Globalization, Security, Sustainability, University of Ottawa Press, 2020

1.2

Money and Politics

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from the defeated (looting). But in the main, those who fought became dependent upon a merchant class that could finance warfare. If kings borrow money, they depend on moneylenders. The moneylenders can, therefore, be described as the real puppet masters, controlling states and kingdoms. This is, however, not completely true, because the more money is lent, the more there is a danger that the borrower wants to get rid of the debt. The case of the Templars in the fourteenth century is well-known because King Philip IV of France did not want to repay the debts to the Templars and invented all sorts of reasons to eliminate them physically. Kings depend on money provided by businesses, but businesses need rulers to regulate markets and to protect private property and free enterprise. It is a false idea that businesses prefer an anarchy situation in which they can do whatever they want. Even if they have preference for a liberal laissez-faire approach, it does not mean they want a lawless situation. On the contrary, businesses want rules because rules give them the frame of the game in which players have the same rights. Above everything, they want the protection of private property and accumulation of capital. Any kind of social and political organization is good for them, except the strict application of a Marxist doctrine that does not accept private property of the means of production, the concept of a free market, and the accumulation of capital.

1.2

Money and Politics

The question of capital and money is central to commerce because business relations are expressed in monetary terms. It is therefore important to see if business can exist without money and whether there is a political or a geopolitical stance on money. The appearance of money goes back to the Mesopotamian shekel, nearly 5000 years ago in the urban centers of Uruk and Ur. Money is one of the sources of hard power. The more money a country, corporation, or individual has, the more power that entity or individual has. The opposite is not true since politicians or military leaders can have a lot of power but no money. Money is not the prerequisite for business activities. Before the invention of money, there were exchanges of goods in the form of barter, gifts, or donations. Business is, therefore, much older than the appearance of the first currency in Mesopotamia. There are several non-monetary exchanges, but we will give examples of only two of them: barter and gift. One of the first non-monetary ways of exchange was the system of barter. Bartering is regarded today as old-fashioned, but it has shown great resilience and is still used on some occasions. The probability for bartering to continue to exist in one form of another is predicated by Edmund Burke: “. . . every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.”4 Bartering can be called mitigation, arbitration, compensation, or trade-off when an individual, a state, or a corporation does not use monetary exchange.

4

Cited by Simon James in Dictionary of Economic Quotations, Croom Helm, 1984, p. 86

6

1

Introduction

Usually, bartering is attached to an exchange of physical goods, but the definition might be extended to any kind of exchange. The System of Barter Bartering is a cashless exchange of goods and services. With the appearance of money, bartering gradually lost its importance even if in the twentieth century it has been revived by the communist states, members of Comecon, under the domination of the Soviet Union. Because their currencies were non-convertible, it was impossible to use them for exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States, for instance. That is why these countries exchanged physical goods (Soviet caviar against American poultry). Barter started to wane after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, but it did not disappear completely. There are still countries with non-convertible currencies or with currencies as depreciated that nobody uses them. Their only option is to switch to another foreign currency (like the US dollar or the Euro) or to use the system of barter. Bartering is also used in cases of embargoes. While under international sanctions, the Oil for Food Program established in 1995 has permitted Iraq to sell oil on international markets in exchange for food, medicine, and other essential items. This was not pure barter, because monetary exchange was involved in the program. However, there was a limited number of items Iraq could receive in exchange of oil, and it was monitored by the United Nations. Corporations usually do not like barter schemes because the system of barter limits the number of players, it caps the amount for exchange, and it limits possibilities of negotiation. However, bartering can be very profitable because of the limited number of operators. If a corporation manages to be on the list of medicine providers for Iraq, it can enjoy a quasimonopoly of supplying an important market. For that reason, suspicions of bribery and corruption are legions when it comes to barter, as voiced by Transparency International in the case of Oil for Food Program [5]. The main problem with barter is the assessment of the value of goods exchanged. For instance, how many kilograms of Soviet caviar would equate one ton of American poultry? This is where problems of availability, quality, and origin of products can pose a problem and lead to an overestimated or underestimated value of goods exchanged. To solve the problem, the Soviet Union used the concept of “world market prices.” But again, what does a “world market price” mean when a multitude of suppliers coexist in a multitude of markets with completely different prices? Foreign Trade Organizations like Amtorg5 have been established by Soviet Union to fix the “world market prices,” but the flux of money did not necessarily match the value of goods, so corruption and bribery were omnipresent in this case, too. Amerikanskaya Torgovlya (Amtorg) was the first Soviet foreign trade organization established in the United States in 1924. After operating without interruption through WWII and Cold War, Amtorg ceased to exist in 1998.

5

1.2

Money and Politics

7

The second form of non-monetary exchange is the gift. The gift economy is as old, if not older, than the barter economy, and it is still alive today. There are two definitions of the gift economy. The first definition stipulates that people give voluntarily, and they do not expect anything in return. It can be a pure donation or pure altruism. The opposite of pure altruism is pure egoism, when the giver is only interested in their own satisfaction in giving. Pure egoism can be motivated by a “warm glow” effect, when the giver expects that other people will admire them because of the gift. According to James Andreoni, there is no pure altruism or pure egoism. Givers are “impurely egoistic” because they search for altruism and egoism at the same time [6]. Occasions for non-reciprocal, voluntary giving abound. They can derive from individual decisions, when people decide independently of each other when they want to give, how much, and who is going to receive the gift. In today’s societies, huge sums of money are spent on specific occasions. Celebrations like Eid, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, or marriages are big occasions for people to give and for corporations to make money. The COVID-19 pandemic did not restrain the gift economy. On the contrary, according to Mastercard, the increase in sales for Christmas 2021 compared to 2020 was about 7 percent, while at the same time, the overall economy suffered greatly from the pandemic [7]. Occasions to give can derive from celebrations such as marriages, funerals, or religious festivals during which people distribute free items to other people, even those unknown to them.6 Occasions and the value of the gift are also caused by the action of other people. Radu Vranceanu and Damien Besancenot analyzed the effect of a pledge (a promise that a person will give a certain amount) on other givers. Other givers usually decide to match or give even more. In this case, the pledge has a direct influence on the pledges or actual donations of other people [8]. In an article entitled “The Cornucopia of the Commons,” David Bollier in his concluding remarks said: Capital is something that is depleted as it is used. But a gift economy has an inherently expansionary dynamic, growing the more than it is used. While it needs material goods to function, the gift economy’s real wealth-generating capacity derives from a social commerce of the human spirit [9].

The second definition of the gift economy relies on give-and-take or reciprocation. As soon as something is given from one person to another, the concept of debt appears. The receiver must give something back. It can be support, affection, consideration, or something tangible. If the item returned is not the same as the item received, the question of value enters the equation because there is a necessity to value what is given and what is received. This was described by Marcel Mauss, one of the leading French sociologists, in his book “The Gift,” in which he studied indigenous populations in the Pacific. Marcel Mauss found that “the exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” [10]. The gift economy regulated and

6

Religious organizations are the biggest recipients of donations (35% of total donations), followed by educational organizations (14%) and foundations (11%). James Andreoni, Abigail Payne, ‘Charitable Giving,’ in Handbook of Public Economics, Elsevier, 2013, pp. 1–50, p. 10

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Introduction

structured exchanges in the first human societies. If the gift is reciprocal, it means that the value of the gift must be determined, and someone must keep a record of items given and received as well as their value, long before modern corporations and currency appeared. Terms like exchange, barter, gift, debt, and value, which predate the invention of money are terms that are very common and still in use today, albeit with different and much more sophisticated meanings. Business taken broadly appears, therefore, concomitantly with the appearance of the first social organizations, long before the Mesopotamian civilization and its shekel. It is difficult, therefore, if not impossible, to separate business from social organizations. This is, however, exactly what has happened, because geopolitics has been voluntarily and artificially insulated from the influence of business.

1.3

Business Excluded from Geopolitical Thought

If business is an integral and important part of the social system, business should be the central piece of geopolitical studies. All books about geopolitics should have an important chapter on business and politics, all political leaders should have a business education, and, in return, all business leaders should receive a geopolitical education. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening. Business is practically never quoted in books about geopolitics. In the geopolitical realm, two kinds of players are clearly identified: State Actors and Non-State Actors (NSA). Corporations, as the main representation of business, fall under the category of NSA, but they are not alone. In this category, there is a multitude of players: religious organizations, NGOs, terrorist groups, stateless populations, football clubs, Hollywood . . . and corporations. In fact, every organization that is not a state or governed by the state falls under the category of NSA. Football (soccer) is the most popular sport in the world, and it is imbued with geopolitics. Clubs such as Real Madrid FC or Manchester United are global players. According to the website “The football lovers,” which compiles the number of followers clubs have on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Real Madrid has an army of 272 million fans, followed by Barcelona (256 million) and Manchester United (165 million).7 These clubs are the real ambassadors of their countries. FIFA and regional organizations play a geopolitical game because they have member associations that may not be recognized by the United Nations. FIFA, for instance, has 209 members while the United Nations has only 193 member states. Palestine, Kosovo, and Taiwan are members of FIFA, but are not members of the United Nations. In Asia alone, Hong Kong, Macau, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Guam, Palestine, and Northern Mariana Islands are members of FIFA. UEFA on its side lists Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Kosovo, and Gibraltar, while these territories are not part of the United Nations. Finally, FIFA

7

https://thefootballlovers.com/top-10-football-clubs-with-the-most-fans-in-the-world/

1.3

Business Excluded from Geopolitical Thought

9

can decide to enroll Israel in the European organization (UEFA) while Palestine is part of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). Kazakhstan is member of UEFA while its neighbors China, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are members of the AFC. The President of FIFA estimated that the combined viewership of the World Cup in Qatar 2022 has brought more than 5 billion viewers. These numbers cannot be ignored by political and corporate leaders. All want to capitalize on the most popular sport in the world. When Saudi Arabia won against Argentina in Qatar, the government declared a public holiday. When the football legend Pele passed away in 2022, the government in Brazil instigated 3 days of mourning in the country. Christ the Redeemer and the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro were lit up in honor of Pele. No other sport can trigger that kind of emotion. The organization of the FIFA World Cup is, therefore, a matter of intense diplomatic battle because the countries that organize the World Cup benefit from the attention of the whole world. Authoritarian regimes such as the Italian fascist regime organized the 1934 World Cup in Italy, while a military dictatorship organized the World Cup in Argentina in 1978. The organization of the World Cup in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022 raised questions about the nature of these regimes because the relationship between FIFA and host countries for the World Cup is sometimes delicate. FIFA acts like a powerful NSA and does not hesitate to challenge decisions of the national associations and their countries. The best example was during the World Cup in Qatar 2022 when eight teams (the Netherlands, England, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Wales), supported by their governments, wanted to don an armband in favor of LGBT rights. The move was rejected by FIFA, and this decision was accepted by the European countries. The popularity of football is so great and FIFA so powerful that geopolitical authors consider football an integral part of geopolitics.8 National football associations and continental federations or confederations are all discrete (independent) agents. They are very protective of their independence, and it is impossible to amalgamate the African organization (CAN) and the Asian one (AFC). At the same time, business is systematically presented as a non-discrete group of actors. Corporations are presented as a homogeneous group of actors in geopolitical analysis. If they are mentioned, it is done “en passant.” Alternatively, corporations are englobed in wider wholes such as economy, capitalism, globalization, political economy, and industry. It is common to read books about the geopolitics of energy or renewable energy, of water, of the Internet, of the food or gambling industries, etc., but not the geopolitics of an individual corporation, even if the corporation is as big as Walmart, Sinopec, or Allianz. Geopolitical authors prefer to talk about the economy instead of individual corporations, and we are not short of analysis coming from economists who specialize in long cycles and global economy

8

Pascal Boniface is one of the geopolitical authors who investigates relationship between football and geopolitics. See his foreword to Kevin Veyssiere, Football Clubs Geopolitics, Max Milo Editions, 2021

10

1

Introduction

such as Immanuel Wallerstein [11] and George Modelski [12], who provided macro analyses, but who did not analyze the behavior of individual corporations. The reason for this is that most geopolitical authors believe that corporations pursue only one goal: maximization of profits. This goal invariably ends up with negative considerations according to these authors. Either the corporations are suspected of influencing states for their own benefit (through lobbying, bribes, and corruption); or alternatively, the corporations want to challenge the state with their own cryptocurrencies or private armies. According to some authors, capitalism has entered the stage of predatory capitalism, or zombie capitalism, in which the unstoppable quest for profits consumes the system itself [13]. For Chris Harman, zombie capitalism “cannot survive without more labor to feed it, just as the vampire cannot survive without the fresh supply of blood” [14]. As an example of that insatiable quest for profits, climate change, an issue that is omnipresent nowadays, is viewed as the consequence of greed and profit maximization pursued by corporations. Because they are aware of the negative image they have in the ecological battle, corporations involved in the fossil fuels industry sent more than 500 lobbyists to COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. This number was higher than any individual state delegation (Brazil had the largest delegation with 471 persons) and demonstrates how important the topic is for them. A typical way of how corporations are perceived negatively is given by Yaqing Qin: a corporate is a business and one of its essential properties is seeking profits. No matter what happens, this essential feature will not change. If all actors are thus defined, there must be laws to enable or restrain their behavior and there must be contracts to bind them together within society [15].

According to Qin, corporations’ actions must be restrained because they seek only profits. There is, therefore, a moral imperative for peoples, associations, and states to fight against such a power. States can restrict activities, processes, and actions of corporations through rules and regulations. Individuals can do so through activism. Many associations propose actions against the “evil” behavior of corporations, such as the group Brandalism, which produces spoof advertisements in outdoor campaigns against banks like HSBC, Barclays, or J.P. Morgan.9 Another group, the Transnational Institute, examines how political and corporate power breed militarized and corporatized responses to climate change, resulting in “acquisition through dispossession.”10 What is common to attacks against corporations and business is a strong binary postulate according to which social justice and profits cannot go together, and that peoples’ interests and corporate interests are irreconcilable. This point is highly debatable because there are many corporations pursuing social goals or doing good

9

Campaigns can be seen on their website: www.brandalism.ch The mission statement of the Transnational institute is to be an institute committed to build a just, democratic, and sustainable world. The main obstacle to a just world being the transnational companies, the advocacy group can only be a transnational one, hence the name of the institute. See: www.tni.org

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1.4

Geopolitics Is Not Excluded from Business and Management Thought

11

for society. Businesses can have variegated statuses, including cooperatives or mutual companies. For these companies, the pursuit of profit is not the main imperative. This is particularly true for Islamic finance or Christian mutual funds. For them, social justice and ethical and moral standards play a dominant role. Non-market economies or non-for-profit organizations are an aspect of business that is usually ignored by geopolitical authors.

1.4

Geopolitics Is Not Excluded from Business and Management Thought

If geopolitical authors tend to ignore corporations and their influence on geopolitics, corporations, on the contrary, never ignore geopolitics. Corporations certainly “do not want to play politics,” but they have always factored the political and economic risk in their calculations because geopolitical upheavals are always part and parcel of business activity. When the first joint stock companies started to emerge in the Western world with companies such as the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602), they had to deal with questions such as war, slavery, religious extremism, corruption, exploitation, racism, and territorial claims. Many of these issues still exist. The difference is that, in the past, it was possible to insulate operations in one part of the world from operations in another. At that time, what happened in Makassar stayed in Makassar. Instant communication and social media did not exist, affordable flights permitting people and goods to move from one part of the world to the other in a matter of hours did not exist, satellites communicating what is happening in any part of the world did not exist. So, it was easy to hide, conceal, or use the tyranny of distance to prevent news hitting the headquarters of the company or any other address. Consumers, for instance, did not know that Danone had a brand of halal water in South-East Asia or that Coca-Cola sold an alcoholic beverage in Japan. The employees in Indonesia and Japan did not know how their colleagues working for the same company in Germany and Brazil were treated. Today, information travels fast. When something happens in one country, it is immediately spread elsewhere. This way geopolitics is a daily concern for corporations. Until recently, companies were largely shielded from political upheavals and public accountability by the state apparatus. States protected “national champions.” It is not rare that a president of one country packs their plane with business leaders when going to an international meeting. “What is good for Coca-Cola is good for the United States” was and still is the leitmotiv for states and Big Business. Big companies expected the state to protect them, but, just in case, corporations insured themselves, nonetheless, against political risk. Many insurers (public and private) offer products providing protection against eventualities such as exchange rates, political violence, or embargoes. This way companies transfer responsibility to an external agent and buy themselves peace of mind: “Geopolitical analysis is not

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Introduction

about Black Swans or hoarding gold for an impending apocalypse. It is about incorporating geopolitical analysis into the investment process, like any other macro factor” [16]. The question is whether such insurance provides any real protection from political violence anymore. There is no longer a final arbiter on what constitutes political violence. If an oil pipeline is attacked in Saudi Arabia and no perpetrator is clearly identified, can that be qualified as a terrorist attack that can then be covered by the insurance policy? If supply chains are disrupted in China because of COVID-19, can this be qualified as force majeure and be eligible for compensation? In the case of any uncertainty, insurance companies will respond with characteristic reluctance to reimburse losses incurred. By the nature of their business, insurance companies know that the world is complex. It was always a VUCA11 world, but it is even more complex nowadays, due to the amount of information and the immediate impact of events that know no borders. For these reasons, corporations and their CEOs must not only pay attention to geopolitical upheavals, but they must also personally engage in preventing and managing them if upheavals happen. They cannot hide or buy peace of mind. Their responsibility is directly engaged, so they must understand the tectonic changes our world experiences if they want to navigate its unchartered waters. Understanding change is essential in assessing risks. The risk is assessed on the quality and quantity of intelligence a company can gather. “Buying intelligence” from current or past political decision-makers is a classical way to shield from political upheavals. To this end, many companies have enrolled former Prime Ministers, Ministers, or Chancellors on their boards. This option does not work anymore because of the complexity of systems that require massive data collection and analysis emanating from the multipolar world in which we live.

1.5

Organization of This Book

This book wants to shine a light on the relationship between corporations and geopolitics. As mentioned above, there is no commonly accepted definition of geopolitics, but the smallest common denominator exists. All definitions of geopolitics revolve around space, state, and power, but how these terms are defined and how they interact is a subject of passionate debate between the different branches of geopolitical theory. The fight is particularly fierce between the theories of classical geopolitics and critical geopolitics. Classical geopolitical theorists, for instance, define geopolitics as “how geography influence states and power in international relations,” while critical geopolitics consider geopolitics as “a form of geographical imagination that highlights the operation of power, in, through and around

11

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity

1.5

Organization of This Book

13

political space” [17]. Space, state, and power will, therefore, be the main prism through which we will analyze geopolitics. This book is composed of six chapters. Chapters 2–4 are devoted to the analysis of the three branches of geopolitics (classical, critical, and feminist) and the resonance they may have with the corporate world. Chapter 5 is devoted to business geopolitics or the relationship between geopolitics and business. Sometimes the resonance is obvious because the concepts used in geopolitics are the same as in the corporate world, such as competition, hierarchy, or soft power. From time to time, the resonance between the two is not obvious and may appear maverick, strange, or inappropriate. Saying, for instance, that the concept of space in geopolitics resonates with Tencent’s metaverse, that the concept of state in geopolitics resonates with the Saudi Aramco’s compound, or that the concept of power in geopolitics resonates with K-pop band BTS is not something that is so obvious. It deserves some explanation. Chapter 2 starts with classical geopolitics, the oldest branch, which enjoyed a monopoly of the discipline until the 1990s. The reason it enjoyed monopoly status is that classical geopolitics is presented as a neutral analysis based on objective facts that no one can contest. If, for instance, the United States has about 7000 nuclear heads and China has only 600 nuclear heads, this is a fact that must be factored into by both countries when it comes to a potential conflict. How corporations view objectivity and pragmatism as essential elements of classical geopolitics is explored within this chapter. Chapter 3 explores the iconoclastic proposal given by critical geopolitics. While classical geopolitics focuses on materiality and objectivity, critical geopolitics puts the emphasis on knowledge and discourse as the source of power. How a conflict is presented and how the balance of powers is understood show a plurality of options that challenge the monolithic and dictatorial understanding given by classical geopolitics. From the business point of view, the deconstruction of a dominant discourse is very interesting because it resonates with its own concept of business model disruption seen as a necessary step for survival. Chapter 4 focuses on feminist geopolitics, which shares many common traits with critical geopolitics, but which departs from critical geopolitics especially in the domain of epistemological enquiry. Feminist geopolitics insists on gender issues on one side and individuals as containers of political life and actors of the geopolitical analysis on the other. Corporations are very much interested in the feminist approach, not only from the point of view of gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace, but also from the fact that feminist authors put the emphasis on individuals and embody geopolitics that resonates with customer-centricity they know too well. Finally, Chap. 5 is devoted to business geopolitics, i.e., how the corporate world views space, state, and power, independently from the analysis linked to the three branches of geopolitics. So far, the starting point has been to take geopolitical concepts and see what their relevance and resonance in the corporate world are. In this chapter, we take the opposite view and ask a different question. What happens if the corporation is the space? What if the corporation is the state and becomes the

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Introduction

main actor and container in geopolitics? What if there is a corporate power different from hard and soft power, and how can corporations use that power to influence stakeholders or the market in which they operate?

References 1. Michael Don Ward, The New Geopolitics, Routledge, 1992, p. vii 2. Allison Garrett, ‘The Corporation as Sovereign’, Maine Law Review, Vol. 60, N°1, January 2008, pp. 130–164, pp. 133–134 3. Harold Laski, ‘The Personality of Associations’, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 29, N°4, February 1916, pp. 404–426, p. 406 4. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, Blackwell, 1990, p. 14 5. ‘Oil for Food programme plagued by ‘lack of transparency’ and ‘scandalous conflict of interest’,’ Transparency International, February 3, 2013 available at https://www.transpar ency.org/en/press/oil-for-food-programme-plagued-by-lack-of-transparency-and-scandalousconfl 6. James Andreoni, ‘Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving,’ The Economic Journal, Vol. 100, N° 401, June 1990, pp. 464–477, p. 465. 7. Joan Ng, ‘Don’t begrudge me the joy of gifting and receiving’, The Business Times, December 25–26, 2021. 8. Radu Vranceanu, Damien Besancenot, ‘The generosity spillover effect of pledges in a two-person giving game,’ Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Vol. 90, February 2021, article 101630. 9. David Bollier, ‘The Cornucopia of Commons’, YES! Magazine, June 30, 2001 10. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, first published in 1950, reprinted by Routledge, 2002, p. 3 11. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Vol I, Capitalist Agriculture and the origins of European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Academic Press, New York, 1974 12. George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics, University of Washington Press, 1987 13. James Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, Free Press, 2009 14. Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, Haymarket Books, 2010, p. 349 15. Yaqing Qin, A Relational Theory of World Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 156 16. Marko Papic, Geopolitical Alpha, p. 20 17. John Rennie Short, Geopolitics, Making Sense of a Changing World, Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, p. 3

Chapter 2

Classical Geopolitics

Classical geopolitics is the main branch of geopolitics. It is firmly represented in academia, politics, and business circles. This branch of geopolitics relies heavily on a realistic rendering of the world. It is concerned with practical questions such as: if a country is attacked, what should the attacked country do? If a country is threatened by another country or a terrorist group, what should it do? If the supply chain is disrupted because of COVID-19 lockdowns, what should a company or a country do? Because it deals with existing and potential threats, classical geopolitics comes up with scenarios and solutions. Classical geopolitics offers a very valuable element to leaders: an explanation for what is happening and a forecast for the future. With the explanation and prevision provided, classical geopolitics gives rulers the feeling that they can control the situation, and this is priceless. Objectivity and materiality are the main characteristics of classical geopolitics as Jakub Grygiel has stated: “The first quality of geopolitics is its objectivity. By this I mean that geopolitics, or the geopolitical situation, exists independently of the motivation and power of states and is not contingent on the perceptions of strategists and politicians” [1]. Following Grygiel, Phil Kelly, a proponent of classical geopolitics, also states that reality and the materiality of the world guide the view of classical geopolitics: Classical geopolitics, in its ontological foundations assumes that some sort of common reality does exist, and that reality is clear enough so that many of us, author and reader alike, together can visualize and study it [2].

Classical geopolitics offers an elegant and irrefutable explanation of world politics devoid of any contingency. It is an account of the world as driven mostly by geography. Therefore, for classical geopolitics, the element geo is as important as the element politics. Geography is taken as “God given” or “natural” and, therefore, “untainted” by ideals, ideologies, or human agency. How can rulers not be attracted to that? When confronted with world problems, rulers need professionals of statecraft, professionals of military, and professionals of foreign relations because they need a solution to a problem, and often, time is of the essence. Rulers do not have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_2

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2 Classical Geopolitics

time to study complex and, at times, obscure theories. What they need is action and resolve. Practically all states run Diplomatic Academies set up by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, where they train “career diplomats,” people who are professionals in their craft, “untainted” by ideology, so that they can serve Republican and Democrat Presidents in the United States, or the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green Party in Germany with the same dedication. In these Diplomatic Academies, the main topics are invariably geography, history, and law, complemented by the study of diplomatic protocol. There is very little place for theory and alternative explanations about how the world works. This approach is not far away from what is happening in the business world. Businesses love to paraphrase John Lennon: “There are no problems, only solutions.” Corporations, too, are obsessed with “professionals” who can serve the old and the new CEO, the old and the new Board of Directors with the same competence and dedication. These professionals are usually trained in business schools where practical topics such as finance, accountancy, supply-chain management, or marketing are omnipresent. Recently, new topics such as ethics, diversity, and inclusion, or doing good for the society have been added to the curricula, but “technical” or “professional” topics still dominate. Despite modifications in curricula, Diplomatic Academies and some Business Schools are still the bastions of “real-politik” and classical geopolitics. Critics say that both types of institutions train future technocrats who can ultimately form a clandestine class of “technos” opposed to elected representatives. They could build a “deep state,” in which the nominal holders of power are in fact influenced by the professionals in statecraft or operations management [3]. Theoretical Foundations of Classical Geopolitics Classical geopolitics relies on the following mainstream theories: positivism, rational choice theory, and causality. We will analyze them in that order. Positivism is the method of choice for classical geopolitics. It aims to analyze and theorize natural and social phenomena. The positivists want to replicate the methods used for the analysis of the natural sciences into the field of social sciences. Following Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), positivism can be understood as the unity of science, empiricism, and causality. The unity of science is the most important postulate. It stipulates that there is just one science, for nature and society alike. If there are laws in nature, by virtue of mimicry, there must be laws in social life. Why should there be a separation between nature and society, they ask. The fact that people have freedom of action does not forbid the possibility that the scientist could not be able to identify the features and logic of their actions and to derive conclusions that can be generalized. If hypotheses and tests are used for natural phenomena, it is possible to use them also for social actions. Because science is defined as neutral, it is possible to have “a gaze from nowhere” and be “all-encompassing, all-comprehensive.” All classical geopolitical authors claim the use of a scientific, rational, and realist approach to geopolitics because it is neutral: “Science is totally neutral . . . It is proud of its neutrality. It is only its exactitude itself, the perfect matching of mathematically obtained results with the

2

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observable data, that science considers praiseworthy. This matching provides the answers to the question “how does it happen’” [4]. Critical and feminist geopolitics question that exactitude can exist, and that exactitude is the only scientific method. This is something we will consider in the third and fourth chapters of this book. Positivism is the child of Enlightenment, a time when scientists of all kinds posited the supremacy of dualism. Dualism states that there is a separation of the world as it is and the knowledge of that same world. Akin to the separation of mind and body, it is possible to apprehend the world with a view from nowhere, a view which is objective and independent. Nature is completely independent from the agency of the observer. If, for instance, there is a river or a mountain, these features do not depend on the observer, or their culture, or biases. The river and the mountain will continue to exist even if all observers disappear. Dualism is, therefore, characterized by externality (the world is exterior to the observer) and determinacy (the observer cannot influence the observed world) [5]. It is possible, for instance, to observe and analyze objectively the size and location of a country or its natural resources. This observation does not depend on the ideas and preferences of the observer because the material world is exterior, it is tangible. Natural laws are based on material elements, such as climate and topography, or availability of food and shelter, necessary for the well-being and proliferation of humans, animals, and vegetation. Nature, therefore, can have a determinist influence on geopolitics. Climate change, as a natural or man-made phenomenon, has direct geopolitical consequences in the form of forced migrations on one side and an increase of likelihood of violence in affected regions on the other. Hsiang et al. collected findings from 10,000 BCE to the present and across all regions. They found that the climate’s influence on violence is substantial. For each standard deviation change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises by 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises by 14% [6]. In examining the reasons for migrations, specifically for the Syrian refugee crisis, Abel et al. concluded that climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011–2015 [7]. Following the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, positivism became important for geopolitics with the scientific advancements proposed by Charles Darwin, who was not a geopolitician, but his ideas were used by geopoliticians without moderation. The transposition of his thinking to human affairs was not long in coming. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) promulgated the idea of “social Darwinism,” a behaviorist philosophy maintaining that man’s social activity is controlled by the same set of rules as those that are applied in nature. The intellectual turbulence provoked by Darwin has had two effects. The first is the idea that major changes in nature and society were inevitable. If changes are inevitable, they cannot be stopped. Mankind does not have agency on these changes. It is, therefore, useless to try to oppose them. Humans can oppose changes that happen in the short term but cannot influence changes in the long run, and by long run, the yardstick is hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. This is beyond the grasp

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of a human life. “We cannot stop history in motion,” is the mantra used by all people who believe in historical determinism. Ultimately, if the changes are unstoppable, and if we know the outcome of the changes, it is possible to work on the acceleration of these changes if these changes are deemed acceptable and desirable. If, for instance, transhumanism and human/robot interactions are the inevitable future of mankind, it would be useful to initiate and provoke changes that represent improvements in the domain of health, crime prevention or conservation of nature. If humans are biased and robots are not, then let the robots rule states and make decisions about peace and war. The second effect of Darwinism is that he initiated an interest in scientific and especially biological theories that can provide the explanation, rationalization, and direction of changes [8]. Everything can be biological: the state, the corporation, social media, machines, etc. Biological theories have proven to be deadly weapons in the hands of dictators in the twentieth century. “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” as Nazi leaders used to say.1 If geopolitics was taboo after World War II (WWII), biology too should be taboo because of the misuse of biology by the same people who misused geopolitics. This, however, did not happen. Biological Darwinism or biological engineering is still the central activity of some biopharma, genomics, and genetics companies, which sometimes have borderline research projects with dubious ethical considerations. Biological Darwinism also gave birth to the anthropomorphic nature of the state (the organic theory of the state), a notion we will see further in this chapter of classical geopolitics. Following positivist (scientific) features, the relationship between states is based on a rational choice theory where players and organizations (individuals, states, corporations, NGOs, etc.) are assumed to be driven by the urge to maximize power or windfall gains from victory. Rational choice theory is very popular in classical geopolitics because it has the elegance of reducing human behavior to one variable (rational choice), and this variable can be explained by rational, objective, factual sets of input. In the economy, individuals and corporations want to maximize utility or value, while in politics and the military, states want to defeat the enemy. Individuals are supposed to take rational decisions with the maximization utility in mind: hence, the invention of homo economicus. The problem consumers face is: “How should I spend my money in order to maximize my utility?” The problem voters face is “How should I vote in order to maximize my utility?” In a market of consumer goods and political ideas, consumers and voters represent the demand side. The offer side is represented by corporations and politicians putting consumer goods, political ideas, and choices on the market. The problem is that consumers and voters express individual preferences and choices while corporations and politicians offer, by necessity, collective preferences, and choices in the form of standardized products

1

The misuse of biology by the Nazis is analyzed by Robert Proctor in his book Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis, Harvard University Press, 1988, and by Mary Nolan, ‘Science for Madmen’, New York Times, August 21, 1988

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or standardized political ideas because they cannot satisfy each and every preference. Hence, the problem of transposing individual choices to collective choices because of the impossibility of aggregating individual preferences. Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) demonstrated a long time ago that there is no democratic mechanism to induce a “collective preference” from a myriad of individual preferences. His “impossibility theorem” states that “If we exclude the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility, then the only methods of passing from individual tastes to social preferences which will be satisfactory and which will be defined for a wide range of sets of individual orderings are either imposed or dictatorial” [9]. The terms “imposed” or “dictatorial” do not necessarily translate into physical violence. Dictatorship can be a consensus of academia, media, and political parties that all go in the same direction. That consensus establishes, for instance, that one foreign country is friend or enemy, or that nuclear power will resolve all problems of energy in the future. The same is valid for “business dictatorship,” where there is a consensus of manufacturers, consumers, and media to favor, for instance, healthy food, or to ban discriminatory practices in the workplace. In both cases, physical violence is absent, but there is dictatorship in the form of one-track thinking, where alternatives are marginalized. The question of individual preferences and choices and how to aggregate them in becoming collective preferences and choices is a fundamental dilemma for business and politics. According to Kenneth Arrow, this passage cannot happen spontaneously. It cannot be decided by the consumers or voters. It must be imposed somehow by outside forces, and all politicians and business leaders are interested in finding out how can they impose a concept or a product on the market. In case of monopoly, it is easy to impose something because choice does not exist. But in the case of plurality of political ideas and a free market, politicians and corporations must use all kinds of communication, propaganda, or manipulation in framing the offer in a way to channel the myriad personal preferences into an aggregation of preferences. And we can count on politicians and corporations to be very inventive in the practice of peaceful or conflictual framing. Conflict is not ruled out because actors choose conflict when it is more profitable than exchange (peaceful exchange). Conflict is dangerous but if the payoff outweighs calculated risk, war is chosen or, more often, prolonged. Conflict, civil war, or insurrection is then an investment or a resource allocation, very similar to how a corporation calculates investment and resource allocation. Rational choice theory is probably the most disputed theory between classical and critical geopolitics. Homo economicus becomes homo politicus when people make political choices. If they want a better quality of life, voters are supposed to vote for the candidate who is perceived as the best guarantee for fulfilling this desire, regardless of the political orientation of the candidate. The term “perception” is crucial. This is what Anthony Downs (1930–2021) analyzed in 1957 [10]. He believed that voters have incomplete information about political issues a candidate defends because the political ideas are not clear or because the political ideas defended by the candidate can change. Because voters are not sure about the political programs of the candidates, they use the economic programs of the candidates as a proxy, especially regarding expectations about their personal gain if they vote for a

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particular candidate. That is what voters understand immediately since it pertains to their own personal condition, rather than to an unidentified, anonymous, group condition. This rational behavior, putting economic issues first, was at the origin of the very famous quote coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton during his presidential campaign in 1992: “- The economy stupid!” And it worked! Similar rational behavior is expected in uncertain times of war or pandemic. Voters can choose a “flight to security” and vote for the candidate promising peace, health, or both, independent of the ideological conviction of the candidate or the voters. Rational choice theory in the economy makes little or no acceptance of other possible motivations such as patriotism, nationalism, ideology, or religion because economics has a tendency to monopolize the explanation of human behavior, sidelining other types of motivations: “As we come to explore this continent, economists will encounter a number of native tribes—historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.—who, in their various intellectually primitive ways, have preceded us in reconnoitering the dark side of human activity. Once we economists get involved, quite properly we will of course be brushing aside these a-theoretical aborigines . . . When these researchers do good work, they are doing economics” [11]. It might be an extreme way the supremacy of economics is positioned over all other social sciences, but if rational choice theory is accepted for economic exchanges, why shouldn’t it be accepted in political situations. In a purely binary situation such as war vs. peace, win or lose, greed vs. grievance, rational choice theory works well, and the theory has been used extensively by political and business leaders alike. Before engaging in a conflict, political and business leaders must assess the costs and benefits on one side and motivations of troops (in military) or stakeholders (in business) on the other. John Kerry encapsulated the winner-takes-all mentality so characteristic in the United States: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq” [12]. Even if these remarks have been criticized as unsensitive to the American troops fighting in many places in the world, they are indicative of the mentality of some leaders. On top of positivism and rational choice theory, classical geopolitics has a penchant for causality. Causality identifies the cause and effect of human actions and material situations. If there is a material situation like global warming or water scarcity, it is expected that entire populations will try to emigrate and go to places where climate conditions are favorable and water abundant. Conversely, humans can try to overcome climate conditions and water scarcity by inventing new living conditions in which climate and water do not represent a critical factor for survival and growth. In the first case, causality forces people to move, while in the second case, causality forces humans to invent a new habitat. If a country consumes too many natural resources and needs resources that are abundant in another country that is smaller and weaker, it is expected that the larger country will put pressure on the smaller one to have access to resources. How the smaller state will respond is a matter of trade-offs that can be analyzed and prioritized following the cause-andeffect relationship.

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In causality, the main question is what? What is happening or what should we do? The onus is, therefore, on action and processes. Once the cause of a problem has been identified, a solution must be proposed, and for that, empiricism and pragmatism are the salient elements of classical geopolitics. All countries can use empiricism and pragmatism, and Singapore is an example. The state has implemented “real-politik,” best represented by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Upon its independence in 1965, the city-state decided to implement the MPH policy (Meritocracy, Pragmatism, Honesty). The pragmatic part of it says that the newly founded state will look for inspiration to build the best educational system, the best health system, or the best safety system. Singapore will go to Finland, the United States, or Cuba if necessary [13]. That was a very unusual move because, in the 1960s, it was unimaginable that a communist country would go the United States for inspiration or that a liberal country would go to China or the Soviet Union for inspiration. Ideological divisions were so strong at that time that there was a limited number of countries that were suitable for inspiration.

*** In the introduction, we have stated that geopolitics revolves around space, state, and power. This is what we are going to see now. Space gives the geographical or spatial frame where geopolitics happens, state identifies the main actor in the geopolitical game, while power analyzes the influence actors exercise on each other. The peculiarity of classical geopolitics is that this branch enjoyed a monopoly status for a very long time. Hence, a plethora of authors and leaders who gave important contributions to the development of classical geopolitics. It is impossible to quote them all. In a recent review of the most important authors in geopolitics, Alfred McCoy has listed Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Alexandre Dugin [14]. Faced with dozens of important contributors to classical geopolitics, there is a necessity to prioritize. The main criteria for our choice are the authors’ contributions to concepts that are still valid today, as well as the possibility that the business world can refer to them or use these concepts in the marketplace. We will quote just four authors in this chapter. Friedrich Ratzel will be studied in the section about space while Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer will be studied in the section about state. Finally, Samuel Huntington will be studied in the section about power. All these authors were active in the nineteenth or twentieth century, and they all were male, old, white, and Western. Classical geopolitics denotes, therefore, a bias, which will be challenged by critical and feminist authors.

2.1

Classical Geopolitics and Space

Classical geopolitics considers space as a geographical space in its full spectrum, carrying all kinds of constraints and opportunities. Geography is the study of physical space and human interactions with the natural environment. The physical

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environment was so important that all human developments, civilizations, cultures, and political institutions revolved around geographical physical settings [15]. The emergence and disappearance of civilizations and empires were, to a great extent, attributed to the friendly or unfriendly physical environment. The analysis of the physical environment, such as climate, location, or availability of natural resources, is the main activity of classical geopoliticians. For classical geopolitics, space is an objective fact because it is physical, and this fact cannot be contested. Based on that, classical geopolitics claims to provide an impartial perspective on geography cleansed from ideology and any other discursive factors. In that sense, geopolitics is “foil to idealism, ideology and human will.” According to classical geopolitics, geographical elements are natural and consistent, facts that are out there waiting to be discovered by the geopolitician. Geography helps to establish classical geopolitics as the “view from nowhere” that offers a scientific and objective look on world affairs. The alternative views are marginalized by default, as they come to be considered “unscientific,” idealistic, political, or outright ideological. There is, however, a disagreement between politics and the military because space can be dynamic for politicians who may tend to dismiss the importance of geography, while military personnel are guided by the static “science” of geography. According to generals, policy recommendations must consider “fait accompli of geography,” the fact that geography is given and not something that can be circled around or dismissed. Phil Kelly encapsulates geographical objectivity in the following way: Classical geopolitics is the study of the impact or influence of certain geographic features— these being positions and locations of regions, states, and resources plus topography, climate, distance, immigration, states’ size and shapes, demography and the like—upon states’ foreign policies and actions as an aid to statecraft [16].

This definition touches upon many important elements of classical geopolitics. Among others, Phil Kelly mentions states as actors and statecraft as the “raison d’etre” of geopolitics. What is clear from that definition is that geography influences the decisions of the state. What is not clear is how that influence works. Is the geographical influence absolute and deterministic or does this influence depend on the definition of geography and the importance that humans give to geography?

2.1.1

Geographical Determinism

Does geography determine human action in such a way that human action completely depends on geographical conditions? If yes, it means that there is no escape. Humans evolve, think, decide, and do everything according to geographical imperatives. If there is a major geographical change like an earthquake, absence, or abundance of rain, the whole of a human’s life will be affected. If, conversely, geography does not determine human action, it means that humans have the

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possibility to detach themselves from the vicissitudes of geography, either by modifying physical geography or by inventing a new environment in which they will live. Geographical determinism is the main dilemma geopoliticians face when it comes to the discussion about the interaction between geography and people. Determinism has two origins, which were dominant in the past. The first one is “theological determinism” according to which God, deities, or spirits have created the world and everything in the world, including natural and social laws. That view prevailed for a long time and, even today, there are theocratic societies in which “creationism” as a synonym of “theological determinism” dominates. The second is “naturalistic determinism.” According to naturalism, nature is a sui generis phenomenon without any influence from outside, but it determines human existence. Both approaches (theological and naturalist) exclude human action or agency in the creation or modification of nature. Classical geopolitics has evolved on the question of geographical determinism. There was a strong temptation in the past to consider natural phenomena as deterministic for human action, but over time, classical geopoliticians have abandoned the idea, preferring to talk about possible influences rather than absolute determinism. Many authors insisted on the importance of geography, among them Ratzel and Mackinder. The latter used to say at the turn of the twentieth century: “man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls” [17]. According to Bert Chapman, “Geopolitics is not geographical determinism but is based on assumption that geography defines limits and opportunities in international politics: states can realize their geopolitical opportunities or become victims of their geopolitical situation. One purpose of grand strategy is to exploit one’s own geographical attributes and an adversary’s geographical vulnerabilities” [18]. The main goal of geopolitics is thus to identify geographical opportunities and vulnerabilities and find a way to use them. According to Ellsworth Huntington, possibilism is an intermediate position: “in our daily practice we all follow an intermediate position between absolute freedom and absolute necessity; a compromise perhaps untanable logically, but pragmatically workable” [19]. According to all contemporary classical authors, man has agency, but only in the limits fixed by nature. In his book called “Collapse,” Jared Diamond wrote about several past societies that seem to have caused their own demise by overusing their resource base [20]. One example of these populations that caused their own death is the Easter Island population. Diamond describes how this society is thought to have overused the timber supply of the island, thus depleted their fuel supply, which led to their collapse. Although his work has been criticized for being overly simplistic and deterministic, it is nevertheless popular because it offers a seemingly easy and obvious framework of understanding the deterministic link between geography and human societies. The “natural” link between humans, geography, and state leads to the organic theory of the state and its main proponents: Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen.

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Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904)

Friedrich Ratzel was a versatile academic. Beginning as a zoologist, he evolved into becoming an ethnographer and a geographer, able to write about human geography and cultural geography, disciplines that barely existed at that time. He was very much influenced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin and his great idea of the natural evolution of species. In 1860, Herbert Spencer was among the first to set forth a hypothesis that there is an analogy between the physical organism and social organization. In the conclusion of his paper, Spencer justified the comparison of societies to living organisms. Akin to living organisms, societies gradually increase in mass, they become little by little more complex and, at the same time, their parts grow more mutually dependent, and they continue to live and grow as wholes, while successive generations of their units appear and disappear [21]. Building on Spencer, Raztel wrote: “The territory of a state is no definite area fixed for all time,—for a state is a living organism,—being dependent for its form and greatness on its inhabitants, in whose movements, outwardly exhibited especially in territorial growth or contraction, it participates” [22]. The idea of a state having a life of its own is not new. Before Ratzel, the German philosophers of the early nineteenth century, Hegel (1770–1831) and Fichte (1762–1814), had already regarded the state as a being or an entity having a life of its own. It was but a short step to the idea of the state as an organism that was developed by Ratzel. As a continuator of Social Darwinism, Ratzel concluded that human communities need space to develop, especially communities with advanced cultural systems like Germany. Writers at that time often displayed racial and social theories that are totally unacceptable today, the crux of these theories being supremacy in racial or cultural terms. Ratzel for his part used the concept of Raum (space) and linked it to the people with great Kultur (namely Germany) so it was natural for him to consider that a strong German Kultur should extend its territory at the expense of weaker states and its cultures, notably in the East. The culmination of this theory was the concept of lebensraum (living space) that he proposed for the first time in 1897 in a book called Politische Geographie. However, the term became much more famous during the Second World War because it was used as a legitimation of Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) of the Third Reich. The starting point of lebensraum is the general increase of the population in Europe at that time, which was an empirical fact. The next step is more dubious. It stipulates that there is an alleged shortage of usable land that induces people to migrate and states to expand, which is a Malthusian assertion. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) proposed to reduce the demographic pressure to fit with existing usable land, but Ratzel departed from Malthus because he proposed quite the opposite. For Ratzel, there is no need to reduce the demographic pressure. There is a need to expand living space, usable land, hence lebensraum. He stated that: “There is a tension between the movement of life, which never rests, and the space on earth, which does not change. . .The struggle for life (Kampf ums Dasein) primarily means nothing more than the struggle for

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space (Kampf um Raum). For space is the very first condition for life and space is the yardstick by which other living conditions are measured” [23]. Ratzel applied it to Germany, but other states were interested in lebensraum too. The most significant example outside of Germany came from Japan. Imperial Japan in the Meiji era (1868–1912) firmly believed in the superiority of the Japanese Kultur over other cultures in Asia. Even if the Meiji era mixed elements of ancestral Japanese culture with Western models and technologies, Japan was still perceived as very much Asian or Japanese at that time. Japan winning the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had huge reverberations across Asia because it was the first time in modern history that an Asian country had defeated a great European power. Benefitting from this success, Japan wanted to impose itself as a liberator to other Asian countries. Some Asian leaders were sympathetic to that idea, even if Japan was primarily interested in extending its territory. The Japanese archipelago is composed of thousands of islands (only 260 of them are inhabited), and only 13% of its territory can be used for agriculture or living, the rest being forests and mountains. The Japanese population soared to 65 million in 1930 because the fertility rate from 1900 to 1930 was around five children per woman, very different from the fertility rate of 1.3 in 2023. Land available to agriculture could not be expanded in the archipelago, and grain production could not be increased. Following Malthus and Ratzel, Japan had two options. The first one was to adapt population to space, meaning to decrease the fertility rate or let people emigrate. The second option was to adapt space to population, meaning to let the population increase and conquer new territories, which would allow an increase in production on one side and establish Japanese settlement communities on the other. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria, the most economically advanced part of China. This was seen as a vital support for the Japanese economy, notably with the provision of coal and land for settlement, and thus reducing population pressure. There was a transfer of Japanese peasants, who moved as emigrants to the rural areas of Manchuria and took up farming, very often on already cultivated farms. They became a vanguard for Japanese imperialism [24]. At the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese leadership applied Drang nach Westen, expanding Japanese influence and territory into China, Korea, and Taiwan in a similar move that pushed the Third Reich to expand in the East. In both cases, there were catastrophic consequences for the local populations. Despite that, some countries or leaders are still obsessed with lebensraum. Their reasoning is that in a world with scarce natural resources such as water, states are pushed to expand their territory and control these vital natural resources. Lebensraum is a very simple idea, which is why it has so easily been accepted. A simple biological statement, the idea of living space, wrapped in mysticism of the nineteenth century, was to become one of the most powerful ideas of our time. According to Hans Weigert, it was an ideal worth living and dying for [25]. Simply put, men need space to live and to grow. If they lack space, they are, individually and collectively, doomed. This lust for space is to Ratzel the inevitable consequence of the biological fact that the state itself is a living organism. Lebensraum was banned from the political vocabulary after WWII because the term was intimately linked to atrocities of the war, so nobody wanted to use the term

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anymore. This lasted for a few decades, but the concept is so resilient that there has been a revival in recent years. It has been used by Palestinians to characterize the policy of Jewish settlements in Israel and by former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, to characterize the Chinese expansion policy in Africa. He compared notably Chinese investments in Africa to neo-colonialism and lebensraum [26]. At first, it seems strange, because lebensraum in Asia is associated to Japan and its imperialistic policy. In his statement, Shinzo Abe wanted to revisit the concept. He implied that China is doing in Africa what Japan was doing in China in the 1920s and 1930s. His opinion congrued with the statement from the former governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who also accused China of exploiting Africa in the same way Western countries used to colonize it.2 There are many simplifications about the work of Razel, among them that he is the forefather of Nazi’s racial theories. But for Weigert, Ratzel had been misused by Hitler and the Nazis: “The master whose twenty-four books and one hundred monographs had been written to serve science and mankind, who loved his fatherland but detested war, would have bowed his head in shame had he known that his romantic dreams of space and man were to become a torch of world revolution” [27]. Ratzel’s lebensraum and organic theory of state had an outstanding influence on the geopoliticians who came after him, especially Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer. He also had influence on some American authors such as Ellen Churchill Semple, who devoted a book to Ratzel’s system of anthropogeography [28]. Does Ratzel’s Raum resonate with the business world? His term Raum focuses on space and natural resources. Since resources are unevenly distributed, the struggle to get hands on available resources is a strategy corporations know too well. This is a global war, and companies do not hesitate to go to great lengths to exploit reserves and mine natural resources such as coal, bauxite, copper, rare earth metals, etc. While oil companies are famous, mining giants like Glencore, BHP, and Rio Tinto are less famous but no less ferocious when it comes to expanding their Raum. Apart from scouting for natural resources, companies pursue their market Raum because they want to conquer some untapped markets. In this case, they do not look for natural resources, but untapped customers. China was a typical example of an untapped market before it opened its doors in the 1970s. After decolonization, many countries were declared open for business, but the purchasing power was so low that these markets were practically closed. Now that great parts of Asia have come out of poverty, countries like Laos, Myanmar, or Mongolia present good opportunities. Raum in business does not mean extending territorial control to these countries with military power. It means conquering market shares with batteries of products and salespersons. Another implementation of Raum in business is when companies bring the fight to the home country of the competitor.

‘China takes from us primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism’, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi declared to The Financial Times in 2013. See ‘Africa told to view China as a competitor’ in The Financial Times, 12 March, 2013 and Adagbo Onoja, ‘How China Lost Nigeria’, The Diplomat, August 25, 2020

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When confronted by low-cost carriers, Singapore Airlines (SIA) did not try to bring down its own fares. It simply acquired two low-cost airline carriers, Scoot and Tigerair (later merging them), to fight against the leading low-cost carrier AirAsia. SIA wanted to bring the fight to AirAsia’s own market, which is Malaysia, and cut the grass of the rival. AirAsia is a tough competitor. It won the TTG Travel Award as the best low-cost carrier in Asia Pacific seven times in a row between 2011 and 2018, but it was dethroned by Scoot in 2019. Raum is very important for Singaporean companies, considering the size of the island. For them, looking for overseas presence is a necessity, and the hinterland represented by Malaysia is their first consideration. Therefore, Singapore welcomed the creation of Iskandar Malaysia, a very important business and residential development just across the causeway in the Malaysian state of Johor Bahru. Three times the size of Singapore, dubbed as the “next Shenzhen” when it was launched in 2006, Iskandar Malaysia naturally attracted companies from Singapore. Among them, the real estate giant CapitaLand and the sovereign fund Temasek. Fifteen years after its launching, the enthusiasm has faded away to some extent, but this will not remove the fact that the only possibility for Singapore to expand physically is there, the other alternatives being Batam and Bintan islands in Indonesia. However, unlike with Malaysia, there is no physical connection in the form of a bridge with these islands, yet [29]. The second term proposed by Ratzel, Kultur (with the sense of German superiority or supremacy), resonates with the idea of corporate culture superiority. It resonated particularly during colonial times. If European countries and Japan successfully subdued scores of countries in a relatively short span of time, it meant that European powers and Japan were superior to the subdued countries, as the colonial narrative went at that time. If this works for states, it works also for corporations, because private companies have built all the technology for communications, transportation, weaponry, and manufacturing, permitting these countries to be victorious. Consequently, corporations coming from colonial countries were convinced that their brands, processes, technology, management techniques, and products were superior to their colonized counterparts. Since they were superior, they believed that they deserved supremacy, either through the elimination of local competitors, or forcing local competitors to work for them. Colonial supremacy set aside, some companies believe that they have a superior corporate culture, a superior brand culture, or a superior organizational culture. As far as corporate culture is concerned, the area of organizational culture is extremely well explored in the business world. For one of the main authors in this field, Edgar Schein, culture is the most difficult organizational attribute to identify and change, and at the same time, it is the most important differentiating criterium with other companies. According to him: “In talking about organizational culture with colleagues and members of organizations, I often find that we agree that ‘it’ exists and that it is important in its effects, but when we try to define it, we have completely different ideas of what ‘it’ is” [30]. The company with a supposed superior organizational culture will expand its presence naturally to other lands because consumers recognize its excellence and appeal. For instance, it may happen that the corporate culture of BMW or Mercedes is so appealing to customers worldwide that these

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companies do not need the support of Germany as a state to sponsor their presence in other countries. It can be the other way around; companies are paving the way for the presence of their states. For many years, Apple used its Kultur of design to impose its superiority worldwide. For years, having an Apple product was a matter of social prestige and technological and design superiority. The aficionados of Apple, Hermes, Ferrari, Ben & Jerry’s, and other brands do not buy only tangible products, they buy the Kultur of a given brand, which proves to have a superior appeal when compared to the competitors. In that respect, Hermes, for instance, can rely on its Kultur of perfection and sophistication, while Ben & Jerry’s can emphasize its Kultur of inclusiveness and social justice.

2.1.3

Location and Distance

Geographical determinism deploys its importance through natural resources, location, and distance. As for natural resources, the nexus between natural resources and conflict is well explored because of the numerous wars to gain natural resources. Concerning location, if one person lives in the mountains or at the seaside, in Latin America or in Asia, this greatly influences the way this person views the world. The most striking example comes from the variegated understanding of the term “Eurasia.” The situation becomes even more complicated when people are not sure if their country belongs to this or that continent, as is the case for Russia and Turkey. Do these countries belong to Europe, Asia, or Eurasia, for instance? Do Russians and Turks perceive themselves as Europeans or Asians? And how do others perceive Turkish people and Russians? Russia can be a synonym of Asia because it represents about 34% of Asian territory. Just after WWII, the Soviet Union controlled its own “Western” states such as the German Democratic Republic and Poland. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia had to find a new identity centered on the bridge between the East and the West. All previous conceptualizations of Russian state identity revolved around the chain of principalities stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The question, which the Slavophiles and the Westernizers chose to answer differently, was whether the future of this nucleus of the Russian state lay in the East or in the West. The original nucleus represented by the Kievan Rus’ of the tenth to eleventh centuries and the Grand Duchy of Moscow of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries had been modified considerably with the extension of Russian territory in the eighteenth century. The geography of the Kievan Rus’ has nothing to do with Russia today. Today, most of the Russian territory lies behind the Ural Mountains, which was not the case before the eighteenth century. For Russia, pan-Slavism can be used as a theory to encompass all territories inhabited by groups of Slavic populations and tribes. Therefore, there are tendencies among Russian leaders to claim the territories of Ukraine, Belarus, or other countries because their populations are deemed to be similar to the Russian population [31]. Pan-Slavism, however, cannot be used to

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justify Russia’s claims over lands located to the east of Urals because Slavic populations did not live there. For that purpose, another theory, the Turanian synthesis, has been pushed forward. Turanianism, which is labeled after the great Turan Depression in Siberia, refers to a theory launched in the nineteenth century as the opposition to pan-Slavism. According to that theory, the “Turanian” people originate from the Ural-Altai area and encompass Finns, Hungarians, Turks, and Mongols, among others [32]. The “Turanian synthesis” puts in motion a synthesis between the Slavic and Turanian components of Russia and maintains the unity of the country. In sum, it is a perfect synthesis of Orthodoxy and a legacy of Genghis Khan that gives birth to the Russian concept of Eurasia. The other country for which location poses a problem is Turkey. A total of 97% of its territory is in Asia (Anatolia). The Western part of Istanbul and its surroundings (Thrace) represents only 3% of its territory but hosts 10% of the country’s population. Geographically, Turkey is an Asian country, but since a portion of it is in Europe, it is possible for Turkey to claim a Eurasian identity too. Historically, the Ottoman Empire ruled large portions of Europe for centuries, as well as North African and some Asian territories. Eurasia became a synonym of the historical Ottoman Empire even though it was not really “Eastern,” or “Asian.” The maximum eastward expansion of the Ottoman Empire was attained with Crimea and its surroundings. It is interesting to note that in its revival of “Neo-Ottomanism,” Turkey never points at the Empire’s possessions in North Africa and the Gulf. It only focuses on European and Asian former possessions of the Ottoman Empire. To stress its influence in Asia, and especially in Central Asia, Turkey focuses on populations speaking some form of Turkic language. This area is huge and goes up into China. Contrary to Russia, where the Turanian synthesis tries to forge a common link between the Slavs and the Ural-Altai populations, Turkey does not use ethnogenesis in claiming Central Asia’s populations as its own. It does not want to amalgamate Turkic-speaking populations. It only wants to establish an influence that can stretch from China to Bosnia [33]. For Turkey, the word “Eurasia” gives the impression of retaining the Republic’s “European” orientation, identified as the antechamber of the European Union while embracing the “Asian” dimension, its real origin coming from the Seljuk Turks. The term “Eurasia” was taboo during the Cold War because Turkey was firmly in NATO. Turkey was perceived as a Western country, and everything labeled East was associated with NATO’s archenemy, the Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall forced Russia and Turkey to question their identity and try to strike a balance between their Eastern and Western components. As for distance, classical geopoliticians view it either as a tyranny or something that is malleable. Distance can be malleable because of the telecommunications revolution. Instant communication has permitted it to get rid of physical distance. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the development of video conference, and it remains to be seen what the long-lasting effects of Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meetings will be. Will people continue to travel, or will they work, study, and play online and this way sign a death sentence to geographical determinism? What is easy to see is that the tyranny of distance did not go away completely

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with the development of telecommunications. There is still a tyranny when time is incompressible in reaching certain destinations. Over the centuries, distances have shrunk owing to progress in transportation technology. What used to be measured in walking distance or horse-riding time has been transformed radically with the introduction of the car, boat, and plane, but some constraints still remain. It is certainly possible to fly over the Himalayas, but if we want to reach remote populations where there is no airport, heliport, or open field to land on, long-forgotten options pop up. With all its stealth technology, the US army, for instance, had to use horse-riders to reach some places in Afghanistan [34]. Practically all armies in the world have a doctrine on guerilla warfare and small unit tactics for situations in which the use of modern and fast transportation equipment is not available. Not only do these small units have to find a way to survive in hostile environments, but they must also find a way to move from one place to the other in the jungle, archipelago, desert, or mountain. Some countries, like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, have built their reputation of resilience on guerilla warfare, and they still preserve that knowledge for the defense of their territories [35]. There is no reason to believe that future wars will be only technological wars. At some point, soldiers or guerilla fighters must be sent on the ground, and this is where the distance will be of essence for moving people, material, and food. Distance forces logisticians to use existing natural paths to reach a certain point, so geography determines how troops, people, and goods will move. The Khyber Pass in Afghanistan is, for instance, the pass that has been used by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, and the Persians when they wanted to move from Asia to Europe and vice versa [36]. There was no other way, or the alternative way was too difficult. The Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca are the only ways to move containers from the Persian Gulf to East Asia. The state that controls these two straits controls the supply of oil and gas to China, Japan, South Korea, and all other countries in Asia-Pacific. Alternatives to the Strait of Malacca exist, such as the Sunda Straits in Indonesia, the possibility to build a canal on the Kra Isthmus in Thailand, or to make a link from the port of Gwadar in Pakistan to China or from the port of Kyaukpyu in Myanmar to Kunming, China. However, these options are not viable from an economic point of view, or they might be difficult or dangerous to operate. Distance also determines how people assess the danger coming from outside. The closer a state is to a certain power, the more it will feel the heat or influence of that power. Distance was analyzed by Patrick O’Sullivan in 1986 when he proposed a model of the spread of power according to distance and time. He identified three stages: the spread of power in the short term, the middle term, and the long term. According to him, the main point in stretching power is the availability of resources (human, natural, monetary, etc.), which can determine the options left to a state. The necessity to cover a certain distance gives him a quasi-mathematical formula for the

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stretch of power, regardless of ideology, religion, or political motivation.3 To illustrate the link between power and distance, he used the example of Hanoi in Vietnam. In the 1980s, Vietnam was still an important ally (maybe the only one) for Soviet Union in Asia. According to O’Sullivan: Hanoi is 2,000 miles away from the closest point on the Soviet border, but over 5,000 miles from Moscow as the crow flies along the length of the Himalayas. San Diego (the closest point on the American border) is 9,000 miles away, but over the ocean. Since the cost of carrying material on the sea is about one-tenth the cost of road haulage, the U.S.A. is closer to Vietnam than Moscow in surface transport cost terms [37].

Rational examination of transportation cost would assume Vietnam to extend its relationship with America rather than with the Soviet Union, but at that time, cost consideration was not the priority for rulers in Hanoi or in Moscow. Ideological proximity was much more important than geographical considerations. Finally, physical distance determines the possibility of operation for an army. To illustrate that point, Kenneth Boulding used the concept of “loss of strength gradient” [38]. This notion expresses the idea that power is greatest at home and power lowers the longer the distance from the home base. The farther the force is extended, the weaker it becomes. Boulding’s reason for the weakening of might with distance was the cost of distance in transporting forces and sending communication. Napoleon and Hitler experienced it when they wanted to conquer Russia. According to Boulding, they overstretched their forces to a point that it was impossible to control the territory anymore, especially in times of harsh winter climate. But this was before nuclear weapons, missiles, stealth technology, drones, and the like. It is today easy to strike a distant target, especially when the targeted country does not have the equipment to prevent the attack or to retaliate. In such case, distance becomes a non-issue, and geographical determinism does not exist anymore.

2.1.4

The World as a Closed System

Geographical determinism became a hot subject at the end of the nineteenth century because at that time the age of “discoveries” (by the Europeans) was over, and it was possible to view the world as a closed system. There were no more “terra incognita” waiting for the Europeans to be discovered. Since the world has become a closed system, it was possible to write general laws about the geographical system as a whole and its influence on geopolitics. The first geopolitician (even if the word was not used at that time) was Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), who was an admiral in the US Navy. He posited the supremacy of one geographical element, the seas. He believed that whoever has supremacy in naval terms would rule the world. This view was shared by most

3

See the model for distance and power in Patrick O’Sullivan, Geopolitics, St Martin’s Press, 1986 pp. 53–76

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people at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Mahan: “The fundamental truth, warranted by history is that control of the seas, and especially along the great lines drawn by national interest or national commerce; is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations. It is so because the sea is the world’s great medium of circulation” [39]. According to Mahan, the order of nature made sea power unchanged and makes it unchangeable, given its immutable character. Next to Mahan was Sir Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), who gave primacy to land instead of the sea. The reason for this shift was the dramatic increase of railways and especially transcontinental railways such as the Trans-Siberian (1905), the Berlin–Baghdad railway (1896), and the Continental railways in the United States (1869). By comparing the outreach of the navy to the outreach of ground troops helped by the railways, Mackinder assumed that ground troops, because of their ability to maneuver and cover large distances on land, would be superior to the navy. In 1904, he theorized this view in his “Pivot to History” article. He added the concept of “Heartland” by focusing on the large steppes in Asia, from where all invasions came in the past. This territorial connection between Asia and Europe is the decisive land area to him, and whoever controls it will control the world. That was the essence of his famous riddle proposed in 1919: Who rules East Europe, commands Heartland, Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island, Who rules the World-Island, commands the World [40].

Mackinder’s approach placed land determinism at the heart of geopolitical strategies, the same way Mahan’s had before him with the navy. Mitteleuropa was Mackinder’s obsession, which he successfully passed on to his successors. American authors such as Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943) and George Kennan (1904–2005) used the theory of Heartland (repacked as “Rimland” by Spykman) to contain the influence of the Soviet Union. Even though, during WWII, Mackinder revised his theory and abandoned the idea of one region that could control the world, his concept of pivot and heartland had a deep impact on the American strategist who based the Cold War strategy more in tune to his 1919 view rather than his 1943 global point of view. Because of the importance of heartland/Rimland, Spykman constantly considered that the Soviet Union was the strategic challenger to the United States much more than Germany or Japan. Jean Gottman recalls an iconoclastic speech given by Spykman in 1941: On the 31st of December 1941, just three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Spykman presented a paper in New York to a joint session of the Association of American Geographers and the American Political Science Association. He stated that the rimland axis powers of Japan and Germany, would, after the end of the war, become new allies of the United States in countering Russian expansionism. This assertion, not surprisingly, caused uproar at the time.4

4 Geoffrey Sloan interview with Jean Gottman at Oxford University in June 1979 and quoted in Sloan, Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History, p. 127

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Spykman was persistent in stressing the importance of geographical determinism and the necessity for the United States to control the areas that were and will always be pivotal for the security of the world: “The present war effort is undoubtedly directed against the destruction of Hitler and the Nationalist Social Party, but this does not necessarily imply that it is directed at the destruction of Germany as a military power. Similar reasoning is applicable to the Far East” [41]. According to him, the United States will always need Germany and Japan to contain Russia/Soviet Union because of the over importance of geographical constraints. In 2023, the concept of Heartland/Rimland was reassessed. Russia as a threat to the United States has not disappeared. It still has a capacity for nuisance in its immediate neighborhood (Ukraine, Baltic States, Georgia, Central Asia), and these are serious threats. More than 6000 nuclear warheads are here to stress the power of Russia compared to other countries, the United States included. However, the aging population and economic problems have created a situation where the control of its vast territory becomes more and more difficult for Russia. As much as it praises as being the largest country on Earth, and that it is shielded by geography from attacks coming from the West or the East, Russia simply does not have enough people to control its territory, so the great size of the country does not automatically result in great power.

2.1.5

The Concept of Heartland and Business

Heartland as a concept can be very useful in business, especially if there is a possibility to redefine what heartland is. While heartland is the “core” area and pivot for Mackinder, the term “core” has other meanings in business. The first one might be the core or indispensable natural resources a corporation needs. In the case of electronics, for instance, rare earth metals can be considered as core elements. The availability and location of these resources are, therefore, critical and the subject of huge animosity between China, which controls more than 95% of extraction of rare earth metals, and countries that need these metals. If one resource is found or exploited in only one country, it is expected that other countries will contemplate a way to get their hands on that resource. The size of and accessibility to that country will be primordial in elaborating plans for how to invade or cooperate with it. The second possibility to use the heartland/core concept for business relates to the core customer of a corporation. All corporations separate their customers into several categories: loyal customers, occasional customers, inaccessible customers, etc. The cost of acquisition of new customers is viewed as much higher than retaining an existing customer base [42]. The loyal customers can, therefore, be identified as “core” customers, the center of all attentions by corporations. How to grow the existing customer base is one of the objectives of the Ansoff matrix. Igor Ansoff developed his matrix in the 1950s, when he identified four strategies permitting a company to play on development of markets (by capitalizing on new customers or looking for new ones) or/and products (capitalizing on existing products or

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launching new ones). Focusing on “core” or existing customers, he proposed market penetration (selling more of the existing products to existing or “core” customers) or product development (launching new products for existing or “core” customers) [43]. With the development of social media, “core” customers can also act as brand ambassadors and become an essential part of a wider concept known as customer engagement. Finally, the company can use the heartland theory in defining its core competences. The concept was proposed by C.K. Prahald and Gary Hamel in the 1990s with the aim of identifying the strategic advantage a company has over its competitors [44]. According to them, the core competence of corporations is not a product or a service, but what the company does best. For McDonald’s, it can be the unique combination of standardization and localization. In practically every country, McDonald’s proposes a standard offer and a specific offer for that country. This “glocalization” competence can be extended to other food businesses such as packaged goods or to businesses that have nothing to do with food such as apparel or the entertainment industry. If, for instance, the core competence for Toyota is to manufacture engines, it can extend its production to aircraft engines, motorcycles, etc., and move from combustion-powered engines to electrical engines. Toyota can pivot and consider that its core competence is transportation. In that case, it can be any sort of transportation: aircraft, trains, drones, spacecraft, ships, etc. Finally, Toyota can declare that its core competence is mobility. In that case, anything that is mobile (mobile phones, mobile homes, mobile education) can be covered by Toyota.

2.2

Classical Geopolitics and the State

The second part of the geopolitical triptych is the state. This is the most important element for classical geopolitics because it is the container of social life and the actor in international relations. As pointed out by O’Laughlin and van der Wusten, “As social scientists, we feel that our first role is to analyze the world as it is, was and evolves. We believe that the current discourse of international relations, which is also our preference correctly reflects the situation: the state system is by far the most important set of political units that exists, particularly with regard to peace/war issues” [45]. According to classical geopolitics, the state is the natural player in the game because only the state has the political legitimacy to represent all the people in one country. Corporations do not represent all people, similar to NGOs and associations, which represent only their own members. Because of its legitimacy in representing people, the state is the only entity to exercise agency in international relations (agency is defined as the act of trying to achieve a certain goal). Only the state can engage responsibility of the people living in that state. Only the state can declare war or accept ceasefire. The state is real. It is the most practical way to organize a society.

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So from a realistic and classical point of view, the state is the natural player in international relations. Classical geopolitics recognizes that there are possibilities of supranational organizations, institutions, or groupings of states. Saul Cohen has identified two types. The first is the geostrategic realm, or the macro level, which encompasses global institutions and groupings such as the United Nations, the WTO, and the IMF. The second is the meso level, represented by groups of countries such as the European Union, the Organization of African Unity, GCC, ASEAN, and others [46]. There have been recurrent predictions that states would disappear. Marxist analysis, for instance, predicates that the victory of the proletariat builds a classless society that renders the state useless. Another predication comes from management authors like Peter Drucker, who believed that the “knowledge economy” transcended national borders and relegated the state to a mere administrative instrument.5 The proponents of globalization believe that globalization in its economic manifestations (movement of capital and emergence of free markets), cultural (challenges to traditional values via new forms of communication), political (the irresistible victory of liberal democracies), and demographic (the welcoming of immigration, including illegal immigration) weakens nation-states and deprives them of regulatory capacity. Going against the globalization manifesto, recent developments like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine fueled ideas about the end of globalization and the impossibility for any supranational organization to replace nation states. John Gray, as early as in 2001, just after the September 11 attacks, already believed that globalization was not going to grow without limits: Now after the attacks on New York and Washington, the conventional view of globalization as an irresistible historical trend has been shattered. We are back on the classical terrain of history, where war is waged not over ideologies, but over religion, ethnicity, territory, and the control of natural resources [47].

Globalization is, therefore, neither irresistible, irreversible, or limitless. Even if classical geopolitics recognizes the power of other entities like corporations, the state remains the glue of the international system, the major mechanism that enables a people to achieve a self-realization inextricably bound with its sense of territoriality. For Cohen, the state has been challenged seriously and repeatedly since Westphalia, and especially in the twentieth century, but it still exists and there is no viable alternative so far. Why is the state so important? The answer lies in the origin and functions of the state. Several theories of state exist. We will first look at the way the state is presented from the organic point of view and secondly, the reasons why the state is a must in international relations. For the former, we will look at Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer, while for the latter, more authors will be analyzed.

‘That the new society will be both a non-socialist and a post-capitalist society is practically certain. And it is certain also that its primary resource will be knowledge’, Peter Drucker, PostCapitalist Society. Harper Business, 1993, p. 4

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Rudolf Kjellen (1864–1922)

Rudolf Kjellen was a Swedish author and a disciple of Ratzel. His main contributions were the development of the organic nature of the state (initially proposed by Ratzel, but much more developed by Kjellen) and the proposal that the state should be studied according to five criteria. When he embarked on the organic theory of the state, Kjellen had to cope with other state legitimacies. The first and long-time dominant theory was the divine theory. It is the oldest theory that legitimizes the existence of the state and rulers by divine right. In a nutshell, the state is created by God, and the rulers are chosen by God to rule. Rulers are not accountable to human beings. It is, therefore, useless to judge their rule by human criteria. The second theory faced by Kjellen was the force theory, by which the state is established by violence and force, usually after a war. The fact that the state has been established by force does not mean that it is automatically authoritarian or dictatorial. It simply means that it results from the use of force. The third theory was the social contract theory, according to which people willingly participate in the establishment and the governance of the state through a series of social contracts between them. The fact that the state has been established democratically does not prevent it from having social contracts by which the state discriminates against a population based on ethnic, religious, or gender differences. As an example, the United States was founded by social contract after the American Revolution (1775–1784), but it did not prevent the country from applying racial segregation until the reforms of the 1960s. Rudolf Kjellen preferred a fourth theory of the origin of the state, an organic theory that puts the emphasis on the natural existence of the state, which has nothing to do with God, force, or social contract. According to him, the state is natural because it is a biological, living being, like any other living being in nature. The organic nature of the state was developed in his book “Staten som livsform” (“The State as the life-form”) published in 1916. While Darwin was concerned only with the living organisms and not with states, Ratzel and Kjellen suggested that states can also be considered as living organisms. In this case, states are born, they develop, and they die like any other living organisms. Kjellen argued that geopolitics, as a new political science (a term that he popularized in 1899), must treat the state as a living organism within its own body and in relation to other states as living organisms. One way to illustrate the biological comparison is when humans grow physically with the state. For him, the American motto “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country” means that the organic growth of the human being mirrors the organic growth of the state with the discovery of new lands. The same analogy was used during colonialism. Colonial powers exhausted the discovery of new lands in their own countries, so they started to “discover” new lands in faraway areas, unknown to them. Colonial powers, therefore, grew with the discovery of new lands. Finally, another type of analogy of “discovery” can be applied to the French or the Russian revolutionaries. While the French and Russians did not explore new geographies in the heat of the revolution (they did not grow with the newly discovered

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lands), they proposed a new concept of the state, and for them this was as important, if not more important, than the growth of a territorial state. They wanted to build a new society, a new man. So, for them, that kind of growth was also an organic growth started by the revolution.6 There are two ways to consider states as living organisms. The first one is to look at the state from the biological point of view and the second from the spiritual point of view. The first way is to analyze the connection of the state to people, and the second is to link the existence of the state to an idea. For the connection with people, the state can be equated to a specific population, and the disappearance of the population means the disappearance of the state and vice versa. In that case, the fate of the state is intimately linked to the fate of one population. Another biological option is to consider the opposite, that the state has a life of its own, and it does not link its fate to the fate of one population. Examples abound of when states did not link their fate to one population or to one specific person, even the person who founded the state. When the founders die, like Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore in 2015, Fidel Castro in Cuba in 2016, Mao Zedong for People’s Republic of China in 1976, or Sukarto and Hatta in Indonesia 1967 and 1980, respectively, the state continued to exist. There are exceptions though. Many observers are of the opinion that socialist Yugoslavia, born in 1945 as a conglomerate or patchwork of ethnic groups, religions, languages, and cultures, could not survive the death of Tito. According to them, Yugoslavia existed only because there was an authoritarian or dictatorial regime that did not permit democratic expression of different opinions [48]. Tito died in 1980, and it took a little bit more than 10 years for Yugoslavia to disappear in a bloody manner. The great majority of states today recognize the heterogeneity of their population. They are not linked to a specific population, so the state can pursue its own existence. For instance, in Malaysia, there are three main populations: Malays who represent about 63% of the population, Chinese 24%, and Indians 7%. If Malays disappear, Malaysia can continue to exist, may be under another name, but there would be continuity of the state. This is especially problematic for the immigrant countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia. These states were founded by European immigrants to the detriment of the indigenous populations, but today the descendants of these European immigrants represent a minority or will represent a minority in the coming years. This demographic shift produces tectonic changes, like the tectonic shift represented by the arrival of European colonizers and settlers. If these states survive the demographic shock, it will be proof that the state has an autonomous existence, disconnected from a specific (European) population. It will be interesting to see if the states that we know under the names of the United States, Canada, and Australia will continue to exist under these names. If Hispanics make up most of the population in the United States, why should they continue to use the name United States for that country? They can call it Latinoland if they want.

6 For the different attempts to build a ‘New Man’ or a ‘New Society’ see Yinghong Cheng, Creating the ‘New Man’: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities, University of Hawaii Press, 2009

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The idea of the organic theory of the state was so attractive that many authors after Ratzel and Kjellen continued to play with the idea: “to us the great nations of the modern world appear, and justly so, like actual historical and moral personalities. They have their inner life and their own character, but also their physical individualities, their exterior shape, and their material figure, which is so distinct and familiar that we never think of them under any other aspect than their present one; their shapes seem to us today to have a sort of eternal necessity” [49]. The state is, therefore, autonomous, organic, and even anthropomorphic, if the geographical shape of the state is given a human form. If the organic theory of the state is not biological, it can be spiritual. In that case, the fate of the state is linked to an idea, not to a specific territory or population. Even if the state never existed or ceased to exist for a long time, people can still stick to the idea that an imagined state continues to exist, even if it does not have territorial materiality. That is the kind of organic theory originally proposed by Ratzel: “The state is a spiritual and moral organism. The spiritual nexus unites what which is physically separated and for that very reason the biological comparison is no longer viable.”7 For Kjellen, the nation can survive the disappearance of the state as has been demonstrated so many times in history when one nation rebuilds a state after centuries of disappearance. Greece is a good example of historical upheavals because the state called Greece has arisen several times like a Phoenix. It disappeared after the Roman conquest in the second century B.C. until it came back in the nineteenth century. There is still debate as to whether the Byzantine Empire (330–1453) was a Greek state or not. In all cases, the Byzantine Empire itself disappeared in the fifteenth century and Greece arose from the ashes only in 1821. For centuries, the Greeks did not abandon the idea that a Greek state should exist. People continue to stick to the idea of the state, as in the case of Israel with a longlasting saying: “Next year in Jerusalem.” For more than 2000 years, the Jews did not necessarily believe that by next year they would go to Jerusalem in a state called Israel, but they maintained that idea built on religious and ethnic grounds. Something similar happened with the idealization of Russia with the concept of “soborna Rossiia,” or “eternal Russia,” in which the community of people is more important than the individual or the state [50, 51]. The best representation of “eternal Russia” or “cosmic Russia” is given in Ilya Glazunov’s (1930–2017) painting “Eternal Russia,” now found in Glazunov Museum, Moscow. In this painting, Glazunov expresses ideas dear to contemporary propagators of cosmism, notably the alliance of Soviet modernity and the traditional values of the Russian empire. Kjellen’s second contribution to geopolitics deals with the way the state should be studied. Kjellen identified geography as the first and most important criterium. Hence, the term “geopolitics,” a combination of geography and politics. According to him: “Geopolitics is the study of the state as a geographic organism or

7

Friedrich Ratzel quoted by Alexandros Stogiannos, The Genesis of Geopolitics and Friedrich Ratzel, Springer, 2019, pp. 41–45

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phenomenon in space; that is the land, territory, or most pregnantly, as country” [52, 53]. Despite geography being the most important criterium, he immediately introduced four other fields that can help to give a comprehensive understanding of the state. The first is demopolitics, where he puts the emphasis on demography. The second refers to oecopolitics, where the economy is a dominant factor. He was especially interested in the economic independence from other countries, preferring autarky to interdependence. The third is sociopolitics, where the interaction between members of the society is studied, and finally, he ends with kratopolitics, where the state as a government should be studied. Kjellen was not the first author to analyze states according to different criteria. Mackinder, who was his contemporary, also stressed the necessity to encompass all fields of power: “The actual balance of political power at any given time, is of course, the product, on the one hand of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples” [54]. The order of criteria proposed by Kjellen is interesting because he starts with geopolitics as the most important in his time, followed by economy, which would become dominant after WWII and continues with demography, which is the most important criterion for power in the twenty-first century. Demography is the big battle today because of the disequilibrium between countries that experience a high fertility rate and those that do not. In the comparison of the United States, Russia, and China, the Russian overall population is already declining, the Chinese population will peak very soon and start its own decline in the next few years, while the American population rises, due to immigration. Comparing two other countries (Iran to Saudi Arabia), Iran has experienced a decrease of fertility rate following the Islamic Revolution. Its population has multiplied by 2.2 in 40 years (85 million now) while the Saudi population multiplied by 3.5 during the same period (standing at 35 million now). Demographic changes are attentively scrutinized in Israel, Lebanon, Bosnia, all countries where the increase of population of one community means the relative decline of the other. Is it possible that Kjellen’s organic theory resonates with the business world? If states can be living organisms, why not corporations? If states can detach themselves from their creators, corporations can detach themselves from their founders and have a life of their own. In the case of eponymous companies, corporations that bear the name of the creator (for instance, Chanel, Ferrari, Toyota, or Hong Leong Financial Group), can they survive the death of the creator or of the founder? Business literature is very rich when it comes to discussions about legacy or family business transmission, and business schools have courses and programs about family business and wealth management [55, 56]. The saying is that the first generation creates, the second develops, and the third destroys. The adage is persistent across geographies with different wordings such as in the United States, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” However, this is not true everywhere, especially not in Japan, where some of the oldest businesses in the world still exist, and they still belong to the same family. Founded in 705, Japan’s Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan (an onsen is a traditional hotel with hot springs) is today the world’s oldest family

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business. This onsen is now in its 52nd generation while many businesses usually disappear after a few generations. Going back to Kjellen’s criteria on how to analyze a state, the first (geopolitics) refers to territory. So, what is “corporate territory”? For instance, the Philippine Postal Corporation in its mission statement says: “The Philippine Postal Corporation provides efficient, competitive and on-time delivery of communications, goods and merchandise, and payment services in any Filipino community.” The geographical dimension is clearly indicated: the whole territory of the Philippines and its 2000 inhabited islands. In that case, the corporate territory is the territory of the state. The second term from Kjellen, demopolitics, is interesting because the power of a state does not rely only on its geography but also on its people. It is easy to apply this to a corporation because it is common to see that many companies today stress that their existence and success rely also on people (their employees or customers). While in the past, companies relied on the superiority of their products, processes, and technology, today they have a propensity to put an emphasis on people who invented these processes, products, or technologies, or on the fact that they know better how to respond to consumers’ demands. The consumer-centered and employee-centered approaches are debated not only in marketing or HR divisions of a corporations, but also on a strategic level because there is great chance to find the emphasis on customers and employees in the mission statement or values of the company. Some of them are quite clear, as in the example of Alibaba Group of China: “Customers first, employees second, shareholders third. This reflects our choice of what’s important in the order of priority. Only by creating sustained customer value can employees grow and shareholders achieve long-term benefit.”8 Finally, the third term, oecopolitics, stresses the economic dimension, which is the essential part of any company. Kjellen’s focus on autarky is very common in business circles under the name of vertical integration. Under this concept, a company wants to control and own all its raw materials, semifinished goods, processes, design, and innovation, and produce everything in-house. For a car company like Proton in Malaysia, it means that they must control everything, from raw materials such as rubber plantations to finished products (tires, for instance). Proton does not manufacture tires, as it does not manufacture spare parts for cars. The automotive component industry is a separate industry with extremely specialized and advanced technology. In the past, it was possible for car companies to be vertically integrated because the electronic component was practically inexistent, and design and innovation were not very important. Today it is mission impossible. In the era of globalization and sophisticated supply chains, companies forget about autarky, even if from the politically point of view, it can be an attractive idea. This was, however, a general trend until the disruption of supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right now, many automotive companies look

This is the first of the six values of Alibaba Group. See https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/about/ culture

8

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sympathetically at end-to-end vertical integration (at least for some components) with the aim to secure the supply chain [57].

2.2.2

Karl Haushofer (1869–1946)

Karl Haushofer was not only a German general. He was also an academic who introduced the first geopolitics course ever at the University of Munich. He founded the Institute for Geopolitics in 1922 and published the first academic magazine for geopolitics, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, in 1924. He was the personification of the German Geopolitik school and a major contributor to the establishment of geopolitics as an academic discipline. Even today, many identify geopolitics with Karl Haushofer. As a continuator of Ratzel and Kjellen, Haushofer followed on the idea of the organic nature of the state, of lebensraum and autarky. His understanding of geopolitics as a scientific discipline based on geographical determinism is captured in the following statement from 1928: “Geopolitics is the science of the conditioning of political processes by the earth. It is based on a broad foundation of geography, especially of political geography, as the science of political space organisms and their structure . . . Though political leadership will occasionally reach beyond this frame, the earth dependency will always eventually exert its determining influence.”9 Haushofer was a prolific author. He produced contradictory and messy definitions of geopolitics, but the above definition puts clearly in one sentence two things he believed in. The idea that the state is a living organism and the idea that there is geographical determinism. According to him, geography is so determinant that the state as a living organism must obey some “natural laws,” coming from geography. Among the “natural laws,” there is the idea of lebensraum, pushing states to increase their territory as their population increases. In one of his many definitions of geopolitics, Haushofer clearly refers to the supremacy of lebensraum: “Geopolitics is the scientific foundation of the art of political action in the life-and-death struggle of state organisms for Lebensraum.”10 Lebensraum is presented as “natural” and “necessary” for Germany. Haushofer never explained how this lebensraum should be accomplished (by invasion or cooperation) and what would be the fate of the populations conquered. This is what Hitler and the Nazis did, with their politics of Germanization, accompanied with extermination camps. While the idea of lebensraum was popular in Germany and Japan, the idea had little success in immigrant countries such as the United States or Canada because of

9

Karl Haushofer quoted by John O’Laughlin, Dictionnary of Geopolitics, Greenwood Press, 1994, p. 112–113 10 Karl Haushofer quoted by Hans Weigert, Geographers and Generals, the Twilight of Geopolitics, p. 14

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the size of the country and scarce population. It was dismissed as a deadly weapon in the hands of dictators or as an idea that did not correspond to the context of immigrant countries. According to Roderick Peattie: “We Americans are not so bound to soil and locale and are consequently less in harmony with our environment; we do not have the peasant consciousness” [58]. It was, therefore, difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to understand the concept of lebensraum, even more so if imbued with some German romanticism. Peattie’s account is interesting because by Americans he thinks European immigrants to America. And it is true that they did not have time to establish a strong, sometimes corporeal, identification with the land. Not only it is a new land for them, but since there is much land to discover, they cannot have an identification with it. He completely dismissed indigenous populations of America as Americans. Contrary to the European colons and settlers, indigenous populations have a very strong bond with the soil and environment, because of their animist traditions. It is true that there were also wars among the native indigenous populations in America, but there was still a possibility for a tribe to move and find another place to live, owing to the great parts of the land that were uninhabited. When Peattie’s article was written in 1940, non-European populations were invisible at that time, and he did not explore what the concept of lebensraum could mean to Afro-Americans, Hispanic, or Asian populations in America. His final missing point goes with the fact that European settlers represented the first or second generation of immigrants to America and, for them, lebensraum can refer to their native country, where they come from. WWII was a testing time for many Americans of German descent. Until Pearl Harbor, it was acceptable for some of them to be neutral or even to support the demands for Nazi lebensraum. After the declaration of war in 1941, it was impossible to openly express their support for Hitler and the Nazis, but this does not mean that the idea of lebensraum has disappeared among some of them. There was a suspicion that some German Americans would support Hitler even after the declaration of war, but this suspicion was not as strong as in the case of the Japanese Americans, who were immediately identified as traitors and enemies. The United States set up dozens of internment camps for Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese descent in the Western part of the United States. Even today, that part of American history does not get the light it deserves [59]. There were no internment camps for Americans of German or Italian descent, even though the United States was engaged in war against these two countries. After WWII, lebensraum was so equaled with the Nazi practice of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and Holocaust, that the term lebensraum and, by extension, the term “geopolitics” fell into disrepute and was taboo for a long time. No author or political person dared to use it. In the 1950s, for instance, authors who wanted to write about geopolitics had to explain and justify why they used this term. Harold Sprout started his article in 1956 with the following words: “I am using the word ‘geopolitical’ in a completely neutral sense—it is a word that became an epithet in the 1920s and 1930s; it became identified with the German program of ‘conquest, war, racism and perhaps it is not yet completely decontaminated’” [60]. Leslie Hepple, 30 years ago, provided an assessment illuminating the near terminal effect of the proximity of

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geopolitics to the German School of Geopolitik: “There does not seem to be any book title in English using the term geopolitics between the 1940s and Gray’s Geopolitics of the Nuclear ear in 1977 (except for Sen’s Basic Principles of Geopolitics and History published in India in 1975), nor are there many papers in either geographical or political journals” [61]. Geographical determinism for Haushofer relates to lebensraum and the existence of pan-regions. Based on the heartland theory put forward by Harfold Mackinder, Haushofer singled out two pan-regions of interest to him and Germany: The EuroAfrican region and the Euro-Asian region. As in the case of lebensraum, where Haushofer paid tribute to Ratzel and Kjellen, Haushofer paid tribute to Mackinder for the concept of pan-regions. Harold Sprout related a warning given by Mackinder in 1919 to the British government: “If you do not do certain things, Germany will become the dominant power in Eurasia.” Haushofer was so impressed by Mackinder’s statement that he added, “It is a good idea; let’s try it” [62]. The domination of Europe by Germany was only achievable through an arrangement with the Soviets, and Haushofer was a warm supporter of an alliance with the Soviet Union and Japan. According to him, it would be better to share the world rather than vainly to look for absolute domination. The sharing of the world among three ambitious states (Japan for Asia-Pacific, the Soviet Union for Central Asia, and Germany for Europe and Africa) gave birth to the idea of spheres of influence, where one country of the alliance does not want to interfere in the sphere of influence of the other party. His moment of glory was the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939. This is what he wrote in June 1941 just before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union: “With Japan as our partner, with Russia placing her resources at our disposal, the ring around England becomes tighter and tighter. Against the horizon there stands out a new Eurasian bloc in the making. It extends from Spain to Siberia, from Norway to Africa.”11 After WWII, spheres of influence did not disappear. The Iron Curtain, a term proposed by Churchill in 1946, separated the Soviet Union and its client-states from the rest of the world. The spheres of influence that Haushofer proposed for the Axis members before and during WWII continued to serve afterward. George Kennan himself proposed in his long telegram to implement a “containment” policy. George Kennan developed an approach that came to form a keystone of US policy in two highly influential papers: his “Moscow Embassy Telegram” of 194612 and his anonymous “Mr X” paper of 1947, which discussed “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” [63]. Spykman and Kennan, however, were not the first to talk about the Russian threat and the necessity of containment. The first was President Lincoln: “What Truman and others took from Kennan was the stark reformulation of

11

Karl Haushofer quoted by Hans Weigert, Geographers and Generals, the Twilight of Geopolitics, p. 157 12 The text of the Telegram can be found on https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/ episode-1/kennan.htm

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Lincoln’s strategy of containment. What Kennan said between 1945 and 1948 was what Lincoln had said between 1848 and 1861: ‘put a wall around the Russians (the South) and that evil society will disintegrate’’ [64]. Karl Haushofer fascinated supporters but also produced opponents, and there were many. His nemesis in the United States was Isiah Bowman (1878–1950), the leading US political geographer at that time. Bowman considered that the German Geopolitik was a pseudo-science, only in the service of the racist and hegemonic interests of Germany. In opposition to geopolitics, he proposed geography, mainly political geography as a real science, rational and neutral without being at the service of any political and ideological interest. In his article “Geography versus Geopolitics,” the last paragraph offered a powerful critique of the quasi-scientific certainty sponsored by the German school: “Geopolitics is simple and sure, but as disclosed in German writings and policy, it is also illusion, mummery, an apology for theft. Scientific geography deepens understanding. But, like history and chemistry, it has no ready-made formulas for national salvation through scientifically ‘demonstrated’ laws” [65]. Opposition to Geopolitik came also from the French geographic school of tradition vidalienne, named after Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918). According to one of the proponents of that tradition, Haushofer’s geopolitics “was pseudoscientific geographical determinism and false ideas of race and he concluded that some learned pedant is always to be fund to demonstrate that the terrestrial appetite of the state is absolutely justified, and that from the natural order of things, if not from God himself, they derive a sacred character.”13 According to another prominent member of the French school, “Haushofer’s doctrine did not deserve to be called a science as it was nothing but a German national enterprise of propaganda and nationalistic education” [66]. Is it possible to apply Haushofer’s spheres of influence and containment model in the business world? In terms of spheres of influence, this certainly can be the case. There used to be a division of spheres of influence between IBM and Microsoft, for instance. IBM did not want to venture into the software business, and Microsoft did not venture into the hardware business. IBM needed Microsoft, and Microsoft needed IBM [67]. There is a similar sphere of influence division between automotive equipment manufacturers and car manufacturers. Usually there is a non-aggression pact between these companies because equipment manufacturers act as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in support of car manufacturers. The probability that Mercedes-Benz will manufacture sensors and camera solutions or that Bosch will manufacture cars is low, if non-existent. There is no willingness of either party to integrate and fully dominate the industry. Companies in this case believe that specialization is permitting the whole industry to thrive. There is no need to have vertical integration and fight with other vertically integrated companies.

13

Yann Morvan Goblet quoted by Geoffrey Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century. p. 89

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Another example of spheres of influence pertains to geographical location. It is understood that the concentration of shoe shops or apparel shops in one street or one shopping mall draws larger crowds of customers. All shops selling similar products benefit from being close to one another [68]. This, however, works for individual shops, not necessarily for anchor shops in a mall. An anchor is the biggest shop in a shopping mall, drawing crowds that will benefit other shops. It can be a hypermarket like Carrefour, or it can be a department store like Bloomingdale’s. Having several anchors selling similar items under one roof usually does not happen because anchors look for exclusivity in the shopping mall. At the same time, the managers of the shopping mall do not believe that having several anchors will multiply the foot traffic. Finally, a sphere of influence could be an agreement on the products, product lines, or brands between two giants that do not want to engage in a head-to-head attack. For instance, Procter & Gamble can decide not to enter the ice cream sector, leaving it to Unilever, and Unilever in turn can decide not to enter the mechanical razor sector leaving it to Procter & Gamble. This practice is very common when a corporation believes that the cost of entry to one market is higher than expected revenues. So, the company just decides to stay aside from a given market. This is not beneficial to consumers because the competition is lower, but again, in a free market, it is impossible to force a company to enter business if it does not want to do it. As far as containment is concerned, the closest concept in business would be barriers to entry when the corporation relies on standards, tariff and non-tariff barriers preventing a competitor from entering a certain market. This concept is detailed in the strategic forces by Michael Porter [69]. Containment can be done through technical standards because a company can have its own private standard and this way make its products incompatible with other manufacturers. Apple was very well known for its standards, among them its iOS operating system, which cannot be found in other manufacturers’ products. A standard can be related to food like the kosher or halal standard that will also restrain access to a market if the competitor cannot come up with products satisfying the standard or if the accreditation body in a country does not recognize the standards coming from abroad. For instance, Jakim, which has a monopoly on halal certification in Malaysia, recognizes only two halal certification bodies from France. If Haribo produces its candies in France and if it has a halal certificate that is not recognized by Jakim, it cannot enter the Malaysian market under the halal label. Containment can also take the form of tariff barriers, and it was easy to see the geopolitical dimension of tariffs imposed by President Trump on China. He believed that China used dumping and other non-fair practices to lower the cost of its products, so he unilaterally imposed tariffs on a series of Chinese products. It did not matter if American companies producing in China were affected by the move or not. Finally, non-tariff barriers such as boycotts can also be very useful in implementing containment. Boycotts represent an efficient way to protect one market. It can be an official boycott launched by a government against another country or a boycott launched by an individual or civil society. The Internet

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nowadays appears to enable celebrities to launch a boycott with a good chance that the boycott would be followed by millions of fans. However, in reality, it simply does not work. George Clooney has millions of fans worldwide. Despite his fame and agency, when he launched a boycott against the biggest hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei in the United Kingdom and the United States [70] It did not work. Contrary to boycotts, ambiguity can be beneficial for business. A company can operate simultaneously in Taiwan and China even if there is no official recognition between the two countries. Taiwan is a popular tourist destination for many Asian travelers, including travelers from the People’s Republic of China. It is paradoxical that the two countries do not recognize each other, and, at the same time, they permit exchange of goods, capital, and people across the strait. This is precisely the magic of Asian pragmatism attributed to Deng Xiaoping, who said: “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as far as it catches mice.” Translated to business terms: “It does not matter if Apple from the United States subcontracts to a Taiwanese company Foxconn the job of assembling iPhones in Foxconn’s factories in China as far as iPhones are assembled.” In many other places, this kind of arrangement would be impossible. Here it works . . . subject to who is the president of Taiwan. If the president is accommodating with Beijing, flourishing cooperation in both directions across the Straits follows. If the president is not accommodating, we can expect bumps between the island and the mainland. This has of course consequences for all companies wishing to have a presence in both territories. The coffee shop chain 85 degrees C from Taiwan experienced this problem when the Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen visited the 85° outlet in Los Angeles in 2018 and was offered a courtesy bag of products. Immediately, consumers started to protest in mainland China, where the chain has the highest number of outlets and where most of its turnover comes from. In the end, the chain had to apologize to the mainland consumers, assuring them that there was no intention of the coffee shop to change the nature of the relationship between the two entities, meaning it does not promote independence of the island. In the statement, the coffee shop says that it endorses the 1992 consensus by which there is only one China, an agreement President Tsai Ing-wen does not endorse.14 The coffee chain 85° is not the only company having problems with the one-China policy. Companies such as McDonald’s, GAP, Versace, and Givenchy, among others, had to issue apologies over Chinese sovereignty and the one-China policy.15

14 On the relevance of 1992 consensus see Derek Grossman, Is the ‘1992 Consensus’ Fading Away in the Taiwan Strait?, June 3, 2020 in https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/06/is-the-1992-consensusfading-away-in-the-taiwan-strait.html 15 See the list of companies in Lucas Niewenhuis: ‘All the international brands that have apologized to China’, SupChina, October 25, 2019

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Sovereignty and the Westphalian System

For classical geopolitics, the importance of the state stems from the “Westphalian doctrine,” which puts emphasis on territorial integrity and non-interference in local affairs. The name comes from a series of peace treaties after the Thirty Years War in Europe in the seventeenth century. According to that doctrine, the state is the principal actor in international relations, and each state is equal. According to Michael Ignatieff, the state quickly became indispensable: “a new interdependence might be emerging in the economic realm, but there is no discernible alternative to the nation state as the chief provider of foreign and domestic security for most human populations. Commerce may be borderless, but human beings cannot be. They need secure territories to live in, and these can only be provided by states with monopolies over the legitimate use of force. It is difficult to imagine any global, regional or continental body replacing the state in these functions, because these bodies lack the democratic legitimacy if citizens are sent to kill and to die” [71]. The realist tradition, which is heavily present in classical geopolitics, considers the mosaic of states and their struggles essentially as a given fact. States represent a constant category, which does not change according to time and space, and all states are sovereign. They all have the same rights. From that point of view, Timor Leste as one of the latest additions to the list of states has the same rights and duties as Egypt or China, states that have existed for millennia under different forms, names, and territories. The reality is that not all states are created at the same moment, and they are not at an equal distance down some hypothetical road toward “statehood.” Scholars and diplomats, however, typically grant all states theoretically the same privilege and accord them the status of equal and genuine player on the board game of international conflict. The reality is different because the power and agency states enjoy in the international arena are not equal. If states are so important for classical geopolitics, it is because they are sovereign. The question of sovereignty is crucial because it means that the state is free to choose the political, economic, or social system it wants. If the state wants to be an Islamic Republic, no other state can oppose it. If the state wants to nationalize its means of production, no other state can protest. If the state wants to change its concept of family and introduce same-sex marriages, no other country can protest. That freedom is absolute and makes the state sovereign. If the freedom is not absolute, the state becomes a client state or a tributary state. It is not a sovereign state anymore. Before Westphalia, there were other international relations realities, especially in Asia, where the Tribute system has been used for much longer than the Westphalian system. The Tribute system is the set of highly regulated, ritualized exchanges that occurred between the imperial court in China’s capital and leaders of other Asian societies. The tribute givers were independent in the management of their day-to-day affairs but acknowledged—at least in theory—the ultimate authority of the Chinese emperor. States or entities in China were sovereign in their own territory thanks to the fengjian system, which created a decentralized system of confederation-like

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government.16 This system, used in China since antiquity, was recycled by the Mongols and incorporated as a standard policy since the establishment of the Yuan dynasty. The Mughal Empire also used the Tribute system. It extended its rule across much of India, with loyal kingdoms paying tribute in taxes and military support, and the British East India Company was given permission to trade with the different parts of the Mughal Empire in 1617 [72]. When the British crown took over control of India in 1858, it continued with the tributary system. The British Crown directly controlled a large part of the land on one side and governed indirectly through local rulers on the other. These local rulers paid allegiance to the Crown and paid tribute in exchange of autonomy. The tribute system did not happen to be only in Asia. The Inca Empire, which was the largest pre-Colombian Empire in Latin America, followed the same pattern as British India. Incas directly ruled some lands while leaving local rulers’ autonomy in exchange for allegiance and payment of tribute. Back in Europe, the Tribute system was mainly a vassal-suzerain variant in which the vassal state or person enjoyed internal autonomy, but foreign policy was controlled by the suzerain. At the very moment when the Westphalian system was promoted in Europe in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire entertained a system of vassal and tributary states, not very different from the system implemented by China. Some authors compare the contemporary American outreach abroad to a tribute system. According to Yuen Foong Khong, the United States has instituted the most successful tributary system the world has ever seen. As the hub or the epicenter of the most extensive network of formal and informal alliances, the United States offers its allies and partners—or tributaries—military protection as well as access to its markets [73]. It appears that prior to the establishment of nation-states in Europe, the Tribute system was common and widespread, even to areas and populations that did not have a contact with one other. Because the tributary system permits some autonomous life of tributary states, it does not correspond to the sovereignty concept stemming from the Westphalian system. China today has a multilinear approach with one-state two-systems applied to Macau and Hong Kong. China considers Taiwan as a renegade province, while at the same time authorizes capital and people exchanges between the mainland and Taiwan. In the West, there are still confederations and federations like Switzerland and Belgium, the United States, Brazil, and Canada. But maintaining the idea of “one China” and encompassing two realities (PRC and Taiwan), without a centralized or federal government is hard to imagine. The closest example can be Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country separated in two entities, but there are still federal institutions safeguarding the unicity of the state and its representation on the international scene. Such a thing does not exist between China and Taiwan. The Treaty of Westphalia is perceived as a Western invention. Unsurprisingly, the decolonization movement after WWII questioned the implementation of Western

16 For the Chinese version of the ‘feudal system’ see Li Feng, ‘Feudalism’ and Western Zhou China: A Criticism, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 63, N° 1, June 2003, pp. 115–144

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concepts in newly established, independent countries in Africa and Asia. Why should these countries use Western concepts, dubbed as universalist concepts, when Asian and African nations did not participate in their elaboration? Amitav Acharya is among the most vocal critics of the exportation of Westphalian rules. In his book “Constructing Global Order” [74], he demands a rethink of the concept of agency in the global policy. The concept of agency is central to political theory because it identifies the agents who carry out political actions. Agents can be states, groups of states, groups of people, political parties, individuals, etc. Since the whole international order after WWII was established by Western states, his opinion is that newly independent African and Asian states are not condemned to be forever the recipients of the norms created in the West. The “Global South,” as he calls it, can also be a norm-maker, and Western countries should accept it. All independent states are theoretically sovereign, but the problem is to identify what a sovereign state is. Some states, for instance, are not recognized by the United Nations, and as such, cannot participate in agencies and organizations set up by the United Nations. The number of members of the United Nations has proliferated since the San Francisco conference in 1945. At that time, there were only 51 members of the United Nations while today there are 193. Among them, the number of states from Asia has increased noticeably. There were only nine Asian countries among the original 51 members while today there are 43. There were only three members from Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, and Union of South Africa) while today there are 54 African states in the United Nations. This is a dynamic process, and we can expect more states to join the United Nations in the future. From the business point of view, it is important to know the status of a country or of a territory. If, for instance, a retailer in the United States or the United Kingdom wants to sell olive oil or wine from the Golan Heights, it is important to establish the “made in” attribution that the retailer puts on the label. Is the product made in Israel, in the Golan Heights, or in Syria? In 2019, President Donald Trump proclaimed that the Golan Heights was an integral part of the State of Israel, making the United States the only country outside Israel to do so, while the European Union rejected the move. If “made in Israel” is stated on these products, they can be freely sold in Ahold Delhaize shops in the United States, but not in the shops of the same company in Belgium and the Netherlands, where the retailer comes from.17 The retailer must, therefore, have a different labeling policy in the United States from that in Belgium, and since the issue is heavily loaded with politics, it is expected that consumers will

17

See Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber) of 12 November 2019 (request for a preliminary ruling from the Conseil d’État—France)—Organisation juive européenne, Vignoble Psagot Ltd v Ministre de l’Économie et des Finances (Case C-363/18). The judgment requires that foodstuffs originating in territories occupied by the State of Israel bear the indication of their territory of origin, accompanied, where those foodstuffs come from an Israeli settlement within that territory, by the indication of that provenance. It is not enough to mention State of Israel, but it must be indicated Golan Heights as well; so consumers know what they are buying. Israel considers the judgment discriminatory.

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read carefully what is written on the label and make the retailer liable if they consider that the country of origin is incorrectly labeled. Some countries enjoy internal sovereignty but are not members of the United Nations, and the most exemplary case is that of Taiwan. During the conference in San Francisco in 1945, Taipei represented China in the UN. After 1949, both sides (People’s Republic of China and Republic of China-Taiwan) sought to be the only representative of whole China in the United Nations. That is why Taiwan has never proclaimed formal independence. If it proclaims independence, Taiwan will be reduced to the main island and the archipelagos of Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, and could not pretend to represent the whole China. Also, because this is the red line that the People’s Republic of China would never accept under the One-China policy, it could trigger a war between China and Taiwan. In 1971, the United Nations adopted a resolution expelling representatives from Taiwan from the UN and instated the People’s Republic of China as the only representative of China. The only way for China to expel Taiwan from the United Nations was to get the majority of votes in the General Assembly in the United Nations. It succeeded to do so in 1971 only because a certain number of communist states and newly independent African states voted for China. Since 1971, Taiwan has been in limbo status. It exists, nobody is questioning its internal sovereignty and control over it. Nobody is interfering in its internal affairs. However, the country is not part of the UN. Since it is not part of the UN, it is not part of its organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). This posed a problem because information about COVID-19 given by Taiwan was not accepted and circulated by WHO.

2.2.4

Classical Geopolitics and the Realist School

If sovereignty is exclusive to states, this means that states are the natural and exclusive actors in international relations according to classical geopolitics. The state is real and classical geopolitics accepts that reality, so it belongs to the realist school in international relations or real-politik. The Realist School in international relations is the oldest and still very influential school. The realists and neo-realists focus mainly on state security and state power while Liberals and neo-liberals add Non-State Actors (NSA) and intergovernmental organizations as key elements to the international system. Both groups share the belief that it is more efficient to accept the world objectively as it is, rather than use ideological or moral lenses in analyzing it. This school dominated international relations for a long time. It deserves, therefore, to be studied in detail. In the long list of theorists for the realistic school, we will quote just a few, and we will present them in chronological order. The first one is Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), who was a theologist and a major contributor to the analysis of the relationship between religion and politics. In his two books: “Moral Man and Immoral Society” [75] and “The Nature and Destiny of Man” [76], he analyzed a supposed conflict between politics and morality. According to him, politics should

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be held hostage to morality. In the decades following the publication of his books, many political leaders like Jeffrey Gartner accepted the separation of the moral realm from the political realm: “The (US) administration ought to pledge not to legally link trade and human rights except under the multilateral umbrella, such as the former embargo against South Africa’s apartheid government. The reason is simple. That is the only way it works. Unilateral sanctions put US firms at a major risk disadvantage vis-à-vis des rivals.”18 That part of Niebuhr’s work paved the way for the realistic school in politics and international relations or what is called realpolitik. Niebuhr based his position on the contradiction between human freedom on one side and human finitude on the other, which can be resolved only by a specific form of realism, the Christian realism. Many authors after him dismissed the religious part of it. They chose to concentrate on moral and political realism.19 One of them was Edward Hallet (E.H.) Carr (1892–1982). Carr was a British diplomat and academic. He had the opportunity to see firsthand the consequences of foreign policy practices between the Two World Wars. He is famous for his monumental “History of Soviet Union” in no less than 14 volumes and “What is History,” but his main contribution to International Relations is given in his book “The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939” [77], where he followed Niebuhr and his realistic view by dividing the thinkers in international relations into two groups: the realists and the idealists. He, too, argued that there is no such thing as a moral argument in international relations. Realism does not mean immutability according to him, since new powers rise, and old powers disappear. It only means that if there are rising powers, it would be more “realistic” to appease rising powers to conserve peace rather than to confront them. He based his analysis on the rising powers of Germany and the Soviet Union before WWII, but the same reasoning can be applied to China today. It brought him to adopt some controversial positions such as the accommodation with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union based on the inevitability that these two powers will contest the world order stemming from the Versailles Treaty. If Niebuhr had a penchant for theology and Carr for history, Hans Morgenthau’s (1904–1980) forte was international law. The opening chapter of his book “Politics Among Nations” [78], is called “Six Principles of Political Realism,” which would become inspiration for generations of specialists in international relations. In these principles, he posited that power infuses rational order into the field of politics and that if there is rational order, there is a possibility to analyze power relationships from the scientific point of view. In a system ruled by anarchy (no dominant power), every state wants more power than the other because only in this way the state can

18

Jeffrey Gartner was the US Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade from 1993 to 1995. See his article: ‘Business and Foreign policy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, N° 3, May-June 1997, pp. 67–79, p. 74 19 Henry Kissinger was the very personification of ‘realpolitik’. According to Robert Kaplan, ‘after discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving the affairs of state can be searing, Kissinger has recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for his actions’. See Robert Kaplan, ‘In Defense of Henry Kissinger’, The Atlantic, May 2013

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guarantee its security. There is no place for moral or idealistic analysis. The analysis must be based on pragmatism and empiricism, the two parts of realism that he advocated. Another realist, Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943), also explicitly disregarded moral principles in state affairs. In his book, America’s Strategy in World Politics, he stated that: The statesman who conducts foreign policy can concern himself with values of justice, fairness, and tolerance only to the extent that they contribute to or do not interfere with the power objectives . . . the search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power [79].

Spykman not only considered that morals have no place in politics, but he also considered that peace is not necessarily the ideal that states should be looking for. He considered peace as a temporary armistice that can last 1 year or 100 years, depending on circumstances. He disapproved of “the tendency to look at peace as normal and war as abnormal. War is unpleasant, but it is an inherent part of state systems composed of sovereign states. To forget that reality because wars are unwelcome is to court disaster” [80]. Not only academics, but political leaders also consider wars as a normal situation. Presidents can be very blatant sometimes, like Richard Nixon was in 1983: “We will meet the challenge of real peace only but keeping in mind two fundamental truths. First, conflict is a natural state of affairs in the world. Second, nations only react to aggression when they believe they will profit from it. Conversely, they will shrink from aggression if it appears in the long run, it will cost them more than it benefits them” [81]. Basically, two kinds of relationship can exist between states: war or collaboration. Unfortunately, wars are the option of choice in resolving problems between states. As Clausewitz used to say: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”20 According to him and many political and military leaders, war should not be excluded from the range of options that exist for one country in case of conflict. Other options can be boycott, influence, or containment, but war can be as legitimate as boycott, for instance. The most important rivalry nowadays is the trade war between the United States and China. The million-dollar question is: can it escalate into a real war?

20 His full very famous sentence is ‘We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.’ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1918. Vol. 1. Chapter 1, ‘What is War’.

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2.2.5

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Is There a Thucydides’ Trap Between the United States and China?

After World War II, the United States controlled the Pacific, with its troops stationed in Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, and Guam. China was a very poor country at the end of the Civil War in 1949, and it had to wait until the 1970s to start to emerge, albeit not as a rival to the United States. The turning point in the rivalry with the United States was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. It permitted China to enter globalization, attract all kind of Western companies, and become the factory of the world. Today, China is a serious competitor to all countries, which contributed to its transformation into an economic giant. As far as military power is concerned, the Chinese policy was “Hide your strength, bide your time” initiated by Deng Xiaoping, meaning that China should defend its territory in case of attack, but will not threaten others and attack first [82]. It was a wait-and-see policy, much in-tune with the low-profile approach used in economic policy. The rising of Xi Jinping in the state and the party goes with the relativization of Deng’s phrase because, with more power, China becomes more assertive. The change happened after the 18th Communist Party of China and National Congress in 2012 when the national diplomatic strategy changed from “Keeping a Low Profile” (tao guang yang hui) to “Striving for Achievement” ( fen fa you wei). Nothing of this went unnoticed in the United States, but while Obama’s administration looked at China as a partner with good and bad sides, Trump’s administration looked at China as a rival, if not an enemy. One way to characterize their relationship is to use the concept called “Thucydides’ trap,” popularized by Graham Allison, a Professor at Harvard University [83]. He studied more than 15 cases in the past when a rising power was challenging an incumbent power and concluded that in a great majority of cases, this ended in a war. For that, he coined the term “Thucydides’ trap,” referring to the famous Greek historian, who was the first to write about wars and especially the war between Sparta and Athens in the fourth century B.C. Thucydides wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear it inspired in Sparta that made the war inevitable.” The two most important variables are rise and fear. According to Allison, it is the incumbent power that initiates a war, a war that is inevitable. If we replace the names of Athens and Sparta and say: “It is the rise of China and the fear that it inspired in the United States that made the war inevitable” it would mean that the United States will start a war. Graham Allison does not believe that war is inevitable, but it is certainly possible. According to him, avoiding war between the two superpowers requires statecraft as subtle as the one of the British in dealing with rising America or America dealing with the Cuban missiles’ crises [84]. Nobody can seriously think that the United States will unilaterally use military force against China, but military is not the only kind of war that exists. A war can be a trade war. That is exactly what the United States initiated with a tariff war between the two countries and also instigated a ban on some companies or individuals from China.

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Not everyone agrees with Allison’s thesis though. China rejects the idea that it is an emerging power akin to Athens. With its history spanning thousands of years, China cannot be reduced to the century of humiliation when it was dominated by Western powers and Japan. The country had to be replaced in the wider historical context. Xi Jinping’s book is clear in that sense. The title of his book is: “The Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” published in 2014 [85]. The term “rejuvenation” is very interesting because it does not refer to China as an emerging power. It rather says: “We are back.” So, “China is not an emerging country, it has always been there, so do not treat us as an emerging country starting from scratch,” he would say. The second criticism is that Allison’s thesis is based on a zero-sum game, which is a concept well known in business circles. Under the zero-sum game, one nation rises only because the second one falls in the same proportion. So, China’s rise means America’s decline. Robert Kaplan in his book about Marco Polo insists on the fact that the zero-sum game prevails in the US–China rivalry and that the United States cannot afford to lose. The zero-sum game escalates into a jungle rule according to him, and wars are inevitable. Even if the United States does not want a war, there might be a call from other countries to defend them against China’s assertive policy. According to Kaplan “the sole reason as to why so many countries are willing to cooperate in the Asia-Pacific region is that the U.S. is geographically too far away to pose a threat to them” [86]. China rejects the idea of the zero-sum game because when China rises, America rises too, simply not in the same proportion. When the Chinese GDP before the COVID-19 pandemic was around 6% per year, American GDP was rising at about 2–3% per year. It did not go down by 6%. For these reasons, Allison’s thesis is not acceptable for China. Many politicians and academics reject his idea as too simplistic, but the concept bounces back and proves that it is robust and will not go away. Why is it robust? This is because it is simple and because people believe in it. They see that China is becoming stronger. They automatically use a relative approach by which it can be only at the expense of the United States. For them, China has entered a geopolitical contest with the United States that is inevitable. That is what Kishore Mahbubani writes in his latest book “Has China Won?” He urges the United States to accept its status of global power number two, behind China, rather than to try to clinch to the status of power number one that is fading [87]. The second reason why the concept is robust is that there is no alternative. If the alternative exists, it will be in the form of “Churchill’s trap.” That trap means, according to Yang Yuan, that if the two superpowers manage to escape the Thucydides’ trap, another trap looms on the horizon, where the two superpowers engage in a long-term confrontation akin to a Cold War, hence, the “Churchill’s Trap,” referring to the famous speech by Winston Churchill in 1946 announcing the Iron Curtain and Cold War. Yang Yuan offers another possibility in the form of “coruling,” where the two superpowers jointly lead all or most of the small and mediumsized countries [88]. While co-ruling seems to be an interesting possibility to abandon the binary approach, the probability that the United States will accept it is very low.

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After the realists of the two World Wars, the second generation of realists is best represented by Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013) and John Mearsheimer (1947–). Waltz considered that the international order is anarchy in the sense that there is no supranational power that can regulate disputes between states. Anarchy does not mean that the world is automatically in a state of permanent war. It only denotes the lack of common government in world politics. In his books [89, 90], Kenneth Waltz draws conclusions that states can practice only two types of realism: a defensive realism looking for status quo and balance of power on one side and an offensive realism, looking for hegemony on the other. Waltz’s neorealism is based on the analysis of recurring patterns in international relations through analogy. This is why he uses the example of relations between Sparta and Athens to explain relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, an analogy that Graham Allison also used in the Thucydides’ trap to explain the relationship between the United States and China. The second author, as prolific as a passionate debater, John Mearsheimer did not start his academic career in the usual way. He first served in the Army, specifically in the US Air Force. He is among the few scholars in international relations who can talk about military issues with some expertise, together with Kenneth Waltz, who served in the Army during WWII and in the Korean War. Following the rational approach in politics, Mearsheimer believes that powers, especially great powers, naturally lean toward hegemony because the anarchy in international politics proposed by Waltz cannot prevent wars, and there is huge uncertainty about other states’ intentions. In his book, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” [91], Mearsheimer elaborates on offensive neorealism by building deterrence rather than waiting for the opponent to become too big. If Mearsheimer was convinced that it is difficult to have one global hegemon, other neorealists believed the United States can and should play the role of hegemon as a stabilizer, especially in the economic arena. Hegemonic order means that “one state alone is powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and that the state is willing to establish and monitor the rules” [92]. The discussion about which state is the hegemonic power today is very acute because there are at least two states (the United States and China) that can fulfill this role. If China has grown its assertiveness in fulfilling the role of the hegemonic power, it is not because it is more powerful than the United States. It has more to do with the voluntary demise of the United States to keep its role, especially during the Presidency of Donald Trump. President Xi Jinping’s appearance on the World Economic Forum in 2017, when he declared that China is ready to be the guardian of international rules and globalization, was a clear indication that China was ready to replace the United States in its traditional role of guardian of international rules-based system [93]. In a nutshell, the realist school assumes that the international arena is anarchical, states are viewed as the primary actors in that arena, the fundamental aim of states is the pursuit of power, the ultimate goal of states is the achievement of primacy and, failing that, security. In short, the realist and the geopolitical analyst are assumed to share the same world view [94]. Can rules challenge force and be respected without hegemonic power? This is what liberal institutionalists propose. The Liberals are

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close to realists, but they also have differences. Stephen Krasner (1942–) takes the standpoint of anarchy, described by Kenenth Waltz, but drifts away by saying that it is possible to have cooperation between states in certain domains where there might by a convergence of interests. Even in the case of anarchy, it is possible for states to go beyond state sovereignty if it is in their interests to do so, and Krasner addressed this issue in the book he edited [95]. Krasner recognized that there is no alternative to states in the modern world: “the sovereign state is the only universally recognized way of organizing political life in the contemporary international system. It is now difficult to conceive of alternatives. The historical legacy of the development of the state system has left a powerful institutional structure, one that will not be easily dislodged, regardless of changed circumstances in the material environment” [96]. And changed circumstances were many, among them the fact that national governments, while endorsing the importance of exclusive territorial sovereignty, have frequently violated these ideas and principles. Sometimes, governments willingly allow their national sovereignty to be violated by encouraging certain flows of investment, skilled people, and ideas through “pooling sovereignty” or “shared sovereignty” that exists in the European Union. This is particularly true when businesses press governments to maintain their competitiveness. While Krasner stresses the possibility for the individual states to come to terms with each other in solving a certain number of situations, Robert Keohane (1941–) takes another path. He capitalizes on the emergence of international institutions inside the United Nations (like the World Health Organization or UNESCO) or outside the UN such as the World Trade Organization or the European Union to demonstrate that anarchy in international relations can be at least partly resolved by these supranational institutions. In his book “After Hegemony” [97], he praises these institutions. Contrary to Waltz, who considers that rivalry and conflicts are the “bread and butter” of international relations, Keohane is more interested in how cooperation can take place between states on a supranational level. The European Union is a typical example where some states decide to adopt the euro as a common currency or a free circulation of people under the Schengen agreement. Everything is nice when everything is good. With the economic crisis in Greece and Italy in 2016 and 2017, many observers asked if the benefit of having a common European currency outweighed the cost. Contrary to Waltz, who considered that states necessarily look to maximize their status relative to that of others, Keohane believes that states are seen as utility maximizers rather than status maximizers. But, on many other accounts, Keohane agrees with Waltz that states are the only significant actors in international relations. Together with his colleague Joseph Nye (1937–), Keohane wrote two books, “Transnational relations and World Politics” [98] and “Power and Interdependence” [99], quoted often as the founding stones of neoliberalism in international relations.

2.3

2.3

Classical Geopolitics and Power

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Classical Geopolitics and Power

Power is a necessity because rules and power make a social life work. Without them, people cannot live together. Some of the oldest documents talk about power. This is the case with the biblical book of Samuel, which Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes consider to be the first and greatest work of Western political thought [100]. The book of Samuel talks about the defense of the society/state/community threatened by an outside attack. The only line of defense is to impose conscription and tax on its own population. An external power, therefore, forces a domestic power to impose something on its own population. In a nutshell, that is what classical geopolitics is. There is an inside/outside divide and pressure, by which the sovereignty of a state or of a proto state is at stake. There is a material and rational assessment of an outside risk and a rational and material answer to that risk. The state defines the territory on which there will be an exclusive power exercising its prerogative and, at the same time, defines people who are subject to this exclusive power. There is no state without boundaries and these boundaries, since Westphalia, are the “holy cows” of international order. Westphalia is heavily present in the Charter of the United Nations, but before that, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of the States from 1932 already provided that “the State as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population, (b) a defined territory, (c) government, and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states.”21 A state cannot modify the boundaries of another state. No political system, rules, procedures, or norms can be imposed from outside if the state does not authorize these changes. States are sovereign, even in the European Union. That is why the Church of Scientology can be accepted as religion in Portugal and be banned as a sect in France, even though both countries are part of the European Union and share a lot of “acquis communautaire” (common rules for EU members). Classical geopolitics considers that there is an inside/outside approach, something that is valid inside the country and something (possibly contrary) that is valid outside. It is illustrated by the quote from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal from the seventeenth century: “Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.” The binary explanatory mode is not new. It was very much in vogue when the European countries colonized the world and looked at it in civilized/noncivilized, educated/uneducated, developed/non-developed, high culture/low culture dichotomies. They, however, did not invent anything. Such a binary approach was used routinely by the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as by the Imperial China or Imperial Japan. If, in all places and always, the binary approach was used, it means that it works, according to classical geopolitics. Theoretically, classical geopolitics respects whatever the system is in another country. In practice, some countries wanted and still want to impose on other countries. If, for instance, there was a resolution from the United Nations for a 21

https://www.jus.uio.no/english/services/library/treaties/01/1-02/rights-duties-states.xml

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coordinated defense of Kuwait during the First Gulf War in 1991, that kind of resolution did not exist for the Second Gulf War in 2003. This did not prevent the United States and a group of allies launching an attack that was illegal from the UN point of view.22 “Might makes Right” was the motto of that time, but the United States was not alone in practicing it. The Soviet Union invented the concept of “limited sovereignty” for the members of the Warsaw Pact, meaning that these countries were not fully sovereign. They could not change their systems without the approval of other members of the Warsaw Pact, meaning the Soviet Union [101]. The “Brezhnev doctrine” insisted on the fact that socialist states are not fully sovereign because they are transcended by a superior goal: the building of communism. In his defense of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he stated, “Any decision of theirs (Czechoslovakia) must damage neither socialism in their country nor the fundamental interests of the other socialist countries, nor the worldwide workers’ movement, which is waging a struggle for socialism. This means that every Communist Party is responsible not only to its own people, but also to all the socialist countries and the entire Communist movement” [102]. The same argument was used when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In both cases, the Soviet Union did not bother asking for a resolution or permission from the United Nations to do so because, for the socialist movement, international law is subordinated to the imperatives of the class struggle and the laws of social development. For the Soviet Union at that time, it was not “Might is Right,” but “Socialism is Right,” or the “Class Struggle is Right.” It justified everything.

2.3.1

Messianic Responsibility, “Manifest Destiny”

The decision to invade or occupy other lands can be justified by a myriad reason. They can be ideological (a socialist country like the Soviet Union “defended” other socialist regimes like Hungary or Cuba), religious (Iran “defends” Hamas in the Gaza strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon), or ethnic (Armenia “defends” Armenians in Azerbaijan, and Russia “defends” Russians in Ukraine). Sometimes decisions are just based on the perception that one population has a mechanistic goal and a mission to fulfill. This is what happened in America. The occupation of North American lands from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts was not only an expansionist policy. It was an ideological struggle because the troops from the Eastern part of America wanted to spread democracy and “Western civilization,” while annexing California, Texas, and Oregon at the expense of the others (Mexico mainly). If the Eastern states of America succeeded in their endeavor, it meant that they were stronger in military, ideological, and religious terms. The Eastern states of America were, therefore,

The then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in September 2004 that: ‘From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal’, Patrick Tyler, ‘Annan Says Iraq War Was ‘Illegal”, The New York Times, September 16, 2004 22

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“destined” to rule the whole of America. The term was coined in 1845 by the journalist John O’Sullivan, who wrote: “it is our manifest destiny to spread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” [103]. “Manifest Destiny” henceforth became the catchphrase that distinguished European imperialism, which was the product of royal ambition, from what was taking place in America, which was held to be a natural process, inherent in the divine scheme of world governance. It was clear for O’Sullivan that America must complete a divine mission in civilizing the rest of the American continent. At that time, indigenous populations of America and Mexico were the main obstacles for the expansion of European settlers. The best depiction of “Manifest Destiny” was given by a painting called “American Progress,” which visually portrays the process of American westward expansion. The figure of Columbia is ushering in an era of modernization, development, and advancement to the West, which in the painting is portrayed as a dark and savage place, especially when compared to the bright, eastern side of the painting. “Manifest Destiny” was very important in building the narrative of American Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of about 50% of Mexico’s original territory. Manifest Destiny as the justification of expansion of one country was nothing new. There used to be “mission civilisatrice” for the French Empire when the French justified the empire through emancipation and making civilized populations that were considered as uncivilized. “Mission” also underlined the motto: “ein Platz an der Sonne” for the Prussian endeavors in the Grand Game in the nineteenth century. The newly formed Germany wanted its place under the Sun.23 The German leaders claimed that just as the United States had a natural right to dominance in its natural sphere of influence (the Americas), Germany should legitimately claim and defend its own geopolitically determined rights and territories in Europe and Africa. The second reason why the state is a convenient container for power is that it defines populations that are subject to its exclusive power. As there is no state without boundaries, there is no state without citizens. The state defines the status of its citizens on whom exclusive power is applied. The state defines the rights and duties of citizens, and these rights and duties are indiscriminately applied to the whole country. The state, however, can introduce different categories of citizens. There are more than a dozen states in the world, where citizenship can be transmitted only through the father and not through the mother. There are states in the world like in India where citizenship is given to refugees of a specific religion, meaning if a person from another religion (namely Muslim) comes from a particular country (namely Pakistan), this person cannot be granted citizenship [104]. Age differences are legion when it comes to the right to vote, the right to be elected, or the right to participate in a referendum. In Italy, for instance, the minimum age to vote is 18 years for the Chamber of Deputies, while it was 25 for the upper Chamber, the

23

In his speech to the Reichstag in 1897, Bernard von Bulow, the Secretary of the Foreign Office of the German Empire declared: ‘In a word: we don’t want to overshadow anyone, but we also demand our place in the sun.’

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Senate, until the Senate lowered it to 18 years in 2021. While people can be elected for the Chamber of Deputies starting at the age of 25, the minimum is still at 40 years for the Senate and 50 years for the President of the Republic in Italy. Exclusive power of states over people is problematic when people hold double or multiple nationalities. In that case, it is difficult to know for certain which state exercises power over individuals. Experience shows that a person holding double nationality will be subject to the power of the country where this person lives and from which they hold the nationality. For instance, if a person has an Iranian and an American passport, and is living in Iran, the United States cannot offer protection to this person because Iran does not accept that a person holding an Iranian passport makes allegiance to a foreign country. In Iran, that person will be considered an Iranian national and not a person having dual nationality. Many countries in the world, especially in Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or Malaysia), do not authorize dual nationality. This is perfectly in tune with classical geopolitics, which prefers to have a binary approach where only one nationality is granted to a person, permitting clear-cut categorization of citizens and foreigners. If all people have the possibility to have dual nationality, there would be no categories such as foreigners and citizens, and there would be no state sovereignty according to them.

2.3.2

Hard Power and Soft Power

Power is usually classified as hard power or soft power. There is also smart power and sharp power, but hard power and soft power are the most important ones. Hard power aims to impose through coercion (mainly military), while soft power aims to impose its view without coercive power, usually through influence. The definition and nature of power have given room to different opinions. Kenneth Boulding classifies power in three categories: coercive (threat power), exchange (economic power), and affective (integrative power) [105]. Hard power can be everywhere in these three powers while soft power falls in the second and third categories. E.H. Carr lists three types of power: military power, economic power, and the power over opinion [106], while Hans Morgenthau includes elements such as geography, natural resources, military preparedness, industrial capacity, and population (classified as hard power) together with soft elements such as national character, national morale, and the quality of diplomacy [107]. The Correlates of War (COW) Project uses three dimensions and six indicators for calculating the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC)24 while according to Saul Cohen, there are four pillars of power: military strength, economic capacity, ideological leadership, and political cohesiveness [108]. The first two are classified as hard power while the third one is soft power. What is common to all definitions is that power combines hard power and soft power elements, and all definitions say that

24

See www.correlatesofwar.org

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power has the capacity to impose something. The realist school views the world as a reality, an agglomeration of factual renderings that can be identified, sorted, and analyzed. Power can, therefore, be identified, sorted, and analyzed at will according to classical geopolitics. Classical geopolitics puts more emphasis on hard power (namely military and economy) than on soft power because hard power is material and practical. It can be engaged at will, while soft power is very often unquantifiable and cannot be engaged in the case of conflict. The belief that soft power is unquantifiable suffers exceptions though because it can still be measured by opinion polls and metrics. Metrics for Japanese soft power can include, for instance, how much Japanese food is consumed in another country, how many manga are sold there, or how many tourists from a given country visit Japan. All this is as real as military or economic power. So classical geopolitics, stemming from the pragmatical realm, can accept soft power as easily as it accepts hard power. The only problem is engagement. For hard power, there is a phone number that a president or a king can call or a button to press to engage the army. There is also a phone number in the Central Bank that presidents and kings can call and ask to stop printing banknotes. This is something that does not exist for soft power, which is more infused and decentralized. For that reason, classical geopolitics tends to privilege hard power, not because it does not recognize the importance of soft power, but because hard power is easier to engage. Hard Power In Robert Dahl’s classical definition, power is the ability to make others do what otherwise they would not do. As he says, “My intuitive idea of power, then, is something like this: A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” [109]. According to him, a more complete statement of power includes the base of power (what an actor can do according to law or the constitution), the means of power (what are the instruments an actor can deploy such as threats or promises), the scope of power (what the opponent actor can do), and the amount of power (what are the probabilities that actors can act in a certain way). Hard power is often termed “coercive power” or “compulsory power” and the relationship it involves is a coercive or domineering relationship. Hard power traditionally was the most important characteristic of a power. Haushofer used to refer to Spinoza: “Quisquis tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valet”—“One has only as much right in the world as one has power.”25 Actors may be individuals, nations, corporations, or NGOs, but in the context of geopolitics, actors are very often states. What can a state impose on another state? It can be appropriation of territory through invasion, it can be appropriation of resources through extortion or colonization, it can be imposing a ruler via a coup d’état, or it can be imposing the political, social, or economic system through an exported revolution. Obviously, this is going against the Charter of the United Nations, which stipulates that there must be no interference in the local affairs of another country.

25

Quoted by Hans Weigert, Geographers and Generals, the Twilight of Geopolitics, p. 228

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The first means of hard power is the military. There are many rankings enumerating what is the military strength of one country in absolute and relative terms. It happens that the mere demonstration of force in the form of an ultimatum suffices to intimidate and force a country to accept unfavorable terms from another country. Demonstration of force can come from conventional or strategic weapons. When strategic weapons are considered, the United States and Russia both have close to 6000 nuclear warheads each, while France, China, and the United Kingdom have a few hundred warheads each.26 Hard power, expressed in nuclear missiles, is not meant to be used on all occasions. It is enough to be used as a threat, as deterrence. The concept is not new. It was proposed by Sun Tzu more than two millennia ago, and contemporary China does not hesitate to use it again. Beijing aims to create a disposition of power so favorable that it will not use force to secure its interests. Showcasing new weapon systems, building port facilities and listening posts in the Pacific and Indian oceans, giving military aid to littoral states located between Chinese territory and the Indian Ocean—none of these moves is secret; all are deliberately displays of power. Rather than fight the United States outright, China seeks to influence US behavior precisely to avoid a confrontation. The most important source of information about military strength comes from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), headquartered in London. Among many reports, IISS publishes the Military Balance, considered the most objective source of information of military strength of more than 170 countries in the world.27 Every country has its own institute on defense or military affairs, while the website Global Fire Power (GFP)28 lists the different elements of military comparisons such as manpower, airpower, land forces, naval forces, natural resources, logistics, financial, and geography. According to GFP, China is number one in terms of active personnel, with more than 2 million active soldiers, while India is number two, the United States number three, followed by North Korea and Russia. As far as airpower is concerned, the United States is by far the largest power with more than 13,000 aircrafts, followed by Russia, China, India, and South Korea. The rapport is 1–4 in favor of the United States compared to China. In terms of land power, Russia is number one for the number of tanks with close to 13,000 tanks followed by the United States, North Korea, Egypt, and India. Finally, in terms of naval power, the supremacy of the United States is overwhelming, possessing 20 aircraft carriers, compared with Japan, France, Egypt, and China, who have between two and four aircraft carriers each. The comparison of conventional force between the United States and China shows that the United States is much more powerful when it comes to air and naval force while China is more powerful in land forces and manpower. All studies show that China is progressing tremendously even if it cannot challenge the United

26

See the estimated global nuclear warheads inventories at Arms Control Association: www. armscontrol.org 27 https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance 28 www.globalfirepower.com

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States on the global arena. Theoretically, China can partner with Russia and create the most important military force in the world. The probability of creating this mammoth military force is rather slim because the two countries entertain a distancing relationship instead of a full alliance. The situation could change if the European Union decides to further isolate Russia. In that case, Russia could be tempted to “Pivot to the East” and develop a close relationship with China, which is already the biggest trade partner for Russia. Apart from military arsenal, it is interesting to see the military budget per country. In that sense, the United States arch-dominates the world. The United States alone represents 37% of the world military spending. However, the military-industrial complex in many countries like Russia and China is hard to assess. The second means of hard power games is economy and finance, in short, money. With money, the issue of a lack of manpower is bypassed since the country can buy the weapons it needs to defend itself. If a small country, rich in natural resources, is surrounded by much more powerful neighbors missing the same natural resources, the probability that the more powerful countries will want these resources is high. The less powerful country can only defend itself by buying dissuasive weapons, permitting it to resist a potential threat coming from the neighbor. In the list of the biggest arms importers in the world, small countries such as Qatar and the UAE are number 8 and 9 while Singapore is number 17, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).29 A small country can also buy peace by paying a regular tribute to the neighbor or by sharing resources. Qatar and Iran share the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the largest in the world. Considering the military power of Iran compared to the military power of Qatar, the sharing of the gas field is the best option for Qatar [110, 111]. Finally, a small country can enter an alliance with another country and this way pay for protection with the resources or money it has. All these options have been tested in the past, so a small, rich country can have a range of options on how to deter an attack on its territory. These measures are, however, pointless if the neighbor not only wants the access to resources but also wants to eliminate the small country, as was the case with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Saddam Hussein not only wanted oil, he also wanted to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq as its 19th province. Soft Power Soft power means that a state exercises influence without using coercive methods.30 These methods are explained by Joseph Nye, who is credited for being the promoter of the term “soft power.” The basic aim of hard power seen above applies to soft power, too. It is the ability to influence, to change the behavior of others, and to enable the desired outcome to materialize. It is also a relationship of control, but it

29 ‘Trends in international arms transfers 2020’, published in March 2021, available on www.sipri. org 30 According to the Oxford dictionary, ‘soft power is a way of dealing with other countries that involves using economic and cultural influence to persuade them to do things, rather than military power’.

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controls the mind rather than the body [112]. The usual influence mechanism of hard power rests on two basic principles: threat of coercion (“sticks”) or inducement and payments (“carrots”). Joseph Nye prefers a third option: attraction that makes others want what you want. This third option is called soft power, and Joseph Nye lists three ways to achieve it: values, culture, and foreign policy. The first soft power resource or power base is values. The values promoted or symbolized by one country are so attractive to other countries that the other countries want to adopt them as their own. The values promoted by Western countries and their most prominent champion, the United States, are free market, democracy, and human rights. These values promote entrepreneurship and innovation better than other systems. The belief in individuals and their freedom is the core of American success, and if other countries would like to enjoy the same success, they must emulate American beliefs and systems. This mantra has been hammered consistently since WWII, and some Asian countries have adopted the system, for instance, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Many countries have not, and they struggle to identify an alternative. These countries say that US/Western values are not universal values and should not be applied to countries that evolve in a different context (historical, philosophical, religious, political, etc.). Among them, Asian countries wanted to identify some kind of “Asian values” that would be an alternative to the US/Western values. The Bangkok conference in 1993 was an appropriate place and time to formulate a set of Asian values. This conference was one of the regional conferences preparing for the United Nations summit, but leaders like Mahathir Mohammad from Malaysia and Lee Kwan Yew from Singapore led the charge to identify specific Asian values. It was a tour de force that in 1993, countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia, and India would agree on something [113]. Among the values proposed by the two leaders, collectivism and authoritarianism were intended to challenge a futile idea of absolute human rights from the West, while pragmatism was intended to challenge the overwhelming importance of liberal ideology imposed by the West. Harmony was also identified as an Asian value because the sake of the group (ethnic, religious, clan, tribe, family, etc.) might be more important than the sake of the individual. As far as pragmatism is concerned, Parag Khanna in his book “The Future is Asian,” believes that the secret of Asian success lies in the fact that Asian countries pursue a more pragmatic, meritocratic technocracy, shifting away from “the Anglo-American failure” caused by ideological and inefficient systems of governance and administration. If Western values were much valued in the past, the emergence of populism and lack of trust in politicians and elected officials in the West does not appeal to Asian citizens [114]. Among Asian countries, China has seen its value system change very much in the past. The situation in China is more complex than it appears in the West because Confucius, who still has huge influence in many Asia countries, had a dialectical approach to values. He used a subtle combination of universal principles dear to the West, and particularism, dear to some Asian leaders today. On one side, he stressed the importance of humaneness and harmony, while on the other side, he divided the world into Hua (an area populated by the Han Chinese under the control of central government and influenced by Confucian doctrines) and Yi (peripherical areas

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populated by ethnic minorities, which were not closely controlled by the central government and where Confucian doctrines were not applied).31 In fact, he opposed Hua to Yi, a contrast between “civilization and barbarism,” the typical way classical geopoliticians used to view the world at the time, albeit in a different context. It was easy in China to use the labels of “civilized” and “barbarian” because Confucius added to the hua-yi dichotomy the idea of Sino-centrism, by which there is a cultural awareness of the superiority of hua over yi. Supremacy is, therefore, not an isolated concept invented by Western powers. In many countries, on all continents, the same dichotomy was used. What seems to be an irreconcilable binary and set-forever dichotomy between “the civilized” and “barbarians,” was in fact more complex because there was always a possibility for “barbarians” to become “civilized,” either because the “civilized” used hard power and imposed their values to the “barbarians” or because the “barbarians” integrated into the “civilization.” In the Chinese context, the authorities used soft power, by showing the Yi all the benefits they would have if they became Hua, while many Western countries, especially colonial powers ignored the “barbarians” or tolerated them only as slaves, laborers, or second-class citizens. Alternatively, they used coercion in imposing “civilization” upon them. After WWII, the communist ideas made their way into the definition of “Chinese values.” Even if communism in China was to a certain extent a domestic movement, with domestic leaders and domestic interpretation of Marxism, the Soviet Union operated the Sun-Yat-Sen University in Moscow from 1925 and 1930 with the aim of training the future leaders of the Kuomintang and the China Communist Party and exporting the Bolshevik revolution to China. The influence of the Soviet Union was strong at the time of the elaboration of Chinese “communist values.” Finally, globalization has enabled some Chinese to explore and embrace Western values. Because of variegated and multiple influences, it is difficult today to talk about homogeneous “Chinese values” based on Confucianism and Daoism as the only sources of inspiration for the Chinese population, especially for young people. The second area of soft power is culture. It is a fact that Western culture was imposed as the culture during colonialism. All local cultures were considered inferior. Even today, some countries that achieved independence after the Second World War struggle to identify and promote their own indigenous culture. The UNESCO world heritage is now filled with tangible and intangible elements of culture from these countries, but it is a relatively new phenomenon. When it came to popular culture and entertainment, this is where the United States reigned without rival. Hollywood, music, sports, etc., everything coming from the United States was gaining huge traction while the European, Asian, or African production present in the United States was only appealing to specific communities. Today, the situation is much more balanced. At least two countries: Japan and South Korea have succeeded in reversing the situation. The J and K words such as K-pop or K-drama, J-pop, or

31

For the discussion about Hua and Yi see Ning An, Confucian Geopolitics, Chinese Geopolitical Imaginations of the US War on Terror, Springer, 2020, especially chapter 3, ‘Confucianism, Chinese Geopolitics and Terrorism’, pp. 35–62

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J-drama together with food, fashion, and beauty products coming from these two countries have a say in many Asian countries and have become regular guests in the West, to such an extent that the K-pop band BTS was invited three times to participate in the Grammy awards (2019–2020, and 2021), which was the first time that an Asian band or artist was invited to do so. For the entire year of 2020, Big Hit, the label behind BTS, logged US $674 million in revenue. BTS has a fan base of 22 million people on Twitter, which is lower than the fan base of Taylor Swift (85 million), Ariana Grande (67 million), Lady Gaga (80 million), or Justin Bieber (107 million), but BTS has much higher engagement on Twitter and more Twitter mentions [115]. This is by far the best achievement of an Asian band so far. Finally, the third area for soft power is foreign policy. According to Joseph Nye, only a benevolent foreign policy can play a significant role in soft power. This is difficult for Western countries because of the legacy of colonization. How can they explain that they want to help, when for centuries they proposed only exploitation and extortion? The only Western country that could use benevolence is the United States because it has not been a colonial power to the extent that European countries have been. Zbigniew Brzezinski called the United States the “indispensable nation” for the world because it has the capacity and willingness to enforce global rules beneficial for all [116]. The United States was certainly the “indispensable nation” in 1976 when his article in Foreign Policy was published. At this time, American soft power was undisputed, but it is no more. The United States used to possess Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, but always portrayed itself as a benevolent power bringing democracy and human rights. The reality is different, and we can quote many examples of the US interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, where values, democracy, and human rights were not necessarily the main motivators. Despite that, the United States still insists on its benevolent approach in foreign policy. Asian countries, except for Japan, by default have a benevolent approach because the only experience with colonization they have had was that they had been colonized. So, it would be completely illogical that they would colonize and exploit other countries. As an underdeveloped country (terminology from the 1960s) or developing/emerging countries (terminology of today), a country like China either did not have the ability to intervene outside or as a fellow underdeveloped country, it could only take on a friendly approach. One testing time was the civil war and genocide in Cambodia, where the killings by the Khmer Rouges were put at a stop only because Vietnam intervened militarily in the country. The best example of dispute about neo-colonization is given by China in Africa. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, China was going to Africa only to help with its own limited resources and did not hesitate to invite many African students to study in China. China had a real ideological proximity only with Marxist regimes in Angola or Mozambique. The situation today is different because China’s approach is much more contractual in the sense that it must be beneficial for both countries. The Belt and Road Initiative that was greeted as the benevolent deal of the century is increasingly criticized because of the debt-trap policy rejected by some countries [117]. Benevolent foreign policy is acts and words. In terms of words, it is expressed in terms of public diplomacy. Public diplomacy can also be called propaganda or

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public relations, but Joseph Nye believes it is more than that because public diplomacy possesses credibility and aims to build long-term relationships with other countries [118]. Public diplomacy is not new. The French did it with Alliance Française in 1883, while Italy created the Dante Alighieri Society in 1889. The United Kingdom created the British Council in 1934, and Germany created GoetheInstitut in 1951. The United States does not have an institute like the Europeans have, but they have many American Universities abroad. The United States operates media outlets, which were particularly active during the Cold War, such as Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe. China banked on the launch of Confucius Institutes at the main universities worldwide. China spends more than US $10 billion per year on more than 500 institutes, providing classes of Mandarin, literature, history, etc.32 Everything was paid for by China, so there was not so much resistance from universities. Recently, however, there have been demands to reconsider their presence, especially in the United States. At least ten of these institutes in American universities have closed recently [119]. Building on these three elements of soft power proposed by Joseph Nye, Portland Communications, a division of Facebook, now Meta, publishes Soft Power 30, the list of the 30 countries in the world with the highest soft power. Portland is not the only one to publish a ranking based on soft power. BrandFinance has its own ranking, according to which the United States is back to soft power number 1 in 2022, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, China, and Japan.33 It is more difficult to publish Soft Power 30 than Military Balance by IISS because soft power touches intangible elements while Military Balance is very clear in terms of tangible elements. Contrary to Military Balance, where the top three countries have very little chance to be challenged and be dispossessed of their rank, soft power can change rather quickly. According to the latest ranking of Soft Power 30 from 2019, France is number 1, the United States ranks fifth while China is number 27.34 The majority of countries present in the ranking come from the West, and there are only four countries from Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore, and China). It is striking that India with its fabulous and diverse culture is not even ranked in the Top 30. Usually, soft power comes from the spontaneous adoption of soft power elements by a foreign population, but it can happen that the state plays a role in the diffusion of soft power, as shown by the example of Cool Japan.

32 Launched in 2004, the Confucius Institutes are part of the Chinese International Education Foundation. See the website: https://www.cief.org.cn 33 www.brandfinance.com 34 https://softpower30.com

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Cool Japan Strategy

Cool Japan is an official strategy implemented by Japan as its main nation-branding project. It intends to combine Japanese traditions like Kabuki masked performances, the traditional attire Kimono, and Sumo wrestling competitions with modern forms of art like manga and anime. This is a unique combination of tradition and modernity that many other countries do not have. According to Douglas McGray: “Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes. . ., Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one” [120]. McGray proposed a new term to put the emphasis on soft power in Japan: Gross National Coolness (GNC) as opposed to Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Following the publication of his article, “Cool Japan” was first introduced in a TV program on channel HNK with the aim of presenting Japanese culture to an international audience. Gradually, it became part of the policy of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote Japan’s popular culture and bring more and more tourists to Japan. It worked quite well. The number of international arrivals to Japan passed from 6 million in 2005 to 31 million to 2018. The Tokyo Olympic Games 2020 was earmarked to be the culmination of Japan’s attractiveness, but the COVID-19 pandemic decided otherwise. A “Cool Japan Fund” was set up in 2013 as a public–private partnership with the aim of investing in the promotion of Japan. Four areas of investment were identified: Food and Services, Media and Entertainment, Fashion and Lifestyle, and Tourism. What is interesting is that in the list of Key Performance Indicators, performance and profitability came second, while alignment with policy was first, and wider influence was third. It was an ambitious initiative, but the results in terms of performance have been disappointing [121]. According to Shuling Huang, the state alone cannot change the country’s image. The state must be seconded by private corporations: “The nationalistic nation-building has increasingly blended with the capitalist nation-branding, at least in some cases in East Asia. The processes involve cultural policies of nationstates, marketing strategies of culture industries, and local appropriation in accordance with the economic logic of profit-making” [122]. There must be an alignment of the country’s policy, the action of private companies, and acceptance by the host country. Only then, nation-branding can be effective. Japan expected that Asian countries would spontaneously show an interest in Cool Japan, especially for the manga phenomenon, and figures from Google Trends confirm that. From 2018 to 2022, Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nepal appear in the Top 10 countries in the world with the highest interest in searches on the word “manga.” What is more surprising is to find countries like Bolivia (spot 4), Peru, Nicaragua, Chile, Panama, and El Salvador in the Top 10. It shows how widespread Japan’s influence is in terms of pop culture. The manga One Piece, for instance, has over 516 million copies in circulation in 61 countries and regions worldwide as of August 2022, making it the best-selling manga series in history and the best-sold comic series printed in book volume. It is also one of the

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highest-grossing media franchises of all time. The release of the One Piece 100 Collector volume in September 2021 was an instant hit in many countries with a vast One Piece fanbase, and more than one million copies sold in a few days. No other manga or comic book in the world can compare to One Piece. The results from public initiatives pale in comparison with private initiatives such as One Piece. The Cool Japan strategy is indicative of the incompatibility between the traditional, top-down approach of Japanese politics and the vitality of private initiative best represented in manga and anime. According to Taku Tamaki, the governmentsponsored initiative “is framed within older constructions of Japanese Self that can trace their pedigree back to the nineteenth century” [123]. As such, it is doomed to fail. Private initiatives are much more dynamic and successful in changing the image of Japan than the official one. Power is associated with powerful actors, states, and corporations. Power can, however, also be linked to civilizations. States and corporations are not civilizations, but in many cases, states act as representatives of some civilizations because they bear the same name, such as Egypt for the Egyptian civilization, China for the Chinese civilization, Iran for Persian civilization, etc. Egypt, Iran, and China may change over time in terms of territory, or in terms of the political or religious systems they have, but they still bear the same name. Civilization has been treated as a taboo term in Western countries because it was understood as the “mission civilisatrice,” according to which the supremacy of “Western civilization” was diligently pursued to the detriment of indigenous civilizations during colonial times. In the post-colonial era, it is considered that either there is no supremacy of any civilization over another or that the term “civilization” should be banned altogether because it is hard, if not impossible, to define it, or because there were so many atrocities committed under the banner of “civilization” that the term should be suppressed. Samuel Huntington managed to give a new luster to “civilization” and put it again in the center of the geopolitical play. That is why we are going to analyze his approach in detail.

2.3.4

Samuel Huntington (1927–2008)

Samuel Huntington was a professor at Harvard University and adviser to various US administrations. He is best known for his book: “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order,” published in 1996. The book is a sequel to his article: “The Clash of Civilizations” published in Foreign Affairs in 1993. Following Francis Fukuyama’s book “The end of history and the last man,” published in 1991, Huntington agreed that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there would be no more global wars based on ideological differences. Since capitalism won the decisive victory, there was no alternative from the ideological point of view. The global spread of democracy, the triumph of market capitalism, cultural globalization, all this was set to make the “old world” obsolete. China, as the last bastion of communism, was scheduled for transition and was reassigned a capitalist and

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modern identity. At the time when Fukuyama wrote his book in 1991, the triumph of the West was unquestioned. According to John Agnew, “The demise of the Soviet Union has left the United States as the only Great Power with a global message: mass consumption, personal liberty, private property, markets and electoral democracy” [124]. To paraphrase Fukuyama, Saul Cohen believed it was not only the end of history, but also the end of geopolitics, because geographic differences would not play any role and, therefore, geopolitics would cease to exist [125]. There was, however, a major disagreement between Huntington and Fukuyama. When Fukuyama predicted stability under Western domination because of the disappearance of alternatives, Huntington posited that there would still be global wars challenging Western domination, but this time wars would be fueled by differences between civilizations and not ideologies. Samuel Huntington identified civilizations and culture as the main drivers for wars in the future. This is fundamentally different from Ratzel, Kjellen, and Haushofer because these three authors took the state as the main actor and not civilizations. Civilizations are, according to Huntington, culture totalities. A civilization is “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people” [126]. In his book, seven civilizations are named, but they are not defined. Three of them appear to be specified geographically (the Japanese, Latin American, and African), four more are specified in religious terms (Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox-Slavic) while the Western civilization is somehow geographically not specified and apparently secular. It can be speculated that Huntington does not need to define civilizations because civilizations are a given and known to everybody. If this was the case, the number and the names of civilizations should be static and used by all authors in the same way. Other writers who wanted to identify civilizations did not come up with the same number and names as given by Huntington. Peter Katzenstein (1945–), for instance, edited a book on the study of civilizations in world politics in which American, European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations were identified. Katzenstein called them “civilizational complexes” since he believed in plural and pluralistic civilizations [127]. In his book, Islamic civilization is the only one identified with a religious name, and there is no Western civilization on the list. On the other hand, there is a separation of European and American civilizations, while many other authors do not separate them. From the Asian perspective, Yaqing Qin quotes several Chinese authors who believe that there are five “cultural spheres” in the world: the Chinese, the Christian, the Orthodox, the Muslim, and the Indian [128]. The Chinese cultural sphere contains China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Chinese authors do not believe in a “Western” civilization, preferring “Christianity.” According to Qin, there is no universally accepted definition of what the West is. It is probable that, in the era of US/China rivalry, the West is equal to the United States because all other “Western” countries depend on the United States, especially from the military point of view.

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Close to 30 years after the publication of Huntington’s article, the “clash of civilizations” is still praised in many countries despite criticism based on methodological and factual grounds. Some critics say that Huntington’s work is very Western-centric. His starting point is Fukuyama’s thesis about the world as the battlefield of two rival systems (capitalism and communism). Both systems originate from the West. This global rivalry is given and self-evident, in which a Western concept (communism) fights another Western concept (modern capitalism). Critics ask why we should reduce global human activity to only these two systems and why we should not explore other, alternative, systems. Are there other concepts stemming from religion (the Confucian mix of spirituality and politics, for instance, or the Islamic understanding of the separation between spiritual and secular life) or other philosophies of life that could be as powerful, if not more powerful, than the dichotomy between capitalism and communism? Capitalism and communism are, after all, recent concepts resulting from the industrial revolution and Russian revolution, all in all, a little bit more than 200 years in existence. Other criticism comes from the concept of civilization. If the term “civilization” comes from the West, there might be a temptation to craft a definition that will better fit with some civilizations rather than others, inducing a classification, hierarchy, and supremacy of civilizations. It was quite common in the past to believe in the superiority of the Western civilization because the Europeans subjugated and colonized the whole world. Hence, Western civilization was presented as superior to others due to its demonstrated success. A typical justification of Western supremacy or Western racism was given by the historian Edward August Freeman (1823–1892), who stated that “the only history which counts is that of the Mediterranean and European races,” and Mackinder added: “for it is among these races that have originated the ideas which have rendered the inheritors of Greece and Rome dominant throughout the world” [129].35 At the time when Western civilization met other civilizations during the colonization period, there was a theoretical possibility of syncretic development, that is, the Western civilizations could take something from other civilizations and vice versa to build a hybrid and universal civilization for all. This cross-pollination of civilizations did not happen because Western powers adopted a Vanguardist approach according to which a monocentric West has a duty to impose Western values and institution (the so-called “standards of civilization”) on other peoples and societies [130]. The third strain of criticism is that Huntington makes little allowance for internal religious, ethnic, economic, or ideological divisions within civilizations. According to Saul Cohen, Huntington assumes the permanence of the cultural fault lines despite the massive demographic changes brought about by migrations and modernization [131]. Migrations existed in the 1990s when Huntington wrote his book, but they are much more important today, so the cultural fault lines proposed by Huntington are more difficult to accept nowadays. Echoing Saul Cohen, Michael Shapiro also

35

See Edward August Freeman, Race and Language, (1879) deposited at the Fordham University and accessible at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/freeman-race.asp

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believes that the fault lines must be reexamined because Huntington uses “freezeframe cultures,” reflected in fixed and timeless mentalities [132]. If mentalities are frozen, they are, therefore, immutable. They did not change in the past, they do not change nowadays, and they will not change in the future. A contrario, Peter Katzenstein argues that civilizations are plural and pluralist. He takes two examples, China and the West, to prove his point. China is often portrayed as a unique Confucian society while Confucianism exists also outside of China. Within China, there are also influences of Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and secularism. It is, therefore, not possible to equate China with one single influence. Peter Katzstein also rejects the idea of a single “West” on the same grounds. “Western” values, like economic freedom or human rights, are also present outside of Western countries while religious, philosophical, and political ideas different from these values coexist in Western societies: “Concepts like ‘East’ and ‘West’ have never been able to describe accurately our past. They do not describe accurately our present. And they will never describe accurately our future” [133]. The main point for him is that cultures are not fixed, they change constantly, they are not cast in stone. This is especially true for Islam. Huntington drew his analysis of Islam from Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), specifically his article “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” published in 1990. Not only did Bernard Lewis called part of his article “A clash of Civilizations,” but he also argued that we must take into consideration a transnational and trans-state category called Islam instead of looking at individual countries: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them” [134]. Huntington embarked on this analysis in presenting Islam as one religion, minimizing differences that can exist within Islam. According to this view, religion is the essential element of the Muslim or Islamic civilization. It is more important than any ideological, ethnic, or economic division that may exist among Muslims in an Islamic country. Muslims will always be Muslims first, and Saudi, Malay, or Pakistani second. Islam is, therefore, homogeneous and the belief in “ummah,” one Muslim community, precedes differences that exist between the branches of Islam. The second point Huntington drew from Lewis is that if Islam is one, it can have only one unique geopolitical goal or mission, which is to oppose the other global and missionary civilization, namely the Western civilization. This point requires clarification. The opposition to Western influence can take various forms, one of them being the “political quietism,” where Muslims do not oppose political leaders, but tend to isolate themselves from the vicissitudes of political battles and concentrate on piety and religious rituals. During colonial times, they did not frontally oppose Western domination, for instance. They retreated to the private sphere and lived a binary private/public life in rejecting concepts given by the West. The other option, called “Political Islam,” consists of an involvement in political battles against the colonizers or secular governments they have at home [135]. It can be a struggle against the colonizers like it was in India or Indonesia before independence, but it can also be a political battle against the reforms introduced by Ataturk in Turkey, Nasser in Egypt, or Reza Pahlavi in Iran. Political Islam was used in all

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these countries as a homogeneous Islamic answer to a perceived Westernization introduced by the domestic leaders who wanted to mimic a “decadent Western civilization.” The third and last option, which was referred to by Huntington is a violent struggle or “jihad” against the Western civilization. Jihad can be sponsored by a state or by individuals financing terrorist organizations. For that, the Islamic Republic of Iran (from 1984) and Syria (from 1979) are still identified by the United States as state sponsors of terrorism. As an opposition to Lewis and Huntington, Edward Said (1935–2003), a wellknown scholar in Islamic studies and orientalism, wrote an article: “The Clash of Ignorance,” published in 2001, arguing that there is a danger that the September 11 attacks would, because of Huntington’s argument, be misleadingly treated as an assault by monolithic Islam. There is no monolithic West as there is no monolithic Islam, as he says: “This is the problem with unidentifying labels like Islam and the West. They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won’t be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that” [136]. As an authoritative author on imperialism and colonialism, Edward Said, in his book “Orientalism,” argues that the Europeans identified themselves by default, against others whose nature was largely unknown. Orientalism entailed a parallel Occidentalism that created a unified image of Europe while the non-European world was subjected to oversimplification and alienation. According to Said: “I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’ (Orientals) . . . When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, the result is usually to polarize the distinctionthe Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western—and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies” [137]. If an Islamic monolithic world is difficult to identify, the same goes with the concept of “Western civilization.” Huntington does not define the West. He defines much better what is the rest, so by default, the West is defined as a negative of the rest. The term “West” appeared for the first time with the separation of the Western part of Europe from the Eastern part, during the Roman Empire, after the schism between the Western (Catholic) church and the Eastern (Orthodox) church. The term “West” is either associated with Renaissance or Enlightenment/Industrial revolution or to the age of Imperialism when the “West” dominated the whole world. Even during the apex of Western imperialism, there were already pessimistic feelings about the decline of the West, best expressed by Oswald Spengler. In his two-tome book “Decline of the West,” published in 1928 and 1932, Oswald Spengler described the West after the butchery of the Great War (World War I) [138]. The book was criticized when it was published, but it was very influential because it proposed a cyclic view of history and the inevitability of Western decline. According to Hans Weigert, the concept of the West by Spengler refers to a very limited cultural area, that of a “Faustian” culture and civilization. Spengler’s rendering of the West is not the West as we understand it, usually identified with Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Sprenger’s West is a Germanic West, and not even the whole Germany, but a limited section of it, the North German Plain, the

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area between the Netherlands and Poland, the North Sea and Germany’s Central Upplands, the land of the Teutons and Saxons. England, America, France, Belgium, Italy, Central and Eastern Europe are not within the boundaries of his “West.” “The realm of Spengler’s West—the Abendland, is a realm of unsatiable ‘Faustian’ longing for the immense and infinite” [139]. The West is, therefore, not a precise geographical term. It is a spiritual, if not mystical, identification of the West with one part of Germany. If Spengler was obsessed with the German origin of the “West,” other countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Kingdom had their own interpretation about what the “West” means. On occasion, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are also part of the “West.” Because it is mystical and spiritual, it gives the West power and resilience. The West is an amalgamation of all kinds of universalistic ideas such as the idea of progress and rationalization, which will help it in its “quest of Faustian longing for the infinite.” Progress and rationalization, together with objectivity and materiality, fit perfectly with the main aspects of classical geopolitics. The idea of the “West” is, therefore, situated in time and place. It is not given and eternal. It emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in one particular place in Germany. According to critical and feminist rendering, the “West” is a typical product of situated knowledge that must be challenged, if not deconstructed. For Huntington, however, this is not the case. He does not put into question the existence of the “West.” He takes it as a given category that other civilizations must deal with. Huntington’s book gained global attention after the September 11 attacks in the United States when the country was looking for a new doctrine facing a new threat. Immediately, “The Clash of Civilizations” was proposed as a ready doctrine, and it became the unofficial blueprint of US actions. Because it has been adopted by the US administration, the book gained global traction and was studied across the world, notwithstanding whether the countries agreed with Huntington or not. During the Bush era from 2001 to 2009, many advisors in his administration believed in the “Clash of Civilizations” and proposed in 2004 a geographical rendering of Islamic civilization called the “Greater Middle East Initiative.” The group of countries was identified as a loose group of “Arab world countries” joined by Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan while some advisors wanted to expand the group from Morocco to Indonesia [140]. During Obama’s presidency 2009–2017, the “clash of civilizations” as a concept faded away because his administration did not believe in it, but it came back with much force with the election of Donald Trump. Today, it is still a work that fascinates and repels at the same time, and we are not short of populist leaders who firmly believe in the concept, especially after the migrant crisis in Europe in 2014–2015. The concept is simple, maybe simplistic, but at the same time it is resilient because of its simplicity and self-evidence. Huntington has been made a key figure in many countries (Brazil, Czech Republic, India, Hungary, etc.) and given official recognition because his theory is extremely useful for multiple political projects. It resonates in domestic debates, especially when the dominant narrative is that Western civilization is under siege. Every time there is an immigration crisis involving migrants from the Middle East and Africa coming to Europe, Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” is resuscitated and used by some politicians to

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block the venue of migrants. Why so? Because it does not tell something new to people. Instead, it tells them something they already believe in. It takes geopolitics to the level of common sense. The populists will ask: “Look around you. Do you recognize your country?” That question does not appear to be geopolitical. It appears to describe something as deeply personal and fundamental as cultural identity, an identity based on binary definitions, whether you are with us or against us. Being not sufficiently Chinese or pro-Chinese on social media, for instance, equates to supporting Japan, the United States, or Taiwan. Being not sufficiently Hungarian or Polish equates to supporting the migrants, Germany, or the European Union. If Chinese or Russian security is conceived in terms of a civilizational fault line, then any manifestation of Islamic civilization (in Xinjiang or Chechnya, for instance) can only be conceived as a problem according to the “Clash of Civilizations.” Is it possible to apply Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations to the business world? The short answer is, yes. Culture has been identified as the core element of civilizations according to Huntington. It is also a core element that companies study before launching a culturally sensitive offer on the market. When companies launch offers (products and services) without a cultural component (usually technological products such as airplanes, cars, and computers), there is no necessity to study the market from a cultural point of view. This, however, must be nuanced because sometimes technological products are also viewed as culturally sensitive products. When the Taliban first took power in Afghanistan in 1996, they banned cameras, TV sets, all kinds of music, and VCR sets because they considered them un-Islamic [141]. Similarly, the authorities in Saudi Arabia banned cellphone cameras in 2004, because they considered they would be used to photograph women in secret [142]. Usually, the introduction of technological innovation does not pose a problem, but these two examples show that technology can become highly culturally sensitive on occasion. There are many culturally sensitive products and services such as food, apparel, or entertainment, necessitating fine-tuned cultural analysis. Culture in the business world can be analyzed from the corporate culture or organizational behavior point of view as seen before. It is also heavily present in international or intercultural marketing. When addressing the end consumer, the intercultural dimension is an essential part of the marketing plan, and it touches all elements of the marketing mix. It starts with the product, of course, because understanding the culture of the consumer is crucial. The cultural analysis tells if some products are compulsory, acceptable, desirable, to be avoided, or prohibited, and there is no better example than stipulations about halal and kosher products [143]. Pricing will also be affected because the notion of the price–quality relationship, bargaining, or what constitutes an acceptable profit for a seller will also be affected by culture. Distribution will have its own share of cultural problems, especially if we consider the gender segregation in some countries or cultural preferences when it comes to brickand-mortar stores over e-commerce. Finally, communication will also deal with cultural issues, either from the message point of view where the cultural sensitivity is the highest or from the media point of view with the immoderate use of social and traditional media [144].

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The question of culture is an important question for managers and marketers. In the management literature, two names shine like stars. Geert Hofstede is famous for his dimensions of culture, and E.T. Hall for his cultural framework based on low-context vs. high-context cultures [145, 146]. These approaches are a little bit old because they were proposed in the 1960s and 1980s, before Huntington and the globalization movement when blurred differences between countries and cultures appeared. These concepts, nevertheless, still dominate the landscape of management education and represent compulsory literature in any class of international or intercultural marketing or negotiation. Classical geopolitics does not enjoy anymore the monopoly status it used to have. It is now challenged by critical geopolitics and feminist geopolitics, which we are going to discuss in the following chapters. Despite new challenges, classical geopolitics still dominates the geopolitical debate because its solutions are simple to implement, even for the most complicated situations. This is something all rulers, political and business alike, long for. The “Mr Fix-it” attitude, so common to classical geopolitics, is based on facts and materiality, especially physical materiality of geography, which no one can contest. Because it deals with material constraints, sometimes permanent constraints, classical geopolitics tends to be conservative. It considers that there are some things that “objectively” can be done and others that “objectively” cannot be done. Considering the material world hard or impossible to change, the social world will also be hard or impossible to change from the classical point of view. States present static populations, static borders, static cultures, or economy, and any attempt to change these elements will be considered a threat. The threat can be real or potential, but classical geopolitics will prepare for the threat, which can escalate into war. The above presentation of classical geopolitics is simplistic because it does not consider other important elements of classical geopolitics such as empiricism and pragmatism. Because it is not bound to morals and ideological “truths,” classical geopolitics has the possibility to change its course of action, to be agile and versatile, and to consider other options, even if they come from political opponents. As an example, the homogenization of a certain territory, in which national and cultural components coincide with the territorial entity, can be considered a sought-after framework by classical geopolitics because it gives a clear delimitation with other states. The other states can be friend or foe, depending on circumstances, but they are “other” anyway. If there is no natural homogenization, there might be a temptation to homogenize it with force through despicable actions such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or culturicide. According to this reading, classical geopolitics will not rule out the use of force to homogenize territories. Conversely, if there is a demonstration that heterogeneity in the form of diversity and inclusion produces better results in economy and social cohesion, classical geopolitics will be the first one to embrace it, and it will not ask if these proposals come from their own ranks or from opponents. This dialectic combination of materiality and pragmatism makes classical geopolitics resilient to crisis and attractive to political and business leaders. Classical geopolitics as the main school of geopolitics has produced a certain number of concepts that are sometimes old, but still very relevant today. We will

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single out just three of them: the organic theory of the state, lebensraum, and realism. The first powerful concept is the “organic state.” Since the invention of the modern state, the protection of the state was a constant priority for leaders because their power depended on the existence and the power of the state. The organicist analogy was very helpful to give flesh and form to the state that could otherwise be distant and unknown to the population. Why would people fight for the state if they did not have a mental representation of it? All kinds of organicist metaphors were used in mobilizing the nation’s resources to protect the state from conquest by foreign aggressors. The state could be “wounded,” the state could be “bleeding,” the state could find its territory “amputated.” This organicist theory has been hardly hit by the globalization movement, which posited that the state will disappear or become irrelevant. The COVID-19 pandemic gave a rare opportunity for the state to get back its prerogatives, especially the most important one: protection of the people, like parents protect their children. During the globalization expansion, organic theory was rejected by practically all Western countries, but this did not happen in the “Global South.” These countries used to be called “developing” countries, a purely organicist epithet, which still has large traction for the depiction of their economic, political, or social situation. Even if new terms have been proposed such as “emerging” countries, the topic of development is very strong, and many countries stick to it. The second concept, lebensraum, and its tragical consequences in terms of genocides, and ethnic cleansing, did not disappear after WWII. Examples from former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Myanmar show that lebensraum unfortunately still enjoys traction among some political and military leaders. Lebensraum fits with the desire of leaders who want to achieve independence of a certain territory. For that, they need a homogeneous population. As explained by Milica Bookman: “As long as nationalists think that they can achieve self-determination on the basis of the ethnic population of a territory, they will strive to create an ethnically pure population in the region or regions they covet” [147]. Finally, the concept of realism in international relations is another important contribution of classical geopolitics. All countries study realpolitik (meaning, among other things, identification and management of war scenarios), while peace studies happen to be a junior topic in international relations. Even if it sounds cynical, war is normal, peace is an anomaly, according to classical geopolitics. States are surrounded by potential enemies, there is no friendship among states, only interest. In that case, states must prepare for the next war that will undoubtedly come, sooner or later. Put bluntly, the job of the leaders is to protect the populations, whether the threat comes from a pandemic or from foreign invasion. While there is hope that a pandemic can be defeated because it is a temporary event, the potential threat coming from other states is perceived as permanent, so more resources would be devoted to counter that threat rather than a pandemic. Peace and war are important elements for states. They are also important for corporations because they want to know if peace is good or bad for them, if peace favors growth or not. Two theses prevail. According to the first, there is a “peace dividend” according to which peace permits states to engage less money in military

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preparedness for war, hence states can engage more money in the overall economy and encourage growth [148]. The other thesis is that military expenditures benefit the whole economy through the ripple effect. Alex Mintz and Randolph Stevenson, in the analysis of 103 countries concluded that military expenditures have a limited (about 10%) positive effect on growth [149]. Military expenditures have a significant impact on military-related industries, but the overall economy does not benefit from them. Some political and economic leaders and thinkers may believe the opposite. They may even believe that military expenditures or war is good for the economy, but research does not confirm that belief. Corporations share many elements with classical geopolitics such as the preference for facts and materiality, pragmatism and empiricism, scientific and technological progress, a binary view of the world. Corporations can stop there, and they do not need to investigate other branches of geopolitics. They do exactly the opposite because of the domestic and international changes that challenged the classical understanding of the world such as disruption, new scales in geography, knowledge as power, climate change, diversity and inclusion, and others. For these reasons, corporations cannot rely on classical geopolitics only. They must see what is in store with critical and feminist approaches and find out if they can use anything that critical and feminist geopolitics have to offer.

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70. Patrick Wintour: ‘George Clooney calls for hotel boycott over Brunei’s LGBT laws’ in The Guardian, March 29, 2019 71. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War, Kosovo and Beyond, Metropolitan Books, 2000, p. 176 72. Richard Smith, ‘Mapping China and the Question of a China-Centered Tributary System’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, N°3, January 27, 2013, pp. 1–18 73. Yuen Foong Khong, ‘The American Tributary System’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 6, N° 1, Spring 2013, Pages 1–47 74. Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order, Agency and Change in Global Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2018 75. Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Moral Man and Immoral Society, a Study in Ethics and Society’, first published by Scribner in 1932, reprinted by The Library of America in 2015 76. Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘The Nature and Destiny of Man, A Christian Interpretation’, first published by Scribner in 1943, reprinted by Westminster/John Knox Press in 1996 77. E.H. Carr, ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations’ London, Macmillan, 1939, reprinted by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016 with a new preface by Michael Cox 78. Hans Morgenthau, ‘Politics Among Nations, The Struggle for Power and Peace’, Alfred A. Knopf publisher, New York, 1948, subsequent editions with Kenneth W. Thompson 79. Nicholas Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, originally published in 1942 by Harcourt Brace & Co, reprinted by Routledge in 2017, p: 18 80. Nicholas Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, p. 25 81. Richard Nixon, ‘Is Peace Possible?’ The New York Times, 2 October 1983 82. ‘Context, not history, matters for Deng’s famous phrase’ in Global Times, 15 June 2011 83. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Mariner Books, 2018 84. Graham Allison, ‘Destined for War?’, National Interest, No 149, May/June 2017, pp. 9–21, p. 21 85. Xi Jinping, The Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, Foreign Languages Press, 2014 86. Robert Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, Random House, 2018, p 40 87. Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Public Affairs, reprint edition 2022 88. Yang Yuan, ‘Escape both the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the ‘Churchill Trap’: Finding a Third Type of Great Power Relations under the Bipolar System’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 11, No 2, March 2018, pp. 193–235, p. 193. 89. Kenneth Waltz, ‘The Man, State and War’, first published by Columbia University Press in 1954, reprinted with a foreword by Stephen Walt by the same publisher in 2018. 90. Kenneth Waltz, ‘Theory of International Politics’, Waveland Press, 1979, reissued by the same publisher in 2010 91. John Mearsheimer, ‘The Tragedy of Great Power Politics’ first published by W.W. Norton Company in 2001. An updated edition was published in 2014. 92. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence, 4th edition, Pearson, 2011, p. 38 93. ‘In Davos, Xi makes case for Chinese leadership role’, Reuters, January 18, 2017 available on https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-china-idUSKBN15118V 94. Geoffrey Sloan, Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History, Routledge, 2017, p. 5 95. Stephen Krasner, Problematic Sovereignties: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities, Columbia University Press, 2001 96. Stephen Krasner, ‘Sovereignty, An Institutional Perspective’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 21, N° 1, April 1988, pp. 66–94, p. 90

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97. Robert Keohane, ‘After Hegemony, Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy’, Princeton University Press, 2005 98. Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, ‘Transnational Relations and World Politics’, Harvard University Press, 1972 and reprinted in 2014. 99. Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, Power & Interdependence, Pearson, 4th Edition, 2011 100. Moshe Halbertal, Stephen Holmes, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, Princeton University Press, 2019 101. Judson Mitchell, ‘The Brezhnev Doctrine and Communist Ideology’, The Review of Politics, Vol. 34, N° 2, April 1972, pp. 190–209. 102. Harry Schwartz, ‘The Khrushchev/ Brezhnev Doctrine at Helsinki’. The New York Times, August 5, 1975 103. Julius Pratt, ‘The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny’’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 32, N° 4, July 1927, pp. 795–798 104. ‘Citizenship Amendment Bill: India’s new ‘anti-Muslim’ law explained’, BBC, December 11, 2019 105. Kenneth Boulding, Three Forces of Power, Sage Publications, 1990 106. E.H. Carr, ‘Twenty years Crisis 1919–1939,’ pp. 97–134 107. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, pp. 80–108 108. Saul Cohen, Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations, p.2 109. Robert Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science, Vol. 2, N° 3, July 1957, pp. 201–215, p. 203 110. Jean-François Seznec, ‘Sharing a Pot of Gold: Iran, Qatar and the Pars Gas Field,’ Middle East Institute, August 22, 2016, available at https://www.mei.edu/publications/sharing-pot-goldiran-qatar-and-pars-gas-field 111. ‘Iran promotes gas projects in Qatar’, Special Eurasia, February 21, 2022, available at https:// www.specialeurasia.com/2022/02/21/iran-qatar-natural-gas 112. Joseph Nye, Soft Power, The Means to Succeed in World Politics, Public Affairs, 2004 113. Chien-Huei Wu, ‘Human Rights in ASEAN Context: Between Universalism and Relativism’, in Chang-fa Lo, Nigel Li & Tsai-yu Lin (Eds.), Legal Thoughts between the East and the West in the Multilevel Legal Order: A Liber Amicorum in Honour of Professor Herbert Han-Pao Ma, Springer, 2016, pp. 277–289 114. Parag Khanna, ‘The Future is Asian’, Simon and Schuster, 2019 115. ‘BTS Has an Unrivaled Twitter Fan Base,’ Statista, Nov 19, 2019, available on https://www. statista.com/chart/19998/bts-has-an-unrivaled-twitter-fan-base/ 116. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘America in a hostile war’, Foreign Policy, N° 23, Summer 1976, pp. 65–96 117. Lingling Wei, ‘China Reins In Its Belt and Road Program, $1 Trillion Later’, The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2022 118. Joseph Nye, ‘Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 616, March 2008, pp. 94–109, p. 101 119. Elizabeth Redden, ‘Closing Confucius Institutes’, Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2019 120. Douglas McGray, ‘Japan’s Gross National Cool’, Foreign Policy, May/June 2002 121. ‘Floundering Cool Japan Projects See Loss After Loss’, July 20, 2018, on www.nippon.com/ en/news/fnn20180713001/ 122. Shuling Huang, ‘Nation-Branding and Transnational Consumption: Japan-Mania and the Korean Wave in Taiwan’, Media Culture & Society, Vol. 33, N°1, January 2011, pp. 3–18, p. 15 123. Taku Tamaki, ‘Repackaging national identity: Cool Japan and the resilience of Japanese identity narratives’, Asian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, N°1, 2019, pp. 108–126 124. John Agnew, Geopolitics—revisioning world politics, Routledge, 2003, p. 80 125. Saul Cohen, Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations, p. 31 126. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, reprinted in 2011, p. 43.

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Chapter 3

Critical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics, as its name indicates, focuses on the critical analysis of geopolitics and, by extension, acts as an opposition to classical geopolitics. It is critical in the sense that it wants to analyze and challenge the prevailing order of things. The main question for critical geopolitics is where does the prevailing order come from, who built the prevailing order, and for what purpose? Critical geopolitics is not problem-solving geopolitics. This does not mean that critical geopolitics ignores reality. It simply wants to debunk ideas, theories, and realities that are taken for granted. If a problem arises, classical geopolitics seeks to solve the problem within the existing framework, while critical geopolitics asks first if the problem really exists, how the problem has been framed, and for what purpose. Only after that analysis is it possible to solve the problem. Let’s take the example of the relationship between Israel and Iran. From the classical geopolitics point of view, the animosity between the two countries is such that only a violent outcome and winner-takes-all attitude can prevail. There is no room for negotiation. Critical geopolitics takes another approach. It situates the conflict in time and space and asks when exactly the conflict started. Was it before or after the Islamic Revolution of 1979? Was it before or after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948? Who is involved in the conflict? Is the whole population of Iran supporting a bellicose attitude of Iran toward the State of Israel or only the leadership of that country? Does the whole population of Israel consider Iran an enemy or only part of its population? What is the attitude of other countries, permanent members of the UN Security Council, and states of the region? Do they have an influence in framing conflict? According to critical geopolitics, this conflict is situated in time and space, it is not eternal, it is not immutable. If the conflict is framed differently, negotiations can prevail. That is exactly what happened with the Abraham Accords, launched in 2020, when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain decided to establish diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, soon followed by Morocco in the same year. It is not clear if the entire population in these three countries agrees with the move

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_3

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decided by their leadership, but the point is that the conflict was reframed, and an alternative solution to the violent approach was found. According to critical geopolitics, the classical understanding of geopolitics is just one of the possible ways to view the world. From the classical point of view, geopolitics is a neutral, objective, and ideologically free tool for use by foreignpolicy experts. Critical geopolitics, on the contrary, considers that classical geopolitics is unnecessarily state-centric with the focus upon the relationship among states within the international system. Critical geopolitics also rejects the possibility that geopolitics is objective, neutral, and ideologically free because of the knowledge upon which all understanding of geopolitics is biased. It is necessarily particular and situated in time and place. According to John Short, “geopolitics is a form of situated knowledge, neither a socially neutral nor a politically innocent form of understanding, but one deeply marked by who is using it, when, and for what purpose. It is a form of knowledge created by specific people at certain points in time for particular purpose” [1]. As early as 1981, Robert Cox proposed what situated knowledge in international relations is: “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. All theories have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space, specifically social and political time, and space. The world is seen from a standpoint, definable in terms of nation and social class, of dominance or subordination, of rising or declining power, or a sense of immobility, or of present crisis, of past experiences, and of hopes and expectations for the future” [2]. Colin Flint summarizes well how critical geopolitics views classical geopolitics. “Classic geopolitics is a way of thinking that claims to take an objective and global perspective, but in reality, has been the endeavor of elite white males in predominantly, but not exclusively, Western countries with an eye to promoting a particular political agenda” [3]. For authors who espouse critical geopolitics, one objective truth does not exist. There are several truths, and the dominant one that comes from classical geopolitics is just one among many. Shannon O’Lear says: “What classical geopolitics narratives demonstrate are efforts to describe the world in a particular way to justify a particular response . . . These narratives are not universal truths or facts but instead reflect a particular view and a specific context of place and time. . .There is never a single, correct geopolitics” [4]. Critical geopolitics rejects the binary approach of the world favored by classical geopolitics usually represented by the opposition of “Us vs. Them” or by the opposition between foreign policy and domestic policy. John Agnew explains the concept of “Us” from the critical point of view: “Who is ‘Us’? is no longer easily answered, if it ever really was. All sorts of ties bind and govern all of us worldwide, without a singular home to report back to. The world is organized on a transversal rather than on a singularly territorial basis with all manner of transnational and global networks and flaws drawing distant locations into topological proximity” [5]. The geopolitical simplification of the world into “friendly” and “enemy” states, between “friendly” and “dangerous” spaces, provided a practical means of giving order to this world. From the classical point of view, dangers come from outside. Anarchy “out there” can be countered only by making sure that “out there” does not

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come “here.” That is why only hegemony, a dominant global position underwriting national security, can guarantee that it stays “out there.” The danger represented by “out there” is valid for politics and business alike. Many corporations wrongly believe that international competition will never come to them. Due to globalization, not only Western companies delocalize their production to low-cost countries but also products from the whole world now come to onceprotected Western markets. As an example, higher education has experienced deep changes. National universities used to be shielded from international competition because their students came from the national market, the professors, too, and the language of instruction was the local language. The internationalization of higher education has changed that situation forever because states wanted their universities to compete with universities in other countries. Students and professors are permitted to move from one country to the other, and the language of instruction has become English. Institutions that for centuries used to live in splendid isolation are suddenly thrown into a global market. Rankings of universities and schools have become the yardstick for success or relevance, so all institutions of higher education now play the game established by ranking and accrediting institutions. At the end, the binary world does not exist anymore because these universities and schools compete in the international market. They do not make a difference between a national and a foreign competitor, especially if universities and schools have campuses in foreign countries. In the chapter on classical geopolitics, a certain number of “founding fathers” like Friedrich Ratzel or Rudolf Kjellen have been reviewed. It is much more difficult to identify the “founding fathers” of critical geopolitics. We should probably start with the French journal Hérodote, which appeared in January 1976. The journal was established by Yves Lacoste (1929–) and a group of geographers who were interested in an analysis of current issues from a critical geographic viewpoint. The first issue included an interview with the major French philosopher of that time, Michel Foucault. Yves Lacoste argued that geography and geographers mostly served the cause of war [6]. He wanted to move geography from being a servile discipline, focused on the state, into an engaged and objective science. Therefore, he sponsored articles about ecology, national issues, global poverty, or global warming. He played a key role in the emergence of Anglo-American “critical geopolitics,” but the latter had other inspirations as well [7]. As far as other influences are concerned, the triggering point of critical geopolitics comes from decolonization struggles, civil rights movements, and social protests in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and France. Critical theory was part of a vast postmodernist and post-colonialist movement of that time. The main influences for critical geopolitics come from Foucault, Derrida, and Gramsci, and we will briefly refer to elements of their thought that have been picked up by critical geopolitics. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is extensively quoted by critical geopolitics for his reflection on the power–knowledge nexus, which is essential in politics or in social life in general. According to Foucault, groups of people are excluded from holding power positions because they lack the knowledge that is critical in exercising power

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in society. Educational systems in many countries systematically exclude some populations from access to knowledge and perpetuate inequalities and dominant/ dominated situations. His power–knowledge concept will be studied in more detail later in this chapter. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) puts the emphasis on the text, the discourse, and the message. The focus is not on actions or materiality (something classical geopolitics put forward) but on how a question or a concept is framed and communicated. Concepts do not appear sui generis. They are framed and communicated by people in authority who want to perpetuate their domination or authority. There is no objective, taken-for-granted concept. All concepts serve a particular interest. For that reason, critical geopolitics wants to deconstruct prevailing concepts and reveal their internal construction. A deconstructionist approach, becoming a central part of critical geopolitics, therefore, does not directly answer the question, what is geopolitics? Rather than submit to the rule of the question, Derrida’s approach is to displace the question, to problematize its limits and conditions of possibility. Deconstructionists will, therefore, ask how “geopolitics” and “geopolitical tradition” have been contextualized with certain meanings at various times and in various contexts. According to O’Tuathail, “the challenge for critical geopolitics today is to document and deconstruct the institutional, technological, and material forms of these new congealments of geo-power, to problematize how global space is incessantly reimagined and rewritten by centers of power and authority in the late twentieth century” [8]. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) is the third author frequently referred to by critical geopolitics. Using Gramscian notion of hegemony, critical geopolitics agrees that the current epoch is an epoch of transnational liberalism. This kind of liberalism represents the belief that universal progress lies in the extension of capitalist markets across the globe [9]. Hegemony is a system, not a country. That is why geopolitics should not be state-centric but structure-centric or system-centric according to critical geopolitics. If, at the beginning of the globalization movement, there was a dominant presence of the US and American companies, this can change, and it is perfectly possible that China emerges as the best defender of the hegemonic ideology of liberalism. This would not be the only and the smallest paradox when it comes to the relationship between communist China and capitalism. Critical geopolitics as a term emerged in the 1990s with authors like Gearoid O’Tuathail (1962–), John Agnew (1949–), or Simon Dalby (1958–), and their influence grew over time. Today, critical geopolitics represents a significant number of academics engaged in geopolitics or international relations. According to Colin Flint, “academic geopolitics is no longer exclusively a preserve of the privileged male elite who used the authority of their academic position to frame policy of a particular country . . . Most academics who say they study geopolitics are describing the situation of those who are marginalized and advocating a change in their situation” [10]. Colin Flint, however, warns in the same book that the significant presence in academic circles does not translate into influence on political and military matters, where classical geopolitics still dominates.

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Critical Geopolitics and Power

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This chapter will be organized differently from the first one. We will start with the focus on power, because of the overwhelming importance of power–knowledge and its corollary, the power of discourse. Critical geopolitics does not put the emphasis on hard power and soft power as classical geopolitics does. It takes as a starting point the definition of power and the source of that power, which is knowledge and discourse. The second part will be devoted to the concepts of space and state. All the postulates presented by classical geopolitics seen in the first chapter are open to criticism. On the level of space, for instance, not only will geographical determinism be rejected outward, but the concepts of geography, natural resources, and environmental risk are also subject to debate. On the level of state, critical geopolitics offers a variety of containers and scales on how to organize a social life. Alternatives can be organized on a supra-state level or on a sub-state level. Why should the state be the alpha and omega of geopolitical thought, critical geopolitics asks?

3.1

Critical Geopolitics and Power

The term “critical” in critical geopolitics refers to a wide and polymorphous critical theory that deals mainly with the concepts of power and domination. What is the source of power and how does power interact with knowledge? This is a central theme in the social sciences. Since geopolitics is also part of the social sciences, it cannot be excluded from conversation. “Knowledge is power” is a phrase attributed to Francis Bacon, though different versions of the same phrase were circulated before, especially in the Book of Proverbs [11]. It was, however, Michel Foucault who made the discussion about knowledge pertinent to geopolitics. According to Foucault, power is based on knowledge, and power makes use of knowledge. Geopolitics should, therefore, concentrate on knowledge creation and diffusion because this is where power comes from. Vlad Strukov, an author engaged in popular geopolitics, states: “In its apprehension of power and discourse, popular geopolitics borrows explicitly from poststructuralist theory—and also from how this theory has been applied in cultural studies—including Michel Foucault’s notion of power” [12]. Foucault asserted, however, that power is not only a child of knowledge. According to him, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its intentions. Power, therefore, does not have a passive role in that it is not a simple conveyer of knowledge. Power has the capacity to select knowledge or to modify it if necessary. The selection and modification of knowledge are the constant desire of people in authority. People in authority (politicians, clerics, professors) can, for instance, declare that some knowledge is out of bounds and should not be explored. Conversely, the same people in authority can impose new knowledge on everyone. This is what happens during mass religious conversions when a traditional body of knowledge is replaced by a new one. The first aim of critical theory is to present a critique of society with the aim to reveal and challenge power structures that institute and reproduce domination. The

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second aim of critical geopolitics is to initiate an action to initiate a reduction of domination. “Reveal” is the starting point of critical geopolitics because power structures of domination are not evident or visible. Power structures can be presented as evident, so “apparently” there is no need for society to reveal and challenge them. Critical theory goes beyond appearance and wants to expose underlying power structures. It may not be sufficient or even accurate for power in a democratic state to be understood according to a classical independence of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. In many countries, media, and especially social media, play a significant role in the power structure, although they are not recognized as such. Media are not recognized as structural power because political and cultural power monopolize structural power. Joe Kincheloe (1950–2008) posited that there is an exaggerated influence of political and cultural power in the construction of knowledge, consciousness, and views of reality [13]. Political and cultural powers for him are less influential in shaping the construction of knowledge than they appear. Real power is channeled through electronic media, not through the legislative or the executive branches of government, the usual subjects of analysis of classical geopolitics. When his book was published in 2005, Kincheloe was thinking about television as the main media. Today, social media has an influence on all things political. Social media can influence elections in a country, and that influence is sometimes perceived by political powers as foreign intervention. In reaction, the state believes that there is a need to protect itself against the meddling of foreign social media. Examples abound of states controlling the activity of social media during election times either through a ban of some platforms such as Facebook or through a general ban on the Internet [14]. Critical geopolitics does not believe that social media is an epiphenomenon of the media revolution. It considers it to be an integral part of the power structure and gives it the place it deserves. If power is “hidden” and must be revealed, that means that equality of citizens is not granted. According to “social contract” in a democracy, all citizens are equal since they have equal rights and power through votes to choose their representatives. This can, however, be concealed by a “hidden” power. The real power structure can be based on a patriarchal structure, on gerontocracy, or on race-based privilege, and this power is usually not visible. It can happen that the state entertains the idea that all people are equal while the government is composed only of people who belong to one ethnic group, age, or social origin. It can happen that the state entertains the idea that it is independent, while at the same time it does not have its own currency, the control of its natural resources, or the control of its territory and borders. It can also happen that the state entertains the idea that all people within the state are equal in their rights while inequalities are hidden. The role of critical theory is, therefore, to expose a power structure that is not apparent or that is ignored or hidden by the state. The second objective of critical theory is to challenge power structures. Critical theory wants to modify power structures, seeking emancipation of human beings. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who was among the first to define critical theory back in 1937, wanted to change society. He sought to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” [15]. The two examples mentioned above

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(social media and social contract) can be instrumental in changing society. It is possible, for instance, to make media, and especially social media, the fourth pillar of power in a state. This way, social media would be recognized as an essential part of the power structure in the state, and if the other three powers obey democratic rule, it would be necessary to make social media democratic, too. As for now, practically all media (social media networks included) belong to private companies. If the state wants to include them in the democratic power structure, the state can nationalize them or force the shareholders to distribute shares of the company to the entire population to ensure public and/or democratic control of social media. There are 223 million Facebook users in the United States out of 2.8 billion active users worldwide. If Facebook wants to become democratic, should it distribute shares to 223 million American users, since the company originates from the United States, or should it distribute shares to all its 2.8 billion users or 28.5 percent of the total world population? As for the second example of social contract, if real power is concentrated in one specific gender, age, or racial group, it is necessary to unlock the power structure and include groups that are marginalized or not sufficiently represented in society. Many countries have adopted laws promoting diversity and inclusion for political parties and business structures. According to critical theory, the adoption of inclusive policies is not sufficient to fight against inequalities because of hidden inequalities. These hidden inequalities stem mainly from unequal economic conditions. If there is domination based on gender, age, or race, it is because of the concentration of economic power in these groups. Economic inequality in capitalism is understood to be self-explaining and necessary because it constitutes a reward for entrepreneurship, innovation, talent, hard work, etc. For the proponents of critical theory, it is not enough to work on quotas in political and business structures. It is necessary to eliminate or at least reduce economic inequalities, including “hidden” inequalities. This can be done by eliminating the capitalist system altogether or by introducing taxes and redistribution of income that could be beneficial for all. For that reason, many proponents of critical theory have been labeled as “Marxist,” even if some critical authors criticize the Marxist doctrine. Economic inequalities exist on the local and global levels. Inequalities can be fueled by domination by a few families in a village as well as by domination initiated by transnational corporations in several countries at the same time. That is why critical geopolitics believes it is necessary to introduce different scales for the analysis of geopolitics and not to consider that the state scale is the only possibility. Critical theory has given birth to numerous fields that can be loosely attached to it. Fields such as feminist critical theory, critical thinking, critical race theory, postmodernism, or post-colonialism can be linked to critical theory. What used to be a matter of discussion in academic circles only is now getting the attention of the whole society, and its concepts are increasingly familiar to the public. Media channels are awash with new terms such as “wokism,” “white privilege,” and “systemic patriarchal domination,” which also stem from critical theory. Critical theory covers the whole societal spectrum. It can be seen in politics, sociology, philosophy, economy, anthropology, and linguistics. Critical geopolitics is,

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therefore, much more open to philosophical and sociological influences than classical geopolitics. From sociology, critical geopolitics will take the non-binary approach according to which there is no “us/them,” there is no “domestic policy/ foreign policy,” there is no “private sphere/public sphere.” Because sociology also covers the dominant/dominated nexus, social and societal phenomena, it has become one of the two pillars of critical geopolitics. The other pillar of critical geopolitics is philosophy because it asks fundamental questions about the origin of power and knowledge, how knowledge is constructed, and how knowledge is expressed in a discourse. Classical geopolitics blames critical geopolitics for being too sociological and philosophical, for not having enough material, and for not being action oriented. Critical authors do not want to be action-oriented because they want to know how the world is viewed, who decided how the world is understood, and for what purpose. Critical geopolitics does not want to be in service of statecraft, the military, or business. It wants to debunk the structures of power that frame the world. Since knowledge is the most important element in debunking power and is a central facet of critical geopolitics, we will ask the following questions: What is knowledge is? What is the origin of knowledge? What is the place of science in constructing knowledge? How the knowledge is structured and transmitted, and what is the power of discourse?

3.1.1

What Is Knowledge?

As we have come to understand in the first chapter, classical geopolitics has a certain idea about power. It also has a certain idea about knowledge. Classical geopolitics believes that the state can control information and knowledge production, be it military or civilian, public, or private. The emergence of concepts such as Information society/Information age, or Knowledge society/Knowledge age, are all too familiar with classical geopolitics because the state and corporations have systematically built knowledge and information useful for them. The state recognizes that knowledge is essential for power, but it tends to assimilate knowledge, information, or data, but these three terms are fundamentally different. In statistics, the usual path is to start with data, to continue with data modeling, and to finish with interpretation, but for critical geopolitics, we start with data collection, then transformation of data into information, and finish with knowledge building. The emphasis on data is tremendous today because the amount of data collected and stored is unprecedented in history. Computers permit us to collect and store this data, giving birth to Big Data Management on one side and infrastructure (data centers and cloud storage) on the other. States and corporations know how to collect and store data. They did it in the past when data were not in a digitalized form, and they do it today. They have always considered that without data, it is impossible to manage production or control people and the environment. The more data they have, the better it is for them. The thirst for data is so great that it generates a war on data. It

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is, therefore, expected that the security and military community in all countries is interested in how to gather and manage data [16]. The main question is to know who owns the data, especially when it comes to the Internet and social media. Is the state the owner of data, is it the social media platform, or is it the individual who posts photos and videos on social media? The question is as important in the United States as it is in China because there is a widespread idea that the entity that controls data controls the world. For the moment, the cloud infrastructure (which is the main container of data) is dominated by private US companies like AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud, while their Chinese counterparts such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud are behind. Corporations from only two countries share the world’s cloud business, and the United States is by far the most important player. Public and private entities can choose the cloud provider they want. The choice is usually technical and commercial in nature, but it can be political as well. Meta is, for instance, the biggest social media company in the world but does not have its own cloud business. Theoretically, it can make Tencent Cloud or Alibaba Cloud its cloud provider, but the probability for doing so is low. It decided to build a strategic partnership with Amazon, so technically AWS can have access to Meta data. An American giant going with another America giant is expected. What happens when a public railroad company from Europe chooses an American provider? This might be a political question, a question of sovereignty. When the state-controlled French railroad company SNCF decided to partner with AWS in 2021, some politicians immediately complained about the decision to transfer to Amazon the control of 7000 servers and 250 apps belonging to SNCF [17]. The United States may be a close ally to France, but when questions of sovereignty are in play, nationalistic rhetoric prevails. Data in the cloud are raw data. It does not have a value per se. It does not have a meaning. Borrowing from semiotics, data can be compared to the signifier (“le signifié”), while the signified (“le signifiant”) is missing. A sign in semiotics is a couple composed of two parts (the material sign on one side and the meaning of the sign on the other), but raw data are only one part of that couple (the ‘signifier’). Let’s take two examples. It is possible to measure the outside temperature at one time in one place. The result of the measure is data. With computers, it might be possible to collect temperature data at 3000 places at the same time, but again this is only data and nothing else. In the business world, one can observe that prices for some goods increased from one month to the other by 2 percent, and the next month prices went down by 0.5 percent. Price monitoring can be repeated every month or every day and for all kinds of goods, but again this is only raw data. In the end, computers are fed with tons of data, and they stop there. There is no specific meaning or usefulness of these data because data pertain to the signifier, not the signified. When data are processed, refined, and structured with the aim of creating relevance or usefulness, it becomes information. In the example about temperatures, raw data give birth to information only when temperature is processed with the aim of showing if there is global warming or climate change. With the accumulation of data, it is possible to give a historic view or a timeline about the evolution of temperatures. If data take the form of numerical expressions like temperature reading

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or price statement, information about climate change or prices makes use of statistics and probabilities with the aim of analyzing, interpreting, and presenting the collection of data. Information about temperatures can take the form of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration or global average surface temperature. For prices, data give birth to information only when price statements are processed and structured. An inflation rate statement is information because data about price changes have been processed, structured, and presented in a way to be relevant and useful to corporations and state institutions. There are several ways to measure inflation such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or the Core Personal Consumption Expenditures (Core PCE). Both are information. Data and information have become the most important sources for decisionmaking, transforming society into a knowledge-based society in which the knowledge is based on information, which in turn is based on numerical data. According to many observers, we live in a knowledge-intensive form of capitalism, in which “knowledge refers to both material processes of knowledge-intensive capitalism (including subject formation), and to the processes whereby this form of capitalism is constructed discursively through imageries and objectifying social practices” [18]. This definition by Sami Moisio looks like the definition of semiotics. Knowledge is, at the same time, a material element of the sign (signifier) and the meaning of the sign (signified). He also points out the importance of discourse and imagery in framing the modern form of capitalism built on the knowledge-based economy. Discourse, narratives, and imagery are salient elements of critical geopolitics, permitting us to analyze social relationships and conclude that all social relationships (including the knowledge-based economy) are a social construct. Information becomes so important that there are demands that political or economic life should be governed by computers because robots make decisions based on information only, without any cultural, gender, or political bias, which could hinder the optimal decision-making process. The question about bias and robots is a complex one, but robots are massively present in all aspects of economic production, in the military and in politics, so perhaps we are not far away from a “Robotcracy” in the future. The war on information is as fierce as the war on data because states and corporations do not want to control the storage of data only, they also want to control the analysis of data. That is why they need powerful computers. To process increasing amounts of data, states and corporations have moved from conventional computers to supercomputers and finally to quantum computers. There are few quantum computers for the moment, so the battle is among supercomputers. The website Top 500 gives the list of the top 500 supercomputers, ranked according to processing power. The latest list from November 2022 features the supercomputer “Frontier” (located in the United States) built by Hewlett Packard as number one, followed by the supercomputer “Fugaku” (located in Japan) built by Fujitsu, and the supercomputer “Lumi” (located in Finland) built by Hewlett Packard. China has only two supercomputers in the Top Ten (Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe 2-A), but it has the largest number of supercomputers in the Top 500 (32 percent of the total),

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the United States is second with 25 percent. However, the United States has the largest performance share (43 percent) as compared with China’s 10 percent.1 States and corporations want computers to calculate complex events and simulate outcomes of these events. This could be the spread of a virus, weather predictions, or crowd movement. With powerful computers, it would be ultimately possible to map and analyze the human brain and find out how the different nodes operate in complex brain networks. Information is necessary in the decision-making process, but it is not enough. All information presented so far revolves around numerical data, which in the end produces a particular type of information, which is numerical information or digital information. Information, however, is not necessarily numerical. It can originate from philosophical, political, or religious sources, and it is not necessarily quantifiable. When processed, information gives the scenarios but cannot say what is good or bad for a state or a corporation. Information does not say what is “better” because “better” is a moral category, and numerical renderings do not reflect moral or ethical considerations. Going further, computers can gather as much data and information as they want, but they will not expose correlations and causality between data and information. This is the domain of human action; this is the domain of knowledge. Knowledge permits us to decide what to do with the Consumer Price Index or with the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration. As an example of choice, the same number of COVID-19 cases per day can be used by the government to impose a lockdown of the country or to do nothing and treat COVID-19 like any other flu. A result of a battle can be declared by military leaders as a loss or tactical regrouping (retreat). The same turnover of a corporation can be viewed as a failure or as an outstanding success, depending on the way results are presented and framed. Interpretation of information and transformation of information into data usually takes one method as a method of choice, and this method is causality. Causality used to be the only method for classical geopolitics, states, and corporations for a long time. It was sufficient in the past, but causality is nowadays complemented by path dependency (which looks at history and resistance to change to explain phenomena and behavior) and complexity (where the components of a model react in multiple and unpredictable ways). Information cannot exist without data, but data can exist without information. Knowledge can exist without information; it can exist without any data. Knowledge can be of a spiritual nature when one person is blessed and vested with all knowledge and wisdom by a supranatural entity. There were many cases in the past when leaders claimed that they were the vessels of knowledge endowed by supranatural entities. Knowledge can also be based on intuition. The person does not need information to justify a decision. Intuition is enough. There are many leaders who act according to their intuition, even against all evidence. These two sources of knowledge are sidelined by classical geopolitics, but they used to be predominant in the past, and they might experience a revival in the future.

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https://www.top500.org

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Knowledge gives meaning to information. This is the final step in the sequence data–information–knowledge. Knowledge analyzes information with the aim of recipients being able to draw insights, to elaborate possible/plausible scenarios, and to make decisions. In the first case of temperature reading, the processed data indicate a sudden change in climate in the last century. This information is useful, but it does not provide a meaning. It does not tell what we are going to do with that information. Knowledge takes that information and correlates it with other information. It will, for instance, link climate change to the increase of industrial production, an overconsumption of natural resources, an increase of the population and consumption, an increase of consumption of fossil fuels, etc. This correlation will, in turn, produce causality according to which climate change is the result of human action. Climate change, therefore, is not a natural phenomenon. After human causality of climate change is firmly established, the public and private sectors may push to abandon fossil fuels, to introduce other sources of energy, or to decrease production and/or consumption. The transformation of information into knowledge works also in the case of inflation. The information about price increases can be correlated to the increase in dividends distributed to shareholders. Inflation, therefore, does not come from the increase in costs of production, the scarcity of production, or the increase of taxes. Despite a variety of causes for inflation, a particular correlation is chosen that links higher prices for consumers to higher profits for the corporation. This correlation, in turn, becomes a causality because a particular reason for higher profits for the corporation has been found: the desire of shareholders to maximize their dividends. As in the case of climate change seen before, inflation is, therefore, not a natural phenomenon. It is the result of human action. This process, starting with information and leading to a decision, is the domain of knowledge. In politics, causality is very important because it permits the singling out of one unique cause for all woes. Postcolonial countries can link poverty to the cumulative effect of colonial exploitation coupled with contemporary neo-colonialism as the cause of their situation. Whatever they do, it will not be enough if neo-colonialism is not suppressed. Conversely, former colonial countries dismiss their responsibility and find a causality for poverty in poor governance, lack of democracy, inefficiency of local companies, or corruption. As there is a war on data and information, there is a war on knowledge. That war is waged on two levels. The first one is a war on a paradigm or Big Idea. It seeks to establish the dominant paradigm in society, around which all society revolves. It can be capitalism, the concept of progress, social justice, theocracy, or socialism, or any other form of organizing society. Academics, corporate leaders, politicians, military leaders, innovators, all members of society are engaged in that kind of war. Sometimes non-state actors engage willingly, out of conviction, sometimes unconsciously, but they all defend an ideal type that serves as the basis for the organization of society. Once the paradigm is established, the production of knowledge that follows that paradigm is established too. A convergence of academic, corporate, or political decisions perpetuates that system or paradigm. According to Bob Jessop, Knowledge-Based Economy (KBE) was selected as a “master

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narrative” in the 1980s by a conjuncture of public and private players in the United States. At that time, other options existed about post-Fordist futures, but KBE was chosen and spread to all countries through international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become the hegemonic discourse that we know today [19]. After the Renaissance period, all big ideas came from the Northern Hemisphere because they were imposed through colonization. In a multipolar world, Big Ideas can come from anywhere, but the Northern Hemisphere still dominates. Once the Big Idea, or the “master narrative,” has been chosen and established, like in the case of KBE, the state defines the budget devoted to KBE. This is the second level of the knowledge war, the production of knowledge that serves the “master narrative.” The public initiative can take the form of a formal statement indicating that knowledge economy is the goal a state wants to achieve. As early as in 2000, the EU heads of state and government adopted the Lisbon strategy, according to which they wanted to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”2 Consequently, the EU launched the European Entrepreneurial Regions (EER) Award scheme, which rewards EU regions with the most credible, forward-thinking, and promising vision and innovative entrepreneurial policy strategy. The EU also launched the Network of Regional Hubs for EU Policy Implementation Review (RegHub), which works as a platform that involves local and regional actors through consultations and collects their experiences on EU policy implementation. The emphasis on regions rather than states is not accidental. About 30 years ago, Kenichi Ohmae predicted that regions will replace states because the nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit of organizing human activity and managing economic endeavor in a borderless world [20]. It is expected, therefore, that the knowledge-based economy should be realized on the regional, not the state level. This, however, did not happen in the case of the European Union because regions are under the supervision of states. The private sector could theoretically oppose the move from the state and finance other kinds of programs that have nothing to do with the “master-narrative.” However, evidence shows private and public research work in the same direction, and more often than not, they cooperate in the process. These two stages of the knowledge war (identification of the paradigm and production of knowledge to serve it) are routinely observed in the military and in business. In military terms, the Big Idea is called strategy while the production of knowledge is tactics. In the corporate world, the Big Idea is the vision of the corporation, while the mission of the company is the knowledge production that permits the company to reach its objectives. Information was, and still is, central for the exercise of power. Knowing something that others do not gives leverage in military, politics, business, and education, or in any other field. People used to kill for information in the past, and they will 2

www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm

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continue to do so in the future because knowledge permits the manipulation and domination of others. It is not necessarily the abundance of knowledge that is decisive. If knowledge stays somewhere and is not used, it does not exist. This was the case for the knowledge accumulated by the Greeks and Romans during antiquity. That vast body of knowledge was completely forgotten in Europe and lost until the Renaissance. It existed in the material form, buried somewhere, but it was not used in practice. It was, therefore, useless. Knowledge is an asset that can be material or non-material. If it is non-material, it stays in the heads of people. There was a dilemma in the past to know if the body possesses knowledge disconnected from the brain such as the knowledge for handicrafts, where hands play a crucial role, or feet for dancers or football players, but neuroscience is clear in stating that all this knowledge is in fact connected to brain activity. Despite advances in neuroscience, many artists still believe that the body can be the source of knowledge, not only the object of knowledge [21]. The non-material knowledge possessed by a person can be transmitted orally to another person through initiation, lectures, or storytelling. This knowledge is inherent to the person: If that person dies, the knowledge disappears as well. According to the African proverb: “Every time an elder die, a library is burnt.” That is also why invaders used to kill people who were depositaries of knowledge. This way, the indigenous knowledge was destroyed by the invaders. If knowledge is material, the physical depositaries of knowledge, such as archives, libraries, museums, and universities, are the object of rivalry and conflict. In times of war, it is essential to preserve the archives, the material proof of the existence of populations or states. The peregrinations of the National Palace Museum in China are indicative. The Museum was established in 1925 in Beijing under the name Palace Museum and contained 700,000 pieces of art spanning 4000 years of Chinese history, mainly from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Because of the Japanese aggression, the collections were moved from Beijing to Shanghai and Nankin in 1933 and 1936, respectively. Finally, many pieces were moved to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949.3 A new museum was built in 1965 in Taipei under the name National Palace Museum to host these collections. Since that time, the collections from the National Palace Museum have become a political pawn between Beijing and Taipei because the entity that holds these precious collections preserves the memory of China and can claim to be the real China. Archives, books, and pieces of art are problematic not only in times of war. Germany was not at war in 1933 when university students burned over 25,000 books. The “holocaust of books” aimed to destroy knowledge deemed contrary to the Nazi ideology, mainly works of Jewish and socialist authors. The numerous bonfires in Western countries are documented. There is ample evidence and documentation of them. This, however, is not the case for the systematic destruction of indigenous knowledge by the colonizers, which was largely undocumented. The colonizers evidently considered that

See Chapter 5, ‘Relocating and Rebuilding the Palace Museum on Taiwan’, in Jeannette Elliott, David Shambaugh, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures, University of Washington Press, 2005, pp. 93–109 3

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indigenous knowledge was not important or was at the lower stage of civilization. As such, that knowledge had to be discarded and destroyed. If the colonizers wanted to preserve some of the knowledge in the form of artifacts, it was only because these artifacts were exotic to the colonizers or fetishized by them. According to critical geopolitics, everything we know about geopolitics has been invented, selected, and distributed in a form of discourse by the depositories of knowledge, usually people enjoying some position of authority. The authority can be of a religious nature, with clergy that has exclusive access to knowledge and governs others though dogma and praxis heavily regulated and enforced. Authority can come from members of the family, usually the elderly, usually male in a patriarchal society, and no other member of the family questions their authority, knowledge, and wisdom. Authority can also come from education and research where professors and researchers are vested with authority coming from years and years of studies and research. Finally, it can come from the military or politics, people who are professionals in war-making and statecraft, so their authority is not questioned either. In business circles, authority is very easy to identify because business is not a democratic institution. Authority comes from people who control the corporation. Control is usually through capital, so the holders of capital (shareholders) have ultimate authority on the strategic and day-to-day decisions. The concept of stakeholders, a group of non-shareholders (employees, customers, partners, community), has emerged as an important factor in designing the strategy and mission of the corporation [22]. However, stakeholders are not shareholders, so ultimately, authority rests with the holders of capital in a capitalist society. It is possible that an engineer, a marketer, or a financial guru has some authority in a corporation, but ultimately the holders of capital make the decision. Finding out what we know and what we can know is the first and the most important challenge for critical geopolitics because the amount of knowledge increases by the day. There was a time when “knowledgeable people” could cover social and natural sciences at the same time. Avicenna (980–1037), for instance, was vested in theology, medicine, and astronomy; Copernicus (1473–1543) was a theologian and astronomer while Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) was a painter, engineer, and scientist at the same time. People who can cover different fields of knowledge are called polymaths or Renaissance men. Lee d’Amato gives a list of the six polymaths who transformed the world, but what is striking is that he starts his post by saying “Knowledge is Power.”4 It is still possible to work on several fields of knowledge at the same time, but because the advancement of fields has been tremendous, it is increasingly difficult to do so. If men cannot know everything, there is a question of prioritization of knowledge, and this is the object of analysis for critical geopolitics. What is the knowledge in geography, politics, history, religion, or national identity that is categorized, selected, and chosen as the most appropriate?

4

The list of 6 polymaths includes Hypathia of Alexandria, Jagadish Chadra Bose, Mikhail Lomonosov, Edward Heron-Allen, Shen Kuo, and Hildegard of Bingen. See the post on https:// explorethearchive.com/famous-polymaths

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Who prioritizes knowledge? Is prioritization the decision of one person, one group of people, or of society as a whole? Gearoid O’Tuathail wanted to explore the scope and nature of knowledge that Robert McNamara, one of the main decision-makers in the Vietnam war, had when decisions were made about Vietnam. Robert McNamara candidly said that the United States was engaged in a frontal struggle against communism, and Vietnam was just one of the dominoes in that war. There was no need to know more about Vietnam. He said: “None of this made me anything close to an East Asian expert, however. I never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or value . . . When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita” [23]. It was maybe terra incognita for McNamara, but certainly not for many US intellectuals, scholars, diplomats, and business leaders who had direct experience and knowledge about Vietnam. In fact, McNamara chose “not to know” about Vietnam, because it permitted him to frame the country as a pawn in a Great Game in which the knowledge of the Soviet Union, as the leader of communism, was sufficient. His situated knowledge was restricted to the Soviet Union at that particular period, and he voluntarily did not want to know anything else, while knowledge was abundant and available. The origin of knowledge for McNamara was to be found in a binary understanding of the world (capitalism vs. communism; good vs. evil). The world was presented “as it was,” it was self-evident. There was no necessity to explore and investigate the origin of knowledge. Critical geopolitics goes beyond the binary world, so the analysis of the origin of knowledge makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of the world.

3.1.2

The Origin of Knowledge

Identifying where knowledge comes from, who is selecting it, and for what purpose is fundamental to critical geopolitics, much more than the discussion about the influence of climate change, much more than the accumulation of capital or the military capacity of a state. The origin of knowledge is a matter of debate between various philosophical schools such the Empiricists vs. the Rationalists on one side or the defenders of innate knowledge vs. acquired knowledge on the other. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the second antagonism (“nature” vs. “nurture”) because it has a direct influence on geopolitics. The debate was resolved a long time ago to the benefit of “nurture” and “acquisition.” However, “natural” and “innate” characteristics of knowledge used to dominate the world for a long time, and they were instrumental in all kinds of domination-based societies and racist ideologies. Racism and domination are important subjects of enquiry for critical geopolitics. Since knowledge is the starting point for domination-based ideologies, it is worthwhile to look in detail at the debate “nature vs. nurture” and especially to Plato, who was the first to initiate the debate and whose influence was extremely important for centuries after him.

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According to Plato (428 BC–347 BC), knowledge is innate. How can an individual learn something if the topic is brand new to that individual? Plato answered by stating that complete knowledge is present, but forgotten, at birth. All information learned by a person is merely a recollection of something the psyche of the individual (translated by “soul” rather than by “mind”) has already learned previously, which is called the Theory of Recollection or Platonic epistemology. The teacher is a person who helps or guides the individual to recollect knowledge. The guide has the role of a “midwife,” therefore the term maieutics, or the Socratic method to qualify the role of the teacher [24]. The role of the teacher, the “midwife,” or the Master is not to give or transmit “new” knowledge to the individual because “new” knowledge does not exist. The teacher is there to help the individual to give birth to knowledge that already exists within the individual. Several flaws exist for this theory, among them how the “psyche” gets the knowledge in the first place. But apart from that, another question is more important for the geopoliticians. It is easy to observe that some people (in politics, in business, or in the military) are more knowledgeable than others. Where does this inequality come from? This is a fundamental question because inequality can produce a classification of people according to the knowledge they possess, ultimately leading to the hierarchy of people. According to Plato, all people have been endowed with complete knowledge, but it is not clear if this “complete” knowledge is the same from one person to another or from one group of persons to another. If the knowledge is different, meaning that people are not endowed with the same quantity and quality of knowledge, a classification of people and some sort of hierarchy, based on supposed “natural” difference between people, can be drawn. History shows that we are not short of dictators and other (religious or secular) leaders who introduced a classification of people according to quantity and quality of the knowledge they possess and subsequent “natural” domination of knowledgeable people over non-knowledgeable people. If differences of knowledge between people are “natural,” this is the objective information that authors who belonged to the Haushofer’s Geopolitik took into consideration. The hierarchy of races is still an obsession for some leaders because even though it is unacceptable, dangerous, and irrational, it is at the same time very much appealing to leaders who want to justify a “natural” domination of some people over others. Because the hierarchy of races has been used repeatedly in history with all the horrific and dramatic consequences, it is fascinating to see how the proponents of racist ideologies were quick to use Plato’s postulates about knowledge. Not only did they claim to be “inspired” by Plato, but it has also been suggested that Plato himself was totalitarian, if not racist.5 During colonial times, the colonizers used a classification of people according to the “natural” differentiation in terms of knowledge, and it was easy for them to

5

The most important attack on Plato was given by Karl Popper in his book: The Open Society and Its Ennemies Vol 1 The Spell of Plato, first published in 1945, now reprinted by Princeton University Press, 2020. The accusation of racism is debated in a paper by George Klosko, ‘Racism in Plato’s Republic’, History of Political Thought, Vol. 12, N° 1, Spring 1991, pp. 1–13

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induce a dominant/dominated dichotomy. Domination does not happen only in far distant lands. It can also happen at home, where a caste of “knowledgeable” people believe that they have the “natural” right and obligation to lead other “non-knowledgeable” people within their own country. Instead of having an aristocracy or a theocracy, the emphasis on intelligence and wisdom can give birth to Plato’s philosopher-kings, or to noocracy, where the power comes from knowledge. On the same path as Plato and other Greek and Roman philosophers who believed in the existence of the “wise men” (sophoi or sapientes), Saint Simon in the nineteenth century believed that human destinies should be controlled by men of genius called savants (the knowledgeable) [25]. As an extreme example, the Raelien movement today also advocates that the world should be governed by geniuses, hence the concept of geniocracy. If “knowledgeable people” do not rule, they should at least be protected according to Ralph Emerson and Ayn Rand because they create, they invent, they innovate. As such, they are not understood nor accepted by the majority, but since they alone can propose something new, they have to be protected: “These individuals (scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, workers) bring value to society and for Ayn Rand they must be protected from state interventionism, from those who do nothing and from parasites, from those who take advantage of the system” [26]. Everything is “natural” with Plato, even inequalities and domination. Leaders were quick to embrace “natural domination” by Plato because it legitimized their power. If a certain kind of knowledge is deemed to be superior to another, it means that some people (race, gender, or religious group) will always be in an inferior position. The logical outcome is also to consider that some people are incapable of learning something new. It is, therefore, useless to teach them something that they cannot recall or they cannot learn. These people are assigned duties and responsibilities of “what they are good at,” and the hierarchy is explained by “natural” capabilities deriving from “natural difference” in knowledge. Once fixed, it is impossible for these people to move upward. This scheme was used by colonizers who instituted a clear racial differentiation, most infamously represented by the apartheid regime in South Africa and other places. It was a common practice to use “divide and rule” by European White settlers in enrolling some populations and giving them privileges other populations did not have [27]. The practice of segregating roles in the economy according to the ethnic origin of people is still present today. In many Asian and African countries, there is still a “division of labor” according to ethnic origin. As an example, the Gulf monarchies started to import foreign workforce with a specific segregation in mind. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates imported millions of workers from South Asia to work as unskilled workers and servants, while the foreigners from the Arab world were usually employed as semi-professionals and technicians. Finally, the third group is represented by Westerners, who usually work as professionals. If every person is endowed with the same knowledge, and we still observe inequalities, how is this possible? How is it possible that some people appear smarter, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, wiser than others, when all people are endowed with the same knowledge? The answer can be in the ability to retrieve the knowledge from recollection. For instance, the capacity to build a boat, to sing,

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or to write a book may be the same for all people because all people have been endowed by the same knowledge, but some people have a better ability or easiness to retrieve and use that knowledge compared to others. According to that postulate, not only is the knowledge innate, but the ability to recollect that knowledge can be too. It means that there are inherent inequalities or natural inequalities in the recollection of knowledge. Something that is supposedly “natural” and individual is very quickly extended by politicians to groups of people. In their effort to homogenize populations and pursue a simple binary explanation, some politicians endow particular communities with more ease to recollect knowledge than others. Corporations that worked in the newly colonized lands were quick to identify and classify groups of people, by attributing to them innate knowledge or the ability to recollect knowledge. Colonial practice was not only concerned with the economic propensity of some “races.” Colonial rule was also concerned with keeping order in the colonies, so it identified the “martial races” in British India, populations that “naturally” possess the ability and talent to engage in martial operations [28]. Finally, going back to Plato, if individuals are endowed with the same stock of knowledge and they have the same ability to recollect it, how can we explain the difference between them? This is where the facilitator or the guide who is helping to retrieve the information comes into play. A particular guide can be very skillful and help an individual to dig out the knowledge, while other guides are not so skillful. Consequently, an individual can have the knowledge and the ability to retrieve the knowledge, but that individual has not been helped adequately by the “midwife,” so the knowledge and ability exist, but the knowledge stays idle and becomes worthless. The role of the “midwife” can also be used by racists’ ideologues. They claim that knowledge exists, that all people have the same ability to recollect it, but some races lack the facilitators or “midwives” to retrieve the knowledge. That is exactly what the colonizers were aiming at. They said that all people are the same, but the more knowledgeable people have a mission to educate (in Plato’s sense to retrieve the knowledge) the more unfortunate people. That explanation has been used by many colonial expeditions, which theoretically treated all human beings as equal, but the European/White people “have a mission to educate the colored people.” The mission can come from the King, or from God, it does not matter. The result is the same.6 One way to dominate the colonized people was the use of the map. The case of imperial maps is crucial. Maps are seen as useful, neutral, and objective, but this was not the case with imperial maps. These maps were made by colonial powers for the colonizers, not for the people who lived there. Only they could read the map and explain it to native populations. They conveyed a particular discourse of imperial supremacy because they perpetuated the idea that the colonizers were the only ones William Cohen starts his article with the following words: ‘The European imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries viewed their African and Asian subjects as children, as men not fully grown, whose destiny had to be guided by the presumably more advanced states of Europe’, in ‘The Colonized as Child: British and French Colonial Rule’, African Historical Studies, Vol. 3, N° 2, 1970, pp. 427–431, p. 427 6

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who could read and make use of maps. It was not rare that footnotes, illustrations of people, and comments about local populations adorned the maps at that time [29]. For the colonized people, reading the map is a completely different exercise since maps were conceived as non-objective and non-neutral, with derogatory remarks about their own populations. The same map can, therefore, have a completely different meaning depending on who is the reader of the map. The map is a powerful tool not only for the distant colonies but is extremely useful at home as well. The legibility of the map is the central element of statecraft. The state requires units that are visible. These units can be villages, forests, people, cattle, everything that the state finds useful to count. Maps, therefore, are not neutral; they have a purpose, but reading the map must be taught by the “more knowledgeable” people. Colonizers did not only bring “civilization” to “uncivilized people.” They also brought the idea that development (economic, political, social, scientific, etc.) is linear and universal. They brought the idea that “uncivilized people” can become “civilized” if, and only if, they are “helped” by the colonizers, if they adopt the same rules, religion, and knowledge coming from the colonizers. This is a very powerful idea. The leaders of the newly independent countries after decolonization did not imagine going back to their ancestral body of knowledge that was challenged or destroyed by the colonizers. All new leaders in Africa and Asia were obsessed with applying the model coming from the North, be it the capitalist or the communist model. If they proceed quickly, they could leapfrog the stages of development and come on par with the former colonizers, as they said. To support the universal path to progress and science, the colonizers needed a universal scientific language. Imposed as “sophisticated” language and the only way to express progress, science, and technology, the colonizers imposed their language of communication and science to all peoples on Earth, eliminating all possibilities of alternatives. The “scientific language” as a tool of domination will be discussed later in this book. It is true that colonialism and imperialism were imposed by materiality, weapons, and machines, but the long-lasting colonialism is in the form of linguistic domination. Colonialism was, therefore, an empire of cultural significance. All knowledge, even the knowledge about the colonized people, was recorded, classified, and given significance in the colonial centers of power, from the position of economic and political dominance. This kind of knowledge continued to spread even after the decolonization struggle gave birth to new, independent states, because the producers of knowledge (professors and researchers) were all educated in the colonial centers, they all used the knowledge produced by these centers, and the methods were presented as “objective” and “universalists” by these colonial centers. Paola Bacchetta uses the example of Hindu nationalists in India, who consciously or unconsciously reproduced categories from the British Empire: “Hindu nationalist ideology, notwithstanding its pretention to Hindu religiosity, is fundamentally grounded in Western, especially colonial, thought. Hindu nationalists have rewritten Indian history, and reinvested memory, by making selective use of notions drawn from colonial discourse and practice, such as the eternalness of Hindu-Muslim conflict” [30].

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The reason why Plato’s approach to knowledge was so popular in the centuries after him is that some religions showed sympathy to “innate” or “gifted” concepts of knowledge. For many expressions of Christianity, knowledge is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. According to Pope Francis, “The knowledge that comes from the Holy Spirit, however, is not limited to human knowledge; it is a special gift, which leads us to grasp, through creation, the greatness and love of God and his profound relationship with every creature” [31]. The gift of knowledge allows one, as far as is humanly possible, to see things from God’s perspective. Together with the other six gifts, knowledge is received at Baptism, which is close to Plato’s “everpresent” knowledge, but the gift must be strengthened at Confirmation for the Catholics and Anglicans. In an episode accepted by the three Abrahamic religions, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is also given by God. Even if there are discussions about what exactly “Good” and “Evil” mean, it can be argued that it contains all knowledge, especially the knowledge that separated men and God and, therefore, makes men equal to God. All religions, however, make a difference between inherent knowledge men are endowed with by God on one side and experiential knowledge that men can acquire during their lifetime on the other. Contrary to the dichotomy and the battle of “nature vs. nurture,” major religions combine both types of knowledge. Universal religions, especially monotheist universal religions, posit that all men have been created by God with an equal propension to salvation. Differences between them in this life come from the grace of God in the form of inherent inequalities and the use or misuse of “free will” given by God to men. In that sense, the religious version of the debate about “nature vs. nurture” is a debate between inherent inequalities created by God on one side and the individual and collective free actions of men on the other. Contrary to Plato’s exclusive focus on innate knowledge, monotheist religions have an inclusive interpretation of the debate about “nature vs. nurture.” Opposition to Plato started practically from the moment of his death. His disciple, Aristotle, was the first to doubt the Theory of Recollection. He introduced the term “unscribed tablet” to indicate that the mind starts blank. He was joined later by the Stoic school, which shared the Aristotelian idea that people are born without knowledge and all knowledge they have is acquired through experience and perceptions. Plato’s idea of knowledge was nevertheless still influential for centuries, despite Avicenna or St Thomas Aquinas frequently defending the Aristotelian point. In fact, the biggest blow to Plato’s idea was given by John Locke (1632–1704). According to Locke, knowledge is not endowed in individuals at birth. People are born without any knowledge, so there is nothing to be recollected or retrieved as proposed by Plato. He introduced the term “tabula rasa” or “blank slate,” a term that has dominated modern epistemology since then. “Tabula rasa” means that human mind is like a memory disk that is virgin or blank. That memory disk is fed by learning and perceptions. If people know something, it comes only through the process of learning. All knowledge is acquired through experience, and there is no specific ability that is innate in people to acquire more and better than the others [32]. Consequently, Locke’s “empiricism,” or the understanding that knowledge is only built on experience and not on innate capabilities, was the keyword used in

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education, psychology, sociology, economy, politics, and other branches of human sciences. Locke’s influence was so determinant that, since his proposal of “tabula rasa,” there was no more debate about innate vs. acquired knowledge. There are no more “innate” or “natural hierarchy of races” since all people start on the same basis, which is “the blank slate.” There is no superior ability to retrieve or to recollect knowledge as proposed by Plato, since all people have the same ability to learn through experience and perception. The “blank slate” is a very powerful postulate because it establishes equality of people at birth and during their lifetime because, if inequalities exist, these inequalities come from the outside world. Inequalities are not innate; they are not genetic. This theory deeply influenced social sciences. It had an unwilling and dramatic influence on racist and eugenicist policies that wanted to create a “new man” or “superman” by isolating babies from their parents and giving them a new environment through which leaders could manipulate and forge a new population. How to forge a new population was an obsession for all ideological attempts in building a “new society,” especially the communist version of it. As Mao used to say: “Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank.” This may seem a bad thing, but, in reality, it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action, and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.’7 Mao’s difference with Locke is that Locke was talking about children while Mao talked about adults. The second difference is that Locke was talking about an “existing” blank slate while for Mao it is possible to make a tabula rasa through appropriate reeducation, the elimination of an undesirable knowledge, and its replacement by desirable knowledge. Mao’s approach was a voluntaristic policy very close to “social engineering,” in this case “knowledge engineering.” Not only was it important to suppress existing knowledge and establish a new one, it was also important to transmit it to new generations; otherwise, the revolution would not be sustainable. The question of knowledge transmission to new generations is essential to all revolutions. The main place where the knowledge transmission happens is in the family. The family is the founding brick of society where culture passes from one generation to the other. Notwithstanding whether the transmission is oral or written, family is the first place where children become conscious, and they learn about themselves. It is difficult for a political power to influence how culture is transmitted within the family. Unless there is a policeman staying with the family and controlling the cultural transmitter, it would be impossible to influence family transmission. Totalitarian regimes do not tolerate alternative narratives from the one they formulate, so the family becomes their enemy. There were attempts to destroy the family as a social unit or to separate children from their biological family and cut the influence that family members could have on them. In the first case, the early Bolsheviks who

7 Excrept from Mao Zedong, ‘Introducing a cooperative,’ 1958, available on www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_09.htm

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took power in the Soviet Union in 1917 genuinely believed that all social structures (family and religion included) would disappear with the advent of communism. Since communism was, according to them, just around the corner, there was no necessity to fight against family or religion. The family would disappear like all the other things of the past [33]. When they discovered that world communism would not happen any time soon, they changed their position and started to use the family as the place where the revolutionary narrative was going to be taught. According to the 1968 law, “Principles of Legislation on Marriage and the Family of the USSR and the Union Republics,” parents are, “to raise their children in the spirit of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, to attend to their physical development and their instruction in and preparation for socially useful activity.” This kind of social engineering was not alien to the Khmer Rouges, who wanted to build a New Communist society from scratch. During their 4 years of tyranny in Cambodia, they separated families and sent them away from each other to work in the fields. The primary aim was to increase production, but there was also the objective of educating children without the interference of their parents and to indoctrinate them from a very young age [34]. Separating children from parents was unfortunately a common feature for all kinds of social engineering. Examples abound in this regard. The Nazis implemented it when they transferred more than 400,000 children from Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, to be given to German families. The Nazis wanted to create a group of Aryan families and children able to transmit their propaganda of racial supremacy. Before the Nazis, during the Ottoman Empire, the practice of devshirme was also very common, when razzias were made in Christian villages to take a certain number of male children to be trained in Istanbul and become janissaries, the best of Ottoman fighters. Today, the question of family is becoming more complex because of sexual and gender issues, as well as single parent and/or recomposed families. The definition of family in Western countries has nothing to do with the definition of family in conservative countries to such an extent that fierce cultural battles oppose people who want to abolish family [35] and conservative societies for which the family is still the fundamental block of society that cannot be contested. The “nature” vs. “nurture” debate had profound consequences on economy and business. According to Locke, our knowledge is always incomplete because there is still room to fill in the “blank slate.” Unlike the typical math problem, one might solve in school, where all data are given and one is given a complete understanding of formulas necessary to solve them, humans evolve in incomplete information situations. Incomplete information does not mean that there is no information. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible that people are exposed to too much information, so they do not have time to explore all of it. “Too much information kills information” and “the paradox of plenty” create incomplete information as much as lack of information. When people believe that they have all necessary data at their disposal to make a decision and that their interpretation of data is the predominant interpretation (they believe that this is a “normal interpretation”), people display a “false consensus effect” or “the consensus bias.” The bias consists of seeing “their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing

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circumstances, while viewing alternative responses as uncommon, deviant, or inappropriate” [36]. Transposed to geopolitics, the classical school posits that there are universal, natural laws in geopolitics and that the discipline can be an objective discipline, without preference, without social construct. This, however, is impossible to accept for critical geopolitics because practically all classical geopoliticians had one specific state in mind that they wanted to consider and protect. All classical geopoliticians were biased because they wanted to help their country. Mahan, for instance, was an American admiral and military writer wanting to reinforce the navy in the United States; Mackinder was thinking about how to preserve the supremacy of the British Empire; Spykman was thinking in terms of domination of the United States over other countries; and Karl Haushofer wanted to push for the preeminence of Germany within the great powers club. There were no neutral approaches in classical geopolitics and maybe there cannot be, because even if one person does not speak for the benefit of their own state, other people will perceive this person as a defender of one specific state. If there is a meeting attended by Japanese and Chinese geopoliticians or specialists in international relations, it is expected that these persons will unfortunately be essentialized according to their country of origin. Do political and business leaders make decisions only when they have a complete understanding like in a math problem, or do they take decisions with incomplete information? Symmetrical and asymmetrical information between two agents (general and soldier, buyer and seller, minister, and public servant) has given birth to many discussions and even Nobel memorial prizes in economic sciences. In 1996, a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to James Mirrlees and William Vickrey for their “fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.” It was followed just 5 years later by another Nobel Memorial Prize in 2001 to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz for their “analyses of markets with asymmetric information.” In real-life situations, there is a necessity to take immediate action, even when a limited amount of information is available. Leaders make decisions according to “bounded rationality,” where bias is not as important as the absence of information. In bounded rationality, leaders try to eliminate the bias by focusing only on the information they have. Since they have incomplete information, they make decisions on cost–benefit trade-offs, i.e., finding the best solution in each environment, surrounded by existing constraints. Some writers believe that “bounded rationality” is just another term for educated guesswork, rule-of-thumb, or random choice. Faruk Gul et al. propose to study random choice not as a marginal option for the person who has to make a choice, but as a coherent strategy in the situation of bounded rationality, especially when that person does not have time to analyze different explanations and has to make a decision quickly: “We propose random choice as a theory of behavioral optimization, that is not as a model of measurement error but as a model of a consumer whose rationality is constrained by behavioral limitations such as limited cognitive abilities or limited attention” [37]. This is exactly what happened with the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. It cannot be said that governments were lacking absolute cognitive information. They did not have enough information about what was happening, but there were many

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epidemiologists who knew what a pandemic was and how to fight against it. On the other side, governments were pressed by time because the pandemic was lethal, and decisions had to be made quickly. The pandemic has been declared a Black Swan event. There was no roadmap how to eradicate it, leaders did not know how the disease was spreading nor how effective the vaccines would be. In the absence of full information and based only on the information given by the epidemiologists or their Ministry of Health, leaders had to take immediate decisions. The fact that many countries facing the same situation took different decisions shows the importance of critical geopolitics, which says that one theory, one unique theory, or one absolute truth does not exist. All decisions were taken based on contingency, especially the trade-off of “lives vs. livelihoods in bounded rationality.” Governments refused to acknowledge that some decisions might have been taken based on random choice, but the explanations given to their populations and to other countries did not convince all citizens. Bias is extremely important in business, especially when it comes to the interpretation of contracts. The problem in international contracts is not only the translation from one language to another. Even when people speak the same language, there are huge misunderstandings because contracts are written in a contractual or legal language and the vocabulary used includes words that may have different meanings from the legal and laymen standpoint. Precision is the master word in legal documents because words must have unequivocal meaning; otherwise, jurisprudence is not possible. Banking and insurance contracts are the most complex for consumers to understand, along with terms and conditions for the usage of some social media platforms. It is expected that differences of interpretation occur between customers and companies because both sides express a different consensus bias. This can also occur among judges who are not ready to accept an interpretation given by other judges [38]. For asymmetric information, there were Nobel prizes, for bounded rationality too. The prize for bounded rationality was given to Herbert Simon as early as in 1978 “for his pioneering research of the decision-making process within an economic organization” while three more prizes were given to Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahnemann in 2002, Robert Schiller, Eugen Fama, and Lars Peter Hansen in 2013, and Richard Thaler in 2017 for their research in behavioral economics that share many common points with bounded rationality and their focus on the psychological determinants of human actions. Robert Schiller specifically addressed the importance of narratives in economics in a speech from 2017. He sought to demonstrate the overemphasis economists put on quantitative methods and that they underestimate or completely discard an important element in the process, that humans are, more than anything, storytellers. This is how he defines narrative economics: “By narrative economics, I mean the study of the spread and dynamics of popular narratives, the stories, particularly those of human interest and emotion, and how these change through time, to understand economic fluctuations” [39]. This definition is very close to the critical understanding of geopolitics. In his article, he established a correlation between narratives and economic fluctuations by using mathematical and epidemic models. He referred specifically to the examples of the

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Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. He recognizes, however, that it is difficult to track and quantify narratives. For that reason, narratives and emotions, as analytical tools for geopolitics, cannot be substitutes for a representational way geopolitics is analyzed. It is more an add-on that can help to provide a more comprehensive way to understand geopolitics. After the origin of knowledge comes the discussion about how knowledge is constructed and communicated. Constructivism as a branch of critical theory has a specific subject of inquiry, which is scientific knowledge. Many classical geopoliticians posit that social sciences mimic natural sciences. According to them, if there are undisputed laws in natural sciences, there must be undisputed laws in social sciences too; otherwise, they cannot be called sciences. According to classical geopolitics, the scientific method consists of the collection of measurable data through observation, experimentation, and the formulation of hypotheses. All this is criticized by critical geopolitics. Measurable data according to constructivists are in fact the specific, particular way, how measurement is defined and used in science. Experimentation for them does not appeal necessarily to rationality. Finally, many hypotheses, many reasoning methods are rejected right away by classical geopolitics because they are labeled “irrational” and “unreasonable,” thus restricting options and alternatives. This is what critical geopolitics wants to challenge. If scientific knowledge is constructed, it means it is constructed in different ways by different communities of people, at different times, and in different places. There is, therefore, not one valid methodology of science, but rather a diversity of useful methods.

3.1.3

Importance of Science for Geopolitics

The battle on science is the crucial battle between classical and critical geopolitics because classical geopolitics bases all its legitimacy on the existence of an objective science, an objective way to look at the reality of the world. If critical geopolitics wants to challenge classical geopolitics, it has to deconstruct science in the first place. Constructivism has a long history and can be traced to the Greek philosophers, Heraclitus and especially Protagoras for his famous phrase: “Man is the measure of all things.” The sentence means there is no knowledge outside of human imagination and agency. Since man is the measure of all things, that measure covers everything: natural laws, laws of nature, as well as laws of science. Protagoras’ and Plato’s views were not accepted by everyone. Most philosophers consider that truth and materiality of the world are independent from human agency and this view prevailed for centuries. Man is not the measure of all things according to them because man is constrained by God, Nature, or both. The Enlightenment era in Europe instituted reason as the judgment for everything, to such an extent that the French Revolutionaries replaced the Cult of God with the Cult of Reason. Also called the Worship of Reason, it was France’s first established state-sponsored atheistic religion, intended as a replacement for Catholicism. Feted in 1792 for just 1 year, it was replaced by the Cult of Supreme Being the year after. The power of reason was so

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strong after the Enlightenment that it was difficult for other philosophers to question it. Attempts were made to formulate some criticism of reason by Kant and others, but that was not enough to effectively challenge reason as a paradigm. The advent of a Marxist regime in Russia/Soviet Union made reason, progress, materiality, science, and technology the pinnacles of human development. There was an absolute reign of reason as the only path for humanity for capitalism and communism alike. The challengers for reason domination had to wait for post-Stalinist Marxist thinkers and a group of French philosophers to emerge in the 1960–1970s. As a proponent of constructivism, Patrick Jackson makes three fundamental assumptions about “scientific monism” that we are going to discuss in detail. First, the world and knowledge of the world cannot be separated, which means that the observer and the observed cannot be separated. That is a strong blow against the Cartesian position of separation of mind and body. Second, there is no absolute “objectivity” in social life. The so-called “objectivity” is in fact socially and culturally constructed. Third, the meaning of social action is given by humans in a particular cultural setting, hence the knowledge is situated in time and space. It can only be particular, never universal [40]. Jackson quotes Max Weber in the following terms: “There is simply no ‘objective’ scientific analysis of cultural life—or, put perhaps somewhat more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes—of a ‘social phenomenon’ independent or special and ‘onesided’ points of view, according to which—explicitly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously—they are selected, analysed and representationally organized as an object of research” [41]. Dualist assumptions give positivists the argument that it is possible to observe the world “objectively” and to have a non-biased “view from nowhere.” Geoffrey Sloan abounds in this field by pointing out that for scholarly work to be scientific, it must be empirically testable. The claim for science can only be deemed scientifically valid if the data are testable everywhere and are found to yield everywhere the same (correct) result [42]. This way the laws are universal in time and space, so classical geopolitics can claim universal values, universal morals, and universal international relations. Dualism, positivism, and reason serve classical geopolitics well. Constructivists challenge the domination of reason by introducing other methods of investigation. The plurality of methods has been advanced by the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who in 1967 proposed the term “constructivist epistemology” [43]. He was not the first one to question the existence of a unique method in science. Before him, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) believed that the way the question is asked determines the trajectory of scientific movement. Scientific movement does not have an immutable life of its own. It depends on the input from the observer and the person who asks a question. He coined the famous statement, “nothing is given, all is constructed,” which was used by legions of scholars after him.8 His statement dates to 1934, but it resonates well

8 The full sentence is: ‘And irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific

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with the “observation” principle in quantum mechanics so popular today, where the observer plays, not a passive role of observing events, but an active role of event creation. Constructivists believe that the process of constructing knowledge and the process of understanding knowledge depend on the individuals’ subjective interpretation based on their active experience, not what “actually” occurs.9 The role of the observer, or the reader, was important for Jacques Derrida. He posited that the signs the author of a movie, article, or a blog deliberately or accidentally leaves in the movie, blog, or book give information about the author. This information is then processed and reinterpreted by the reader or the viewer because the reader or the viewer is aware of the author and their intentions [44]. This way, the reader or the viewer does not hold a passive role. They actively participate in molding the information and content. Going further, and according to Foucault, the reader becomes the “author,” so there are as many “authors” as there are readers [45]. In geopolitics, this is very clear. The very fact that the author is Russian, Chinese, Israeli, or Shiite immediately triggers waves of sympathy or antipathy among the readers. The name of the author is a very powerful sign imbued with gender, ethnic, religious, class, or other characteristics that will orient a particular reading of the work. If it is not the name, it will be a choice of words. If an author talks about Shiism as a legitimate branch of Islam or as a group of heretics, this sign immediately gives an idea about the preferences of the author. The reader consciously or unconsciously reads the work with a different gaze. Since the seventeenth century, there has been a tendency in Western countries to assume that the right science, and enough of it, will lead to the best policy in all domains, geopolitics included. In the economy, the positivist approach prevails since it wants to count everything, consumer preferences included. From the postpositivist approach, this is absurd. According to Stephen Marglin quoted by James Scott, “the emphasis on self-interest, calculation, and maximization in economics, are classical examples of self-evident postulates. They reflect more an ideological commitment to the superiority of episteme than a serious attempt to unravel the complexities and mysteries of human motivation and behavior” [46]. According to social constructivism, science is not objective reality or truth. It is a view of the world that is socially constructed. Science is socially constructed in that it does not reveal truth about nature so much as it reveals trends in human values, our understanding about the world, and how we use scientific methods and technologies to observe the world. The example of environmental crisis illustrates well how

spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no questions, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed’, Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, first published in French in 1934, Clinamen Press, 2002, p. 25 9 The website www.radicalconstructivism.com pays tribute to Ernst von Glasersfeld as the founder of critical constructivism. He claimed that knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject. According to him, ‘Those who . . . do not explicitly give up the notion that our conceptual constructions can or should in some way represent an independent, ‘objective’ reality, are still caught up in the traditional theory of knowledge.’

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knowledge is situated in time and space. Human beings may precipitate the depletion of natural resources because they do not know what the consequences of this depletion are or because they consider that this depletion does not impact their own existence. Conversely, during Anthropocene, humans may decide to stop depletion of resources because they know what their contribution to environmental damage is and what the consequences are for the whole of humanity. There has been a huge change of consciousness about human contribution to the environment over the past 100 years. According to www.footprintnetwork.org, the world’s biocapacity per person was 1.6 gha (global hectares is the unit measuring biocapacity) in 2018, while the ecological footprint per person was 2.8 gha. The deficit was thus 1.2 gha. This contrasts with the situation in 1961, when there was a global surplus of 0.8 gha. The drastic change is undeniable, but awareness about environmental crisis has not been universally established. It varies across time and place. Societies have a different degree of knowledge about environmental consequences due to the focus that their educational systems place on it because political and economic priorities are not the same. While Western countries are primarily concerned with environmental damage, other countries are much more concerned with statehood, sovereignty, wars, and famine. As a result of these different priorities, public policies are different too. In Western countries, the possibility of degrowth (economic shrinking and population decrease) is seriously debated while at the same time, the Global South experiences a fast growth (economic and population wise) [47]. It is impossible to ask the Global South to concentrate on degrowth while their standards of living are so far from the standards of living in the North. That would be morally inacceptable for many countries. One way to reconcile the interests of the Global North and Global South is contraction and convergence. It implies that Western (Global North) countries agree to shrink their economic production to allow the Global South to “catch-up.” Later, both parts of the world will equalize their level of production and living, and there will be no disparities. It would be possible at that moment to implement global solutions for the whole world, which is not possible today. Therefore, the Global North should sacrifice itself to permit equalization with the Global South. Contraction and convergence were proposed for the first time in 1995, but the awareness of the concept is much more recent.10 This sacrifice does not have huge traction among the populations living in the Global North, so the possibility of contraction and convergence is still only that, a possibility. Scientific knowledge offers to explain “the way it is,” but there may be alternatives to understanding and codifying human–environment interaction, especially if the meaning of the terms is displaced. The term tangible, for instance, is a master word for classical geopolitics, but it can be displaced. If the material world is tangible, it does not mean that everything that is tangible is material. Buildings, land, and weapons are considered tangible because they are material. It is possible,

10 ‘Contraction and Convergence, A Global Solution to a Global problem,’ 3 June 1997, available at http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/ZEW_CONTRACTION_&_CONVERGENCE.pdf

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however, to have another definition of tangibility and say that everything that lasts is tangible. Or everything that is hard or impossible to change is tangible, too. In that case, marriage, religious beliefs, and human rights can also be tangible because they are hard to change. Laws and rules decided by people and not by nature or religious laws can be as hard and binding as real estate or weather, which are decided by nature. It takes centuries, if not millennia, to change social rules while it takes seconds to change material elements of nature in the event of earthquakes or a tsunami. What is more tangible in that case: rules that can last for millennia or butterflies that can last only a few days? If social actions are tangible, they can be analyzed by the same methods and laws as manifestations of nature. Analyzing Mutual Assured Destruction, the power of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFA), or religious intolerance can be analyzed in the same way as laws of physics or chemistry because they are tangible and durable. If science is not the only way to see how “the world is,” what are the other ways? The list is short, but it includes, among others, animist and religious explanations. The former is the oldest explanation that predates the founding of science, and it still exists today. It can be associated with superstition, veneration of the deceased, witchdoctors, voodoo, and shamans who enter into contact with other, parallel universes. Leaders on occasion deliberately quit the realm of reason and logic and embrace a spiritual way to access information and make a decision. Fortune-tellers, voodoo priests, magicians, and marabouts have not disappeared in modern times. Often viewed as completely outdated in the contemporary digitalized and rationalized world as folkloric reminiscence of the irrational beliefs that firmly belong to the past, all these practices have a fantastic ability to survive and proliferate in today’s world. There are heads of state who used to have their own fortune-tellers, and they were not shy of that. Charles de Gaulle, the former French president, has had his own astrologer, Maurice Vasset, who he used to consult before making big decisions. One of his successors, François Mitterrand, did the same with his own fortune-teller Elizabeth Teissier while the South Korean president Park Geun-hye had her own fortune teller-shaman Choi Tae-min. Believing that there is a knowledge that exists beyond the material world is very powerful, and many people are interested in that. In the business world, intuition or feng shui is widely spread in Asia, especially in South Korea [48]. In all corporations, non-rational method is a daily practice in negotiation because of gut feeling and intuition, the necessity to decode the silent language or the use of space of the other party is of essence. Maybe the best example of a feng shui battle in business is between the HSBC and Bank of China buildings in Hong Kong. They oppose each other with shape, position, and equipment that obey feng shui laws [49]. After animism, the religious explanation refers to the superhuman agency in any form (polytheism, monotheism, henotheism, etc.) and offers a way in which the world works and how human interactions and human–environment interactions should be. Religious explanation has been a dominant, if not a unique way of explaining how the world and its materiality have been viewed. Long before critical theory, religion was a powerful challenger to realists because it posits that all laws, including laws of science, come from God or another suprahuman agency.

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According to a theological explanation, laws are given by God, and humans can or cannot understand and apprehend them. If they cannot apprehend them, they must accept that they cannot access the mystery of creation. This is a very powerful explanatory mode, and for a very long time, humankind adhered to that explanation. The theological explanation is a social construct, not because people have invented God as some authors propose [50], but because people have accepted the theological explanation. This acceptance is crucial because social constructivists can capitalize on that acceptance in defending epistemological plurality. In books and papers about geopolitics, religion and theological explanations are nevertheless rarely treated under the pretext that the great majority of states are secular, and that religion is separated from political power. That is true, but there are still countries that have theocratic systems, and there are scores of countries where the faithful represent the majority, and for whom religion is an important motivational factor for every aspect of social life, including politics and business. In books and articles about management, religion is also sidelined even if the economic, social, and legal structures are directly inspired by religion in some countries.

3.1.4

What Is the Language of Knowledge?

Scientific knowledge is one thing, communicating scientific knowledge is another. For that, a specific language has been invented: “scientific language.” Strong social constructivists challenge the existence of scientific knowledge and of scientific language because, to them, “Western type” knowledge and “Western type” language are just some of many that existed in the past. Why should Western scientific language be the base for all knowledge dissemination? Strong social constructivists question the use of scientific language in research, but also in manufacturing, engineering, construction, planning, all of which are core business activities. Corporations are pragmatic. If there is a scientific language useful for business and if it happens that it originates from the Western hemisphere, this language will “naturally” be imposed by businesses everywhere. Businesses do not care where the scientific language comes from. If the language is universal, they will implement it. It does not matter if the company operating in China or in Japan comes from Germany or the United States and what vernacular language the employees speak. The employees use the same scientific language in all these locations, and the same “scientific” methods are applied, such as robustness tests, causality, correlation, or regression analysis. This is what social constructivists reject. According to them, there is nothing “natural” in the laws of nature. The scientific laws that are used to explain laws of nature such as chemistry or physics or completely abstract laws like mathematics are also a social construct. That seems strange at first sight. It is somehow easy to defend the idea that social relations are a social construct because of interaction between people, and they can decide on any kind of social interaction that they want. Decisions about ethics and morals, taboos, or injunctions and prescriptions are

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decided by people. There is nothing “natural,” meaning coming from nature, in determining the behavior of people. Social relations can be codified in the form of “social contract,” when individuals accept freely to surrender part of their freedom for the benefit of the community or the state in exchange for something (protection of remaining rights, for instance). The social contract is a pure social construction. Scores of authors have elaborated on the idea, among them Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This kind of social construction is easy to defend. Defending the idea that laws of nature and laws of science are also a social construct is much more difficult to uphold. The journal “Critical Inquiry” published in 1991 a series of articles that introduced a constructivist approach in various disciplines, including natural sciences [51]. Among them, Jerome Bruner’s article “The Narrative Construction of Reality” and R.C Lewontin’s article ‘Facts and the Factitious in Natural Sciences’ expose well how the community of scientists help to create a narrative that becomes dominant in their discipline because it is based on supposed “facts,” and “reality,” while the demonstration of these facts and reality is much more difficult than it appears at first sight. How come humans have “invented” physics and mathematics? These laws surely do not need humans, and they do not need to be invented. They existed before the advent of humans and will continue to exist if, by chance, humans cease to exist. There is no human agency on laws of science. Social constructivists will oppose that postulate on two grounds, both built on the concept of language. Languages are not given. People have invented the language as a medium of communication, and they have invented scientific language to support “scientific explanation.” All existing laws of nature and scientific laws that we know fit with that language. But what happens if the language of communication and scientific language are not universal? Will we have the same laws of nature and scientific laws if we use different scientific languages? Language is, therefore, very important because it is the vehicle of knowledge. If there is no language, knowledge will be hard to share. As far as “scientific language” is concerned, if scientific laws are universal, then scientific language must be universal, too, according to classical geopolitics. This is the language of formulas, causality, and universal laws. All this is rejected by constructivists, and they will use the example given by mathematics. Mathematical language uses the same formulas and symbols worldwide. It does not matter if you are in Beijing, Boston, or Nairobi, mathematicians use the same (Arabic or Greek) numbers and symbols, together with the same mathematical laws and formulas. This is a typical universal “scientific language” that social constructivists want to challenge. Their main argument is that there were various numeral systems invented by humans in the past. The Egyptian, Roman, and Chinese representations of numbers were radically different. The “invention” of the number “zero” has revolutionized mathematics. The Italian mathematician Fibonacci is credited for bringing the number “zero” to Europe, while the number “zero” was invented long before in different geographies. People knew how to count from the beginning of social life, but the decimal system that we use today is relatively new. It is not immutable. People have invented other systems in the past, like the Mayan and Aztec numeral systems, which were of quinary (base 5) and vigesimal base (base 20), respectively.

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For social constructivists, laws of nature and laws of science might have existed forever independently from human agency, but humans have written nature and science laws, they have codified them into categories and given them the importance and utility in manufacturing, and in scientific and technological progress. In that sense, humans have “invented” laws of nature and scientific laws. What appears to be a “natural” and “scientific” language, the language of modern mathematics, especially symbolic algebraic knowledge, and procedure, has been invented in a particular place (Western Europe) and time (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries). Since the invention of mathematical language is situated in time and place, people who do not belong to that time and place are excluded from this knowledge. This is important for critical geopolitics because some systems and languages have been imposed on populations during the time of colonization, and all alternatives of systems and languages have been eliminated. This is not a natural process. It has been imposed by people in authority, so the concept of dominant/dominated in science is valid. Critical geopolitics and social constructivists suggest, therefore, that elimination of domination should begin with the deconstruction of systems and languages. That is why the demands for “cancel mathematics” or “cancel the white supremacy in mathematics,” can have traction among some social constructivists. Critical geopolitics says that all knowledge is situated and there are people who were not raised in the same environment, so they are discriminated against.11 Mathematics should be canceled because it breeds cultural violence, which is not always quick and visible [52]. This form of violence is hard to detect because it can span decades, if not centuries, and the causality of events is not evident. By displacing the concept of violence, critical geopolitics introduces another interpretation of terms that otherwise would not be self-evident. Galtung posits that “if mathematics is viewed as a formal game with one basic rule, that a theorem T and its negation,—T cannot both be valid, then there may be violent consequences” [53]. This formal game is typically binary in nature, and societies where non-binary situations prevail do not obey the same postulates as the formal mathematical game. Therefore, imposing on these societies, a formal binary game is a form of cultural violence, hence “cancel mathematics.” The debate about “cancel mathematics” is fueled by a limited number of Western countries (the United States being at the forefront of the battle). Other countries do not see the necessity to engage in the battle. If “cancel mathematics” succeeds in the United States, the whole scientific world would be affected, and some countries could perceive this as a weakening United States and could question the leadership of the United States. This is how an internal issue of “cancel mathematics” in the United States becomes a geopolitical problem. What is the impact of social constructivism on business? Social constructivists consider there are no natural laws in society. Business as a social phenomenon is a

11 Paul Bond, ‘Math Suffers from White Supremacy, according to a Bill Gates-Funded Course,’ Newsweek, February 23, 2021. Newsweek quotes the website www.equitablemath.org according to which ‘White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when. . . The focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer.’

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social construct, too. The social constructivists seek to deconstruct economy and corporations as they deconstruct states, international relations, and geopolitics. When managers hear the term “deconstruction,” they understand disruption. The topic of disruption is very popular in business circles. In the case of intense competition, many companies are looking at new ways to do business, and they explore possibilities to deconstruct their business model.12 Something companies used to take for granted, and what worked for decades is put into question because the competition intensifies, and technology has forced many companies to reconsider the way they do business. Disruption is not new. Industrial revolution completely modified the industrial landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and companies did not hesitate to question their operational modes and purpose at that time. Today, the digital transformation also pushes companies to disrupt, and companies do not hesitate to do so. Nevertheless, and despite disruptions, the finality of the company is always the same: increasing value, market shares, revenues, profits, or dividends. What is new with the social constructivists is that deconstruction puts into question the nature of the enterprise and its very existence. Why do we have companies? Must they be private? Why is there a free market? Is there an alternative way to organize the production of goods and services and make them available to everyone in a sustainable and inclusive way? What is the role of money and private property of the means of production? Social constructivists do not ask the question about how to optimize flows or guarantee a sufficient return on investment. They question the purpose of having a free market or for-profit organizations. As of today, the question about the purpose of the corporation has become central to many companies pushing them to craft altruistic mission statements. How to reconcile the award for risk-taking and the necessity for social responsibility is the central dilemma for all corporations. Risk is the essence of business because entrepreneurs, shareholders, suppliers, and customers take a risk when they embark on creating, producing, or buying a certain product or service. Without risk, there is no entrepreneurship, reward, or failure. From the business point of view, the geopolitical risk is always seen as a country risk. Country risk can be anything: it can be political, economic, or security. Corporations want to be protected against these risks. That is why they buy an insurance policy, which tries to list the different risks that can happen: revocation of a mining license, foreign exchange volatility, revolution, etc. The Caribbean Island of Hispaniola is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. They have the same geographical features, but the country risk has nothing to do with this. According to Coface, the French company specializing in risk insurance, Haiti is at D (very high risk) for country risk and E (very high risk) for business climate rating in 2021 while the Dominican Republic scores B (acceptable

12

The milestone article about disruption has been written by Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, ‘Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, how companies can prepare for tomorrow’s customers without losing their focus on today’s.’ Harvard Business Review, January– February 1995, pp. 43–53

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risk) for both metrics.13 There is no global risk rating for the whole world. There is no global insurance policy for the whole world. Corporations must buy insurance policies country to country. Since insurance policies are bought on a country per country basis, this is the domain of classical geopolitics, but according to critical geopolitics, risks per se do not exist. What creates risks is our understanding (the knowledge) of phenomena perceived as risks. Ulrich Beck described risks in modern society as being difficult, if not impossible, to measure because they are non-compensable (undesirable loss or suffering cannot be reasonably paid off or balanced by an opposing force) and delocalized (the effect of, for instance, pollution in one place being most likely tied to causes in other places) [54]. Because risks are non-compensable and delocalized, it is impossible to reasonably measure impacts, to articulate the nature or form of loss, and to know how processes in different places are connected. For Beck, things that are not known are inevitably a form of risk, especially when the scientists themselves do not agree on the risk perception, be it climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. If there is not one single scientific truth, other “nonscientific” explanations can also be accepted. Therefore, risk and security do not exist for critical geopolitics. What exists is how people, states, and corporations identify risk, security, doubt, and certainty. As a way to displace the concept of risk, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway give the power of doubt. They tell the story of how the tobacco industry was under pressure from scientific evidence linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Instead of combating that evidence directly by supplying counter evidence, the tobacco industry worked to create doubt about whether cigarette smoking was a direct cause of cancer [55]. That is, people in the tobacco industry did not have to prove anything, they just generated doubt in people’s minds and weakened the perception of risk. In the same way, leaders in the fossil fuel industry can create doubt about the causes and the likely impact of fossil fuels on climate change.

3.1.5

The Power of Discourse

According to critical geopolitics, if one controls the narrative, one controls the reality, because reality does not exist without a narrative presenting it as a reality. If it is possible to paraphrase Mackinder’s riddle, we would say: “He who controls knowledge, controls the narrative. He who controls the narrative, controls the reality.” The narrative influences how people view the past and how they can imagine the future. This was well encapsulated by George Orwell: “Whoever controls the present, controls the past, and whoever controls the past controls the future” [56]. In the battle of narratives over Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, it was clear that both sides, Zelensky’s Ukraine and Putin’s Russia, wanted to control the narrative of the past because this way they can legitimize an “independent Ukraine,” 13

See www.coface.com

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which was “forever” part of Europe for Zelensky and a Ukraine that was “forever” part of Russia for Putin. According to Shannon O’Lear, “Geopolitics is not a map of reality, but a narrative about the way the world works from a particular perspective. Past and current geopolitical narratives present what appears at the time as an interpretation of obvious facts about the world . . . Geopolitics is a form of storytelling that situates groups of people, usually Us and Them” [57]. Narrative does not exist without communication of the narrative. Nobody builds a new social system in a cave for just one person without sharing and communicating with other people. If there is communication, there must be language (not the “scientific language” but a language of communication), and this is where there is a problem. Is language only a medium facilitating the exchange, or is language structuring and influencing the exchange? This is not a new dilemma, but it is gaining increasing traction now.14 If language structures social life, geopolitics as human action and states as social formation are related to language, too. Some differences in language exist between modernists and structuralists. Modernists do not give language and discourse a role more important than being a medium or a facilitator of exchanges. According to them, language is a platform permitting the exchange, just like Uber permits the connection of drivers and riders. The language is a facilitator, but it does not create anything, either in politics or in business. Opposed to modernists, structuralists and critical geopolitics give language and discourse a much more important role because they believe that language and discourse structure human life. In their understanding, Uber is not only a facilitator but a way of life and a revolution when it comes to connection between people and exchanges that they entertain, so language structures human life. The means of communication of choice is the written language. Other languages exist, such as body language, sign language, or oral languages, but the most used by far is the written language. According to critical geopolitics, the command of language yields power. The access to language is power. The access to certain written resources is power. The main interest of critical geopolitics is the following: how some discourses maintain their authority, how some “voices” get heard while others are silenced, who benefits and how? According to Colin Flint: “Critical geopolitics critically engages the choice of words and the focus of policy statements, maps, essays, movies, or pretty much any media to identify what is known as underlying discourse. Discourse is a fusion of power and authority in the content of language” [58]. Knowing the right language, having a rich vocabulary, using perfect grammar and syntax give a person “symbolic capital” that can differentiate people and ensure Eward Sapir gives an older discussion about the importance of language in ‘Language as a Form of Human Behavior’, The English Journal, Vol. 16, N°6, June 1927, pp. 421–433; while Barnardine Racoma gives a more contemporary view, ‘Language Shapes the Way People Think and Behave’, June 20, 2018, available on https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/language-shapesthinking/ 14

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domination. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) believed that it is wrong to reduce language to an act of communication that is destined to be deciphered by means of a cipher or a code. It is wrong to consider that language is inoffensive and neutral just because it is a medium of communication. Language can be an act of domination, just like knowledge and discourse are acts of domination [59]. Knowledge, language, and discourse are not neutral, they do not come from nowhere. They are not passive conveyors of message; they structure the message according to critical geopolitics. The discussion about discourse invariably revolves around the notion of “truth,” about “true news” and “fake news,” especially today when social media give room to the emergence of “fake news,” “deepfakes,” and other manipulations. Foucault argued in “The Order of Discourse” (1971), that the “will to truth tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses,” and went on further to ask the question: “what is at stake in the will of truth, in the will to utter this ‘true’ discourse, if not desire and power?” [60]. Discourse, therefore, is not neutral and cannot be neutral, not because it expresses one particular point of view, but because it is an instrument of domination. Contrary to classical geopolitics, critical geopolitics advances the idea that there is no absolute truth. All truth is situated, molded by a specific time and place. In the opening remarks to the movie “Backstabbing for Beginners” (2018), Ben Kingsley while playing a seasoned diplomat at the United Nations States says: “The truth is not a matter of facts; the truth is what the Security Council of the United Nations says is truth.” That means that if the UN Security Council says today that Saddam Hussein is a legitimate representative of Iraq and that other countries must talk to him, then let it be. But the same Security Council can say the next day that Saddam Hussein must be eliminated because he imposed atrocities on the Kuwaiti people and his own Iraqi population. This then, too, becomes the truth. There is no absolute truth. Appreciation can evolve over time so the postulate presented by classical geopolitics that they can explain the situation through facts and truths does not work in critical geopolitics. Many geopolitical actors (states, NGOs, corporations) are interested in controlling the truth [61]. When a state controls the media, political action is invariably linked to deception, lies, and manipulation according to critical geopolitics, and we are not short of spin doctors, speech writers, and media consultants whose specialty is precisely to present a specific discourse deemed advantageous to the politician. Jack Hirshleifer in his enumeration of the “dark side of the force” of human relations, lists crime, war, and politics, as if politics is equivalent to crime and war. Politics is, according to him, the domain of discourse, a discourse invariably based on deception and obfuscation [62]. Discourse is power because it can manipulate or create realities, but the “right discourse” does not necessarily translate into “right actions.” Ruth Wodak (1950–) is of the opinion that “disorders of discourse,” meaning a change of discourse without a change of policy, can result in subtler, but also more effective, forms of dominations [63]. Political leaders use, on occasions, a discourse that does not correspond to actions. For instance, they may have an anti-militaristic discourse while at the same

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time they increase the defense budget. They can publicly declare that they discontinued a relationship with a foreign dictator while at the same time maintaining an undercover relationship. These are typical examples of “disorders of discourse,” when actions do not follow the discourse or when leaders do not “walk the talk.” “Disorders of discourse” also happen in corporations. This is what is happening with gender washing or greenwashing. The discourse is there, clear, and fine. Corporate leaders want to show their commitment to inclusiveness, diversity, and equity at all levels. The problem is that the discourse is there, but institutions and actions do not necessarily follow, and this might affect the bottom line of the corporations involved [64]. The chosen discourse provides the vocabulary and expressions that can lead to completely different interpretations. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about guerrilla movements, described as “freedom fighters” or “terrorists.” This was the case for the Taliban in Afghanistan, the FARC in Colombia, or the UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army). These local situations are unfamiliar to readers. Analogy permits familiarizing unfamiliar names, places, and situations so that the target audience understands an event or an experience. When the United States pulled out from Afghanistan in 2021, with planes rolling on the tarmac, abandoning people on the airfield, the analogy was immediately made with the anarchic evacuation of Saigon in 1975. When Vladimir Putin compared Ukraine to a Nazi state in 2023 or when the Western world compared Putin to Hitler, such analogies work because unfamiliar situations are explained by familiar and understandable comparisons. Myron Weiner asked himself if it is possible to make meaningful analogies across time and space. The mélange of populations in the Balkans has produced, according to him, a “Macedonian Syndrome,” a situation of inextricable secessionist and irridentist demands [65]. If we can analyze irridentist and anti-irridentist movements in the Balkans (akin to centrifugal and centripetal forces in physics), they can serve as an analogy for Asia and Africa. Asia and Africa also have states that are multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural like in the Balkans, hence the analogy. To illustrate the power of discourse and how it is made, O’Tuathail gives the example of Bosnia and the fact that, at the beginning of the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia, there was no clear understanding in the United States about what was going on there [66]. There were two narratives. The first one considered that Bosnia is the modern-day Holocaust, the place of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The second narrative wrote “Bosnia” within the terms of a Balkan/Vietnam script wherein “Bosnia” was a site that was a dangerous military quagmire. According to David Reuff, the dominant narrative made the Bosnian war not European, but an eruption of a premodern, Orientalist/Africanist/Slavic savagery (“a white man’s Rwanda”) in the heart of Europe, the continent of freedom, enlightenment, and the rule of law [67]. As a result, the situation in Bosnia was described by the Bush administration as the “law of the jungle.” This is not the first time that the term “Balkans” has triggered confusion and danger. Since the end of the nineteenth century and the emergence of new Balkan states built on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the term Balkans is associated with “balkanization,” the breakdown of

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multinational empires (Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian). Since statehood and corresponding territorial delimitations for Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others were lost for centuries under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, the establishment of national states invariably brought irredentist and secessionist desires. Today, the term “balkanization” is challenged only by “Lebanonization” if someone wants to refer to inextricable, impossible to understand, history-bound, religiously volatile, and violent societies. Discourse, knowledge, and power resonate with other geopolitical questions such as identity and the national question. The concept of “imagined communities,” dear to Benedict Anderson, stipulates that communities do not exist by themselves, they are the construct of people, especially how people imagine themselves and communities they belong to.15 This approach is completely different from the essentialist or deterministic definition of nation, which tends to fix populations in certain categories from which they cannot move. For Anderson, not only is discourse important in nation-building, but it comes before action, which is contrary to the classical geopolitics approach according to which discourse comes after an event to explain or to essentialize the event. For critical geopolitics, it is the opposite: “It is not actions that determine discourse; the critical issue is the power of discursive formations rooted in existing geographical and geopolitical imaginations to determine patterns of action” [68]. The existence of the nation does not produce “le roman national” or the “national narrative.” Imaginary tales and myths produce the nation and not vice versa. Ethnogenesis, as the endeavor to identify one unique origin of a contemporary nation, is a myth according to Anderson because it is based on the attempt to connect a present population and state to events that happened 5000 years or more. A case in point is the situation of China. According to John Agnew, “Like all modern states, China is an ‘invention’ in the sense that it is a fusion of historic stories of its past, including the ‘humiliation’ at the hands of foreign powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and adjustment to and incorporation into the wider global order” [69]. Milan Kundera echoed Benedict Anderson when he said that the definition of Central Europe is more cultural than geographic, “What are its borders? It would be senseless to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation” [70]. If the nation is an “imaginary community” according to Benedict Anderson, that imaginary is a fruit of a (state) discourse. It is possible to invent new nations like the American, the Singaporean, or the Yugoslav nation. None of them existed in the past, but if there is a will of the state to impose a new identity on its citizens and a will of the population to accept the new identity, discourse can create it. 15 Benedict Anderson analyzes how the state perpetuates an imaginary community. The tools used by the state can be the census of populations, which permits to frame a population in each country, a map, which permits to frame the territory identified with one population. A tool can be the National Museum, which frames a history associated to the population and territory. See the latest version of his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, first published in 1983, Verso, 2016

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There are several critiques to the idea of imaginary communities. The first is the Primordial Critique, which is present with force in classical geopolitics. According to this current, nations are ancient communities with an existence prior to modern theories, having traditional and primordial roots [71]. These nations are prior to the state, so if we have a nation-state, it is not that the state builds a nation. On the contrary, the nation builds the state. The nation can exist without a state, but not the opposite. The primordial critique is used by Chinese leaders when they establish a continuum of a 5000-year-old history of China and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation today. The rejuvenation means that after a century of humiliation (1839–1949), China is back. It never disappeared, it was dominated by foreign powers, but now it is back and claims the historical continuum. The second critique of imaginary communities is the Eurocentrism Critique because Anderson’s imagination is a Western imagination, and it limits imaginations of former colonized populations. Indigenous populations from Canada and Brazil or aboriginal populations in Australia might have their own imaginations about community and nation, which do not fit Anderson’s definition, but this option has not been explored [72]. Finally, there is a Masculinist Critique because, in his definition of imaginary communities, Anderson talks about a nation that is “always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.” The use of the term “comradeship” poses a problem for authors who believe that this term institutionalizes gender differences and supremacy of masculinism [73]. Discourse and narratives can make a difference. Many of them have been touted as game-changers such as “I have a dream” from Martin Luther King, “Ask what you can do for your country” from John Kennedy, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” from Winston Churchill, “Power to the Soviets” from Lenin or “The East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind” from Mao Zedong. The discourse galvanizes masses but also instills a reading of the world. In that respect, one of the most influential discourses was the “long telegram” sent by the then US Ambassador to Moscow, G.F. Kennan, in 1946. In this telegram, he portrayed a Manichean, binary world that would end in an inevitable and epic battle between communism and capitalism, between the “free world” and the “non-free world.” To avoid that battle, which would engulf the entire world, he proposed containment of the Soviet Union. For decades, and up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “long telegram” was the blueprint of understanding the relationship with the Soviet Union for many American presidents, culminating with Ronald Regan’s “Evil Empire” depiction of the Soviet Union [74]. If facts cannot be changed, they can be interpreted, twisted, or even invented on occasions. The discourse of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is exemplary. Presented as a genuine intention of the Jewish community to secretly dominate the world, it has repeatedly been proven that it was a fake document fabricated by the Russian secret services before the Bolshevik revolution. Despite its falsehood, the “Protocols” is a very resilient document, since it has been used many times to prove an alleged conspiracy fomented by the Jewish community. Hitler was enthusiastic about “The Protocols,” and he quoted them several times in “Mein Kampf,” while many leaders also endorsed “The Protocols” as authentic [75]. There is no more

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powerful discourse than the one people want to hear. The “Protocols” were and are still useful to all antisemitic discourses. It does not matter if “The Protocols” are false or authentic, the discourse has a life of its own. Discourse exercised its power during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022. The Guardian published a story in February 2021 about 6500 migrant workers who died in the construction of stadiums. The title was: “Revealed: 6500 migrant workers have died in Qatar as it gears up to the World Cup. Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure likely to be an underestimate, as preparations for 2022 tournament continue.” The figure of 6500 dead workers comes from various official sources in Qatar, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, but the title did not indicate the period concerned or the cause of death. In fact, the figure covers a period of 10 years from the time the World Cup was awarded to Qatar up to 2022. Furthermore, according to officials from the countries quoted above, about 80 percent of deaths were due to natural causes. The Guardian later changed the title to “Revealed: 6500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded” [76]. The 6500 story has nevertheless widely circulated, even after other media did their own checking and found that the story is not backed by sufficient data. After looking at the relationship between knowledge and power, which is a conceptual cornerstone of critical geopolitics, we will now turn to the other two elements of geopolitical analysis: space and state.

3.2

Critical Geopolitics and Space

Space according to classical geopolitics is physical and human geography. Geography is natural, hence the geographic determinism or possibilism we saw in the first chapter. Critical geopoliticians on their side accept the idea that nature is given, and that geography is given, but the importance humans give to some geographical features is socially constructed. All “given” elements, such as the understanding of geography, of a territory, of the world, or of nature are subject of scrutiny by critical geopolitics. Their challenging view has either sociology or philosophy as a starting point. Following Max Weber, “It is not that ‘the world’ does not exist, but that at the most basic logical level it is quite impossible to disentangle that world from the practical knowledge activities we use in constituting and studying it.”16 And following Foucault, “Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power.”17 As a case in point, saying that fossil fuels exist in Saudi Arabia is a fact. Nobody questions it. But saying that fossil fuels are an important resource for Saudi Arabia is a socially constructed reality. This is not a fact. In the past, fossil fuels were not important, they

Max Weber, quoted by Patrick Jackson, ‘Foregrounding Ontology, Dualism, Monism and IR Theory’op. cit. p. 147 17 This statement is a response by Foucault to a question from the journal Herodote in 1976 16

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are important today, but probably in the future they will not be important. Before the advent of Islam, Medina was an oasis of low/medium importance, while Mecca was already a place of pilgrimage. Because of Islam, the two cities have become extremely valuable destinations since the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) is the fifth pillar of Islam. Before Islam, Al-Ula was an important place for different religions, but after the advent of Islam, it practically disappeared from the places of importance in Saudi Arabia. Recently, the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has decided to open Saudi Arabia for tourism, and Al-Ula regained some of the importance of 2500 years ago, when the city was built by the Nabataeans. If Jordan can capitalize on Petra, why cannot Saudi Arabia capitalize on Al-Ula? Places remain the same, they have not changed in millennia, but the importance people give to them has changed radically. This is exactly what Jeremy Black said: “Coal deposits exist in France and Germany, but from 1870 to 1945 the location and real significance of coal and iron deposits played a role in territorial aspirations and strategic planning of those nations” [77]. As quoted before, critical geopolitics does not aim to give ready solutions for geopolitical problems. What they do is to ask questions and propose alternative understandings of a geopolitical problem. It ca be an epistemological problem, it can be an identity issue, it can be a historical understanding of a situation, and it can be a geographical problem. Simon Dalby, a pioneer in critical geopolitics, wrote an article as early as in 1991 about the alternative views about geography: “We must not limit our attention to a study of the geography of politics within a pregiven, taken-for-granted, common space, but investigate the politics of the geographical specification of politics. That is to practice critical geopolitics” [78]. According to him, nothing is pre-given, nothing is an undisputed fact. Everything, including physical geography, is a subject of critical analysis. Natural resources, for instance, do not have value per se. They do not yield power by their very existence. People decide about value and power. People can decide that natural resources do not have a value when, for instance, governments and society operate a switch from fossil fuels to alternative sources of energy. Critical geopolitics considers that it is possible to give a different value to geographical features on one side and that it is possible to make geography malleable because a new geography, a virtual space, can be invented. If geography is malleable, it means that it is not given, a war on geography or on natural resources is not inevitable.

3.2.1

Natural Resources and Critical Geopolitics

The question of natural resources is of utmost importance for classical geopolitics. As a starting point, critical geopolitics criticizes the postulate according to which natural resources are separated from human beings. As Slavoj Zizek provocatively suggested: “Nature does not exist!” [79]. There is just one whole system in which humans are not separated from nature. In the current Anthropocene epoch, there is no

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meaningful separation of the natural and social realms. Instead “we,” as members of the social realm, are part of the issue. Our own actions create what has become deemed a security threat. Simon Dalby paints a gloomy situation in which he says that the rich North, by subduing the poor South, in fact harms itself: “These whom we threaten—the poor in the Global South, or our as yet unborn grandchildren and great-grandchildren—are not planning to defend themselves; nor do they have the ability to threaten affluent Northern states in any plausible manner. They don’t have armies that can invade; they don’t have navies or air forces to transport non-existent armies either. In the long run, however, with sea-level rise, disasters increasing, and major disruptions to agriculture and global economy, the affluent societies that have set the trends in motion will be directly affected too” [80]. When Dalby published his book in 2009, international migrations caused by climate change were not as acute as they are now. Climate migrants are set to become a decisive factor in international migrations, much more important than migrations due to war and conflicts. Human action has a deep impact on human geography, pushing people to change their habitat and thus creating a geopolitical problem. The scarcity of natural resources was and still is a valid reason for war according to classical geopolitics because valuable natural resources are few, and there is a need to secure them. In the analysis of the aims for Germans during the two world wars, natural resources such as coal, ore, and oil were often cited as the main drivers. Even if other motivations (ideological, xenophobic, or nationalistic) were also present, Ferdinand Mount does not want to sideline the importance of natural resources for WWI and WWII, “The control over such resources had been a key point in the program for a Greater Germany in the run-up to both world wars. Here the industrialists were in total agreement with the politicians” [81]. What is considered a valuable natural resource can vary over time. It can be water, oil and gas, wood, coal, gold, or diamonds, anything that people identify as valuable. According to critical geopolitics, the value of natural resources is situated in place and time, except for water. Therefore, there is no “natural” value given to natural resources. Their value is socially constructed. To illustrate that position, we will refer to a debate between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon centered around the question of natural resources and the planet’s limits. Paul Ehrlich, professor at Stanford University, in his book published in 1968 asserted that the world’s human population would increase to the point where mass starvation will ensue, and humanity would be doomed.18 This view was a popular theme at that time, based on Malthusian postulates and the Club of Rome, a group of intellectual and business leaders, who predicted in 1972 that natural resources will be depleted by the exponential population and economic growth [82]. All the ingredients of classical geopolitics are there: natural resources are vital for development,

The opening of his book is is clear, ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is lost’. Paul Ehrlich, ‘The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion’, Ballantine Books (expanded edition), 1971, p. 1 18

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there are few of them, the demand increases because of the increase of population and industrial production. The clash between limited offer and accumulated demand results in war. As the full title of Ehrlich’s book suggests it, the only way to avoid oblivion of humankind is to limit the growth of population. His position looks like one of the options from lebensraum, which proposes to limit the population growth when there is a disbalance between limited space and booming population. Opposed to Ehrlich, Julian Simon in his book “The Ultimate Resource” posited that fears over natural resource scarcity often underestimate the flexibility of markets and the ingenuity of the human brain [83]. He recognized that some physical resources would go down, but this could be substituted by human ingenuity and technological progress. Simon believed that humans can eventually find alternatives to missing resources. This cornucopian approach was picked up by Stephen Hawking: “Humans are endlessly resourceful, optimistic and adaptable. We must broaden our definition of wealth to include knowledge, natural resources, and human capacity, and at the same time learn to share each of those more fairly. If we do this, then there is no limit to what humans can achieve together” [84]. Simon and Hawking used critical geopolitics as a standpoint because they believed that the value of natural resources is situated, and that it is necessary to displace the definition of natural resources by adding non-material elements such as human ingenuity and innovation. The clash between Ehrlich and Simon resulted in 1980 in a wager called The Bet upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. Eventually, Ehrlich lost the bet. The management of natural resources is not only a social and ecological issue. It is above all an economic issue because it cannot be solved without an active participation of corporations, and these corporations have a cost structure of natural resources in mind. As Joachim Klement has indicated, “Of course, human ingenuity is virtually endless, but to motivate the search for new technologies, scarce resources must first be priced correctly. Nobody is going to develop a technology to reduce the consumption of a resource that is free” [85]. This classical geopolitical position is challenged by critical geopolitics for which the social and ecological issues related to the management of natural resources are more important than cost considerations. To counter the dominant classical understanding of the cost structure, the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning was published in 2017, a special edition in which it demonstrated that the classical management of natural resources is socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable [86]. Instead of taking arguments about food shortages, resource conflicts, or climate security at face value, critical geopolitics investigates how food, resources, and climate are identified, made distinct, measured, and portrayed as something somewhere, to be secured and collected. David Harvey long ago stated that resources have a meaning only in relation to specific social, economic, and political configurations: “‘Resources’ can only be defined in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to make use of them and which simultaneously ‘produces’ them through both the physical and mental activity of the users. According to this view, then, there is no such thing as a resource in the abstract or a resource which exists as a ‘thing in itself’” [87].

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An example of how resources are defined in relationship to the modes of production is given by a pipeline. The Keystone Pipeline, for instance, channels oil from Canada to the southern part of the United States. The United States is a large country, there is plenty of space, the pipeline is tiny, 1 meter in diameter. The pipeline runs for more than 3000 kilometers, and because it is tiny, it is supposed to go unnoticed since it does not run through inhabited areas. There were three phases in the project. A fourth pipeline called Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) proposed in 2008 was the epicenter of a long battle involving environmental, health, and civil rights issues. Among these issues was the claim by the indigenous populations that the pipeline was going through an area spiritually important for them. They started a protest, soon joined by many other protesters with different motives. In the end, President Biden scrapped the project, which from the classical geopolitical point of view presented many benefits [88]. It was scrapped because of the value humans give to certain territory and resources. This value is not expressed in monetary terms, and ultimately, it won the game. Other examples of indigenous populations protesting mining projects and pipelines have had contrasting outcomes. Two neighboring countries (Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia) have a completely different approach for the land owned by the indigenous populations. While in PNG, indigenous populations control more than 95 percent of total land, in Australia, the same population controls only 15 percent of the total land. Indigenous possessions look like “commons” possessions because they belong to the whole community and to each member of the community. If the community wants to sell the land, it needs the approval of all members. If one member opposes, there is no sale. It means also that one member alone cannot sell the land either. Finally, having natural, valuable resources in abundance is not a guarantee for prosperity. On the contrary, more powerful countries would be interested in getting their hands on these riches. Alternatively, the local, predatory elites can do the same, depriving the local population access to the incomes coming from these valuable resources to such an extent that in many cases there are wars for resources. Cases of resource curses abound, especially in Africa, where some weak states and institutions cannot oppose plundering [89]. The traditional definition of space is of a geographical entity (a valley, a river, a mountain, a neighborhood, villages, schools, workplace, etc.), but space can also be outer space where satellites and outer space missions abound. Space can also be virtual, it can be cyberspace, generated by the Internet. Classical geopolitics views the Internet as a platform where information is exchanged, while critical geopolitics can see the Internet as a space of its own.

3.2.2

The Wonderful World of Virtuality

The virtual world is created and managed by private companies, not states. The social interactions in that world are not decided by the users, but by the companies that created it. Corporations can decide to mimic the social relations existing in the

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“real” world or invent a completely new system of relationship among people or between people and their virtual environment. Video games offer dozens of options where people can immerse in or create worlds and characters of their own. These virtual worlds or life simulation games are usually separated into three groups. The first one is composed of digital pets, in which a gamer raises and/or trains a pet like the famous Tamagochi launched by Bandai in 1997. Twenty years after, Bandai has announced that it has sold 83 million units of Tamagochis as of March 2021 [90]. There is a limited number of options (animals) in these games, but their evolution is controlled by the player, so two people having the same pet may not have the same animal at the same point in time. The number of options is much bigger in the second group of life simulation games: the biological simulation games. In these games, the player creates a completely new zoology with rules that do not necessarily apply on Earth. The player can control, explore, and guide evolution of living forms like in Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life launched by Crossover Technologies in 1997. The player can also invent completely new species like in Spore, a game developed by Maxis and launched by Electronic Arts in 2008. Spore is part of a sub-genre called God video games in which players play a God-like role in inventing new creatures. Thanks to the incorporation of its Creature Creator feature, Spore announced in 2008 that there were more species on Spore than on Earth, 1.7 million species compared to 1.6 million [91]. Worlds and characters can be invented, and a completely new psychology, sociology, or politics can be invented, too. There are no barriers based on religion, culture, language, or ethnic origin, because these worlds make humans coexist with other living forms, trans humans, droids, and artificial beings. The third group of life simulation games is the most important for geopolitics: the social simulation games. In these games, the objective is not necessarily the choice and/or invention and/or evolution of existing or new creatures. What counts is the relationship between the characters and the building of new worlds. The Sims and Animal Crossing franchises are the most famous social simulation games. Developed by Maxis since 2000 and published by Electronic Arts, Sims has sold 200 million copies worldwide so far, while Animal Crossing: New Horizons, developed and published by Nintendo in 2020, has sold 41 million copies worldwide as of June 2022. If there is a society, there must be some kind of “social contract” to regulate the behavior of participants. In video games, the “social contract” is the agreement or understanding between all the participants about how they will behave toward each other. There is no limit to invention of “reality” and “society” in a virtual world, a concept very important for critical geopolitics. Howard Rheingold started to discuss virtual communities in his book “The Virtual Community.” Published in 1993, just 2 years after the World Wide Web was made available to the public, Rheingold pointed out the benefits for individuals and society at large to be part of virtual communities [92]. Thirty years after, the Internet virtual worlds innovated in the sense that the receiver (the gamer) can modify the story, the world, and characters at their will. The second innovation of the Internet virtual world is that the gamer is not alone. Other people also play the game. Hence, the interactivity between them makes the

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game limitless in the form of social relationship (invention of love/hate relationship between the characters, command/obey, completely invented cultural/religious taboos regulating the social life, etc.). The gamer is not given 100 percent free agency because there is often a limited number of options, but the choice of options gets bigger and bigger. It takes years for a gamer to explore all the options available in one of these virtual worlds, so it becomes limitless de facto. For example, Minecraft, which is developed by Mojang Studios, is a sandbox game, which gives gamers limitless possibilities to create their worlds out of 3D blocks and fluids without any predefined pattern. Acclaimed as one of the best video games ever, Minecraft was purchased by Microsoft in 2014 for US$2.5 billion. Minecraft added more than 2 billion worlds in 2020 to its platform, and one person needs to explore 50 worlds per minute for 80 years if they want to explore all worlds in Minecraft. If the virtual worlds were shielded from the “real” world and were regarded as an “escape” to the “real” world for a few hours, like reading a novel or watching a movie, they would not represent a danger for classical geopolitics. After some hours of “escape” in virtual worlds, people go back to the “real” world where they live, work, earn, and spend money and engage in “real” social life. Apart from a few people who are definitively lost (people who live in the virtual world 24/7 and do not go out to the “real” world anymore), this is not a problem for classical geopolitics. The problem starts when the “real” and virtual world melt to compose one entity. This happens nowadays with the concept of “metaverse” (meaning “beyond the universe”) of a virtual shared space that converges with real space. Although the term was coined by Neal Stephenson 30 years ago, it got its real boost only recently [93]. With new technologies, such as virtual/augmented reality, and 3D avatars sharing the same world, the distinction between “real” space and virtual space like the Cartesian separation between mind and body, does not exist anymore. In metaverse, there is a possibility that the “transitional experience” becomes “permanent experience,” and in that case, it is not entertainment anymore. The metaverse becomes the space in which social life is empowered by corporations. The metaverse becomes, therefore, a geopolitical space. Metaverse is a problem for classical geopolitics, which has an immoderate use of “reality” and “tangible assets.” From the classical geopolitics point of view, real estate is material, so there is a question about the land on metaverse. Is it material too? If land in the metaverse is presented as real, can it be real estate? The land created by Sandbox or Decentralized is virtual, but it is possible to make it real and tradable. This can be done by using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) [94]. As of today, NFTs are used mainly to see a virtual piece of art like avatars, emojis, and paintings. In all these cases, NFTs are tradeable. It is possible to identify a unique (exclusive) owner of the NFT because of the blockchain technology that gives a unique identification of the NFT and its owner. NFT technology is used to prove ownership of a digital asset because only a physical person, represented by the address in the crypto wallet, has proof that they made a given transaction. With NFT, it is possible to prove that a certain piece of land in the metaverse belongs to a certain person. It is effectively a real-word equivalent of copyright. That copyright is then judicially enforceable, which brings us to the question of law in the metaverse.

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Currently, there is no legislation that sets the legal framework for the metaverse, but we can assume that the metaverse, as a future iteration of the Internet, will be largely regulated in a similar way to today’s Internet. This means that the metaverse is very likely to be covered by copyright law, other intellectual property law, contract law, and defamation law [95]. All these laws can differ greatly according to jurisdiction. The metaverse has no borders, it combines the real and digital world, so the question arises as to who will enforce the laws of such a world and by which standards. As a first possibility, the metaverse would be regulated by laws and smart contracts voted on in direct democratic elections, an approach applied today in cryptocurrencies and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Users in that case have the power, and they can decide about governance or the use of money. This approach is close to the liberal model or to the self-management model. The beginning of online communities was in fact a self-managed system. Among the very first attempts, the LambdaMOO (“MOO” stands for Massively Multiplayer Online) is a game or a universe where many people can simultaneously connect, play, or chat. LambdaMOO is probably the oldest MOO, launched in 1990. At that time, there were no infographics, photos, videos, or animations. It was a text-based universe only. It was managed by the players themselves through a complex system of voting and ballots, but it did not prevent the first rape in cyberspace [96]. At that time, states did not intervene in cyberspace, but the situation today is completely different. It is possible that the metaverse, like the Internet, will be subject to regulations by individual states. This approach is close to a state-controlled, conservative approach. It would be too easy to assimilate the first model (self-management) to Western countries while the state-controlled approach is reserved for countries such as China or Russia. In fact, both groups of countries will probably be liberal and authoritarian at occasions because they face the same problems such as DeFi (decentralized finance), legal enforcement and online safety. Due to their advanced stage in the metaverse, it is expected that China and the United States will lead the new virtual space, seconded by their companies, Meta and Tencent. Cyberspace and “metaverses” offer an argument for critical geopolitics because the concept of space and state is radically different in metaverse and cannot be embraced by classical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics questions what is “taken for granted” like “real” space. “Metaverses” propose another definition of space that goes beyond the “real” space and “causality” linked to “natural laws” on Earth. “Metaverses” can be the ultimate spatial representation of critical geopolitics.

3.3

Critical Geopolitics and the State

The state is a social construction according to critical geopolitics, and the relationships between states are a social construction, too. The state can have different shapes, different aims, and different governance systems depending on circumstances and the will of the people. Michel Foucault in his work on biopolitics focused on the relationship of a regulatory power over a population. He had a

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definite idea about the state: “The State is not universal; the State is not in itself an autonomous source of power. The State is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual stratification (étatistation) or stratifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationship between local powers, the central authority, and so on . . .” [97]. According to him, the state should not be understood as a permanent feature or as the only container of political life. The state has changed in the past and will change in the future. It is, therefore, not given. As with any other social construction, it can vanish if society wants it to. Critical geopolitics offer different options to dismiss the state as the only container in which geopolitics can happen. According to critical geopolitics, it is necessary to consider that the state is a concept situated in time and space. It is a modern invention, and it refers to the Westphalian view from the seventeenth century. Before that, other modes of organizing politics were kin-based polities, city-states like the Hanseatic League, Venice or Genova, classic empires such as those of Ottoman Turkey or Manchu China, or federations and confederations like the Indian confederations in America. There is nothing “normal” or “compulsory” in having Westphalian states as the sole container for political life. Critical geopolitics devotes a large part of its analysis on international relations. If states are not “natural,” interaction between states is not “natural” either. There are no “natural laws” in international relations, so how can states interact? One way is to use the concept of anarchy where there is no supranational agreement or a unique superpower imposing its rules to the whole world. The concept proposed by Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013) stipulates that the state of anarchy is not deliberately sought after by the states. It is simply there because every state has a selfish attitude and looks after its own well-being without consideration to other states. As a result, there is anarchy in international relations with volatile and versatile arrangements depending on the circumstances [98]. The other way proposed by the constructivists and critical geopolitics stipulates that anarchy is not given, it is created, meaning it is constructed. Anarchy is created by states and individuals. States and individuals can choose to create an anarchy that can result in wars, as they can choose to create an anarchy that can result in peaceful coexistence. Alexander Wendt (1958–) used to say: “Anarchy is what states make of it,” [99] meaning that states have full freedom and agency because, at least in the medium run, sovereign states will remain the dominant political actor in the international system. They are fully accountable for their actions since everything is a social construction, and nothing is inherent or “natural.” A state cannot say, “I must invade another country because I badly need natural resources I do not have.” A state cannot say, “I must fight another state because of the incompatibility of political regimes.” It cannot say, “I am a communist state, so I must fight other states to impose world communism,” or “I am a theocratic state, so I have to fight atheist and secular states and impose the will of God.” According to constructionists, there is always a choice. Instead of resorting to war, the state can engage in a contractual relationship with another state and buy or exchange natural resources. The state can also try to invent alternatives to natural

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resources. If it decides to invade, this is not something natural or “normal.” This is an assumed choice the state is accountable for. A theocratic state can choose, for instance, to live in coexistence with a secular state. Invasions, wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing are not a fatality. There is always a choice. In his book “Social Theory of International Politics,” [100] Alexander Wendt develops the concept that ideas and cultures shape state interests and generate tendencies in international relations. It means also that state interest or national interests are not given or “natural” in the sense of objective and rational justification. Rather, they are the result of social construction that occasionally can change in time and space. States can choose a type of relationship they have with other states, as it was done with the Non-Aligned Movement. The binary world was the norm during the Cold War era, but several countries refused to side with the United States or the Soviet Union, this way rejecting the world the two superpowers wanted to impose. If some of them agreed to align with one of the superpowers, many of them did not. They built up a third group, which was called the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Founded by charismatic figures such as Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Soekarno, and Nkrumah, the non-aligned movement still enjoys a good traction oscillating between the nostalgic aura of post-colonialist optimism to contemporary willingness to avoid being dragged in superpowers fights all over the world. The binary vision of the world was challenged by the NAM, but not to the point of challenging the state as the container of social life. On the contrary, it is because all these countries wanted to preserve their sovereignty that they initiated the NAM.

3.3.1

Cities and Regions as a Scale for Critical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics asserts that the state is not the only container of social and political life, that alternatives exist. These alternatives are found with different scales in geopolitics. The alternative can be the global scale, which is a supranational scale, or on the subnational scale, on the level of regions or cities. The scale of cities is particularly interesting because geopolitical situations can have consequences on the city level. Cities are now interconnected, and they host a diverse population, so any macro event (among countries) can have micro consequences on the level of the city. If, for instance, a state decides to welcome millions of refugees, these refugees will not be hosted by the state, but by cities and villages. Some cities are already the place of a delicate mixture of populations, so any macro event such as a war between two countries, or a terrorist wave in another part of the world, can have implications on the level of the city. As a case in point, the suburb city of Sarcelles, near Paris, is dubbed “little Jerusalem,” because it has the highest concentration of Jewish shops, synagogues, and Jewish schools of the whole Paris region, while at the same time the city hosts a big Arabic population. It is evident that anything happening in Israel has repercussions in Sarcelles. In Alfortville, another suburb of Paris, dubbed “little Armenia” because of the significant Armenian population living there, it is evident that any event happening in Armenia or Nagorny-Karbakh will have repercussions

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there, too. These are small cities, but big cities are cosmopolitan too. Toronto and Los Angeles are the homes of various and numerous communities living side by side, and events in faraway lands can affect them, too. Cities are also at the forefront in cases of war. Wars usually do not involve whole countries. Wars tend to be concentrated in some parts of the country or in some cities and villages. While some cities were destroyed at the end of the war, other parts of the country are relatively preserved from bombing and destruction. Decisions about war and peace are taken by states, but consequences are felt on the local level, to such an extent that cities have become symbols of martyrdom for the whole country [101]. Beirut, Sarajevo, Vukovar, and Bakhmout have become synonyms for urban battlefields. Cities are battlefields because no army will attack a mountain or a river. The enemy attacks people, in the place where people live and work, that is, villages and cities. Some urban choices like bridges or public buildings are decided on the city level, but urban planning, the decision to build new cities, the connectivity between the cities are decided on the state level. State decisions are political decisions even if at first sight choices are of a technical nature, as in the case of smart cities. With smart cities, states want the cities to take on responsibilities of technological, social, and environmental development, or “progress.” A smart city is for classical geopolitics a technology-centered vision of the city of the future. Smart cities are, therefore, equal to smart buildings, smart mobility, or smart connectivity. This is a technological vocabulary, presented without political overtones. According to critical geopoliticians, if everything is smart in the city, there are also “smart citizens,” people who are identified as flexible, highly educated, creative, tolerant, and cosmopolitan. If there are “smart citizens,” aka “good citizens,” there is also the opposite, people who are not smart, aka “bad citizens.” For Alberto Vanolo, smart cities do not deal with technical issues. They impose a new moral order by using technical parameters with the aim to distinguish between “good city” and “bad city,” between “good citizens” and “bad citizens”: “The smart city discourse may, therefore, be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimation” [102]. The decision to promote smart cities is not made on the state level only. In the case of the European Union, an Urban Agenda for the EU was established in 2016 with the Pact of Amsterdam. Its aim is to promote cooperation between member states, cities, and the EU institutions. It does not have institutional power, or a big budget compared to the Committee of the Regions, but the European Union has a complex system of institutional framework and budgeting that can be beneficial for cities and regions. The European Urban Initiative, established in 2014, aims to build capacity and knowledge, to support innovation and develop transferable and scalable innovative solutions to urban challenges of EU relevance. It has a dedicated budget of 450 million euros from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), but the total money from the ERDF (about 200 billion euros) is largely available to cities and regions. This is not the only money available. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the European Union to establish a Recovery and Resiliency Facility of 700 billion euros, which is also available to regions and cities to spend. The state or the region can decide measures around inclusion, poverty alleviation, health policies,

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or education, but ultimately, the city is the place where all this happens and where successes and failures happen, too. Education is, for instance, an area where there might be an overlap of competencies coming from the state, region, or the city. Is it relevant, for instance, to measure quality of education and student performance on the national or on the regional/city level? International statistics and measures are made on the national level, but China has decided not to present the pan-China results in PISA rankings for educational rankings as other countries do. China has decided to present the results of only four provinces: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Zhejiang replaced Gouandong in 2015 in the collection of results. These four provinces are hardly representative of China, and since the two biggest Chinese cities are included, China took first place in the PISA ranking.19 This shows how cities might be more important than the country for certain classifications. If we apply the same model to international ports, eight out of the ten busiest ports in the world are located on the Chinese coast. On the intercity level, it is possible to have an association of cities that share common traits. For instance, the Port of Singapore and the Shanghai International Port Group, the two busiest ports in the world, can have common interests to cooperate without referring to the state. Another scale of interest for critical geopolitics can be the region. The regions are predicated to establish a global cooperative system among themselves, without passing through states. An institutionalized attempt to promote regions has been made by the European Union. Back in 1994, the European Union established the Committee of the Regions (CoR), an advisory body representing Europe’s regional and local authorities. Through the CoR, regions can share their opinion on EU legislation that directly impacts regions and cities. The Committee is composed of locally and regionally elected representatives coming from the 27 member states, but the list of these representatives is set up by states, so ultimately these representatives form national delegations and not regional delegations. Despite this caveat, it is an ambitious program wishing to balance the overall sovereign power given to states. The elections for the European Parliament can also give more importance to regions. Most of the member states function as single constituencies. However, four member states (Belgium, Ireland, Italy, and Poland) have divided their national territory into several regional constituencies. Italy has, for instance, 20 regions and a complex proportional electoral system consisting of two levels. If all European MPs are elected on a regional basis, there might be a conflict with the European Council or the European Commission, where states are represented. That is probably the reason why most countries continue to favor the whole state as a single constituency. In the classification of organization types proposed by Durand et al., regions correspond to the third type of organizations (out of four) [103]. Here is how the four models are seen by states and businesses: 1. The first model is the “ensemble of worlds.” In this model, humans live in separate cultural areas or civilizations with limited communication and 19

See the PISA rankings from 2018 and the analysis of B-S-J-Z (China) performance on www.oecd. org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_QCI.pdf

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interaction between them. The nodes are “civilizations.” Each area has a sense of profound difference beyond its own boundaries without any conception of the character of the others. This kind of separate organization existed for a very long time because people were born, lived, and died in the same place. They did not have the opportunity, except for a few, to see the outer world and its differences. In business terms, this is the kingdom of micro-companies, such as stalls in a food market, where another food market (only 2 km away) is already considered as a foreign zone. 2. The second model is “field of forces.” The nodes are states. The states are rigidly defined according to territorial units in which each state has total control over its own territory. This is the model of Westphalian geopolitics that still prevails today. In business terms, this is the case of monopolies (public or private). Monopolies enjoy a protected status because there are barriers to entry, so foreign companies cannot enter the market. At the same time, these corporations do not want or cannot venture outside, so they stay at home, a place where they enjoy a privileged status. 3. The third model is “hierarchical network.” The nodes are city-regions. If the states disappear, they are replaced by a multitude of city-regions that establish relationships among themselves. Even if states continue to exist, city-regions get more and more autonomy within the states. The states still have sovereign powers, but some power (political, economic, and cultural) is devoted to cityregions. This is the emergence of “global cities,” “smart cities,” “super-regions,” etc. As Peter Taylor stated in 2011, “The prime governance instrument of the modern world-system has been the inter-state system based upon mutually recognized sovereignties or territorial politics (the model of choice for classical geopolitics). It is possible that we are just beginning to experience an erosion of territorial sovereignties and their replacement by new mutualities expressed through city networks (the domain of critical geopolitics)” [104]. Peter Taylor and Ben Derudder have demonstrated that the passage from the inter-state system to city networks is not accidental. It is not decided by states or cities, it is decided mainly by private corporations [105]. The shift from states to city-regions is powered by transnational corporations, which find it more efficient to deal with cities and regions rather than to deal with states. These corporations have chosen cities or regions where they want to establish a significant presence, and in response, cities, regions, and states have adapted and facilitated their presence. Corporations have adapted their mode of presence because, depending on circumstances, they will opt for one of the possible foreign-market entry modes. The concept of foreign-market entry modes is very famous in the management literature about strategic management because it lists the pros and cons of centralization or decentralization of operations in foreign countries [106]. In some cases, corporations opt for a full-fledged subsidiary while in other cases they prefer to work with importer-distributors or franchisees. 4. The fourth and last model is that of the “integrated world society.” The nodes are social groupings. The cultural community, political identity, and economic integration are all structured at a global scale. There is no respect for state borders

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(or region/city borders), and the “public opinion” is a global public opinion. People are not citizens of states, they are citizens of the world. Real and virtual space becomes indistinguishable. This is the globalization kingdom, which can serve corporations very well. The global corporation does not care about state boundaries and has a global policy worldwide. This is, however, not easy to implement because, even if there are no entry barriers in the form of legal or technological nature, there still might be barriers in the form of cultural and social constraints. State-centricity is challenged by geographers and their close cousins, the historians. If, for instance, geographers consider that the supra-national and sub-national scales are appropriate for the study of geopolitics, historians can do the same for the time scale. Departing from the classical analysis in history, in which important personalities and states dominate, and where particular events (usually battles, marriages, or conversions) are studied within the boundaries of the state, the French historical school of the twentieth century (the Annales school) proposed two interesting options after WWII. The first is the longue durée, treating events over a longer period, sometimes longer than 1000 years on a supra-national scale. This is slow thinking and slow change. Changes are not immediately apparent, but they work on the fundamental elements of social interaction. The best representative was Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the standard-bearer of the second generation of the Annales School [107]. The second current is represented by a microanalysis of the level of the village, where the inhabitants are given names, flesh, and bones, and history is lived on an individual level. This is the domain of fast thinking, where an answer, a behavior, or an act can mean death to individuals and where the scale is not the state or a supra-national grouping, but the limited territory close to and known to people. The best representative is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the rock star of medievalists of the third generation of the Annales School, who wrote a bestselling book about Montaillou, a small village in the Pyreneans [108]. According to John Agnew, the state is a “territorial trap” because it is based on three assumptions: (1) that states have an exclusive power within their territories as represented by the concept of sovereignty; (2) that “domestic” and “foreign” affairs are essentially separate realms in which different rules are applied; and (3) that the boundaries of the state define boundaries of society such that the latter is “contained” by the former [109]. Critical geopolitics challenges all the three assumptions mentioned above, but we will concentrate on the first two. The first assumption views the state territory as the identity of the state. The state as the container of social life is represented by the internationally recognized boundaries, giving the state a definite physical shape. Critical geopolitics points out that this is not always the case because boundaries are artificial on one side and can be imaginary on the other. For instance, South Korea entertains hundreds of employees in the Committee for the Five Northern Korean Provinces (North Korea) as if they were part of South Korea. China has a Taiwan Affairs Office, part of the State Council, while Taiwan has a Mainland Affairs Council Bureau for mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau because both (Beijing and Taipei) pretend to govern

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one, whole China. Back in Europe, Serbia has an Office for Kosovo and Metohija (the full name Serbia gives to Kosovo) and considers it part of Serbia, even though Serbia does not govern Kosovo. The state as a social construct can build all kinds of boundaries (“natural,” artificial, or virtual). Not only does the state not have a definite shape in the form of boundaries, but it is not the necessary container of social and political life. The state can disappear. Peter Kropotkin, long before the experiment of self-management system in socialist Yugoslavia, proposed selfgoverning communities in place of states and worker-controlled enterprises. In his vision, it was perfectly possible to have an organized social and political life without the state [110]. Following a Marxist reading, the capitalist mode of production and modern sovereign states is not natural and inevitable. If the mode of production changes, the state can and will change. The state should eventually disappear with the advent of post-capitalist (communist) society. As Marx and Engels put it in 1848: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” [111]. Following this interpretation, Lenin (1870–1924) stated in 1917 that “the State is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class” [112]. As such, the state should be dismantled. The Marxist approach is deterministic and realistic because it is based on material forces and relations of production that shape social classes that in turn produce a determined class behavior. The bourgeois will always behave a certain way while the proletariat will behave in another way. The bourgeois will be interested in the national interest of the country because they want to protect their own interest from the interests of the bourgeois of another country, except when they believe they can win over the other country to increase their riches. In that case, they will not hesitate to initiate a war or infuse imperialistic behavior with the desire of plundering the wealth or exploiting the natural resources of the other countries. The proletariat per definition experiences the same fate whoever the bourgeois is. Therefore, proletarians are not interested in the national interest, and they can develop proletarian internationalism and solidarity expressed in the motto “Workers of all countries, unite!” Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto encapsulate this idea firmly: “The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationalities. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got” [113]. Neither Marx nor Engels was interested in building socialism/communism in only one state. They were interested in a world revolution that should follow the industrial revolution so, logically for them, the revolution should occur in the most advanced, industrial, capitalist states such as Germany or England. During the first years following the Bolshevik revolution, there were still debates between revolutionaries who wanted to build socialism in one country, and other revolutionaries who were convinced that socialism in one country will never work, and they petitioned for a world revolution. The position of Lenin was more complex because before 1917, he favored the orthodox approach of the world revolution, but later, he was concerned with the fate of the Russian Revolution, so his attitude flipped [114]. Lenin disagreed with other Bolsheviks who wanted to suppress the state immediately after the

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proletarian revolution. For Lenin, the proletariat still needed the state to expropriate the expropriators. His position was pragmatic. He proposed two stages after the capitalist mode of production. Socialism first, where the state still exists to ensure the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat, communism second, where all classes and states are abolished. It is only because the world revolution did not kick off, that, out of necessity, the Bolsheviks decided to build socialism in one country, that they decided to strengthen the Soviet Union and export socialism to other countries. Following the Marxist approach, contemporary authors like Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) do not use the state as an analytical unit. Wallerstein prefers to divide the world in large groupings rather than individual states. In his two volumes book “The Modern World System,” [115] he introduces his “world system theory” by dividing the world in three groups: the core (Western Europe and North America), the semi-periphery states (Latin America), and the periphery (sub-Saharan states, South Asia). According to him, the unit of analysis should not be one state but a group of states having a similar stage of development. The core states purposefully perpetuate inequality between the groups and dependency on the core states, preserving the perpetuation of the capitalist system. At the basis of his core-periphery theory lies the concept of “unequal exchange” according to which cheap commodities from the periphery are imported to the core countries where they are processed and re-exported to other core and periphery countries as finished goods. Not only would periphery countries sell their commodities at a cheap price, but they would also import manufactured goods at a high price. According to him, the expanding capitalist world economy relies on two fundamental inequalities: the class inequality of bourgeois and proletariat, and the spatial inequality of core and periphery. Among the praises for Wallerstein, Peter Taylor stated: “it was argued that Wallerstein’s ‘world-system’ should replace the state as the prime object of analysis in geography. Hence the state is ‘downgraded’ as an object of study, as this approach presents opportune political geographers to return to the global scale of analysis. But this was not to be a return to Mackinder and new geopolitics of East versus West; this new global analysis privileged a very different political agenda, geography pressed as North versus South” [116]. Both Wallerstein and Taylor considered that it was time to go beyond states. They did not look at the world in the Mackinder’s prism East vs. West but in North-South terms (rich nations vs. poor nations).

3.3.2

Critical Geopolitics and the Binary World

As for the second assumption of John Agnew, classical geopolitics tends to analyze the world in a binary manner: domestic policy vs. foreign policy, domestic populations vs. foreign populations, inside vs. outside, etc. The binary approach used to be a great success, not only among academics, but also among politicians and business leaders. There were many examples of how to implement the binary system, the most famous being, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Rules were valid in

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some areas, for some people, not for all people and in all places. When Woodrow Wilson proposed self-determination for the settlement of the war in his “14 points” in 1918, many of these points referred to “autonomous development” (selfdetermination), but the places where this “autonomous development” could be applied was strictly limited, only to the Empires that had lost the war, certainly not for the indigenous populations in the United States for instance. Finally, only a couple of “plebiscites,” or referenda were conducted at the outskirts of Germany after WWI. One of Wilson’s points referred also to colonialism, but he immediately posited that the colonial powers have the same rights as the colonized people. It was out of the question to apply self-determination or “autonomous development” in British India, French Algeria, or in American Philippines. It was a typical binary policy in which the internal, domestic situation is decoupled from the external, foreign situation. This was, however, an “old school” approach. President Clinton declared in his inaugural address in 1993: “Communication and commerce are global, investment is mobile, technology is almost magical, and ambition for a better life is now universal. There is no longer a clear division between what is foreign and what is domestic” [117]. If there is no domestic/foreign dichotomy, how will people identify themselves? For instance, if there is an attack by China on the United States, how will the American Chinese react? Will they show loyalty to the United States and fight against China, or will they stick to their ethnic origin and in that case fight against America even though they are fourth-generation American Chinese, they have never been to China, and they do not speak any of the Chinese languages. The same can be said for religious loyalty. If, for instance, Iran attacks Lebanon, how will the Lebanese Shiites react? Will they defend the Lebanese state, or will they defend Shiism or Iran? If the state is not the unique container of social life, it means that the constituting elements of a state such as foreign policy/domestic policies, Ministry of Interior Affaires/Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or boundaries separating sovereignties cease to exist. The rejection of the binary understanding of the state was encapsuled by Gaston Blanchard in his chapter “The dialectics of inside and outside”: “Outside and inside . . . has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative” [118]. The “outside and inside,” an often mutually exclusive binary approach is challenged by the movement of globalization. According to Cowen and Smith, “Geopolitics was never only about the state’s external relations, but rather we argue, involved a more encompassing inside and outside state borders” [119]. Geoeconomics is the main driver of globalization. Many observers predicted the end of the state or the disappearance of the state because of globalization pushes, but the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stop to the desegregation of state powers. This does not mean that the state and its inside/outside dichotomy have made a triumphant comeback. The Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the dilemma between binary and non-binary analysis. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 can be framed as an aggression from outside. In that case, it is pure inside-outside reading of the situation when foreign soldiers attack a country. The same conflict can be framed as a non-binary one in which some local populations in

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the eastern part of Ukraine seek independence. It is non-binary also when local institutions like the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate are labeled as internal enemies of the state. In Russia itself, some NGOs and individuals do not support the invasion of Ukraine. They are labeled as enemies of the state too. There were more than 3 million Ukrainians living in Russia and more than 8 million Russians living in Ukraine before the war. Are they also enemies of the state? For critical geopolitics, everything depends on how the situation is framed. There might be several contradictory readings of the situation while the position of classical geopolitics is clearly based on binary inside/outside readings (Gaston Bachelard’s sharpness). Another example of the binary attitude is that attitude concerning human rights. Realists will cherish human rights at home, but when it comes to other countries, they hide behind the curtain of sovereignty and do not want to impose anything on other countries. That postulate is highly debatable because there might be people originating from the Global South living in a Western country having family members who continue to live in a country where human rights are not respected. As an example, David Rieff labeled Los Angeles as the Capital of the Third World because of the spaces inhabited by domestic minorities such as “women of color” and “underprivileged” ethnic and social groups [120]. Rieff in fact followed the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guettari, who suggested in their time that the capitalist states of the center not only have external Third Worlds but also internal Third Worlds. These are seen as peripheral zones of underdevelopment in which “masses” of the population are abandoned to erratic activities such as work in the underground economy [121]. These people are not “Third World” immigrants. This is a domestic population suffering the same kind of domination as in the “Third World.” America is a good example of inside/outside paradoxes, a territory that used to be colonized by the Europeans only to become a colonizing power. The United States did not only colonize other countries such as the Philippines, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The United States started by colonizing its “own” territory by waging war against the indigenous populations of North America (the “Indians”) and the indigenous population of Mexico. According to David Slater, the United States has experienced a unique situation of a “post-colonial imperial power” [122]. This statement must be nuanced because it happened in Canada, Australia, partially in Latin America, South Africa, and some other African counties, too. In all these places, the colonial powers (states like Spain or Britain) have been displaced by their own settlers who founded new independent states of South Africa, Australia, or Mexico. The difference is that they did not always wage a revolutionary or independence war as a prerequisite to establishing an independent state. Australia, for instance, became independent without a war. Even though there were Anglo-Boer wars in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Republic of South Africa as an independent state was proclaimed in 1960 after a referendum and not after an independence war. The second difference is that these countries did not seek global influence and/or domination, contrary to the United States. How can the critical understanding of the state affect corporations? The classical geopolitics conception of state serves businesses well because state-centrism gives a

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clear delimitation of all social relations, including business relations. It is easy for corporations to use a state-centric approach because laws and regulations are clearly defined in a state. Every transnational corporation used to have an international division completely decoupled from domestic operations and country managers completely separated from each other. The country manager was seen either as the Prince of Arabia or the Shogun in Japan, a person who knows the country so well that corporations wonder if the country manager serves the interests of the corporation, the interests of the host country, their own interests, or the three altogether. That was the usual modus operandi of multinational corporations up to the accelerated globalization of markets. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new organizational model came to power: the matrix management system. In that system, country managers lost their power because the company was organized around business units on one side and functional reporting on the other. For example, the Unilever ice cream manufacturers in China started to report to the Ice Cream Business Unit and to global functional units like finance, supply chain, or marketing in the headquarters, instead of to the country manager in China. The country manager for China who overlooked all businesses of the corporation lost their power. The matrix organization was very appealing to corporations because they noticed that boundaries had disappeared and that there were more free-trade agreements, lifting the cumbersome bureaucratic and costly handling of operations country per country. For them, countries ceased to exist, a global market emerged, and the need for country managers disappeared. In the beginning of the 1990s, some authors warned that corporations were losing in-depth knowledge about a country because of the matrix system, but the appeal for globalization was more powerful [123]. The situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption of supply chains brought back the country manager, but corporations are still reluctant to give up the matrix system because it gives them the possibility to control everything from the headquarters. There is a wide gulf between classical geopolitics and critical geopolitics. Classical geopolitics blames critical geopoliticians for only “unpacking” or “deconstructing” the discourse, the geography, state, or power without proposing an alternative of how to conduct the state or how to answer an immediate military threat coming from abroad. Classical geopolitics believes that critical geopolitics lives in an “unreal world” and misses practicality. It also uses another argument, the argument of temporality and universality. How come the concepts of power, state, and geography have obeyed a classical, binary approach for thousands of years and nobody thought to challenge them during all that time? If it was always useful on all latitudes, surely there must be some value in the classical, binary approach. In the first pages of his book, Geoffrey Sloan states: “This book also constitutes an escape tunnel from the internment camp of critical geopolitics. For too long, arguments that geopolitical concept are merely power-serving ideologies rather than pertinent analytical contributions about reality have held sway” [124]. The words “internment camp” are extremely strong. They are violent. According to Geoffrey Sloan and some other classical geopolitical authors, critical geopolitics launched an onslaught on classical geopolitics, denying its pertinence and scientific legitimacy. On the same grounds, Jeremy Black dismisses critical geopolitics

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because it is ideologically tainted: “The self-styled ‘critical geopolitics’ with their emphasis on how material realities are inserted into discursive contexts, and the more recent attempts to develop a Marxist or, at least Marxian geopolitics, can be readily and valuably incorporated into an account of geopolitics as an argument about power” [125]. Phil Kelly has encapsulated his preference for classical geopolitics in the following way: “The author asserts adherence to an objective methodology. This objective approach will follow a modernist or positivist path, one devoid as much as possible of the author’s bias and experience. Here facts will rule over opinion, rationality over doctrine and any claims to insight must welcome replication by others” [126]. According to Kelly, critical geopolitics is not objective. It is post-modernist and post-positivist, full of ideological bias and without experience. Critical geopolitics does not put emphasis on facts, but on discourse. It does not have a rational approach. It has a doctrine to defend, not rationality based on facts and reality. In return, critical geopolitics is not soft with classic geopolitics. According to Colin Flint, classical geopolitics is written by white, male, and Western educated elite who are “all seeing” and “all-knowing,” using universal “truths” to justify foreign policy. Classical geoponics is disqualified because it presents necessarily a particular, often masculinized and militarized view of geopolitics, separating people into “us” and “them” [127]. Critical geopolitics does not want to serve as bullets for the statecraft, but rather to expose the discourse that comes from places of authority. Critical geopolitics wants to give voice to the marginalized, would be they women, immigrants, or minorities. Despite their confrontation, it is oversimplistic to oppose classical and critical geopolitics because the two branches do not follow the same logic and method. While classical geopolitics is in the immediate, problem-solving mood and action, critical geopolitics is in reflective mood and to analyze facts and events without an immediate and concrete recipe for how to settle a problem. For that reason, the two approaches are more complementary than contradictory. While classical geopolitics takes the world as it is, critical geopolitics asks questions about how we come to perceive the world. The critical approach does not deny reality, it only asks questions about the production of knowledge of that reality and the dissemination of that knowledge through discourse. The methods and aims used by critical geopolitics are not the same as concepts used by classical geopolitics, so it is difficult to compare them. Can classical and critical geopolitics be reconciled? In his second article from 1919, Halford Mackinder identified two groups of people in politics: what he named the organizers and the idealists. The former understood the geopolitical realities, while the latter had the ability to change the world through the development of principles and new institutional structures of human governance: “The development of his two foreign policy ideal-types of organizers and idealists, which pre-dated Carr’s realists and utopians by two decades, allowed him to develop an international theory that combined the understanding of natural constraints to human action with a road map of transcending the limits of power politics” [128]. This is exactly how it is possible to combine classical and critical geopolitics. From the

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classical school, political and business leaders take the reality, and from the critical school, they take reflection and innovation. Political and business leaders are practical, so they go for doctrine-shopping, and they can choose among different offers on the market. The market in question is an academic market because concepts, ideas, and doctrines usually come from the academic world. Constructivism has become the main approach used by scholars who teach international relations (the closest academic branch to geopolitics). The latest 2017 survey conducted by Teaching, Research and International Policy has shown that constructivism is the approach of choice for 24.41 percent of international relations scholars, followed by realism with 18.12 percent and liberalism with 12 percent. It is expected that constructivism will continue to progress while other schools will see their influence decrease.20 This is particularly true for liberalism, once a dominant approach in international relations. As the majority of respondents for the survey came from the United States, there is, therefore, a bias, but this country has a tremendous impact on other geographies because a great number of international relations scholars from around the whole world were educated in the United States. In the list of the best colleges in the world for international studies, nine colleges are from the United States (Harvard, Stanford and Princeton topping the list), LSE being the only non-American institution in the Top Ten. As seen at the beginning of this chapter, critical geopolitics comes from critical theory, which produced many currents in the political and social sphere such as postcolonialism, post-positivism, and critical or feminist geopolitics. While feminism as a movement is much older than critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics shares many common traits with critical geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics, however, does not hesitate to criticize critical geopolitics for being elite-centric and masculinized. It considers that critical geopolitics neglects individuals because individuals supposedly do not enjoy the same agency as “big actors” such as states or corporations. Critical geopolitics, therefore, ignores the embodied geopolitical experience at a smaller scale [129]. Feminist scholars propose to decenter the focus from “high politics” toward “low politics.” According to Jennifer Hyndman, “While critical geopolitics is useful for a feminist geopolitical analysis, its deconstructive impulses are insufficient to generate change for building alternative futures. With a few exceptions, the scholarship on critical geopolitics ignores the gendered landscape of dominant geopolitical debates . . . We are left with well-interrogated but tacitly masculinist categories, and no clear way forward in practice” [130]. Finally, feminist geopolitics regrets that critical geopolitics puts too much emphasis on the representational elements, that is, the analysis of cognitive, textual, and visual experience, and that they neglected the non-representational theory, which can help to capture fluid, felt, and inexpressible experiences. One of these non-representational experiences, which can play a great role in geopolitics, is the affect (love-hate experiences) proposed by Hayden Lorimer [131].

20

https://trip.wm.edu/data/dashboard/faculty-survey

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For all these reasons, we decided to separate feminist geopolitics from critical geopolitics, even though they share many common elements.

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48. Kang Hyun-kyung, ‘How fortune tellers became go-to people for business tycoons’, The Korea Times, May 14, 2021 49. ‘HSBC Building Feng Shui Cannons’, Atlasobscura, February 28, 2019, available on www. atlasobscura.com/places/hsbc-building-feng-shui-cannons 50. Thomas Romer, The Invention of God, Harvard University Press, 2015 51. Critical Enquiry, Vol. 18, N°1, Automn 1991 52. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011 53. Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27, N° 3, 1990, pp. 291–345, p. 301 54. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications, 1992, and Ulrich Beck, ‘Living in the World Risk Society’, in Economy and Society, Vol. 35, N°3, August 2006, pp. 329–45 55. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury Press, 2010 56. George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classic, 1961, p. 162 57. Shannon O’Lear, op. cit., p.165 58. Colin Flint, Introduction to Geopolitics, p. 6 59. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press, 1991 p. 37 60. Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours: Lecon inaugurale au College de France prononcee le 2 decembre 1970, Gallimard, 1971 61. Teun van Dijk, ‘Politics, Ideology and Discourse’, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), Elsevier, 2006, pp. 728–740 62. Jack Hirschleifer, ‘The dark side of the force,’ p. 5 63. Ruth Wodak, Disorders of Discourse, Longman, 1996 64. Ioannis Ioannou, George Kassinis, Giorgos Papagiannakis, ‘How Greenwashing Affects the Bottom Line,’ Harvard Business Review, July 21, 2022 65. Myron Weiner, ‘The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of International relations and Political Developments’, World Politics, Vol. 27, N°4, July 1971, pp. 665–683 66. Gearoid O’Tuathail, ‘Between a Holocaust and a Quagmire ‘Bosnia’ in the U.S. Geo-Political Imagination, 1991–1994’, in Gearoid O’Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, op. cit., pp. 187–223 67. ‘Europeans could not do these things to one another, therefore the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia could not be European.’ David Rieff, Slaughterhouse, Bosnia and the failure of the west, Simon and Schuster, 1995, pp. 44–45 68. Paul Reuber, ‘The political representation of space after the cold war and in the new millenium’, in Murphy et al. ‘Is there a politics to geopolitics’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 28, N°5, 2004, pp. 619–640, p. 634 69. John Agnew, Hidden Geopolitics, p. 89 70. Milan Kundera, ‘The Tregedy of Central Europe’, The New York Review of the Books, 26 April 1984, pp. 33–38, p. 35 71. Alan Bairner, ‘National sports and national landscapes: In defence of primordialism,’ National Identities, Vol 11, N°3, 2009, pp. 223–239. 72. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Anderson’s Utopia,’ Diacritics, Vol. 29, N° 4, Winter 1999, pp. 128–134 73. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, University of Minnesotta Press, 1999; Anne McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, nationalism and the family,’ Feminist Review, Vol. 44, N°1, Summer 1993, pp. 61–80. 74. Viktor Malk’ov, ‘Kennan’s Long Telegram, Commentary,’ Diplomatic History, Vol. 15, No. 4 Fall 1991, pp. 554–558 75. Itamar Marcus, Barbara Crook, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: An Authentic Document in Palestinian Authority Ideology,’ pp. 152–160, in Ricard Landes, Steven Katz (eds.), The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, New York University Press, 2012

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Chapter 4

Feminist Geopolitics

Feminist geopolitics shares with critical geopolitics the necessity to deconstruct the narrative proposed by classical geopolitics, the way geopolitics is presented to the opinion and decision-makers. Feminist geopolitics departs from critical geopolitics on several points, mainly the gender issues and epistemological enquiry. There exist misconceptions about feminist geopolitics, because it is often reduced to the analysis of gender in geopolitics. While this is an important element, it is not the only concern for feminist geopolitics. The other misconception is that feminist geopolitics is reduced to the analysis of the everyday life and mundane activities of people. This is what is called “low politics” (emphasis on economic and social issues in a society) as opposed to “high politics” (emphasis on the sovereignty and survival of the state). Since feminist geopolitics is the only branch of geopolitics to address “low politics,” it is reduced to that interpretation, while the reality is that feminist geopolitics addresses both “low politics” and “high politics.” In his approach on sexuality, Laurent Bibard has identified some concepts that resonate very much with feminist geopolitics: “. . .the essential role sexuality plays in people’s lives is very often disregarded. This disservice is rooted, as is the case for other concerns related to that which is tangible, in the perception of the body as a means for the desires born of consciousness and of a calculating and rational will that is both efficient and reliable” [1]. Elements such as “that which is tangible,” and the “perception of the body,” are central parts of the feminist analysis. Feminist authors address, therefore, two main issues. The first is the question of underprivileged groups (women, ethnic or religious minorities, discriminations based on age, education background, or purchasing power, etc.) and the individual and their body as the actor of geopolitics. The second issue is of epistemological nature. Akin to critical geopolitics, feminist authors take “knowledge is power” as a starting point. Classical geopolitics puts rationality, objectivity, and facts as building blocks of knowledge. Critical geopolitics challenges this point of view, but feminist geopolitics goes further and offers some alternatives to the understanding of knowledge. Feminist geopolitics wants to identify who constructs knowledge. Are there some groups that are excluded from knowledge construction (women for instance)? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_4

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If the source of classical and, to some extent, critical knowledge is the male, patriarchal, and white group of people of authority, feminist geopolitics wants to deconstruct that reality and propose alternative sources of knowledge. Critical geopolitics has made its own introspection of the dominant male position within its own ranks [2], but feminist authors believe this is not enough. They look for a better diversity and inclusion in terms of knowledge creation, discourse, and interpretation. It is difficult to trace the origin of feminist geopolitics because there are in fact two currents. The first refers to feminism, and the second to critical theory. Feminism is an old movement initiated by women who wanted to change the role of women in male-dominated societies. Motivated mainly by the struggle for equal rights such as voting rights, the right to divorce or to own property, feminism has been correlated to the “suffragette” movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [3]. The feminist struggle is, however, much older than this movement and had different forms in the past. One of them that Deborah Dixon presents in her book is “Les Precieuses,” aristocratic women from the seventeenth century who established their “salons,” where men and women could come and debate all kinds of topics, including gender roles and relationship. Deborah Dixon makes a distinction between an Anglo-Saxon feminist tradition that has for a long time been concerned with suffrage, equality in the eyes of the law, the attainment of reproductive rights and responsibilities, and the dissolution of frontiers that separate people according to gender. This tradition did not seek to overthrow the political, legal, and economic apparatus. It just wanted a fair and full presence of women as equal members within the apparatus. This view of feminism contrasts with the European continental feminist tradition that was more concerned with the articulation of womanly differences and the notion of liberation. It appears that the European continental tradition was more revolutionary than the Anglo-Saxon one because it wanted to change the system [4]. Among the many important names who contributed to feminist studies of the European continental tradition, Deborah Dixon quotes Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. The second source of feminist geopolitics goes back to the critical theory of the 1960s and 1970s, a current we have seen in the chapter on critical geopolitics. Today, feminist geopolitics is mainly represented as a separate branch in disciplines such as international relations, human rights scholarship, or scientific epistemology. Among the contemporary authors, Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway are best represented in feminist scientific epistemology, while authors like Cynthia Enloe, Joanne Sharp, Jennifer Hyndman, Deborah Dixon, Virginie Mamadouh, and Susan Smith are very active in feminist geopolitics. It is a truism to say that female authors are practically inexistent in geopolitical literature. Bert Chapman, for instance, in the chapter called “History of Geopolitics and Biographies of Key Personalities (twentieth century)” lists 18 names. Diversity in terms of geographical coverage does exist, since personalities come from the United States, the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but all authors are male and white and, except for Sergei Gorshkov, they all come from Western countries. There is, for instance, no author from Asia or Africa,

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no female author [5]. In the part called “Current Geopolitical Thinkers,” he presents 11 authors, and again they are all male, white, and Western educated. Geoffrey Parker on his side presents less than a dozen names. There is no diversity either, but Parker clearly indicates that he is covering only a limited number of Western countries. The omnipresence of Western authors is also present in Saul Cohen’s book. Authors are all white, male, and Westerners. In his book about the great geopolitical theatricians, Florian Louis gives 22 names, and again they are all white, male, and Western [6]. Finally, only O’Tuathail, Dalby, and Routledge, out of 36 essential reads in geopolitics, have selected eight non-Western authors and two female authors [7]. The lack of diversity is not expressed only in the origin or gender of authors. There is also a lack of diversity of topics (geographical, critical, or feminist) [8]. According to some authors, there is a persistent parochialism of American dominance while the Global South is marginalized [9]. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan regret a Western (American) bias in the choice of topics covered, and they propose a more diverse choice of topics. Authors working on China are particularly interested to introduce some other (Chinese) points of view, which can complement Western domination. In his article published in 2020, Yongjin Zhang posits that the “Chinese school” of International Relations (IR) is now mature after 40 years of existence, and it can contribute significantly to the overall IR theory [10]. The Chinese school or the Chinese schools are a diverse space where people focusing on ancient Chinese diplomacy and politics coexist with people who want to import Western traditions and authors who reject Western domination and want to invent a new school separate from the Chinese legacy on one side and Western domination on the other [11]. The Chinese authors question the claim of the American “core” as the creator, depositor, and distributor of universal knowledge. Some of these authors accept the Western terminology and concepts in IR but want to include “Chinese characteristics” in them, while others reject all the grand key theories of international relations, concepts such as realism, post-positivism, and others. Later in this book, we will look in more detail at Yiqing Qin’s proposals, one of the proponent members of the Chinese school. We will start this chapter by looking at the salient elements of feminist geopolitics (gender issues, individual-centered geopolitics, and epistemological proposals). We will continue further on with the usual triptych (space-state-power) and how feminist geopolitics looks at it.

4.1

Specificities of Feminist Geopolitics

Feminist geopolitics have two salient elements. The first pertains to discrimination of all kinds. Gender discrimination is obviously the most important for feminist geopolitics, but other underprivileged groups (migrants for instance) receive their due attention from feminist geopolitics, too. The second salient element is of epistemological nature. Feminist geopolitics challenges not only classical, but also critical, understanding of science and epistemology by proposing new options such

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as non-representational and “non-scientific” possibilities of investigation. As is the case in critical geopolitics, references to sociology and philosophy are more important than is the case in classical geopolitics.

4.1.1

Geopolitics Is Gendered, Individuals Are Ignored

Feminist geopolitics wants to show how women as a group have been systematically discriminated and ignored in geopolitics, especially by classical geopolitics. Robert Keohane pointed out in 1989 the discriminative attitude toward women: “women have been victims of patriarchal states and major aspect of modern international relations—its institutionalization of warfare and its reinforcement of state sovereignty—have had harmful and often disastrous effects on women’s lives. It is often pointed out, furthermore, that Third Word development has been maledominated and that women have often suffered from the form that development has taken” [12]. At roughly the same time, the seminal work of Cynthia Enloe (1938–) wanted to make feminist sense of international politics by showing how women participated in international politics without being acknowledged [13]. Her objective was to make women visible, be it on military bases, banana plantations, or in garment factories. Usually, people do not expect that women working as farmers or domestic helpers participate in international politics, but that is exactly what Enloe wanted to change. According to her, the discrimination of women is visible when crises and scandals happen. A crisis happens when there is a fire in a Bangladeshi sweatshop in 2013 causing the collapse of the Rana Plaza building killing more than 1000 workers, almost all of them women. A crisis happens when more than 300 students are abducted in Nigeria in 2021, all of them girls. But a scandal happens also when there is a photo of G20 leaders without female leaders. The political longevity of Chancellor Angela Markel was such that at least one woman (herself) was always in the photo for 15 years. She was seconded by Christine Lagarde from IMF and leaders such as Theresa May from the United Kingdom, Dilma Rousseff from Brazil, or Park Geun-hyu from South Korea, but these female leaders cannot compare with the longevity of Chancellor Markel. She retired in 2021, so the probability that there will be an all-male G-20 leader photo in the future is more probable than ever. The G-20 leaders’ photo is a gender discrimination that is visible, but discrimination can also be invisible. Cynthia Enloe gives the example of military bases, where the commanders of bases want to operate them “smoothly,” meaning without scandals and crises emanating from gender equality and women empowerment. According to Enloe, “hundreds of military bases operate smoothly. Their operations are greased by daily humdrum . . . International politics are composed of more than just crisis and scandals. International politics can be humdrum, with power flowing unnoticed and uncontested. Humdrum is political. Humdrum is gendered” [14]. Feminist authors claim that domination is a patriarchal institution from which women are excluded. Therefore, women cannot oppress other women, since all

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women are excluded from the spheres of power. This postulate is rejected by some post-colonial writers such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. They reject this idea because they believe that Western feminist authors enjoy situations of privilege compared to feminist authors coming from non-Western world. According to C.T. Mohanty, “Western feminist research cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in such a global economic and political framework” [15]. Since all knowledge is situated, Western feminist authors cannot claim objectivity and neutrality. They are also the product of their environment. Consciously or unconsciously, they spread concepts that originate from the Western world that may not be adapted to the non-Western audience. C.T. Mohandy believes Western feminist authors cannot understand “Third World Women” because they do not share the same environment and situated knowledge: “This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, having control over their bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decision” [16]. As for G.C. Spivak, the “third world women” because she is “third word” and “woman,” must fight on two fronts at the same time, the patriarchal situation at home and neo-imperialistic tendencies from abroad. According to her: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” [17]. Women are systematically discriminated against, even by liberation movements. “National interest” as the trump card invoked by many states for the protection of borders, corporations, people . . . is a banner that is rejected by feminist authors because “national interest” should cover all populations living in one country, especially women and the underprivileged. During colonial times, the anticolonialist movements presumed that all the forces marginalizing and oppressing women were generated by the dynamics of colonialism and neocolonialism. Since all evil comes from colonization, the precolonial, pre-globalized society was portrayed as one in which women enjoyed respect and security. Following this analysis, simply restoring national independence will ensure women’s liberation. Women’s liberation was not a priority, and any demand in that sense was labeled as divisive if not traitorous. This approach was the norm everywhere. As an example, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus, which fought in favor of an agrarian reform in Mexico in the 1970s, did not address gender segregation. Scores of liberation movements in Africa also did not address these issues. Women were told to be patient, to wait until the nationalist goals are achieved. Then, and only then, could relations between men and women be addressed. “Not now, later” was the leitmotiv of nationalist movements. According to feminist geopolitics, gender issues on the contrary must be addressed immediately, during the liberation war, because the nationalist movement, holding a patriarchal vision of the new nation-state, is likely to produce just one more actor in an untransformed

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international arena. “A dozen new patriarchal nation-states may make the international bargaining table a bit more crowded, but this will not change the international game being played at the table” [18]. The nationalist liberation movements have gradually changed their position. Women’s participation and feminist agenda have become prominent elements of the program they fight for, especially after the Zapatista movement in Mexico initiated the process in the 1990s [19]. How to change discrimination against women? Feminist authors propose as a first option to give women adequate place in society through quotas, positive discrimination, politics of inclusiveness, etc. This approach is quantifiable. It is easy to count the number of women in certain positions of power and claim a fair distribution of power. And in many cases, it has succeeded. This, however, does not change the structure of society. It is still divided into two genders, one gender still dominates the other one, if not openly in public life, it still does it behind the scenes. The second option is to challenge the binary view (male/female) and introduce more gender categories, so the supremacy of one of them (male) gradually disappears under the assault of a plurality of genders. Some countries have recognized a category “other” or “non-binary” on their passports. Fifteen countries including Argentina, Canada, Pakistan, India, and Nepal have introduced such changes. While for most people in Western countries, it is a question of individual choice to mark if one wants to be “other” or “non-binary,” this is not the case of the Indian subcontinent. In Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, a whole community called “hijras” has been accepted as the third gender by law, and India and Pakistan have introduced this category in their passport options. The situation of Pakistan is unique because it is the only Islamic country to accept the third gender on its passports. Having an option of “other” or “non-binary” is not enough. The growth of categories has prompted the Queensland University of Technology in Australia to identify as many as 33 gender categories in its sex survey.1 Corporations follow the trend with Facebook launching as early as in 2014 the possibility for its users to customize their gender with 58 different categories. If corporations do so, it is mainly because there is pressure from Millennials and Gen Z customers who ask corporations to be in tune with their vision of society and gendered norms [20]. The growth of gender categories can harm the “binary dictature,” but it will not destroy it according to Donna Haraway (1944–), who advocates a third option. Her proposal is to eliminate the gender category altogether and this way eliminate patriarchy and matriarchy, all kinds of dominations based on gender. In 1985, her essay, “Manifesto for Cyborg” published in Socialist Review focused on the masculine bias in scientific culture [21]. According to her, it is impossible to reform the system by adding more positions and recognition to women. Women must be conscious not only of their exclusion and exploitation but also stop being complicit in the system. Donna Haraway proposes to avoid gender categorization because being female is a highly complex category constructed on contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Therefore, she proposes the concept of cyborg.

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https://www.australiansexsurvey.com.au/

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In the first page, Donna Haraway acknowledges that her proposal is ironic and blasphemous, but still, it can be relevant in expanding the choice of epistemological methods. The cyborg for her is not only a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. It is according to Haraway a set of ideals of a genderless, race-less, more collective, and peaceful civilization. While other authors talk about post-humanism and trans-humanism in general, Donna Haraway uses these examples in a gendered way. In her words, “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor” [22]. Haraway’s proposal that humanity must move to a post-gender world, coupled with her disruption of Cartesian duality, objectivity, and masculinity, has sparked strong interest in academia [23]. War is a pertinent time to analyze cyborg and posthumanist activity. If the weapons are automated, can the decision to engage in war be automated, too? This decision is usually of human nature but, precisely because it is of human nature, it can lead to catastrophic consequences. If we follow Scientific Management, the decision to engage in war can be left to automated machines because they will take (supposedly) unbiased decisions and opt for a decision that offers the best trade-offs for a state or a population. If the preservation of human lives and a nation as a collective body is the ultimate goal in politics, machines can decide to surrender to the invader because this is the best way to preserve lives and the community. Their rationale is to say that in given circumstances, they cannot win, so they will wait for a better opportunity to engage in combat. Finally, in the domain of international relations, if we consider that states do not have friends, that they only have interest, the definition of the interest and how to manage that interest can also be subject of scientific management where the choice of allies is not bound by historical, religious, or national preferences. Machines are again supposed to be unbiased and can take a decision to engage in an alliance with countries that most people would refuse because of all prejudices and biases. The machine will nevertheless take that decision because of the cost–benefit ratio. It can, for instance, favor a military Indian–Pakistani alliance or a China–Japan alliance based on mutual economic interest, but this kind of decision is not likely to happen. If, on the other side, machines are programmed to preserve liberty, historical places, or holy places, there is no surrender, no negotiation, even if the state is in a very unfavorable position. All probabilities and all calculations show that the weaker state will lose, but machines will sacrifice people and themselves, if necessary, because they are programmed to do so. The second option for how to address women’s discrimination is to consider that gender is a transnational category of people who suffer discrimination in all countries, so the struggle can only be a transnational one. In all countries, “sex” is accepted from the biological point of view, but “gender” is socially constructed. In a very famous and powerful sentence, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) as early as

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in 1948 said: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.2 She distinguished sex from gender and suggested that gender identity is gradually acquired. It means gender identity is not innate. The difference with the tenets of critical geopolitics is that feminists go beyond observations and launch a call for action, a call to change the state of things. In that sense, they become militants and actors, not only observers. Because they suffer all sorts of discrimination in many countries, the fight to eliminate these discriminations must be brought to the supranational level, and this is exactly what they did by bringing the issue to the United Nations. The UN Resolution 1325 is an example how the universal rights of women can be upheld.3 Gender discrimination can be justified by several factors. Among them, the economic justification seems to be a powerful one. Economy introduces a division of labor between men and women. Among the most famous embodiments of women’s role in the society was the German Empire 3Ks slogan (Kinder, Kuche, Kirche, meaning Children, Kitchen, Church), clearly indicating what was expected from women in the nineteenth century. Since men are supposed to have “real” work outside of the household and receive “real” salaries while women tend to stay at home and do not receive salaries, a hierarchy is established in which men contribute to household and national revenues while women do not. If women do not contribute to value creation, they cannot have a say in national and international politics. Only men can be geopolitical actors because they create value. According to Statista, the percentage of GDP contribution by female workers as of 2015 was 37 percent on average with huge disparities among countries with China where the percentage is the highest (41 percent), compared to India where the percentage was the lowest (17 percent).4 These statistics are dubious because a large part of women’s labor is unpaid, so the statistics based on salary work do not reflect women’s real contribution. The United Nations values unpaid care and domestic work in the form of cooking, cleaning, fetching water, or taking care of the elderly and children at 10–39 percent of GDP [24]. This is a huge number, which added to the females’ paid work, and makes women’s contribution to GDP equal to or higher than men’s contribution. Masculine biases in economy are explored in the book edited by Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson, published in 1993. The book is a collection of contributors coming from economy, sociology, and philosophy. Its main trait is to debunk masculine biases in economy. In the reprint edition, 10 years later, this is how the two editors present their work: “We pointed out how, in the social construction of contemporary mainstream economics, culturally ‘masculine’ topics such as men and market behaviour, and culturally ‘masculine’ characteristics such as autonomy, abstraction, and logic, have come to define the field. Meanwhile, topics such as women and 2

The most cited remark by Simone de Beauvoir is in the opening remark of the Part Two of her book, The Second Sex, Vintage Books, first published in 1949, reprinted in 2011, p. 283. 3 The resolution adopted in 2000 is the first formal and legal document requiring parties in conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction and protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence. The consequence is that women pass from the status of victims to the state of actors. 4 https://www.statista.com/statistics/523838/women-share-of-gdp-region

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family behaviour, as well as characteristics of connections, concreteness and emotion are all considered ‘feminine’. In a sexist culture, they are denigrated, sometimes even by women themselves, and largely excluded from mainstream thinking” [25]. Contrary to some other post-positivists who also want to deconstruct traditional economics, but fail to propose alternatives, feminist economists propose an alternative in the promotion of a holistic understanding of the economic life. The hidden value of women’s contributions is part of it, as well as the redefinition of growth, success, and non-market activity. Ester Boserup (1910–1999) was one of the pioneers in feminist economics when she presented in 1970 (at that time mostly ignored) the role of women in agricultural transformation and industrialization in developing countries. Not only did Western countries not recognize the essential role played by women, but the colonial powers also actively contributed to women’s marginalization. As Ester Boserup said: “European settlers, colonial administrators and technical advisers are largely responsible for the deterioration in the status of women in the agricultural sectors of developing countries. It was they who neglected the female agricultural labour force when they helped to introduce modern commercial agriculture to the overseas world and promoted the productivity of male labour” [26]. In her endeavor to make women’s work visible and appreciated, Ester Boserup was followed by other authors like Marilyn Warning, who highlighted women’s contribution to the economy and society through unpaid work that is not reflected in national accounts [27]. These are unpaid activities, so it is difficult to put a price tag on children’s care, household activities, or informal volunteering. Marily Warning’s book is more than 30 years old, and there was a hope that over the last 20 years, national accounts systems over the world would have found a way to evaluate all these non-market activities, in majority performed by women. This nevertheless did not happen. Kathrin Marcal in her provocative book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics laments about the fact that economics still focuses on self-interest and excludes other motivations and disregards the unpaid work of mothering, cooking, and volunteering [28]. Finally, The United Nations in the Advisory Expert Group on National Accounts has yet to come up with a compulsory valuation and incorporation in national accounts of non-market activities performed within and among households. As they said in 2020, “Without an account of this activity, economic growth rates can be a misleading indicator of progress, blind to any transfers of activity from market production into the unpaid household domain, or simply change in the volume or value of the latter. The exclusion of unpaid household service work may directly impact welfare if economic policy biases intervention to favour the paid economy over unpaid household production” [29]. The number of influential female economists over the last few years has expanded to include academics, professional economists, and women with economics degrees who work in the field of economics. Academic Influence has published a ranking of the most influential women in economics, according to which Esther Duflo, the second female recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics from 2019 is number one; followed by Stephanie Kelton, a specialist in monetary theory; Janet

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Yellen, former Chair of the Federal Reserve and now the US Secretary of Treasury; Christine Lagarde, former Chair and Managing Director of the IMF and now president of the European Central Bank; and Anne Case, Professor of Economic and Public Affairs, Emeritus at Princeton5, but their number pales in comparison to the number of male economists. Gender discrimination is justified by the supposedly uneven contribution of men and women to the society. As mentioned above, economic reasoning is one of the justifications, while the second reasoning is women’s participation in war activities. It is assumed that men go to combat, while women stay at home to ensure the production of everything men need for combat. This separation of roles is viewed by Cynthia Enloe as a basic gender segregation when it comes to geopolitics: Women, because they are women, not because they are nurses or wives, or clerical workers,—cannot qualify for entrance in the inner sanctum, combat. However, to allow women entrance into the essential core of the military would throw into confusion all men’s certainty about their male identity and thus about their claim to privilege in the social order [30].

Masculinist primacy in combat is not immutable. There were many cases in history when women participated in battles and even led combat as shown by the Amazons, the Berber Queen Al-Kahina, the women warrior samurais, the American native women warriors, and the shield-maiden from Scandinavia. All these wellknown warriors are present in popular media, among them the latest were the shieldmaiden in the “Vikings” saga on Netflix and the movie The Woman King released in 2022, which portrayed a group of all-female warriors who protected the Kingdom of Dahomay in the 1800s. There is nothing “normal” about women being excluded from activities of politics and war. There is nothing “normal” about only men being attributed power, rationality, and independence while women are associated with irrationality, in need of protection, and confined to the private sphere. For the feminist authors, this is a typical social construct that can and must be modified or eliminated. The masculinization of processes and goals of society, the preeminence of individual success and use of force in conflict resolution, should be replaced by the search for harmony, arbitration, and mediation, according to feminist authors. As a result of masculinism, geopolitics and international relations became heavily masculinized with topics concentrating on war, rivalry, power relationship, rather than on peacebuilding or peacekeeping processes. While Sara Ruddick (1935–2011) gave an alternative to patriarchy, militarism, and war in the form of mothering and motherhood [31], Carol Cohn (1949–) concentrates on the military sector as one of the main influencers on International Relations. According to her, the military sector is not masculinized because of the arch-dominance of men in the army ranks but because of the culture and language it employs. This particular culture and language exclude de facto

The full list is given in ‘Influential Women in Economics from the Last 10 Years,’ Academic Influence, February 15, 2022, available at https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/people/womenscholars/economics

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people (women in this case) who do not accept or do not share this masculinized imagery or narrative. In the concluding remarks of her paper, she stresses that “the dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture; it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the world—until that voice is delegitimized” [32]. One of the most vocal critics of the gendered vision of international relations is J. Ann Tickner (1937–), who in 1997 critiqued mainstream theorists who consciously or unconsciously omit to address gender issues in international relations [33]. Finally, women are not the only underprivileged groups in Western societies. Immigration and refugees are usually portrayed by right-wing groups as a danger to national cohesion and national interest. The origin of migration can be diverse: climate change, wars, earthquakes, or simply the desire for a better life. Migrants and refugees are, by definition, underprivileged persons, except in the case of highpaid expatriates working for large multinational companies who move from one country to the other. The emphasis on human rights and tolerance has shifted over time. It started with religious tolerance after the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It moved to minority rights of ethnic groups during the era of nationalism in the nineteenth century. From rights of ethnic groups, the emphasis shifted to individual human rights (the prohibition of slavery and the adoption of Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations has given millions of people the possibility to enjoy human rights for the first time). Globalization at the end of the twentieth century was the pinnacle of individualism because it abolished barriers to the movement of people, goods, and capital. The main argument for the development of globalization according to Helen Milner (1958–) is that corporations have been so internationalized in the troubled times of the 1970s that they were pushing against protectionism, a move in contradiction with that used in the crisis of the 1920s. The newly established narrative since the 1970s was that protectionism would increase the cost of production, so states accepted to open the doors to even more globalization, which was supposed to bring the cost of production down [34]. From individual rights during globalization, the emphasis has finally moved now to individual rights of migrants. The question of immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylees, asylum seekers, indigenous populations, aborigines, women, LGBT populations, etc., has largely been ignored by classical geopolitics because the agency or power of these populations was low. These populations were not seen as significant actors in the geopolitical game. They were always marginalized. Critical geopolitics, from the point of view of feminist authors, did not address the issue in full, but this is somehow changing. In his latest book about hidden geopolitics, John Agnew devotes an entire chapter called “The Asymmetric Border, The U.S. place in the World and the Refugee Panic of 2018” [35]. According to him, there cannot be separation between foreign policy and domestic policy when refugees from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan are the result of American actions in these countries. On the same grounds, there is no separation between foreign policy and domestic policy when refugees from Honduras, Salvador, Colombia, and other Latin American countries flee to the United

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States because of inequality and violence, in which the United States played a huge role [36]. The business world takes everything that can contribute to value creation, whatever the source of value creation. Capitalizing on the feminist proposal, management theories will incorporate the issue of gender in its various economic dimensions. The inclusion of gender theories in business can be justified by an increase of economic performance of the corporation generated by the inclusion of women at all levels of the company, including the Board of Directors. If there is proof that having women in the Board of Directors contributes to value creation, there is no reason for the corporation not to coopt them [37]. Finally, the feminist approach is very useful for business when it comes to values pushed forward by managers, employees, suppliers, or customers in different aspects of corporation life: management of the workforce, relations with competitors, suppliers, and clients, and for the messages in communication campaigns [38]. Masculine vs. feminine values are part of the cultural analysis for companies, and this is something we are going to look at later in this chapter.

4.1.2

Feminist Epistemology

The main theoretical contribution of feminist geopolitics is in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Critical geopolitics believes the production of knowledge based on science is something that can and should be challenged on the grounds that there is not one unique epistemological method. Feminist geopolitics proposes other ways of investigation such as reflexive methods or “non-scientific methods.” Taking the example of African and Middle East situations, Nicola Pratt believes that the use of personal narratives (personal experience) as the main source for research is motivated by the need to challenge orientalist, Eurocentric, and masculinist epistemologies that continue to dominate the study of international relations. Feminist researchers, as well as historians of marginalized groups/classes, have long been champions of narratives/life/stories/oral history methodology as a way of bridging personal and public narratives and give voice to those ignored by conventional scholarship. It is easier today to capitalize on oral history than before because of modern, digital ways to record personal experiences and narratives. It is also easier today to disseminate oral history because of the Internet and unlimited possibilities to make these personal experiences and narratives available to everyone [39]. There was a debate among the Greek philosophers about the best way to transmit knowledge. On one side, the proponents of oral transmission of knowledge praised the importance of poetry, public declamation, and community-based knowledge, while written transmission of knowledge (prosaic formulation) praised the importance of solitary and unbiased transmission. The oral transmission, which was the mode of choice for the philosophers of Antiquity, ultimately gave way to written form, first in Greece, and afterward in Western countries because of its unlimited

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capacity of storage, and its unmediated transmission since there was no need for human intercession in the learning process. It was open to anybody who could read rather than to an elite group of “poets” and disciples who were trained to memorize and recite. The written transmission was, however, not the choice made by other cultures, in which oral transmission continued to be the only channel for the transmission of knowledge. In contrast to archival material, which is praised by classical and critical geopolitics consisting of cognitive, textual, and visual representations, personal narratives and oral histories uncover the voice of those underprivileged persons whose activism is not necessarily documented. Similarly, the use of personal narratives helps to avoid overlooking small organizations that do not have resources to collect and catalog their archives or to make such archives available to other institutions. In that respect, narrative approaches contribute to the diversification of voices. This is where feminist geopolitics departs from critical geopolitics. According to feminist geopolitics, reading and critiquing policy statements, deconstructing the underlying discourse, or interpreting movies, as proposed by critical geopolitics, is a necessary step, but this is not enough. What feminist geopolitics wants to do is to speak to real people in real places, especially people who rarely have been the object of investigation and places that have rarely been identified as geopolitical spaces. In short, feminist geopolitics wants to give names to people and flesh to the bones of a critical investigation. To do that, feminist geopolitics accepts nonrepresentational ways of understanding geopolitical space in the form of emotions, affect, and personal experience. In her paper, Rachel Pain proposes to take account of fear as an important part of the geopolitics of emotions because emotional topographies clearly identify some places as places of fear or absent from fear [40]. Emotions are important in epistemology because, according to Donna Haraway, knowledge is not only situated in time and space. It is also situated in a physical body because only people (individuals) can produce knowledge. Knowledge can be transmitted from one individual to the other through a learning process. There is, therefore, a question of the nature of knowledge transmitted. Is it personal knowledge or general knowledge? If it is personal knowledge, it is inituitu personae, vested in only one person. Science becomes an individual science in that case. This person can decide to share the knowledge or keep it confidential. Even if the knowledge is shared with 1 million persons, knowledge is unique because it is intimate, locked in only one individual. That approach is contrary to scientific knowledge, which is general knowledge. General knowledge is not associated to one individual even if inventions and innovations can be traced to easily identifiable individuals. General knowledge is replicated easily because it is rendered anonymous and universal. There is no need any more for the generator of knowledge to personally share the knowledge. Knowledge has been codified and classified. It has become objectified. Modern science, therefore, is anonymous, universal, and objectified. This is the domain of classical geopolitics while feminist geopolitics wants to highlight the possibility of individual knowledge, a knowledge that is not codified, classified, and made anonymous. Knowledge has been established in the Western world as extrinsic knowledge, having a gaze from nowhere. The opposite, in the form of intimate, or embodied knowledge has been

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proscribed and all manifestations of intrinsic knowledge rejected, together with people who were accused of practicing intrinsic knowledge such as witchdoctors, voodoo, marabouts, mentalists, shamans, and other witches. Not only have these people been rejected, but they have been persecuted too, and in many cases exterminated. This is how extrinsic and “objective” knowledge has conquered the mind, by physically eliminating other forms of knowledge. Intrinsic knowledge can be of use for geopolitics, especially when general knowledge, so praised by classical geopolitics, is unable to explain a situation. As opposed to general knowledge, “reflexive relation” proposed by feminist geopolitics is interesting for politics and businesses because, instead of using a gaze from nowhere supposed to be exterior and objective, Sandra Harding starts with the observer’s point of view and how the observer perceives and understands the world. Reflexive status in politics refers to individual actions of the leader. The leader is the only one to take a decision, so the reflexive stage is a very important one. There are legions of examples when other people could not understand the leader’s decision, which defied logic and was known only to the leader. In business, reflection is very common in the artistic and craftsmen realms, where intuition and talent are inherent qualities. They are unique, so the decisions and productions are unique, too. For instance, the designer in the fashion industry will look for inspiration, intuition, and what they personally consider to be beautiful, while the nez (the fragrance designer) will also look for inspiration and intuition in designing a new fragrance. On the management level, reflection is an essential element of leadership, because akin to the political realm, the decisions of a business leader are not necessarily understood by their collaborators. The emphasis on the narrative and testimonials is very interesting for business authors and political leaders because they learn from one another. Very often, it is impossible to bring evidence about the decision-making process for a major decision, so the only way to have a clue is to ask people who participated in it. It can be a biography, an autobiography, or an interview. The autobiographies of Winston Churchill, Obama, and Putin are among the bestsellers of biographies of political leaders, but the autobiographies of Steve Jobs, Phil Knight, and the Vanderbilts can compare to them. Business authors do not hesitate to interview people (usually insiders) to gain the most information possible. This is how the authors of Barbarians at the Gate, a book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco presented their methodology: “Ninety-five percent of the material in these pages was taken from more than 100 interviews conducted between January and October 1989 in New York, Atlanta, Washington, Winston-Salem, Connecticut, and Florida. In large part due to contacts we made while working at the Journal, we were able to interview at length every major figure involved in the story as well as scores of minor ones” [41]. Classical geopolitics usually discards intrinsic knowledge because classical geopolitics bases its forecasts and predictions on an ever-increasing amount of data and fine-tuned forecasting methods, which give it the illusion of scientific enquiry ending in probabilistic outcomes. Despite all efforts, forecasts are not infallible in economy. Forecasts are even more difficult to make when it comes to armed conflicts. That is

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what Hegre et al. tried to do in 2013 when they wanted to predict conflicts for the years 2010–2050. In doing so, they used indicators such as population size, infant mortality rates, demographic composition, education levels, oil dependence, ethnic cleavages, and neighborhood characteristics. They predicted a drop in conflicts probability from about 15 percent in 2009 to 7 percent in 2050, the main factor for the decrease being poverty reduction and demographic variables [42]. The more variables we get, the better the prediction is, if we follow the quantitative approach. Many political and business leaders find solace in batteries of data, which are supposed to explain all situations and forecast all outcomes. They, however, forget one thing, which is the irrationality of human behavior, especially the behavior of voters. Who can predict election results, for instance? A tiny victory of 50.9 percent against 49.1 percent in favor of President Lula in Brazil during the General Election in 2022 sets a radically different course for the country for the next 4 years. The US senate is notorious for a tiny majority of just one senator out of 100. Since all states have two senators, Wyoming with about 579,000 population has the same number of senators as California with more than 39 million population, so a tiny change in Wyoming electorate can change the whole Senate. People vote according to their conviction (this is what all pre-electoral surveys show) but also according to their daily mood, and this is impossible to predict. Motivation is a central piece for voters and leaders. If the motivation of leaders is to leave their mark in history or to pursue a cause known only to them (messianic complex, vengeance, paranoia, megalomania), their actions will be labeled as irrational, and they cannot be forecasted by the usual methods of classical geopolitics. There are thousands of military analysists in the world, but who could have predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine in February 2022 and who can say what were the real motives for Vladimir Putin for doing so? Feminist geopolitics do not have answers to all questions, they cannot predict everything. They just say that the methods used by classical and critical geopolitics should be complemented by methods putting the individual in the center of the game. They start by arguing that the human factor is crucial in all sciences, especially in human sciences, where there is no compulsory causality. Instead of causality, they propose equifinality, that is the possibility that “several explanatory paths, combinations, and sequences lead to the same outcome,” or multifinality (many outcomes consistent with a particular value of one variable).6 This is exactly what happened during the September 1983 incident when the human factor was decisive in preventing a nuclear war. When Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer of the nuclear warning system Oko in the Soviet Union registered in September 1983 nuclear attacks from the United States, he should have immediately launched a counterattack on the United States according to the input/nuclear attack on Soviet Union—output/

6 Equifinality and multifinality are particularily pertinent in psychological studies. See Susan NolenHoeksema, Edward Watkins, ‘A Heuristic for Developing Transdiagnostic Models of Psychopathology: Explaining Multifinality and Divergent Trajectories,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 6, No. 6, November 2011, pp. 589–609

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nuclear attack on the United States causality. Stanislav Petrov chose to ignore that attack because he did not believe that the United States would launch an attack, so he did not retaliate. It was proven later that there was a technical malfunction of the Soviet system. This incident shows, however, that the automation of reactions could have dramatic consequences. In the time of AI and ChatGPT, human decisions have become optional. As Michael Klare has indicated: “A time could come when machines on all sides will dictate the dynamics of a future nuclear crisis” [43]. Human decision filled with intuition and “irrational” behavior is still needed in critical times according to feminist authors. Science is presented as providing objective and clear insights to guide our decision-making in geopolitics. It means that humans practice some sort of “divine methodology” because they view themselves as separate from the environment and can observe the environment from outside, like God observing Creation. In that sense, they can “see everything from nowhere.” This is due to the Cartesian separation between the observer and the observable or between subject and object, which permits us to have a rational, objective, scientific analysis of a situation. Critical and feminist intellectuals reject the possibility that science is unquestionable, since for them all knowledge, scientific knowledge included, is situated. Carl Sagan, renowned for his contribution to science, was aware of the propension among scientists when he observed: “Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best one that we have. In this respect as in many others, it is like democracy” [44]. In the same vein, the classical understanding of science has been called by Donna Haraway the “god trick” [45] of objective, scientific authority. The “god trick” of scientific knowledge portrays science as unquestionable and universal, founded on an ethical neutrality, and assuming unquestionable facts and laws of nature. The claim that scientific knowledge is immune from ideological considerations was mainly challenged by the Marxist tradition of dialectical materialism. The Marxist tradition rejects the empiricist method according to which objects can be understood independently of observing objects. According to Marx, subject and object are not regarded as independent entities but as relationships one to another. The subject is seen as both structuring and being structured by the object. Since the subject in that relation is a human being, the relation with the object is of necessity founded on social and cultural understandings of humans. These understandings change as often as humans find it necessary to change. Therefore, there is no “god trick” in science. According to David Harvey, “The principles of scientific method (whatever they may be) are normative and not factual statements. The principles cannot, therefore, be justified and validated by appeal to science’s own methods. The principles have to be validated by appeal to something external to science itself. Presumably, this ‘something’ lies in realms of metaphysics, religion, morality, ethics, convention, or human practice” [46]. Feminist authors complete Harvey’s enumeration of realms by adding a possibility of a gendered understanding of science. Sandra Harding in The Science Question in Feminism (1986) posits that there is a standpoint theory, a feminist theoretical perspective that argues that knowledge stems from social position in which genders have different statuses. The feminist

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perspective denies that traditional science is objective and suggests that research and theory have ignored and marginalized women and feminist ways of thinking. In her preface, Sandra Harding states that “science today serves primarily regressive social tendencies; and the social structure of science, many of its applications and technologies, its modes of defining research problems and designing experiments, its ways of constructing and conferring meanings are not only sexist but also racist, classist, and culturally coercive” [47]. It means that science, from a social position and the dominant social position that makes sciences, is invariably represented by a group of white, wealthy, educated males. Science is, therefore, a masculinized tradition of scientific rhetoric, and the concept of objectivity can be challenged. As far as the first assertion is concerned (“masculinist” science), Susan Hekman has claimed that “feminism like postmodernism poses a challenge to modern thought in every discipline from philosophy to physics, but the cutting edge of both critiques is to be found in those disciplines that study ‘man’. Both feminism and postmodernism are especially concerned with challenging one of the defining characteristics of modernism: the anthropocentric definition of knowledge. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been defined in terms of ‘man,’ the subject, and espouses an epistemology that is radically homocentric” [48]. Since Enlightenment, epistemology places women in an inferior position, outside the realm of rationality, and challenging the priority of “man” in the modern episteme must be fundamental to any feminist program. Evelyn Fox Keller goes further by asserting that modern Enlightenment science has incorporated a belief system that equates objectivity with masculinity and a set of cultural values that simultaneously elevates what is defined as scientific and what is defined as masculine [49]. If classical geopolitics and to some extent critical geopolitics are composed of a male group of people, their proposals will be questioned by feminist geopolitics. All proposals such as state-centricity or scale alternatives to the state, the materiality of nature, or the “scientific methods” presented by classical and critical geopolitics will be questioned. Feminist Epistemology and ‘Science Wars’ As one of the founders of feminist epistemology, Sandra Harding participated in “Science Wars,” in the 1990s. The Science Wars were a series of intellectual exchanges between scientific realists on one side and postmodernist critics on the other, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry. They took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul Gross, Jean Bricmont, and Alan Sokal) argued that scientific knowledge is real, classless, and genderless and accused the postmodernists of having rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method, empiricism, and scientific knowledge. This (continued)

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is exactly the position of classical geopolitics, whose authors put their faith in science and rationality. In Higher Superstition published in 1994 [50], the scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt accused postmodernists of anti-intellectualism. They suggested that postmodernists knew little about the scientific theories they criticized and practiced poor scholarship for political reasons. The book is admittedly polemic, the choice of words is admittedly provocative to such an extent that the critics of Higher Superstition see the authors using the very same methods that they denunciate [51]. Higher Superstition inspired a New York Academy of Sciences conference titled “The Flight from Science and Reason,” organized by Gross, Levitt, and Gerald Holdon.7 Attendees of the conference agreed upon the intellectual inconsistency of how laymen, non-scientists, and social studies intellectuals dealt with science. As a conclusion, scientists from natural sciences did not want that social scientists enter their domain. During the conference, they considered social scientists as anti-intellectual because they do not follow the methods that natural scientists consider to be true. This is exactly what critical theory challenges. It is, therefore, easy to reject a priori other methods, other methodologies, other investigation approaches if one considers its own method to be orthodox. Using a religious analogy, the others are heterodox and even heretic in their approach. Finally, the accusation of “un-scientific method” resonates with geopolitics because in their time, Karl Haushofer and his “Geopolitik” had been accused by Isaiah Browman and others of being pseudo-scientists. As a response to the conference, Social Text, a Duke University publication of postmodern critical theory, compiled a “Science Wars” issue containing brief articles by postmodernist academics in the social sciences and the humanities, who emphasized the roles of society and politics in science [52]. In these articles, authors like Sandra Harding and Andrew Ross considered that the attack on social sciences was a conservative reaction to the emergence of new trends in science. The war between social and natural sciences has influence on geopolitics. The main battle is between “universalism” and “particularism.” Either human rights, democracy, and freedom are universal, and they should be defended as such across time and geography, or they are social constructs, and in that case, there is a variability and relativity of freedom, human rights, and democracy. Some countries such as the United States and France, constantly defend the (continued) 7

The whole issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol 775, N°1 (June 1995), has been devoted to the conference (572 pages) with communications titles such as ‘Sucking with Vampires’, ‘In prize of intolerance for charlatanism in academia’, ‘Radical environmental philosophy and the assault on reason’, or ‘Voodoo sociology: Recent developments in the sociology of sciences’, and others.

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idea of universality of values, but what happens if, in their own countries, there is a consensus within the scientific community (especially for social sciences and humanities) that universal values do not exist and that everything is a social construct? Will governments of the United States and France go against the consensus of the scientific community in their own countries, or will they continue to defend “universal values?” The outcome of this battle will have tectonic influence on domestic policies and international affairs. If there is no binary approach such as inside/outside and if there is a consensus that universal values do not exist, these countries will have problems in defending “universal values” abroad. “Science Wars” is the consequence of Thomas Khun’s (1922–1996) ideas about scientific paradigms. He sought to demonstrate that scientific theories are social constructs. Thomas Khun’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962 fully opened the study of science to new disciplines, and feminist geopolitics embarked on the idea to provide new methods of investigation rejected by classical geopolitics [53]. Kuhn described the development of scientific knowledge not as a linear production in truth and understanding, but as a series of periodic revolutions that overturned the old scientific order and replaced it with new orders (what he called “paradigms”). But, if knowledge creation is not linear, is it sequential? Is it possible that a society can bypass paradigms and have access to the latest developments? If yes, that is the theory of leapfrogging, permitting to pass from one paradigm to another without following a sequential suite of paradigms. It resonates very much with politics and business. The theory of leapfrogging permits newly independent states after the decolonization to implement what they considered to be modernity, without following the sequential development of Western countries. Development studies are full of reports about countries that succeeded in leapfrogging and of others that did not, for a variety of reasons [54]. In the current context of climate change and sustainability imperatives, it is suggested that developing countries must leapfrog and implement immediately clean energy, sustainability goals, and circular economy instead of following the sequential path given by developed countries. Leapfrogging is very much present in business, too. A typical example is given by Elon Musk. He does not need to be in the car business for 100 years before launching an electrical vehicle. He can do it immediately and leapfrog the decades of knowledge accumulated by Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler. He does not need to be in the space business for decades before launching his SpaceX program. He can do it immediately and leapfrog the decades of knowledge accumulated by NASA, Roscosmos in Russia, or CSAC in China. Leapfrogging can also happen on the consumer side. Many customers in the emerging countries in Africa and Asia have passed directly from no fixed telephone lines to smartphones. There is no lengthy learning curve to adopt innovations in mobile telecommunication. While in the past, it was possible to reserve the most innovative products to a certain number of advanced markets while old generations of products were routinely sent to emerging

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markets, this is not the case anymore.8 The latest iPhone can be sold even in the most remote island in Indonesia or in the forest of Amazonia at the same time it is sold in New York, provided simply that there is mobile telecommunication coverage and enough money to pay for the device. Following Thomas Khun, some radical philosophers, such as Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in religion) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with equal validity as did scientific explanations. In his book Against Method, he gives the example of Galileo’s trial and the position of the Church at that time. For him, the Church’s position was coherent and rational according to the situated knowledge at that time: “The Church at the time of Galileo not only kept closer to reason as defined then and, in part, even now: it also considered the ethical and social consequences of Galileo ‘s views. Its indictment of Galileo was rational and only opportunism and a lack of perspective can demand a revision” [55]. This concurs to his position that neither science nor rationality is a universal measure of excellence. Science and rationality are situated, so the position of the Church from the seventeenth century can be as rational as is the position of Academy of Sciences about quantum mechanics today. Is it possible to reconcile classical, critical, and feminist geopolitics on the question of science? Contrary to some authors who tend to oppose “scientific and objective” knowledge to situated knowledge, Arturo Escobar has a midway approach by putting the emphasis on plurality of scientific methods, so the “objectivity” and “subjectivity” can coexist as methods. These two methods can be convergent and complementary.9 Methodological convergence means that “natural scientists” must accept the idea that their natural laws are not only laws but also narratives, while the proponents of situated knowledge should not dismiss “objective truth” as something that does not exist at all. That is what Steven Shapin tried to do in 1998. In his article “Placing the view from nowhere,” he starts by presenting both views. All scientific knowledge is situated in time and place on one side, and scientific knowledge is accepted as universal because of the trust scientists give to each other and the trust that non-scientists give to scientists: “The modern science is no less trust-dependent than science in the past or than other forms of modern culture . . . The condition of scientists knowing their discipline’s knowledge, and of the laity knowing what scientists know, is a massively important solution—or series of solutions—to problems of trust” [56]. Steven Shapin makes a convergence from

8

Not only consumers from emerging markets demand latest products, but companies originating from these countries become on par with some developed market’s companies. For Antoine von Agtmael, ‘The era of emerging markets companies being nothing more than unsophisticated makers of low-cost, low-tech products is rapidly coming to a close.’ See his article, ‘The Emerging Markets Century Revisited’, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 45, N°1, July 2009, pp. 127–136, p. 127. 9 See the part II of his book, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018, devoted to rationalism, ontological dualism, and relationality, pp. 79–104.

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the position of a sociologist. Is there a possibly to reach convergence from the business point of view? If knowledge is a social construct, can corporations produce knowledge, or can knowledge be produced in a corporation? Scientific discoveries and innovations come from two sources: publicly funded laboratories and privately founded laboratories. There is an attribution bias because the great majority of patents are registered by private corporations while the process leading to a discovery is very often a mix of public and private efforts [57]. Private research is recognized and accepted as a legitimate source of knowledge production, on the same level, if not more, than public research. The vaccine against COVID-19 was produced by private research in companies like Pfizer and Moderna and not by public research institutions like The Institut Pasteur, the main vaccine public research institution in France. Scientific research covers social sciences and natural sciences. In social sciences, knowledge creation massively comes from publicly funded institutions (publicly funded universities). Practically all Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences have been awarded to university professors (mainly public universities), never to the chief economist of Citibank or the chief economist of Microsoft even if the impact of Citibank or Microsoft is much more significant on the daily lives of millions of people worldwide. There are private universities that contribute very much to knowledge creation such as Harvard University in the United States, Keio University in Japan, and FGV in Brazil, but even these institutions receive funds from public sources. The business world is open to situated knowledge and feminist geopolitics because the manager and the consumer live in a certain habitat (a situated environment if we take the terms from the critical theory). They do not live and operate in a vacuum. That is why the study of environment is a compulsory path of managers’ training through the form of a PESTEL analysis (P for political, E for the economic, S for the sociocultural, T for technological, E for environmental, and L for legal environment). Originally created as ESTP by Francis Aguilar, the analysis was expanded in the 1980s by the addition of legal and technological aspects of environment [58]. All books on strategy and marketing contain an analysis of PESTEL because it gives a comprehensive view about what the corporation should know when approaching a market. As for the investigation methods, the economic and technological parts of PESTEL are usually identified as a quantitative analysis. Managers count money and people. They organize supply chains and manufacturing operations. All this is the reign of statistics, facts, materiality, and objectivity. The other three elements of PESTEL analysis (political, social-cultural, and legal) use qualitative methods. Qualitative research uses a plurality of investigation methods such as reflexive or intrinsic methods of investigation (analysis of narratives, life stories, in-depth interviews, surveys, oral history, etc.). These three elements of PESTEL have much more to do with critical and feminist geopolitics. Corporations, therefore, combine all methods of investigation, primarily because of their pragmatic mindset. If the investigation method is useful in value creation, they will adopt it, and they will not ask if it refers to a classical, critical, or feminist method of investigation. Feminist geopolitics shares many elements with critical geopolitics, among them the knowledge/power nexus and social constructivism. Since these elements have

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been discussed in the chapter on critical geopolitics, there is no need to repeat them here. That is why we will follow the same outline as for classical geopolitics and try to see the different and salient elements feminist geopolitics proposes in space, state, and power analysis.

4.2

Feminist Geopolitics and Space

Feminist authors agree with critical geopolitics that physical geography is a fact, but what people do with space is socially constructed. Instead of talking about space, feminist authors prefer to talk about scale. Scaling is not a new phenomenon in geopolitics. Classical geopolitics has traditionally identified four scales in the following order of importance close to the classification given by Duran et al. in the previous chapter: the global (the scale of the world as a whole), the international (the scale of relations between the states), the domestic-national (the scale of individual states), and the regional (the scale of the parts of the state). World politics was considered as working from the global scale down to regional and city level, a classical top-down approach. It is at the global and international scales, therefore, that the word “geopolitics” was usually applied from the classical point of view. Critical geopolitics introduced new scales such as cities, bypassing the level of the region or global. Feminist geopolitics goes even further in introducing the body of the individual as the main scale of geopolitics. This is where feminist geopolitics has innovated most and departed from critical geopolitics. For feminist geopolitics, the connectivity between people and place is a complex process, which does not obey binary explanations. For instance, an individual can have attachments and empathy to several places: a place where the person is born, a place where the person works, a place where the person is feeling the most at ease, a place where this person wants to be buried after death. It is, therefore, impossible to identify or to essentialize a person with one unique place. Consequently, geopolitics does not occur in fixed physical geography. Geopolitics occurs where the person is, and this place can change drastically according to circumstances, especially for migrant, displaced, or expat populations. If geopolitics occurs where the person is, geopolitical space can be everything: a dancing ballroom, a kitchen, a classroom, a secretary’s desk, any place where people live. For Timothy Blanning, popular places of power emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when centers of power moved from the royal court to the public sphere, and there is no better representation of public sphere than the theater, the library or the coffee shop, all places where people gather and create public opinion [59]. Maybe the most ubiquitous place for international politics is the hotel bar. Very often, this is the place where decisions are made, information is passed, people and goods are bought and sold, etc. “Rick’s Café Americain” in the movie Casablanca (1943) is a fictitious bar, and one of the most iconic in movie history. In this bar, it was possible to find German soldiers, French resistance, French administrators of Morocco, Americans, British, local Moroccans, and other Arabic population, and of course Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid

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Bergman, all of them drinking side by side, intriguing and plotting one against the other [60]. Another famous bar was the bar in Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, featured in the movie Backstabbing for Beginners (2018). In between the Gulf Wars in the 1990s, the bar was the place where spies, politicians, UN officials, businesspeople, and journalists exchanged information, rumor, and plots. Together with another hotel, Al Hamra, this was the place where international journalists have been hosted. They received the same information; they intoxicated each other with the help of spies and people who had an interest in selling a story. This was the place where narratives about the Gulf Wars took shape, not in the corridors of the United Nations or in the White House [61]. Everyone participated in storytelling, not only the politicians and journalists but also singers and musicians, bartenders, waiters, prostitutes, and security personnel. In the electric atmosphere of Baghdad at that time, information was the currency everyone was looking for, and everyone had something to sell. In a more futuristic environment, the Mos Aisley Cantina in Star Wars Episode IV: The New Hope (1997) is a bar where creatures from all sides of the Galaxy gather to drink, plot, and gossip. This is also the place where information, illegal products, and mercenaries can be found [62]. For the feminist writers, any place where people live, exchange information, contribute to the economy or the military is a space for geopolitics. Simply, we are not used to seeing them as the space for international politics because of the dominant position of classical geopolitics preferring to put the emphasis on “high politics” places of power such as Ministries, army headquarters, or political party headquarters, rather than on “low politics” places of power.

4.2.1

Identity and Space

For feminist geopolitics, any place where people are is the place of geopolitics, but it does not mean that any individual can claim any place as their own. The claim of space ownership in a democratic regime obeys the rule of majority. Classical geopolitics accepts without reservation representational democracy by which people elect people who can rule over them. Having a majority gives power over other people in the state and over the space that is attributed to the state. This power is problematic when there is a melange of populations because having a majority can produce marginalization of some populations simply because they are in the minority. In their relation to space, it means that these minorities do not own their space, even if they have been living there since time immemorial. If feminist geopolitics does not want to overturn representational democracy as a system, it can challenge some elements of the system, such as the definition of a majority and how people are counted. These are fundamental questions because they produce majorities and minorities, they produce power, and they produce space in which the power of majority or minority is exercised. Several problems occur. The first stems from the feminist

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rejection of clear-cut categories, which essentialize people and put them in clearly designated boxes. These authors reject the “fetishization” of identity, especially when the identity is associated to racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds.10 From the classical geopolitics point of view, the majority and minority seem to be easy to discover. It is only a question of enumeration when a state or another authority counts people in a census of population. The reality is much more complex because of possible manipulation during the census exercise. The first discussion is about absolute, relative, and qualified majorities. A qualified majority of 66 percent or 75 percent as opposed to the simple majority of 50 percent +1 is very often used when a change of constitution is required or when important decisions must be made. As an example, the Council of the European Union estimates that a qualified majority is reached if two conditions are simultaneously met: 55 percent of member states vote in favor (in practice, this means 15 out of 27), and the proposal is supported by member states representing at least 65 percent of the total EU population.11 Why it is 65 percent and not 50 percent or 75 percent remains a mystery. The second discussion is about the classification of people into categories during the census exercise. If they want to manipulate the results of the census, states have a large choice of methods. They can use fragmentation, amalgamation, omission, or invention. The first and the simplest method is omission, when the state simply does not put the name of the ethnic, religious, or linguistic group in the census form, and there is no blank space that people can use to write in their group name. Instead, the last option is “other,” where all groups are melted into one. This happened in the Balkans, where the ethnic and religious kaleidoscope is one of the most complicated. From time to time, groups appear like the “Salonika Jews” in the census of population in Greece before WWII, or “Macedonians” or “Pomaks” in the census of population in Bulgaria after WWII, only to disappear from subsequent questionnaires. The situation in the Balkans varies very much from one country to another. While in Greece, no national minority is recognized (the Greek census questionnaire does not have a question about ethnic groups), Romania recognizes 20 “historical minorities” having more than 1000 persons each. These minorities have the ability to enumerate themselves during the census, and the rules in the country permit a representation of minorities in Parliament [63]. In Asia, some groups are systematically omitted, either because the country does not want to collect information about minorities like in Turkey (the number of Kurds or Armenians can only be estimated) or because the country ignored the existence of minorities for a long time as in the case of the Burakumin or Ainus in Japan. The second option for the government is amalgamation when one ethnic group is amalgamated to another, usually a bigger one. For instance, in the census of

See the definition of ‘fetishization’ in Martijn van Beek, ‘Beyond Identity Fetishism and Communal conflict in Ladakh and the limits of autonomy,’ in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 15, N ° 4, November 2000, pp. 525–69, p. 527. 11 https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/voting-system/qualified-majority 10

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population in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before WWII, Montenegrins and Macedonians were not listed as ethnic groups and were identified as Serbs, while the Muslims from Bosnia were split into Serbs and Croats. There can be huge amalgamations like Arabs, Slavs, Hispanics, or Asians in the census questionnaire. An example comes from Singapore, where there is an amalgamated category called Chinese, without giving a possibility to split the Chinese group into Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, or the possibility to list a mixed population called Peranakan [64]. The practice of amalgamation exists also in Mexico, where people of African descent do not have the possibility to express their specificity. African slaves outnumbered the European settlers in the past, but because of the numerous “interracial marriages,” especially with the local, indigenous population, they have lost their roots and have systematically been categorized as “mestizos” or “mixed” population, which encompasses all groups of people: indigenous (Amerindians), Africans, and Spanish. Therefore, the “mestizos” group is the most important in Mexico (estimates vary from 40 percent to 90 percent of the total population in Mexico), even though its definition is not clear. The third option is fragmentation. Instead of showing a large group that could claim specific rights, the state suppresses the generic name and introduces separate names to divide the group. This is what happened in Romania under Ceausescu with the German minority. Instead of having one denomination such as “German,” Ceausescu introduced Saxons, Landler, Swabian, etc., arguing that when they arrived in Romania some 800 years back, Germany did not exist as a state, so the designations used at the time of them coming to Romania should be used [65]. Fragmentation is also present in Lebanon, where the different religious groups that share power are numerous. Instead of having two broad groups: Christians and Muslims, there are 18 groups, among them 12 Christian groups and six Muslim groups. Under these circumstances, having a majority of 50 percent is impossible. Finally, there is invention. The state invents a new ethnic group that did not exist before. It is not the same as amalgamation because amalgamation replaces previous groups. In the case of invention, the new name appears on top of the existing names, and the state hopes that in due time people will identify themselves with the new name and abandon the old one. This is what happened when in 1961, the group “Yugoslavs” was added to the census of population and more than 700,000 people chose this name in the census of 1991. The ethnicity of Kirghiz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Turkmens is subject to dispute. Their existence can be the fruit of the Soviet invention, or it may result from a genuine demand coming from these populations. In all cases, these countries are now independent countries, and the existence of these nations is not disputed anymore. Deciding what categories of people to put on the census sheet is a matter of epic battles in countries like the United Kingdom or the United States because there is a demand to introduce neutral ethnic groups or mixed ancestry groups [66]. The front page of the census sheet asks people to fill in the form, but there is also the back side of the paper with instructions. These instructions are very important because they can influence answers. For instance, instructions can stipulate that only one language is used to fill in the form and conduct interviews. This way the

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interviewer can influence the interviewee or even record down whatever they want because the interviewee does not speak the language of the census and cannot check what has been written. The census of population is a fantastic opportunity for the state to classify people and assign them names according to certain places. The Census of population in the United States is interesting because the Census 2020 wanted to show more diversity than before. However, the categories are inconsistent. Some categories make a reference to a “race” such as “white,” while other categories seem to be geographically defined such as “Asian,” “Hawaiian,” or “Pacific Islander.” It is never indicated what is meant by “Asian” or “African American,” but the search for diversity has introduced a category “Asian alone non-Hispanic.” What does it mean? Is there an Asian Hispanic population? If yes, which one is it? The list of Hispanic and Latino countries does not give any “Hispanic” Asian place, state, or population. We can just assume that this is a reference to the Philippines, where the official language was Spanish for three centuries, but it is not anymore. Every country can identify a population with a certain territory and people do not have a choice when they answer the census. It can be a place holding a modern name like Benin, so the inhabitants are called Beninois, but it can be an old name like Dahomey, so the same inhabitants from Benin can be called Dahomey people (after the old name of Benin) or Fons (after the tribe that founded Dahomey in 1600). There are already 18 groups of people officially recognized in Lebanon, and they are all called Lebanese. However, they can also be called Levantine if we enlarge the region and include Syria, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, because that was the name given to the area by the Europeans in the fifteenth century. They can also be called Phoenicians if we go back at least 3000 years in history. It is up to the state to decide the category to be used during the census of population, and very often the category refers to geography and the space these populations have occupied in history. One of the most striking examples is given by China because it has a large territory and a very long history, so many upheavals in the linkage between people and territory have occurred. Ethnic policy in China China is officially a diverse country. It states that there are 56 ethnic groups but just one Chinese nation. These ethnic groups are called minzu in Mandarin and translated as nationalities (nothing to do with the concept of nationality or citizenship in Western countries) or minorities. When President Xi Jinping launched a book about the future of China, he called it the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation [67]. For China, all members of the 56 groups belong to the Chinese nation. The term “Chinese Nation” is a relatively new term because, for more than 2000, years China used the terms hua and yi, to differentiate between the people of the central part of China and people from the periphery. This is why geography and space are important in the definition of a nation. (continued)

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Liang Qichao (1873–1929) contributed to the creation of the “Chinese nation,” which includes all Chinese ethnicities (both Han and non-Han populations) into a grand unity [68]. Since then, hua has been broadly used as a notion referring to China and the Chinese nation while yi became the synonym of foreigners. China was viewed as the center of the world and “civilized celestial empire and superior state,” while foreign places were imagined as barbaric, backward, and marginalized other, subordinated to China. From the Western point of view, building a synthetic nation is problematic, especially if one component (the Han) represents more than 90 percent of the total population. If the Han population accounts for 1.1 billion people, why do we not call China the Han state instead of China? There are states with a much lower percentage of people belonging to a single group where the state is named after the most important group or where the group is named after the territory. Malays, for instance, represent only 67 percent of the total population, and the country is called Malaysia. Latvians represent 62 percent of the population in Latvia, and the country is called Latvia. The second question is why are there 56 groups in China, and not 57, 22, or 6? In the nineteenth century, there used to be six ethnic groups in China, and this number evolved over time to be fixed at 56 in the 1980s. Among the 56, there are Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Koreans, and Mongolians. They all agreed to be Chinese citizens since they live in China, but it remains unclear if they agreed to be part of the Chinese nation. Maybe Tajiks prefer to be identified as members of the Tajik nation living in China rather than members of the Chinese nation. China did not need to invent everything from scratch in settling the national question. There were precedents in other socialist multiethnic countries at the time of foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union is the most interesting example because it was the first multiethnic socialist state to implement a national policy. The Soviet national policy goes back to 1913 when Stalin wrote a small book called “Marxism and the National Question” [69]. Stalin was not known as a leading theoretician among the Bolsheviks, but he was Georgian, and it seemed appropriate to Lenin that a member of a minority should write about the national question in a multinational socialist state. It was difficult for Stalin to refer to Marx and Engels because their concept of nation and state was largely erratic in theory and in practice. As far as the national question is concerned, he had to look elsewhere. Stalin draws his ideas from the German philosopher Johann Fichte, who in his Addresses to the German Nation in 1808 looked for the distinctiveness of the German nation in its language, culture, and literature [70]. Stalin accepted the culture and language elements and added geography, history, and economic conditions to build his own deterministic definition of nation. He also (continued)

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draws from Georg Hegel the idea of a nation-state, the idea that there is a necessity for nations to have their own nation-state and drew from Lenin his concept of self-determination [71]. Many countries were interested in Stalin’s definition because it is deterministic, and leaders do not want people to choose of their own will. The constitution of the Republic of Cyprus is also deterministic. It is rather clear when it comes to the definition of who is Greek and who is Turkish.12 By an extraordinary suite of circumstances, Stalin had the opportunity to implement his policy with the foundation of the Soviet Union in 1922 and especially after the death of Lenin in 1924. He built the Soviet Union as a federation, and the number of republics matched the number of nations. If there were only 11 republics before 1940, there were 15 of them after WWII with the addition of the three Baltics republics and Moldova. The principle was to assign each republic a nation that holds the sovereignty and to each nation he assigned one republic. If it happens that the ethnogenesis of some titular nations in the Soviet federal system was not firmly established, the Soviet Union implemented the system of korenizatsiya (indigenization). The term comes from “koren,” which means roots, so the link with territorial roots is clear. The existence of a separate population justified the existence of a separate republic [72]. To ensure the rights of the territories, the Soviet constitution of 1936 stressed the fact that all republics can exercise the right of selfdetermination and opt out for independence if they want. This would never happen because of the monopoly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but it gave the Soviet Union huge appeal to many other people outside the Soviet Union to claim the same status as the republics and nations in the Soviet Union. The fact that the republics could become independent permitted the Soviet Union to declare some republics like Ukraine and Belarus as independent states, and they were even founding members of the United Nations. In 1945, in San Francisco, the Soviet Union had three seats (USSR, Ukraine, and Belarus). At that time there were 11 republics in the Soviet Union. It remains unclear why Stalin introduced Ukraine and Belarus and not the other republics as independent states. (continued)

12

Article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus (1960, amended 2013). For the purposes of this Constitution:

1. the Greek Community comprises all citizens of the Republic who are of Greek origin and whose mother tongue is Greek or who share the Greek cultural traditions or who are members of the Greek-Orthodox Church; 2. the Turkish Community comprises all citizens of the Republic who are of Turkish origin and whose mother tongue is Turkish or who share the Turkish cultural traditions or who are Moslems; available on https://www.legislationline.org/documents/action/popup/id/5816

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As the only socialist and a federal state with a national policy, the Soviet Union was clearly a blueprint for the other two socialist states Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. There were two nations, so Czechoslovakia ended up in a federation of two republics, while in Yugoslavia there were five nations and Bosnia shared by three populations, so the decision was to build a federation of six republics. All this was implemented before 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet policy of self-determination and the principle of nationalities was hailed by its instigators as giving freedom to discriminated populations in what was called by Lenin the “Russia as Prison of Nation” under the Tsars [73]. There was no need for China to invent something different. It had just to follow the Soviet example, build China as a federal state, and match the number of republics with the number of nations. This, however, did not happen, and China invented its own model. It first declared that China was a unitary and not a federal state, so republics, especially republics that could exercise the right of self-determination and declare independence were not included. The next step was to declare China a multiethnic state. At the beginning of the communist rule, it was unclear how many nations or minorities there were in China. Since there were serious upheavals like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the national question was put aside, especially because the Han population represented and still represents more than 90 percent of the population, so there were no demands from other ethnic groups to claim collective rights, apart from the Tibetans and Uyghurs. The number of 56 minorities in China was fixed only after the Cultural Revolution and, since then, it has not changed. If China is not a federal country, it still has five autonomous regions because China considers that minorities in these regions deserve some specific rules. These five regions are Xinjiang, Tibet, Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia. The question is unanswered as to why not have 56 autonomous regions and give all minorities, regardless of their demographic strength, a specific region of their own. The colonial system added another layer of complexity in the identification of people and their link to space. Colonial census categories gave names to groups of people, sometimes according to geography. These names were totally new in some cases because there was a desire to equal the name of the geographical space to the name of the population. If there was a territory named South Africa by the colonial power, the colonial power invented the Afrikaners (of Dutch and other European origin), who hold the power in the country, while the rest of the population under the Apartheid regime was divided into several categories including Black and Colored without specific identification.13 If there was a place named Madagascar by the 13 Ken Jordan begins his article about Afrikaner identity by quoting Breyten Breytenbach: ‘We are a bastard people with a bastard language. Ours is a bastard nature. And like all bastards, uncertain

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colonial power, there would be people called Malagasy, even if people may prefer to be called Merina or Makoa. If the colonial power invented the Maghreb, it had to disconnect it from other colonial inventions such as the Middle East and Africa. For that purpose, the population called Maghrebis was also invented by the colonial powers. Building on the work of Edward Said, Arun Appadurai emphasized the role of enumeration as a quintessential orientalist practice bringing together classificatory and exoticizing tendencies. In the colonial imagination, and later, in postcolonial political mobilizations, “statistics are to bodies and social types what maps are for territories: they flatten, and they enclose” [74]. If the bodies are not manipulated by the colonial powers, they can be manipulated by domestic, nationalistic leaders. According to Maja Kovac, nationalism is an element of demographic engineering introduced by political and military leaders who want to change demographic situations in an artificial way [75]. It is essential for the state to have a clear reading of its territory altogether with people who live there. So, in the case of complex situations, the state can be tempted to simplify the situation with the help of ethnic cleansing or population swaps.

4.2.2

The Body as a Geopolitical Scale

If the individual is the finest scale of geopolitics according to feminist geopolitics, the physical form of that individual is their body. So, the body of the individual is geopolitical. The body is the scale of geopolitics because the physical appearance of the individual, the way the individual uses their body, or wears clothing, accessories, or ornaments are geopolitical decisions. The geopolitical decision is the choice of jewels and tattoos, which give the first identification of the person and can easily end in a decision of life and death for that person. The body can also represent geography because geographical elements like maps can be written on bodies, but it can also be the other way around when the territory is represented as a body. For instance, maps can feature corporeal elements or names. It was common for the imperial forces to equate “virgin” lands (undiscovered lands for them) to female virgins and give anatomical names to geographical features like the Sheba’s Breast and the Mouth of Treasure Cave in the King Salomon’s Mines from 1885 [76]. Representations of the body, often the body of a woman, serve as a proxy for the national body, thus rendering these bodies vulnerable to both symbolic and physical violence. Sara Smith investigated why bodies and individual decisions on intimate bodily life—marriage, birth, contraception, and so forth—can acquire geopolitical significance. She investigates how bodies can contribute to the construction and maintenance of the territory by affecting demographic data. She used as an example the

of their identity, we have begun to cling to the concept of purity.’ In Ken Jordan, ‘The Origins of the Afrikaners and their Language, 1652–1720: A Study in Miscegenation and Creole,’ Race and Class, Vol. 15, N°4, 1974, pp. 461–495, p. 461

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Ladakh region of Northern India, which is characterized by intense, historically rooted territorial conflicts. Marriage and the reproductive capacity of bodies are often regarded as strategic decisions decided by the community and not by individuals [77]. In that region, the religious identity is expected to shape voting patterns. Hence, the marriage between those of different religions and the relative growth of religious populations determine majorities and minorities and their power and ownership of the territory. Marriage is a geopolitical tool. How did the emperors and kings negotiate with or wage war on others? Sometimes on the battlefield, but at other times territory itself was expanded through strategic marriages. Mixed marriages that were celebrated as a symbol of union and integration in the case of Ukrainian–Russian marriages suddenly became a liability and the problem in the aftermath of the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022. In the case of the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, “among the first targets and victims were people whose existence was a living period or the possibility of living with the ‘Other’: the so-called ‘mixed’ or interethnic couples and families, people of mixed background. These people were considered doubly traitorous and were often rejected as ‘Others’ by one group and as ‘disloyal’ to the other” [78]. In wars, rape as a weapon was military strategy and still is in many cases. Flesh, Bones, and Geopolitics According to Deborah Dixon, the body is where geopolitics happens to be and especially the feminine body that gives birth. According to feminist geopolitics, critical geopolitics is excellent in criticizing discourse, but it fails to identify a material state that could be the container of geopolitical life. Feminist authors like Jo Sharp offer that material state in the form of the human body: “We sought to put the body at the heart of geopolitics as a counterbalance to the overwhelming discursive nature of critical geopolitics” [79]. The body is the first property of individuals and sometimes the only property they have. The body as a tool for procreation, the body as a cannon fodder, the body that can be sold temporarily or permanently is a subject of geopolitics, and an actor of geopolitics. There are many reasons to consider the body as an economic and/or political subject. If the body is private property belonging exclusively to the individual, there cannot be political, economic, or military power forcing people to dispose of their bodies in a way they do not agree with. If the political system considers that land or money belongs exclusively to individuals, it should consider that the body also belongs exclusively to individuals. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening. The body, and especially the female body, has always been an object of intense dispute because all societies have a precise idea (positive or negative) about the possibility for women to dispose of their bodies. Women are not the only categories seeing their rights (continued)

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of disposing of their bodies wiped out. Some societies wanted to eliminate the right for all people to dispose of their bodies by suppressing the property right of bodies. Instead, they instituted a collective right for bodies, in the sense that society or the state is the owner of bodies, not individuals. It can be done for a particular group of people (slaves, prisoners of war, people declared to be insane) when society or the state makes decisions for the bodies, making them free or imprisoning them. Society can decide that all bodies belong to society as in the case of war when the state decides about the role of all people involved in the war effort. Since the body is material and an actor of geopolitics, the different material elements of the body must be explored. Deborah Dixon identifies two bodily parts: flesh and bones. In her part about flesh, Dixon points out several problems [80]. The first pertains to borders. The borders between states restrict or authorize the crossing of borders for individuals. Each state is sovereign and can decide freely about rules and regulations for border crossing. Flesh is here the flesh of travelers and migrants who want to go from one state to the other. The pressure exercised by migrants can be very strong as in the case of migrations from Central America heading to the United States or migrants from Africa heading to Spanish possessions of Ceuta and Melilla. If there is huge demand and few or no official possibilities to enter a country, it is expected that some kind of illegal business will develop. Human trafficking is very often gender-based. According to NGOs, the traffickers target boys to transform them into child soldiers and girls for child sex trafficking.14 This is what Dixon calls “flesh on the move,” but we can also say “flesh for sale.” “Flesh on the move” is routinely monitored by states. It is done with digital imprints that can identify one person. Monitoring is now done via eye and facial recognition. There is theoretically no need for a passport or an identity card if cameras and computers can identify a person not only from the visual point of view but also genetically with samples of saliva or from the nose. This is exactly what happened when states wanted to contain the COVID-19 virus. They did not care about nationality or citizenship. They just wanted to know if travelers were infected or not. Flesh and especially the flesh of a female body is a constant goal, reward, or prize for conquerors. The case of Korean “comfort women” forced into prostitution by the Imperial Japanese Army during the conquest of Korea resonates with countless examples in history when women were forced to experience a similar fate [81]. Conquerors systematically raped, put into slavery, or engaged females as part of harems or brothels with the aim of (continued)

14

See reports by NGOs like www.equalitynow.org, or www.savethechildren.org

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wiping out the national character of a community because the new generation of children would have a new genetic pool that would differentiate them from the previous one. If the concept of nation is based on strict blood ties, conquest changes the blood and makes the concept of nation malleable. The question of bones is different. While flesh and soft tissues disappear over time except in the case of mummification, the bones are the only vestige from bodies that can last. All the flesh disappears, the states disappear, governments disappear, companies disappear, but the bones stay there, for millennia. If there is one material element of the body that lasts, it is the bones. Dixon wants to give them a geopolitical “life,” or more precisely, an “afterlife” because very often bones “come alive” in the hands, minds, and eyes of the manipulators and contemplators. On one side, there are many examples when bones were either fetishized or kept as a memory of a time of suffering or supremacy of a belligerent. For instance, the Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries, which hold the remains of more than 6 million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris’ ancient stone quarries. A part of it is open to the public and is managed as a museum by the Town of Paris. The Catacombs do not have a big geopolitical impact contrary to other bones, parts of bones, or ossuaries of saints or emperors. Having the teeth of the Buddha or a bone of a catholic saint was a sure path for establishing the place as a pilgrimage destination. Bones and especially skulls were a big prize in the event of war, since the skull was the representation of the body or the individual. Beheading was a typical behavior of winners against losers, and the exhibition of the head or of the skull was the most impressive display of power and might. A skull tower, for instance, was a tower made up of skulls of Serbian uprisers of 1809. After the victory by the Ottoman soldiers, Hurshid Pasha ordered that a tower be made from the skulls of the fallen rebels. The tower was 4.5 meters high and originally contained 952 skulls embedded on four sides in 14 rows. Nowadays, only 58 skulls remain, but the historical, national, and emotional importance of the Skull Tower is still there. The practice of putting skulls in a tower is nothing new. Under other latitudes, there was a Tower of skulls in Mexico City made by the Aztecs in the fifteenth century. The structure is made of 600 skulls, probably from human sacrifices at that time. Skull towers are important elements in the buildup of national identities because they can make a physical link between people in the past and people today, which is an important element in ethnogenesis (proving the origin of a contemporary population), but it can also lead to necropopulism as documented by Bilgesu Sumer, who said that it is an invisible element of institutionalized violence because Skull Towers can be mystified and manipulated in order to build national identity [82]. (continued)

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Bones have been politicized as proofs of repression of holocaust or genocide, but also as a means of reconciliation and peace-making. After the death of General Franco in 1975, the transitional government tacitly introduced a politics of forgetting (“A Pact of Oblivion”) manifest in an Amnesty Law in 1977, which left the dead of both sides in the ground [83]. The tacit understanding is that any attempt to unearth the bones of people who fought during the Civil War would reopen the wounds with unknown consequences. The same kind of tacit agreement exists in Cambodia with the voluntary occultation of the horrors in the Killing Fields, but reconciliation is, however, a strange word in both entities in Bosnia (Croat-Muslim Federation and Republika Srpska), where excavations are routinely done with the aim to prove how the other side committed crimes against civilians.

4.3

Feminist Geopolitics and the State

Feminist geopolitics agrees with critical geopolitics that the state is not a “natural” container of political life. Other containers and actors exist, such as the suprastate/ supranational or substate/subnational organizations, transnational corporations, NGOs, or religious organizations. Despite the existence of other actors, the state cannot be ignored. Because of the Westphalian regime, it still represents the main actor. Feminist authors accept this reality, but they will analyze the state through a specific prism. Since the body is the finest scale for geopolitics according to feminist geopolitics [84], the state is analyzed like a body. The first part of the analysis pertains to the materiality of the body, in that case the materiality of the state. What does the body (the state) consist of? What is the shape of the body (the state)? There is no body without integument (skin separating human organs from environment), there is no state without boundaries (an “integument,” which separates a state from another state). This is not the organic theory of the state proposed by Ratzel and Kjellen. Feminist authors do not consider that the state should be organic, anthropomorphic, or alive. They use the analogy with the body as an analytical tool, not as an ontological status of the state. As there is no state without boundaries, there is no state without people (citizens). Citizens are the constituting elements of the state, so their relationship with the state is also a matter of concern for feminist geopolitics. The second part of the analysis is the action of the state. Like any other body, the state is a performing actor, so the actions, the processes, what the state shows and does not show, what the state makes visible and invisible will be the object of enquiry. Feminist geopolitics believes that “hidden” or “unnoticed” action, “hidden” or “invisible” actors are as important as visible actions and actors. This is what we are going to discuss in this next section, following which we will discuss questions pertaining to nationality and citizenship, the relationship of citizens with the state, and whether sovereignty is collective or individual.

4.3

Feminist Geopolitics and the State

4.3.1

185

State Performance and Visible/Invisible Actions

If the state (considered to be the “natural” player as classical geopolitics says), does something, the actions of the state must be visible to everyone, except for some military operations, which are classified. State decisions have a direct impact for people and corporations. If there is an embargo on Cuba decided by the United States, it is valid for all American companies. Exceptions exist, for food and medicine, for instance, but these exceptions must be visible. If there is an embargo on Russia decided by the European Union, it is valid for all 27 members of the EU, regardless of whether they like the decision or not. All these decisions must be visible and clear for the parties involved. The parties involved are multiple: public opinion, corporations, other states. All of them are interested in understanding a policy that is clear and visible, because they are expected to observe these decisions. It is impossible to observe an embargo if parties involved do not know what the embargo consists of. Visible actions are the domain of classical and critical geopolitics. What feminist geopolitics wants to do is to expose and make visible the invisible mechanisms of geopolitics. Cynthia Enloe did so a long time ago when she spoke about the military and the “humdrum,” which goes unnoticed. John Agnew does something similar today with the transnational corporations, whose activities are also invisible or hidden. Hidden does not mean voluntarily hidden, in the sense that transnational corporations want to hide their activities because their activities are illicit, or because they want secretly to run the world. According to Agnew, “‘Covert geopolitics,’ in that sense, organized by treasonous global cabals capturing ‘deep states’ is conspirational nonsense” [85]. Activities of corporations are hidden because they are global. It is difficult to track the activities of Coca-Cola, which is present in more than 200 countries and territories. Under the banner of free enterprise and globalization, it is easy to establish presence in other countries, source raw materials, semifinished goods, or fully assembled products. These activities are hidden because there is no systemic monitoring of transnational business operations. An exception to this rule is the Global China Investment Tracker, proposed by the American Enterprise Institute.15 The Tracker has been monitoring all Chinese overseas investments and constructions since 2005 per country and per enterprise. More than 3800 transactions have been monitored for a total amount of investments of US$2.5 trillion since 2005. The tracker also identifies the industries of choice for Chinese investors. Without surprise, energy comes first, followed by metals and transport. It is, therefore, possible to debunk some myths about global Chinese investments and get precise information about individual deals. Chinese investments are not hidden, information exists, but it is buried under the phantasm of China willing to buy out the whole world. That narrative is more powerful than facts. On the other side, despite much higher Western investments worldwide, there is no Global Investment Tracker for the United States, Germany, or Japan. The Bureau of Economic Analysis of the 15

https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker

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United States16 and Statista release information about direct investment per country and per industry, but they do not give the detailed information deal per deal as it exists for the China Global Investment Tracker. Information, therefore, exists, but it is aggregated in macro groupings, so the individual activity of corporations remains systematically hidden from the public. If geopolitical actions are invisible, it is mainly because the geopolitical actors are made invisible. Feminist geopolitics puts the emphasis on invisible actors who are systematically neglected by classical geopolitics and to some extent by critical geopolitics. People are geopolitical actors because people make decisions, not machines or algorithms. As expected, classical geopolitics puts the emphasis on the people in power because they sign orders. The psychological analysis of the people in authority or the sociological analysis of the group of people in authority represents a great part of classical analysis. Feminist authors have a different point of view. For them, all people are geopolitical actors, not only people who exercise power. Even if decisions about war and peace are made by a small group of people in power, war is conducted by soldiers and citizens. Soldiers and civilians usually do not have a voice in decisions about war and peace. As an example, the military is often excluded from political decisions because of the fear that the military could seize power and install a military dictatorship. This is why in France, for instance, the Army is always referred to as “la grande muette” or “the big mute,” an institution that is invisible and mute in political debate. The military is openly excluded from political life, but there are also citizens who are “covertly” excluded, subject to their color, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, language, etc. These “excluded” or “invisible” citizens are as real as the economy or the political establishment, so feminist geopoliticians do not see a reason why they should not be involved as geopolitical actors in the decision-making analysis. The state has a convenient way of making some actions and some actors visible or invisible. It usually separates society into public space and private space. According to classical geopolitics, the state regulates the public sphere (which is the visible part of politics) and leaves the private sphere (the invisible part of politics) to individuals, citizens, or families. In a patriarchal society, the state allocates the private sphere to women (making them invisible) while the public sphere is reserved for men (making them visible). This roles assignment is something feminist authors reject, so the fight for women’s rights is invariably a fight for visibility and removal of gendered assignments of the public and private spheres. According to Nicola Pratt, “A feminist geopolitics is concerned with the embodied dimensions of geopolitical processes, writing the experiences and agency of ordinary women and men into international politics. It reconceptualizes international politics to include the personal sphere and the everyday as important sites in the exercise of and resistance to geopolitical power” [86]. The separation between private and public sphere is an important concern for feminist geopolitics. They believe that this is not only a fight for one category of 16

https://www.bea.gov/resources/learning-center/what-to-know-international-trade-investment

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people (women), but a fight for an overall reassessment of what is public and what is private [87]. In that sense, they are joined by other groups, especially religious groups, that can have their own views about what is public and what is private. They are interested in the state definition of the public sphere and how the state views the display of religious symbols in the public sphere. This dilemma is particularly acute in France, where the law has forbidden the use of the hijab in the public sphere even though the definition of what is private and what is public space is not clearly defined [88]. In many Western countries, there is currently competition between positive law (law imposed by the legislative power) and religious groups because some individuals claim individual sovereignty and say: “my religion is above the law” [89]. In case of incompatibility between positive law and religious convictions, they petition for a “reasonable accommodation” in which the state should accept some rules dictated by religion to the detriment of positive law. They, therefore, want to move from the private to the public sphere, from the “invisible” to the “visible” part of politics. People can be made invisible by the state, but the actions of the state are not invisible. Feminist geopolitics considers that the state, like anybody, is a performing body, so the actions of the state are analyzed like performing bodies, or performing actors are analyzed. According to this analogy, the state, like the body, is in continual metamorphosis. According to Cynthia Weber, “sovereign nation-states are not pre-given subjects but subjects in process and all subjects in process (be they individual or collective) are the ontological effects of practices which are performatively enacted” [90]. Cynthia Weber believes that states are subjects in process. States are not fixed. They can be fluid or volatile, they can disappear, they can resuscitate, they can emerge, and they can change. States do not have immutable shape and do not perform immutable actions. Since states are always in the process of constant change, the only perception of the state from outside can be gained through the analysis of its performance, its enactment, not through its existence or being. The enactments are various and numerous. They can be foreign policy statements and actions, organization of press conferences, legal decisions, or military interventions. All this is performance, and since it is performance, Cynthia Weber makes the link with the human body, which is also analyzed through its enactment and performance. The state is not any body, it is a clearly defined body: “. . . allows me to consider the sovereign nation-state not only as a performative body, but also as a sexed and gendered body” [91]. The duck test illustrates her point. The original duck test says, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Let’s just replace the terms and say, “If a state acts like a body, if it performs like a body, if it talks like a body, then probably it is a body.” The emphasis on the body opens the question about the ownership and sovereignty of the bodies of citizens. The state is conceived as having legitimate control over bodies of citizens because the state can put people in prison, it can kill people, if necessary, it can regulate the reproduction of people, it can give people the right to die, and so on. All these questions are fundamental questions about collective and individual sovereignty. If people are geopolitical actors and if the body is the scale of

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geopolitics, then individuals must have sovereignty; otherwise, they are not geopolitical actors. The main question is: who is sovereign, is it the state or the individual? Feminist geopolitics believes that it is possible to transcend the state and give sovereignty to the individual just like Marxism transcends the state and gives sovereignty to the working class. Can the individual be a state, and in that case can the individual be sovereign like the state is sovereign? The individual in democratic societies is already sovereign because of the rights individuals enjoy, such as the right to vote. The individual also enjoys human individual rights such as freedom of speech, equality of treatment, or freedom to carry weapons on occasion. Individual rights are, however, not absolute because they are restrained by the majority, who can impose coercive measures. This is where feminist authors see a problem because of the conflict that may happen between the concept of collective sovereignty and individual sovereignty in a state. There are multiple cases where individuals have claimed that they are “sovereign,” meaning the decisions produced by the majority in a state should not apply to them. Sovereignty of the individual or self-ownership is the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one’s own body and life. According to Gerald Cohen, “the libertarian principle of self-ownership says that each person enjoys, over herself and her powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply” [92]. This concept is central to some political philosophies like libertarianism or anarchism. As for the philosophers, Ralph Emerson was among the most vocal defenders of individualism through the concept of “self-reliance,” by which the ultimate goal of the individual is to attain self-improvement, not through selfishness, but in construction with the others [93]. Ayn Rand goes further in rejecting any kind of authority over the individual. In that sense, she is close to the anarchists or nihilists: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” [94]. Anarchists are very famous for their slogan “No Gods, No Masters.” They reject democratically elected governments because, for them, every government represents the Masters. The COVID-19 pandemic was the occasion for some individuals to voice their rejection of masks or vaccines imposed on them by the executive power. The decision by the Supreme Court in the United States in 2022 to scrap abortion as a federal law gave impetus to many individuals to claim, “my body, my choice,” regardless of the position of different states in the United States. The claim “my body, my choice” seems to be universal and evident, but this is not the case because that claim opens thorny issues about sexual transition, ethical discussions about euthanasia, or about human organs that can or cannot be sold. These inherently personal issues have become geopolitical issues. Sexual transition and personal decisions about gender identification are ideas that are not accepted everywhere, so decisions by international sports association about accepting athletes of some countries where sexual transition or gender identification is accepted are blocked by other countries. “My body, my choice” is not a universally accepted idea in that case. Euthanasia or “assisted dying” is still not allowed in many countries, so the few countries where it is accepted and regulated, like Spain, Belgium, Colombia,

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Feminist Geopolitics and the State

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or Australia, are destinations of choice for people who would like to undergo it. In this case also “my body, my choice” is not universally recognized, and the claim may pose problems of sovereignty and state control of the citizen’s body. Selling human organs is prohibited universally while donations are authorized. This is where there is a gray area for some shadow operations because there might be selling in disguise. Other human parts are openly for sale such as hair, bone marrow, eggs, or sperm, but human organs are not. The usual explanation is that we cannot sell something nature cannot replenish such as the heart, kidneys, or corneas. War is unfortunately an occasion for organ harvesting without the consent of people. In that case also, there is no “my body, my choice.” Because of its focus on individuals, feminist geopolitics is not about women’s rights and gender issues only. It puts the individual center stage, especially the marginalized individual. People can be marginalized and made invisible for various reasons. This can be gender, disability, religion, or race, but it happens unfortunately that in many cases (some authors would say systematically), the marginalized people are women. Automatically, because of the marginalization scope, feminist geopolitics tends to speak more about gender issues than religious or disability marginalization. That is why feminist geopolitics is perceived to be “gender geopolitics” while in fact it is “individual-centered geopolitics.” It seeks to reveal why some people are marginalized and what are the instruments of the state for doing so. Among the instruments, nationality and citizenship are the most powerful ways to marginalize and make people invisible. Some citizens are made invisible because they “belong” to a state since they have the nationality of that state, so the state can sort, categorize, and make people visible or invisible.

4.3.2

State, Nationality, and Citizenship

Classical geopolitics uses the concept of “natural state,” which is the source of many misunderstandings. It comes from the belief that every population, community, nation, ethnic group should have its own state and that boundaries of such a state are “natural.” “Natural state” can also be understood as “primitive state,” a term used by the colonial powers when they colonized newly discovered areas. For the most part, state boundaries in the Middle East or Africa were largely imposed upon by European powers, often against the wishes of the indigenous actors. Consequently, state boundaries decided by the colonial powers have been contested by local populations because they were not granted a state of their own (Kurds, Yazidis, Bedouins). The boundaries have been contested also by suprastate actors (such as pan-Arab nationalists), who wanted to agglomerate all Arab populations in one nation and one state. After decolonization, newly founded regimes had to work hard to legitimize and normalize their authority as a requirement for successful state building because some of these states did not exist prior, or they existed with different boundaries. The legitimacy of regimes was anything but evident. It was important for these new states to present themselves as “natural states.”

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What is the place of feminist geopolitics in such a situation? Laws that deeply affect gender relations, including personal status laws, nationality law, and domestic violence laws are understood not as matters of citizenship rights, but rather as issues that touch on the very fabric of the state and society, with repercussions for their future and stability. When the political power controls the bodies in the form of passport issuance, IDs, enumeration of people during censuses, birth or marriage certificates, there is a possibility of manipulation and weaponization of biopolitics. Even if laws pertaining to these issues are called personal laws, they are not personal: “Personal is geopolitical and geopolitical is personal,” echoing Cynthia Enloe [95]. Geopolitics is personal when members of a family, friends, coworkers, and colleagues are sent to fight in another country. This is how abroad becomes local. Every American knew someone who had been sent to fight in Korea and Vietnam, like every person in the Soviet Union knew someone who has been sent to fight in Afghanistan. If they were lucky to come back, the “Afghantsy” of the Soviet Union or the “Vietnam Vets” of the United States were not particularly welcomed, adding local resentment to a lost foreign war. Geopolitics is personal when only men have the right to pass on the nationality to their children and spouses. This is particularly a problem in Jordan and Lebanon, where a substantial number of women are married to non-nationals who are often long-standing refugees or exiles from neighboring Arab countries. In many states, women do not have full freedom about their marriages. A marriage is often decided by the men in their families. Laws, including marriage and family laws, are voted on by the parliament, and in almost all countries, the majority in parliament is represented by men, so women are at their mercy when it comes to family laws, reproduction laws, or nationality laws. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a note from 2021 has listed 25 states that do not grant women equality with men in conferring nationality to children [96]. According to Human Rights Watch, there were more than 88,000 Jordanian women married to non-citizens in Jordan, mainly Palestinian men, with more than 350,000 children without Jordanian nationality [97]. In that case, marriage is political and international. The law in some countries punishes any women who marries outside of her national grouping for blurring the boundaries of the state and failing in her expected role as the biological and cultural reproducer of the nation. By limiting who may or may not be considered a national, the law strictly reinforces the boundary between the inside and outside of the state. According to Roxane Doty, “A fundamental way a state can do this is by exercising its legal prerogative to control entry into its territorial boundaries . . . Without this prerogative the whole idea of territorially fixed population that forms the basis of the sovereign nation-state would become highly questionable” [98]. Not only does the state regulate who can enter its boundaries, but it also regulates who can be a citizen within the boundaries. The question of nationality is a big question because if the individual is sovereign, that individual is not constrained by the nationality of any state. Nationality is not the same thing as citizenship even if both notions are often presented as synonymous. While citizenship pertains to rights and duties of

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individuals within the state (generally including the right to live and work in the territory of the state and obligation to pay taxes), nationality means that a person holds the passport of a certain state, permitting this person to travel to other countries and have protection of the passport issuing state. When another country accepts the travel document, it does not mean that it automatically accepts the issuing entity as an independent country. When the United States accepts passports issued in Hong Kong and Macao as valid documents to enter the United States, it does not mean that the United States considers Hong Kong and Macao as separate states. Hong Kong and Macao are Special Autonomous Regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). There are nevertheless three different passports (PRC, Macao, and Hong Kong) for one state (PRC), and the entry and visa regimes are not the same according to the type of passport a person holds. The same thing happens when the United States accepts the passports issued by the Palestinian Authority. It does not mean that the United States accepts the Palestinian Authority as an independent state. The passport is only a travel document, containing the identity of one person and nothing else. It is mainly used to travel to foreign countries and sometimes to travel within a country. Many people today, especially young people, declare that they are citizens of the world. They believe that global problems such as climate change or migrations call for global solutions and global citizens who are not bound to a specific country. However, a passport for a global citizen does not exist yet, so for the moment, state sovereignty and nationality are compulsory elements when someone wants to travel. Nationality was not always important in the past. During feudal times in Europe, serfs were attached to a territory. They were technically not slaves, but to move from one place to the other, or to marry, they needed the permission from the lord. At that time, what was important was who your lord was and not your nationality. The King was the state as in a famous statement attributed to the French king Louis XIV in 1655: “L’Etat c’est moi!” (“I am the State”). During Tsarist Russia, it was necessary to have a “propiska,” a residence permit cum passport permitting travel within Russia [99]. This practice of internal migration control survived in the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, while other socialist regimes, like China and North Korea, for instance, used a similar system called “hukou,” permitting these states to control travel within the country and restrict access to certain areas or towns to people coming from the countryside. Only after the Westphalian system had been established and the American and French revolutions succeeded did the state become independent from the royals, lords, or religion, and subsequently, the question of nation and nationality was introduced. States usually have two types of passports: an ordinary passport and a diplomatic or service passport, but there is just one nationality. All rules suffer exceptions. The country with the highest number of citizenships is probably the United Kingdom (the British government calls them “Types of British nationality”). There are in fact six of them: British citizenship, British overseas territory citizen, British overseas citizen, British subject, British national (overseas), and British protected person. All of them have different statuses in terms of possibility to work and live in the United Kingdom, hold a UK passport, pay taxes, and participate in political life.

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Some of these British citizenships are not accepted in other countries. To add to the confusion, Britain does not exist as a state, but there still is a British passport. Having a passport and an identity card is not as normal and automatic as it may appear. Many people do not have a passport or identity card because they did not ask for one or because they are not entitled to one. People living in remote areas who do not travel do not feel the need to have a passport. They live their entire life in the country, they never travel abroad, so they have never asked for a passport. For instance, 67 percent of Russians older than 55 have never been abroad, while 64 percent of Americans of all ages have never left the country [100]. For them, there is no need to hold a passport. For them, an ID card, insurance card, or driver’s license is much more important. There is no official “national identity card” in the United States, in the sense that there is no federal agency with nationwide jurisdiction that directly issues an identity document to all US citizens for mandatory regular use. The US passport exists, but it is not mandatory. The result is that more than 200 million people in the United States (more than 60 percent of total population) do not have a passport. To prove their identity, they can use the driver’s license or Social Security Card. There are also situations where people do not declare the birth of their children, so undocumented persons can still live in a country without any document of identification. The massive documentation of people in India in 2010 was probably the biggest documentation exercise in the world when India issued an identity card to all its citizens for the first time [101]. The reason for not having documents or ID from the state can be a voluntary decision because the individual does not recognize the sovereignty of the state. Some Palestinians living in Israel do not want documents from the State of Israel because they do not accept the legitimacy of the Israeli state. If they accept Israeli documents, they will travel abroad as Israeli citizens and might be regarded as traitors by some of their compatriots. If they do not take Israeli documents, they can apply for a document from another country (Egypt, Lebanon, or Jordan, for instance), but the probability of getting it is quite low. All people who can document that they are born in Palestine (a territory not clearly defined) can apply for a Palestinian passport issued by the Palestinian Authority. This passport is not accepted everywhere, and there is a limited number of Palestinian consulates worldwide that could offer protection for the holders of that passport. People can reject a passport, but what is more common is the state refusing to issue documents to some people. A state can decide not to give documents to a large group of people because it considers that these people are not nationals of that country but in fact foreigners. The Middle East is home to many stateless persons, such as Palestinian refugees in Lebanon or “Bidoon” in the Gulf, especially Kuwait. There is a difference between stateless persons who do not have any nationality at all and people who have a nationality but no country of reference. Millions of Roma in Europe hold a nationality of a European state, but they do not have a state of their own, even though estimates say that there are 10 million Roma (or Romani) people in Europe. The authorities in Myanmar consider that the Rohingya population is in fact a Bangladeshi population living in Myanmar. As such, they should have Bangladeshi documents and not documents from Myanmar while Bangladesh

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considers them to be Myanmar citizens. The result is that the Rohingya do not have documents at all, they cannot enjoy full citizenship rights in Myanmar, and they cannot travel because they do not have a passport [102]. When they take a boat and arrive illegally in Malaysia or Indonesia, they are treated as stateless people, without any state to seek protection from. While the concept of nation is subject to debate, the nationality law must be clear because the state issues identity cards and travel documents, and there are rights and duties attached to the holder of the document. The nationality law must explain clearly who has the right to claim some documents, and there are no two countries in the world having the same dispositions. Some countries have remarkable stability when it comes to nationality or citizenship law, like the United States, while others change them very often as in the case of India, where the first citizenship law was adopted in 1955. Since then, it has suffered several modifications, the last one being the highly controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2019.17 The nationality law is not only precise about how to get the nationality, but also how to strip someone of their nationality. Clear rules are necessary; otherwise, arbitrary decisions may happen. Stripping someone of their nationality can happen only if the person holds several nationalities. There were many cases of foreigners going to war in Iraq or Syria. As of December 2015, there were about 30,000 fighters from at least 85 countries who had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These people held several passports, including passports from France, Germany, or the United Kingdom. Public opinion petitioned for stripping them of their French or British nationality and deporting them to the other country where they hold nationality. This is not a simple process because many conventions on human rights signed by France and the United Kingdom can slow down or even nullify the process of nationality stripping. This brings back the case of dual citizenship or multiple nationalities. Many countries in Asia such as the People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, and Singapore do not accept dual nationality. If a person has dual nationality, that person cannot claim the protection of both states. For instance, if a person holds an American and an Iranian passport (which is forbidden from the Iranian side because it accepts only one nationality), the United States cannot help that person when they are physically in Iran because the country person is has higher claims on that person than the country of the other passport that person holds. It is the same if a person has a British and Chinese passport (illegal again because China does not accept dual nationality). The United Kingdom cannot help that person when the person is in China. If a person holds several passports, they may believe that they are shielded from political upheavals, but this is not the case. Carlos Ghosn, the former CEO of Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi, used to have three passports (Lebanese, Brazilian, and French), and he believed that France would help him during his arrest in

17 See the citizenship (amendment) act from 2019 at https://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/201 9/214646.pdf

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Japan in 2018 [103]. When he escaped in a rocambolesque way from Japan to Lebanon, he accused France of not actively helping him.

4.3.3

Nationality, Citizenship, and Business

Nationality is very important for businesses. There are in fact two types of nationality to consider: the nationality of the company and the nationality of the employees. As far as the nationality of the company is concerned, many transnational companies would like to be stateless companies, not to be attached to any state. This is not possible because companies must obey to state rules, and they must pay taxes somewhere. Some companies have more choices than other. In the case of a state-owned company or government-linked company, the company is incorporated in that very country and pays taxes there. It is the same for municipal, county, or utility companies that have a monopoly or a license to operate in a country. There are also companies in which the equity is private, but the state holds a stake, or a golden share. The French state participation in Renault is about 15 percent, in Airbus 10 percent, and 25 percent in Thales. It is unimaginable that these companies would be incorporated in any other country than France. And even if the state does not have a participation in a company, it is also unimaginable that General Motors or CocaCola would be incorporated in any other country than the United States. That kind of decision has nothing to do with the amount of revenue the company gets from a given country. Nestle originated and is incorporated in Switzerland even though sales in Switzerland represent only 2 percent of Nestlé’s global sales. For the companies that have a choice of incorporation, they take many parameters into account. Of course, the ease of doing business, the level of taxes, the availability of a pool of talents are important [104]. But there is also a political question. How will the country of origin react, how will the consumers react, how will the suppliers react if there is change of country of incorporation? Toyota and Samsung, for instance, are private companies. For many reasons, it would be better for Toyota or Samsung to be incorporated in Panama or Cyprus. But again, there are intended and unintended consequences of this move, especially if there is a suspicion of tax evasion. The European Union has a list of non-cooperative states in the domain of fiscal havens or tax evasion. It is called the “non-cooperative tax jurisdictions for tax purposes” and is available on the website of the European Parliament. In the latest edition from 2022, the European Union has listed Trinidad and Tobago and Panama as “non-cooperative states,” the highest level of tax evasion suspicion.18 According 18 The US Virgin Islands is also on the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. According to the United Nations, the US Virgin Islands is a Non-Self Governing-Territory depending on the United States. The United States entertains a series of territories like American Samoa or Guam, while the United Kingdom entertains Bermuda or Cayman Islands as self-governing territories permitting the United States and the United Kingdom to benefit from the gray zone about jurisdiction and tax payments.

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to the latest Corruption Perception Index from 2021, Trinidad and Tobago rank 82 out of 180 countries while Panama ranks 105.19 When there are corporations like Unilever and Sony outranking states like this, perhaps it is time to give these companies more say in the political realm. For instance, why would these two states issue passports to their citizens while Unilever or Sony cannot? Why would the two states quoted above be able to have the power to issue passports to their citizens, while much stronger entities, like Unilever and Sony, cannot? The latter two are public companies, and their accounts are scrutinized by all kinds of interested parties. They regularly pay taxes in countries where they operate. Their transparency and governance are on a much higher level than in the two previously mentioned states, so it could be possible to trust them in issuing passports. The Marshall Islands is an independent country and maintains a very small network of embassies, only five of them. At the same time, Coca Cola is present in 200 jurisdictions. The commitment, experience, and knowledge of international relations are far larger in Coca Cola than in the Marshall Islands. So why can the Marshall Islands issue passports for its 58,000 inhabitants and Coca-Cola cannot for its 700,000 employees across its company and bottling partners? Having a passport from Coca-Cola would avoid problems when people holding a certain passport cannot travel to certain states because of visas or because some passports are not accepted, such as the Israeli passport not being accepted in countries like Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, or Malaysia. The second question about nationality is the nationality of employees and of national preference exercised by the employers. In times of crises, like the COVID19 pandemic, with millions of people losing their jobs, will the country try to preserve all jobs or only the jobs and livelihoods of their nationals? Singapore is a good example, because since the beginning of the pandemic, especially after the full lockdown of the summer of 2020, there was a strong demand for companies to safeguard the Singaporean “core” (meaning the citizens and permanent residents), and if the company must retrench employees, foreigners should be the first to support the burden. Singapore Airlines immediately retrenched more than 2000 employees, but it did its best to keep the Singaporean ‘core’ [105]. At the same time, Singapore decided to keep foreign workers who were essential in the construction industry or working in the Port of Singapore, even though they could not work during lockdown. This is a remarkable difference with the situation in Gulf countries, where the same foreign workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka were left practically without income and no possibility of returning to their country of origin [106]. Many states have regulations about how to hire, promote, train, or fire people according to their nationality, and the company must stick to these rules. Companies can, for instance, send foreigners to head a regional hub in a certain area, but the passport of that person can require a long visa application process, and this complicates travel plans and meetings within teams and leadership in the region. Holding passport from the People’s Republic of China or Jordan, for example, limits the

19

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021

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freedom of travel considerably, and time and money must be devoted to securing the visa for travel. The consequence of that is that the company must choose between a person who has better credentials for a leading position but has a passport that could pose problems and a person who has is less qualified but has a “good” passport. Determining which passports are “good” or “bad” is easy as they are listed on the Passport Index website, which gives updated information about visa procedures for all types of passports. The latest ranking of passports for 2023 shows that people holding the passport of Jordan can go to 65 countries out of 195 without a visa, while the holders of the passport of the People’s Republic of China can go to 85 countries without a visa.20 Once the question of nationality of an employee is settled and accepted, there comes the question of identity. Sending an American national with a Chinese name to China can be perceived as sending a Chinese national. The officers at the immigration office, customs, HR department, and the general Chinese population would be glad to address them in Mandarin. When they discover that the person does not speak Mandarin, but English only, the appreciation goes down and the person can sometimes be regarded sometimes as a traitor. Conversely, if the same manager speaks Mandarin and is at ease with the political/social/cultural environment, the manager could be perceived as Chinese and could be expected to defend China and Chinese interests, sometimes to the detriment of their company. Different sentiments apply when the origins of the envoy sent to China are Taiwanese, as was the case when President Biden nominated Katherine Tai as the US Trade Representative to China in March 2021. This is how the South China Morning Post, the leading newspaper from Hong Kong, presented Tai: “Joe Biden’s reported pick as US trade representative to succeed Robert Lighthizer is a Chinese American who speaks Mandarin and has worked in China” [107]. Managers can be asked to betray or conclude agreements and contracts bad for the company but good for the local partners because the manager can be pressured to prioritize the interests of the country over the interests of the company. In that case, formal nationality is not important, what is important is the community that this person belongs to or is supposed to belong to. Timothy Blumentritt and Douglas Nigh have investigated the integration of subsidiary political activities in multinational corporations, and they concluded that subsidiary strategic integration and the economic strategic integration in the host country significantly influence integration of subsidiary political activities [108]. This means that subsidiaries must consider the fact that they evolve in a host country and must adapt their political activity to the situation in the host country. The manager can be torn between the necessity to respect policies and goals of the corporation on one side and the rules of the country on the other. If the two collide and if the headquarters is not happy with that, the only option is for the company to pull out from that country.

20

https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php

4.4

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Feminist Geopolitics and Power

When it comes to power, feminist geopolitics seeks to find out the place of the individual and especially of women in the power play or power game. As Cynthia Enloe used to ask: “Where are the women, what forms does power take? Who wields it? How are some gendered wieldings of power camouflaged so they do not even look like power?” [109]. According to the feminist thought, it is impossible to fully understand an event, or series of events, if we do not ask where women are. Feminist authors challenge the classical definition of power and its reduction to quantifiable elements present in military and economy. They would like to introduce other elements into the definition of power, such as work–life balance, sustainability, or diversity and inclusion. If these elements were considered in power ranking, the classification and ranking of countries would be completely different. According to them, it is possible to challenge the supremacy of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main or the only indicator of economic performance. The alternative can be the Human Development Index (HDI) or the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), which is the measure of the quality of life or well-being of a country. It is also possible to opt for the Gross Happiness Index (GHI), which is the measure of collective happiness and well-being of a population. All these alternative indicators are well known in academia and economic circles. They are sometimes adopted, for example, Bhutan for the Gross Happiness Index, but the GDP is still there and is bound to remain the main economic indicator for the future. The other option is to eliminate the notion of power altogether because it implies competition and domination. Feminist geopolitics challenges the concept of domination, especially if power means hypermasculinization of relations with other countries, or hypermasculinization of relations between people and government within the country. According to feminist authors, militarism is an ideology, a particular view of understanding of society and how it should be organized. As an example of the militarization of society, there are scores of flags in the world where weapons are proudly displayed. There is an iconic AK-47 on the flag of Mozambique adopted in 1983 while different kind of swords, spears, and shields are present on the flags of Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Angola, Haiti, and Sri Lanka. The starting block for the feminist authors is the masculinity myth: the notion that to be a soldier means possibly to experience combat, and combat is the ultimate test of man’s masculinity. In many countries, women are systematically excluded from military activity and the reasons for exclusion vary. It can be the alleged physical differences between men and women making women less apt for prolonged physical stress. It can be the necessity to take care of the family (children) and manufacturing process while men are at war. It can also be a cost-effective reason like in Singapore where the Ministry of Defense compared the social cost of having women in the Army and the benefit for the Army and the nation. The conclusion was detrimental for women [110]. Singapore imposes compulsory National Service for 2 years for all boys finishing high school, while this requirement is not imposed on girls. In practically all countries, it is possible to have women serving in the army in administrative and support

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positions, but combat positions are traditionally reserved for men, except in some Western countries and in Israel.

4.4.1

Hard Power and Slow Violence

If feminist geopolitics challenges classical geopolitics, it must challenge the concept of power. Hard power means that something can be imposed through coercion. Usually, coercion is understood as based on material strength expressed in terms of weapons and physical violence. From the feminist point of view, violence is not necessarily physical, it can be invisible, it can be silent, and it can be slow. Johan Galtung defined violence as physical and mental harm in his article from 1969: “Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic (bodily) and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” [111]. Invisible violence (mental violence for Galtung) is as important as visible (somatic) violence. Violence is especially exercised on decisions about education, marriage, or work choices for women. This pressure (violence) is invisible and sometimes hard to document, so the figures of authority rarely take this violence into account. Asher Kaufman has commented on that kind of violence: “To be sure, it is tempting and perhaps natural to study direct, physical violence. It is easy to see it, to collect data on, to know who the perpetrator is, and to discern the cause and effect” [112]. More recently, Rob Nixon has expanded his work on slow violence. Slow violence according to him “is a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” [113]. In the example of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, violence is both quick and slow. The COVID-19 outbreak was sudden. This is quick violence. The Fukushima disaster was quick violence as well, but also slow violence because of the number of people who were mildly contaminated in Japan after the outbreak. The effect on fauna and flora is taking its toll in the longer term, and it is impossible to assess the total damage that the Fukushima disaster will have on one or several generations. As for COVID-19, there is a very high number of people who have been contaminated but not documented so it is also difficult to make a final assessment. On top of that, some people who have been contaminated by COVID-19 may experience long-term effects known as Long COVID. We do not know how many people will experience long-term effects and what long-term effects they will endure. This is a form of slow violence that is invisible and hard to fight against. The Fukushima nuclear disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic are accidents (a technical failure or disease outbreak), but they can be read differently. It is possible to claim that the Fukushima accident is a result of political preference for nuclear energy while other sources of energy that do not carry the same risk were available. In that case, the accident is the fruit of a political decision. As for COVID-19, it is possible to claim that the extent of the outbreak would have been much more limited if

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information had been exchanged transparently and immediately. It is also possible to claim that the extent of the outbreak would have been different if governments had taken it seriously immediately and engaged adequate measures to stop it. In such cases, the political reaction is more to blame, not necessarily the disease itself. Some systemic preferences such as the reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear energy or the compartmentalization of information in the World Health Organization stem from a political choice and operate through the “soft knife of routine processes or ordinary oppression” [114]. In all cases, the victims of slow and quick violence are people, and this is the main concern in feminist geopolitics. Slow environmental disasters due to human action are present on all continents. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published its list of environmental disasters for the past 100 years. It prioritized the big man-made disasters. One-shot disasters are listed like Italy’s Seveso Dioxin Cloud in 1976 or India’s Bhopal Cyanide Gas Leak in 1984, but there is also a list of slow disasters such as the “Four Big Pollution Diseases” in Japan, which lasted from 1912 to 1965 or the Amazon disasters in Ecuador (1964–1990) and Peru (1971–1996). The latter are typically slow violence because the causes are not apparent or because the political establishment does not want to recognize who is at the origin of these disasters. The CFR points to human, and especially corporate, responsibility in these disasters: “Industrial disasters around the world, many involving multinational corporations, have caused significant health, environmental, and economic damages. Such tragedies have also led to lengthy legal challenges and prompted new global regulations” [115]. An example of an economically motivated disaster is the overproduction of cotton in Central Asia leading to a “creeping environmental change,” a concept that was put forward by Michael Glanz to describe ecological degradation that happens imperceptibly over time. In his book, he used the example of the Aral Sea to demonstrate slow, creeping environmental changes, labeling the process as a “quiet Chernobyl” that nobody notices because it is slow. in the end however, the Aral Sea disappears [116]. Feminist geopolitics has a negative stance about corporate practices when it comes to the treatment of individuals (mainly women) in the workplace. This negative stance is reinforced by the fact some corporations are directly responsible for quick and slow violence affecting individuals. If slow violence is invisible, the power behind this slow violence (people and institutions leading to this violence) is invisible, too. How can that power be identified? This is the question Yaqing Qin tries to answer when he proposes three types of power. The first and the most important one is agential power, meaning that agents (states, corporations, individuals, etc.) have power to the extent that they can voluntarily determine whether the outcome occurs or not. They freely determine goals such as KPIs or military goals, they freely decide if they want to achieve the goals or not. They freely assess if the goals have been achieved. This is exactly what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. States decided whether they wanted to fight against COVID-19 or not. At least one country (Sweden) decided for many months that COVID-19 was not important, so it decided not to fight against it, while other countries implemented immediately various forms of lockdowns. No two countries had the same strategy in fighting COVID-19. After the roll-out of vaccines,

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states (governments) decided the pandemic was over, regardless of the number of cases. In 2022, for instance, with more than 100,000 cases per day, France decided to abandon its emergency rules around COVID-19. China also decided overnight to abandon its restricting COVID-19 policy and open the country at the end of 2022. This is typically an example of agential power because governments can voluntarily decide whether the outcome occurs, how to qualify it, and how to assess the success of the outcome. This power is visible, it does not hide, it wants all citizens to be aware of the decisions taken by the agential power. Is agential power limitless? Can states and leaders really do anything they want? This is what Kathryn Sikkink (1955–) explores in her book “The Justice Cascade,” where she looks at the individual responsibility in violation of human rights, especially in the case of genocides or ethnic and religious cleansing [117]. Making political leaders accountable for the violation of human rights in their own country is a radical demand because it goes against the conventional non-interference in internal affairs. Non-interference in internal affairs produces two consequences. The first is the impossibility to intervene in one country without the approval of that country. The second is that the world should wait that the local population revolts and changes the regime and people in power. In many countries, it is wishful thinking because the civil society is not strong enough to oppose the autocratic leaders who hold military power and do not hesitate to engage in mass killings in case of disobedience. Popular revolutions did happen in countries like in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, or in the former European socialist countries in 1989, but they were rather exceptions than the rule. If there is non-interference, it means that the local despots and mass killers are shielded from the local and international judiciary. Kathryn Sikkink believes that these individuals should not be permitted to escape justice. Her concept of justice stems from norms and values that are universal, and all leaders must abide to them. While in the past, leaders were practically immune to prosecution on human rights violation accounts, this is no more the case because of the acceptance of universal norms and values related to justice. This concept is called “universal jurisdiction” under which states or international organizations can claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of that person’s nationality, regardless of where that person lives, and regardless of where that person has committed a crime [118]. It is, therefore, possible for Finland to prosecute a person who allegedly committed a crime in Rwanda, even if that person is not a Finnish citizen. Many states invoked “universal jurisdiction,” but there are still many states that have not, claiming that state sovereignty is superior. The second type of power proposed by Yaqing Qin is structural power. According to Susan Strange, structural power permits “to decide how things shall be done, how frameworks are going to be shaped, within which states relate to each other, relate to people, or relate to corporate enterprises” [119]. The state sets up institutions, processes, and frameworks permitting to attainment of targets defined by the state. Once established, structural power can have a life of its own, and this structural power is difficult to change. Processes are visible, so structural power can be labeled as visible power. There is an exception though. The term “deep state”

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corresponds to the case of an anonymous structural power so great that the nominal holder of power (people, government, or parliament) does not exercise real power. Many conspiracy theories refer to the existence of an all-powerful structural power in the form of “deep state.” In that case, the structural power is hidden and invisible. These two powers proposed by Yaqing Qin refer to classical geopolitics because powers are exclusive and proprietary. The agents are clearly identified. Power exclusively belongs to agents and structures. What is interesting from the feminist geopolitics point of view is the third power. A power Yaqing Qin calls “relational power,” but which other authors call “social power” or “social capital.” This power is usually invisible.

4.4.2

Relational Power

The most important power for feminist geopolitics is relational power because it involves relations between people, between states, or between corporations. It is not as visible as the agential or structural power, so it sometimes must be debunked. It deserves, therefore, to be discussed in detail. Yaqing Qin’s “relational power” is shareable, exchangeable, and co-empowered, contrary to the first two aforementioned powers, which are exclusive and proprietary [120]. Relational power is shareable in the sense that an agent can help another agent altruistically. This postulate goes against classical geopolitics, which posits that agents (in that case, states) do not have friends, they only have interests. With the relational approach, that is not true. Social power is not in opposition to agential and structural power. It is just another power that can facilitate relations between people and foster interpersonal and personal–institutional cooperation. Daniel Aldrich calls relational power the “social capital” among people. This social capital is activated mainly in the case of catastrophes (natural catastrophes, wars, displacement of persons), when solidarity between people works best. He investigated cases of post-disaster recovery and identified three sorts of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking (among family members, friends and between citizens and government officials, respectively.) As he said, “the social capital is the ties that bind neighbors, friends and acquaintances together, deepening their trust and making their collective action more likely, works in ways often guided by geography and distance” [121]. It is “normal” that the closer people are to a disaster, the more willing they are to alleviate the damage, but physical distance is not as important nowadays as it was in the past. The Internet and social media have provided a completely new dimension to geography and distance. There is, therefore, a possibility to express empathy and act to alleviate damage even if people live far away from one another. This is especially the case when members of diaspora use remittances to send money to people who are affected by disasters in their home country. Altruism and cooperation do not dominate politics and business, but they are not rare either. Relatedness, upon which altruism and cooperation rely, can be based on kinship, affection, or religious or moral grounds, but relatedness it is. Gyorgy Szabo

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and Attila Szolniki compared the egoistic player, whose only purpose is to maximize its own interest without considering the interest of others, to the fraternal player who considers not only its own interest but also the interests of its neighbor. The authors consider that if people share their benefits fraternally, then, this will provide “optimum payoff for the whole society” and make the whole society better off. According to them, “the highest total income is achieved by the society whose members share their income fraternally. Any deviation from the fraternal behavior can result in the emergence of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ within a suitable region of payoff parameter even for altruistic players characterized by the other-regarding preference” [122]. Many mission statements in the corporate world of today refer to the concept of fraternity. Fraternity is also used in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) case. It is easy to prioritize relationships with brothers rather than strangers. But when the dilemma concerns two brothers, who is the brother that the person will choose? It is also called the “lover’s dilemma” by Szabo and Szolniki. In business this happens with equivalent offers, especially when it comes to generic products. If the price of 1 kilowatt is the same from one electricity supplier to the other, if the price of 1 liter of water is the same from one utility supplier to the other, if the generic medicine is the same from one manufacturer to the other, which one will the client choose? According to the theory or relatedness presented by Yaqing Qin, the client will choose the offer with the highest degree of relatedness, based on affection, longlasting relationship, closeness, etc. Relational power posits that all sides lose and win at the same time, but depending on the relative power they have, the more powerful state can decide to lose a little bit more to the benefit of the less powerful state. When the United States established the Marshall Plan in Europe in 1948, it was not sensitive to gains and losses. It simply believed that this was the right thing to do, so no calculations were made, even though the United States’ “hidden motivations” are routinely investigated by many observers. The same thing happened when the European Union (at that time the European Community) accepted countries like Portugal and Greece in the 1970s or Bulgaria and Romania in the 2000s, countries that were not ready to join the European organization at that time. It was a net loss in terms of finance for the European Community, but the EC believed this to be the right thing to do. It is a typical example of when one country or group of countries enjoying more power decides to help other countries by permitting them to join the organization even though the qualifying criteria were not fulfilled. But what happens if a country or a corporation helps a direct competitor? Is an altruistic attitude still possible? That is what Martin Nowak asks himself: “Why should one individual help another who is a potential competitor in the struggle for survival?” [123] The question is asked by a biologist, but it can easily be asked by a politician or a businessman in the following way: “Why would a state or a corporation help another state or a competitor in the struggle for survival?,” “Why would, for instance, the United States help China to become the world factory or why would Philips help TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) to become the world leader in semiconductors?” The question of cooperation is very interesting because it goes against the principle of natural selection and selfish interest,

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presented as the sine qua non relation between states and corporations by classical geopolitics.

4.4.3

Power and Relational Reciprocity

To answer that question, the Journal of Theoretical Biology launched a special issue to mark its 50th anniversary in 2012. The whole issue was about cooperation, and authors came from a wide array of disciplines. There were biologists, computer scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, economists, psychologists, and business scholars. The only missing disciplines were politics, sociology, and philosophy. Even though geopolitics was not included in the special issue, feminist geopolitics can use many of the observations, especially the mechanisms proposed by Martin Nowak. In his contribution, Martin Nowak has identified five mechanisms justifying cooperation over selfish interest. The first one is direct reciprocity, when the individuals base their decisions on previous direct cooperation they had with each other. This is the tit-for-tat reciprocity. The second mechanism is indirect reciprocity, when individuals base their decisions on the reputation and experience of others rather than their direct experience. The third is spatial selection, when individuals choose that they are part of some group and as members of the group they show solidarity for the members of that group. The fourth mechanism is multilevel selection, where being part of a group means that other groups become a threat. The fifth and last case is kin selection, where individuals cooperate with members of the family according to fraternity and solidarity. All the five mechanisms are used in politics and business. Direct reciprocity focuses on permanent friends and enemies. If one state helped another state in a war, it is expected that the other state will pay back the debt in a future war or conflict. For instance, the United States helped the United Kingdom in WWI and WWII, so the United Kingdom will follow the United States in its wars after WWII without questioning the legitimacy of the US demands. On the other side, Japan could propose all the money it wants, military assistance, or natural resources, but there is little probability that China will make Japan its military ally. In these two cases, a relationship does not rely on a power base, it relies on history, religious proximity, or political system similarity. In the example of the United States and the USSR, their mutual non-aggression and tacit cooperation stem not from trust, but from the durability of relationship, since during the Cold War, both countries considered that they would deal with each other indefinitely. Time is the condition for stable cooperation according to Robert Axelrod, even among enemies [124]. In the business environment, the manufacturer helps the supplier to become part of the ecosystem. After many years of collaboration, the relatedness is so strong that both parties continue to engage in the relationship even if there are more profitable alternatives on the market. The manufacturer of tires or gearboxes can be invited by the car manufacturer a very long time in advance in the conception of a new car model to participate in the elaboration of new innovative features. If another supplier

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comes to see the car manufacturer and proposes the same part at half the price, the car manufacturer will seriously look at the proposal. The probability that the car manufacturer will dump the long-term supplier is, however, low because the car manufacturer must build trust and a long-term relationship with the newcomer. This is not easy because the long-term supplier has demonstrated that the car supplier can rely on the supplier. Let’s imagine that the car manufacturer abandons the long-term partner for the benefit of the new supplier. Who can guarantee that the new partner will engage in a long-term partnership and will not abandon the car manufacturer if another car manufacturer pays more? In that case, the car manufacturer loses on both sides. According to Robert Axelrod, “The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the belief that one will have to do business again with the same client, or the same supplier” [125]. The company can even decide to abandon a certain business and give it to the supplier. All car manufacturers have abandoned vertical integration, and they have left large parts of the business to their suppliers or Original-Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). In the business world, the practice of piggybacking or nudge can be assimilated to altruistic help because one agent helps another agent to get access to certain markets, customers, or technology and does not ask for anything in exchange [126]. However, a debt is a debt, and at some point in time, the corporation that helped another can expect help from the indebted corporation. In the case of indirect reciprocity, the question is about reputation. Angola is the biggest producer of oil in Africa for 2022, following the fall in production in Nigeria. Its reserves of oil are mainly offshore. The country does not have the capacity to exploit these oil fields, so it issues concessions for foreign companies. The choice of concessionaires can be made on a political or technological/business basis. Politically, Angola can favor a fellow emerging country like China to get concessions, and this is what it did. However, for deep water exploration activity, all concessions go to Western companies that have a reputation for offshore exploration, especially for ultra-deep waters. One Western country ticks all the boxes in offshore exploration. That country is Norway, which has a reputation as a country that is politically neutral and willing to help emerging countries [127]. At the same time, Norway has an excellent reputation in drilling offshore in its own waters in Norway. This double reputation could help Equinor from Norway to get a high number of concessions, but the overall reputation of Total, Chevron, and BP is much higher than that of Equinor. As for spatial selection, it is about “neighbors helping each other.” On a political level, African countries can develop their own, indigenous mechanisms and solutions to help each other and stop conflicts on the continent. These countries already have an organization called the African Union. They can theoretically help each other and stop interference of non-African powers on the continent. This, however, rarely happens, and the future is gloomy according to The Economist [128]. The African situation contrasts with water management agreements. The Amazon Cooperation Treaty or the Mekong River Commission can work well despite animosity between countries because they face the same issues. It is remarkable that, despite all problems and wars between Pakistan and India, the Indus Water Treaty still works, thanks to the Permanent Indus Commission composed of officials from both

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countries who manage the goals and objectives of the treaty. Regardless of the animosity between neighbors, the countries surrounding the Ferghana valley in Central Asia or India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, the geopolitical conflicts over water are either weak or nonexistent according to Marit Brochman, who found that most water conflicts from 1948 to 1999 were resolved through cooperation and treaties [129]. The fourth mechanism is a multilevel selection, where being part of a group means that other groups can be labeled a threat to the first group. In that case, the group behavior or herd mentality is most important. In politics, this is very common in parliament, where coalitions are made to exclude parties or individuals. Being a member of a Democratic Party means that chances to vote for a proposal made by the Republicans are very slim and vice versa. Being a member of the party gives a certain comfort zone for politicians because they can count on the solidarity of the other party members. Party discipline is primordial, and the only way to break the party discipline is to leave the party. When Emmanuel Macron was elected president for the first time in France in 2017, he did not have a political party of his own, so he built a new party with members of established parties who decided to break up with their parties and build this new one. In business terms, defensive alliances can be established against a common enemy. In the case of hackers, the enemy is not clearly identified, but it clearly exists, so companies build defense systems for cybersecurity where they help each other with information and material capabilities. If one country is identified as a threat, all companies coming from that country can be declared suspicious, and there is a knee jerk, automatic reaction to a perceived threat coming from that country. Chinese companies are routinely suspected of working for the Chinese government and the army, so they are banned, as Japanese companies were banned in the 1980s in the United States, because “Japan Inc.” was presented as an apocalypse for the American economy.21 The last mechanism is kin selection, or “family comes first.” This was a traditional way of looking at politics because of dynastical exercise and transmission of power. All kinds of royalties and feudal systems put the emphasis on kinship. Even a socialist system like the North Korean “juche” puts the emphasis on the Kim dynasty and transmission of power. In South-East Asia, it is not rare to find children of former prime ministers or presidents becoming prime ministers or presidents themselves. Kinship also exists in democracies where the “power path” starts with the right kindergarten, continues with the right elementary and high schools, and finishes at the right university. This is particularly true in the United States with the elite Ivy League, where the future people of authority come from. These universities usually reserve a certain number of places for the children of alumni. It helps also if the alumni contribute generously to the University Fund. The legacy system in the universities was clearly assumed in the past because the universities did not want some undesirable populations to attend. For instance, Princeton

Interview of Kristin Vekasi, ‘Lessons for Today from The U.S.-Japan Trade War of the 1980s,’ NPR, May 20, 2019.

21

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University adopted a comprehensive admissions process in 1922, like the one at Dartmouth College created in 1919, which stated that “all properly qualified sons of Dartmouth alumni and Dartmouth college officers” would be admitted. Even today, legacy students represent a large part of the freshmen cohorts [130]. Kinship has generated the “fraternal player,” an important factor in politics and business, because individuals can count on their parents and siblings. Everything, however, depends on the definition of family. Apart from the basic differentiation between a nuclear and extended family, there might be political and business definitions of family. The term “fraternity” can also be misused because the Soviet Union has always portrayed itself as the elder brother for Eastern European countries. These countries were in fact dominated by the Soviet Union. They did not want the Soviet Union as the elder brother. When some leaders in Hungary and Poland compare the European Union to the Soviet Union, this is unfair because they compare one country (the Soviet Union) to a group of countries (the European Union) unless they implicitly consider that one country (Germany) dominates the European Union, like an elder brother. In business, family is very important, because in most countries, family businesses represent more than 95 percent of all businesses. Family businesses also represent more than 35 percent of the Fortune 500 largest companies. Business is, therefore, family business first. The transmission of businesses from one generation to the next is not an easy issue. It often ends in family feuds, but the concept of family business is resilient. All issues linked to kinship in politics are the same for kinship in business. Marriages between royal families or between business empires are anything but private decisions. Whole families are involved in that kind of decision. Succession plans are sometimes clearly set up, like in the succession to the British throne, but this is typical, especially in the business world. The size of the business empire is so great that the succession plans of the Ambani family in India and Li Ka-Shing family in Hong Kong are as important as the succession plan of King Salman in Saudi Arabia. Knowing who is going to inherit the throne or the business empire has huge political implications in the country.

4.4.4

Relational Theory and Business

Feminist geopolitics brings issues about diversity and inclusion, customer-centricity, and employee-centricity to the table, and many corporations have incorporated them into their strategy. Feminist geopolitics also brings the relational theory as a complement to rational choice theory to help corporations define their goals and operations. This is something we are going to discuss in the following paragraphs. In a rational choice approach, the selfishness of actors is viewed as a sure way to regulate the market independently from the regulator because actors by themselves will find the smallest common denominator, ensuring their survival and prosperity. Selfishness is presented as the greatest achievement in human history according to Friedrich Hayek, who contended that “only when people learned to be selfish, learned to overcome their innate instincts toward communal sharing, did it become

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possible to make the transition from primitive society to free civilized world.22” So, Hayek would claim that economists aren’t corrupting the young by teaching them selfishness, they are civilizing them! As propagators of rational choice theory, classical geopolitics is associated with selfishness, “the winner takes all” or “the market is a battlefield” mentality. It does not mean that classical geopolitics systematically reduces social relations (be it in business or in politics) to individualism or a winning mentality. Classical geopolitics recognizes that love, affection, or friendship plays an important role in social relations. They simply recognize as a fact that what Hirshleifer calls the “dark side of the force” in the form of crime, war, and forceful appropriation plays a role as equivalent as cooperation, loyalty, or solidarity. Since classical geopolitics is the only branch of geopolitics to consider it as an important, if not a legitimate driver of human behavior, classical geopolitics has been reduced to rational choice theory while feminist geopolitics has been reduced to relational theory. Both reductions oversimplify the situation, but the simplification is not groundless. Firms do business in society. Hence, social rules and relations play an important role in their success or failure. The literature in business management abounds in two types of studies: one prioritizing rules, and the other arguing for relations. As John Shue Li pointed out, “It is important to note that agreements can be enforced only by rules or by relations, and by nothing else” [131]. It is important to note the term “enforce,” because the regulation or a conflict resolution can be achieved only if the regulator has the power to inflict even heavier damage. Corporations in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan) do share a lot with their Western counterparts, like the pursuit of profits and contractual relationship, for instance, and they also display differences in their governing styles and pay special attention to establishing and utilizing relational resources. Many Western authors have tried to discover the key success factors of East Asian corporations. Jeffrey Dyer compared the advantages of Japanese and American companies and concluded that hybrid relationships, alliances, and a combination of relational and ruled-based approaches, often employed by the Japanese, realize virtually all the advantages of hierarchy that the Americans use while avoiding all their disadvantages [132]. The relational approach seems to be commonplace in Asian societies, be these societies in East Asia, South Asia, or Western Asia (the Middle East). The example from China congrues to practices seen in Japan. Ambrose Yeo-chi King quotes Liang Sou-ming in an article from 1991, which is still valid today: “Chinese society is neither ko-jen pen-wei (individual based), nor she-hui pen-wei (society-based), but kuan-hsi pen-wei (relation-based) . . . The focus is not fixed on any particular individual, but on the particular nature of relations between individuals who interact with each other. The focus is placed upon the relationship.’ In a nutshell, man is a relational being in the Confucius system” [133]. The Western approach to management usually ascribes to relationship or guanxi (or kuan-hsi) an instrumental

22 Hayek quoted by Jack Hirshleifer, The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–2.

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role, rather than an end, but again, practicality and pragmatism prevail. Western managers adapt quickly to relational power if, and only if, it is a condition sine qua non to do business in a certain place, or that relational power is more efficient or more profitable than the use of rules-based power. Again, the case of China is significant, because its development after the reforms of the 1970s was based on relational power. Most of the first investments did not come from Western corporations. They came from Chinese investors who lived in Hong Kong and South-East Asia. The Chinese diaspora from South-east Asia, called “huaren” (citizens who are Chinese by ethnicity, or descent), established the “bamboo network” based on trust and personal connections between Chinese families scattered over South-East Asia and Chinese families in China. Relational power was the only power used at that time. Rules were not important. The Economist estimated in 2021 that over three quarters of the US$369 billion in South-East Asian billionaire wealth was controlled by “huaren” in 2020. And although they make up around 5 percent of the region’s 650 million or so people, ethnic Chinese dominate the region’s US$3 trillion economy. Thailand and Singapore are home to the largest proportion of this wealth, with 20 billionaire “huaren” residing in each country. This wealth is spread across the region, from Malaysia and Indonesia to the Philippines and beyond [134]. According to Sawada Yukari, 80 percent of the privately held shares in domestic companies in Thailand, 75 percent in Indonesia, 60 percent in Malaysia, and 50 percent in the Philippines were owned by local Chinese [135]. Diaspora is present everywhere. It is estimated that there are more people of Lebanese origin living outside of Lebanon than in Lebanon itself. Lebanese cultivate a similar relational power as the Chinese “huaren” do. They also dispose of a capital which can be utilized for the development of Lebanon. The only thing missing is the political stability of the country, which increases the investment risk to such a level that there is no return on investment. Relational power is, therefore, important, but it is not enough since the rules-based approach provided by a stable and efficient political power guaranteeing investment is the other side of a coin. One without the other does not work, as illustrated in the work of Mustafa Emirbayer, who presented in 1997 two opposing views in sociology, namely substantialism and relationalism [136]. The former way of thinking holds that an actor is independent, discrete, and rational, capable of taking self-action of his own will. It is a dominant way of thinking in the Western capitalistic world, but the latter is also important because these independent units must interact with one another in processes. Emirbayer advocates that the process itself is a significant unit for analysis, that it does not come second after the agents and actors. For him, an actor is as independent and rational as it is social, so both substance (agents) and process (relations) are important, and they cannot exist one without the other. Rule-based and relational governance models coexist in the business world. Mainstream international relations scholars have paid almost exclusive attention to rules and regimes, while business circles and business management scholars have been open to relational governance also. Businesses do not see it necessary that there is an incompatibility between the two systems of governance [137].

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Feminist geopolitics concentrates on making visible discrimination of individuals and groups of individuals (women in particular) in politics and in the workplace. Feminist geopolitics also entertains discussions of epistemological nature and proposes non-conventional, post-positivist ways of how to analyze situations. Because of their insistence on underrepresented individuals and groups of people, feminist geopolitics can be perceived as anti-business. According to feminist authors, society voluntarily makes women’s labor cheap, thus reducing women’s importance and agency in the household and society. According to Cynthia Enloe, “no one’s labor is automatically cheap. It has to be made cheap. It is the deliberate manipulation of ideas about girls and women, and of the notions of femininity that empowers those who try to cheapen their labor” [138]. Obviously, corporations are the first in line to make women’s labor cheap, seconded by politicians and society at large. However, the situation is not as simple as it seems at first sight, and Cynthia Enloe gives both sides of the story. For many women in the world, moving from villages to cities, working and earning their own money, even if it is in sweatshops in Bangladesh, living without the supervision of male family members is huge progress from their otherwise regulated life by male family members. Despite low wages or long working hours, it is still progress, which could not have been made without the active involvement of transnational companies [139]. More women in the workforce is the first step toward women empowerment, a condition that is necessary but not sufficient in making women decision-makers of their own future. Feminist geopolitics is not only perceived as anti-business, but also as antipositivist, a trait shared with critical geopolitics. Classical geopolitics is the realm of quantitative methods that can be used in finance, accountancy, statistics, big data, business simulations, etc. The positivist approach is very important when a company deals with public entities (government, ministries, regions, cities) and with other companies. Not only are the decision-makers entities that act rationally, but the process is also well-defined and structured for the reasons of transparency, fairness, and good governance. There is no place for personal preferences and an emotional approach in a business-to-government approach, or an industrial or business-tobusiness relationship. Actors are rational entities, and they are looking for the best price–quality relationship. The feminist approach aims to nuance the rationality of actions and processes. As far as actors are concerned, one way to nuance rationality is to use relationality. Feminist authors seek to demonstrate that public entities and corporations are not anonymous and not non-person entities. On the contrary, public entities and corporations are made of people who take decisions very often based on personal preference. Preference can be based on religion, ideology, or the country of origin. For instance, China can decide not to buy from Japan, not because the price–quality relationship is not good, but for political or historical reasons. Some customers in Pakistan can decide not to buy goods at shops owned by members of the Ahmadi community, even if the products happen to be the best and the cheapest in the world. They do it just because they believe that Ahmadis are not Muslims. This is where individual preferences are more important than rational economic reasons. People

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are not anonymous, and they base their decisions on relational grounds as much as on rational grounds. As for the processes, feminist authors seek to expose the flaws of the positivist method by showing that processes are not always as clear as they pretend to be. Corruption, autocratic mode of government, influence of foreign interference, or opaque procedures constantly modify processes that cannot be analyzed from the positivist point of view because decisions do not necessarily obey processes. The example of a multi-billion French submarine deal with Australia, suddenly canceled in 2021, came as a surprise for France. Australia recognized that it unilaterally reversed the decision to buy French submarines and did not respect the process. Australia eventually agreed to pay a compensation fee of 550 million euros to settle the problem [140]. If this kind of problem happens between allies, it can happen anywhere. The second way to nuance rationality resides in the definition of value. Business shares with classical geopolitics the creation of value as the definition of success. Political leaders present value creation for the state or the society as an important legitimization of their work, while business leaders also use value creation to enhance their successful leadership. All mission statements of companies talk about increasing value, without necessarily indicating what kind of value and for whom. Not only is there a dilemma if the profits should be distributed within society, but there is also a dilemma about who is entitled to receive the most within the corporation itself. In his paper, Radu Vranceanu has analyzed the attitude of the two dominant economic theories, neoclassicism (best represented by Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, and Leon Walras) and the Austrian School of Economics (Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Shumpeter, and Ludwig von Mises) and concluded that there is a disagreement about the final recipient of profit creation in a corporation: would it be the shareholders (sleeping partners sometimes) or internal entrepreneurs who are the direct generators of profits [141]. The two schools cannot agree on the issue. The question of value recipient is not settled, as the definition of value is not settled either. The question of value is where the feminist approaches is interesting because it puts the emphasis on value defined as quality of life through the work–life balance and not the accumulation of capital through the maximization of profits. Many companies today have accepted the trade-off of lower revenues or profits if this results in increasing another type of value (ecological or societal). The concept of the stakeholder was introduced rather early in the debate about the goals and mission of the company. It was probably the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression in America followed by the crisis in Germany and other places that prompted the discussion about the purpose of business and limitations to the sacrosanct imperative of profit maximization [142]. Nowadays, stakeholder equity has been encapsulated as “good for the society,” where the society is not only the ecosystem of the corporation (suppliers, employees, customers, or institutional partners), but the whole society and the planet. The discussion about the role of profit maximization, doing good for the planet and the society, CRS, and ethics in capitalism is far from over.

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Academics who write about geopolitics usually entertain harsh discussions of rationality vs. irrationality, materiality vs. non-materiality, facts vs. discourse, disagreements about the origin of knowledge, power, and science, and a gendered vs. a non-gendered view of politics. Politics and business are much more pragmatic than academic entrenched visions, provided that one approach (anarchy vs. hegemony or rules-based vs. relation-based, for instance) demonstrates that it is more efficient than the other, and political and business leaders pick it up. Academics can live in ivory towers if they want. They can also decide not to travel and see for themselves what happens in other countries. They can concentrate only on theoretical issues. In all these cases, they avoid being exposed to outside influence. Corporations on their side are always exposed to every kind of influence. For large transnational corporations, geopolitics is their bread-and-butter concern. Companies such as McDonald’s, Nestlé, Mercedes, or Ferrero are exposed to geopolitical upheavals on the local and global levels at the same time. Even small companies are exposed to global events when they must secure raw materials. Small bakeries in the Middle East and Africa, even though these countries have nothing to do with the conflict, feel the heat of the Russian invasion of Ukraine because cereals are not available at the price and the quantity they used to be. Small and mediumsized companies in Europe also suffer from the same conflict because of the inflation, and they are no longer able to cover their costs. How businesses respond to the geopolitical challenge and how businesses capitalize on solutions offered by the different branches of geopolitics is something we are going to discuss in the next and final chapter.

References 1. Laurent Bibard, Sexuality and Globalization: An Introduction to a Phenomenology of Sexualities, Palgrave, 2014, p. 2 2. Klaus Dodds, ‘Political Geography III: Critical Geopolitics after Ten Years’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 25, N°3, 2001, pp. 469–484; Gearoid O’Tuathail et al., ‘New Directions in Critical geopolitics: An Introduction’, GeoJournal, Vol. 75, N°4, 2010, pp. 315–325 3. Jill Matthews, ‘Feminist History’, Labour History, No. 50, May 1986, pp. 147–153 4. Deborah Dixon, Feminist Geopolitics: Material States, Routledge, 2015, p. 4 5. Bert Chapman, Geopolitics, A Guide to the Issues, Praeger, 2011 pp. 7–27 6. Florian Louis, Les grands théoriciens de la géopolitique, Belin, 2020 7. Gearoid O’Tuarhail, Simon Dalby and Paul Routledge, The Geopolitics Reader, second edition, Routledge, 2006 8. Jo Sharp, ‘Subaltern geopolitics: introduction’, Geoforum, Vol. 42, N°3, June 2011, pp. 271–273; Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations, Stanford University Press, 2011 9. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Why is there no non-Western International Relations theory? Ten years on’, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol. 17, N°3, September 2017, pp. 341–370, p. 345 10. Jongjin Zhang, ‘The Chinese School, Global Production of Knowledge, and Contentious Politics in Disciplinary IR’, All Azimuth, Vol. 9, N°2, 2020, pp. 283–298

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11. Hun Joon Kim, ‘Will IR Theory with Chinese Characteristics be a Powerful Initiative?’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 9, N°1, Spring 2016, pp. 59–79 12. Robert Keohane, ‘International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint’, Journal of International Studies, Vol. 18, N°2, June 1989, pp. 245–253, p. 248 13. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, second edition, first published in 1990, reprinted by University of California Press, 2014 14. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Making Feminist Sense of Intrenational Politics, op. cit., 173 15. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, boundary 2, Vol. 12, N° 3, Spring-Automn 1984, pp. 333–358, p. 336 16. C.T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,’ p. 337 17. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, ‘Can the Subalterne Speak?’, in Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313, p. 306. 18. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Making Feminist Sense of Intrenational Politics, p. 124. 19. Grace Miller, ‘The Zapatista Army: A Feminist Revolution Existing within the Patriarchy’, The Yale Review of International Studies, June 2021 20. Lisa Kenney, ‘Companies Can’t Ignore Shifting Gender Norms’, Harvard Business Review, April 8, 2020 21. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in The Late Twentieth Century’, in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1990, pp.; 149–181 22. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in The Late Twentieth Century,’ p. 150 23. Ajnesh Prasad, ‘Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies’, in Gender, Work and Organization, Vol 23, N°4, 2016, pp. 431–446 24. Women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work, Report of the SecretaryGeneral, E/CN.6/2017/3, December 2016 25. Marianne Ferber, Julie Nelson, Feminist Theory and Economics, Beyond Economic Man, reprinted edition in 2003, p. 1 26. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, first published in 1970, reprinted by Earthscan 2011, p. 41–42 27. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, Harper Collins, 1990 28. Katrine Marcal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics, Granta Books, 2015 29. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics, 14th Meeting of the Advisory Expert Group on National Accounts, Unpaid Household Service Work, 5–9 October 2020 available on https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/aeg/2020/M14_6_7_Unpaid_ HH_Service_Work.pdf 30. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives, 1983, p. 15 31. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Beacon Press, 1995 32. Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs, Vol. 12, No 4, Summer 1987, pp. 687–718, pp. 717–718 33. J. Ann Tickner, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagement between Feminists and IR Theorists,’ pp. 611–632 34. Helen Milner, ‘Resisting protectionism: global industries and the politics of international trade,’ Princeton University Press, 1998 35. John Agnew, Hidden Geopolitics, pp. 72–55 36. Julian Borger, ‘Fleeing a hell the US helped create: why Central Americans journey north,’ The Guardian, December 19, 2018

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63. Oleh Protsyk, Lupsa Marius Matichescu, ‘Electoral rules and minority representation in Romania,’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 31–41 64. Png Poh-seng, ‘The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A Case of Local Identity and Socio-Cultural Accommodation,’ Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 10, No. 1, March 1969, pp. 95–114 65. Robert Schwartz, ‘Romania’s ethnic Germans,’ Deutsche Welle, November 18, 2014 66. ‘2020 U.S. Population More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Than Measured in 2010,’ United States Census Bureau, August 12, 2021, available on www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/0 8/2020-united-states-population-more-racially-ethnically-diverse-than-2010.html 67. Xi Jinping, The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation, Foreign Languages Press, 2014 68. Theresa Man Ling Lee, ‘Liang Qichao and the Meaning of Citizenship: Then and Now,’ History of Political Thought, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 305–327 69. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, published in 1913, reprinted by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015 70. Johann Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Hackett, 2013 71. Boris Meissere, ‘The Soviet Concept of Nation and the Right of National Self-Determination’, International Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter, 1976/1977, pp. 56–81 72. William Fierman, ‘Identity, Symbolism, and the Politics of Language in Central Asia’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 61, No. 7, September 2009, pp. 1207–1228 73. Lauri Malksoo, ‘The Soviet Approach to the Right of Peoples to Self-determination: Russia’s Farewell to jus publicum europaeum’, Journal of the history of International Law, Vol. 19, N° 2, May 2017, pp. 200–218 74. Arun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesotta Press, 1996, pp. 114–39, p.133 75. M. Korac, ‘Refugee Women in Serbia: Their Experiences with War, Nationalism and State Building’ in Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis (ed.), Women, Citizenship and Difference, Zed Books, 1999, pp. 192–200 76. Henry Rider Haggard, King Salomon’s Mines, Cassel, 1885, p. 30 77. Sara Smith, Intimate geopolitics, Love, territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Treshold, Rutgers University Press, 2020, p. x 78. Mirjana Morokvasic-Muller, ‘From Pillars of Yugoslavism to Targets of Violence: Interethnic Marriages in the Former Yugoslavia and Thereafter’, in Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, edited by Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, Berkeley University Press, 2004, pp. 134–151, p. 135. 79. Jo Sharp, ‘Materials, forsenics, and feminist geopolitics’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 45, No 5, October 2021, pp. 990–1002, p. 990 80. Dixon, Feminist Geopolitics: Material States, pp. 59–83 81. Pyong Gap Min, ‘Korean “Comfort Women”: The Intersection of Colonial Power, Gender, and Class,’ Gender and Society, Vol. 17, No. 6, December 2003, pp. 938–957 82. Bilgesu Sumer, ‘The invisible dimension of institutional violence and the political construction of impunity: necropopulism and the averted medicolegal gaze’, pp. 137–147 in Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Timothy Dunn (eds.), Handbook on Human Security, Borders, and Migration, Edwar Elger, 2021 83. Francisco Ferrandiz, ‘The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain’, Anthropology Today, Vol. 22, N° 3, 2006, pp. 7–12 84. Wenona Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, ‘New Directions for Feminist Research and Politics,’ in Sites of Violence, Gender and Conflict Zones, ed. by Giles and Hyndman, University of California Press, 2004, p. 310 85. John Agnew, Hidden Geopolitics, Governance in a Globalized World, p. ix 86. Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, University of California Press, 2020, p. 3

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Chapter 5

Business Geopolitics

Business and politics have always entertained a complex relationship. On one side, corporations depend on politics for the organization of society and the definition of what they can do or cannot do. On the other side, businesses make money, they employ people, they create value. Akin to the relationship between state and religions in a secular society where theoretically politics is separated from religion, the same is expected from business and politics, a separation of public and private interest. Reality is, however, complicated. Centuries ago, businesses were already engaged in global relations and politics of their time with Greek colonies and trading points (emporium or comptoirs) in the Mediterranean, the Silk Road, the Hanseatic League, the political and business rivalry between Venice and Genoa, just to quote some examples. But the real gamechanger was the globalization surge that happened after the end of the Cold War, which permitted for the first time real global presence for corporations, with Russia and China joining the world economy. In a capitalist system, there can be passive coexistence between the two powers. The Roman Empire introduced a distinction between imperium (the rule over all individuals by the prince or political power) and dominium (the rule over the things that are individual, i.e., private property and the economic power) [1]. In modern terminology, it is called public and private interest. They need each other, but they do not want to cross the boundary and interfere in each other’s realms. The second option is intense collaboration and partnership between corporations and state managers. “The state managers need the support of economic actors in order to maintain some reasonable level of economic growth. Conversely, capitalists (business) need the state for economic regulation, domestically and internationally, for instance, through organizations like the World Trade Organization” [2]. Situations of intense collaboration and manipulation abound. A condition of cooperation is to identify the “national interest.” Corporations and banks do not want to help governments, which can be sectarian or corrupt. Corporations want to help the country, the nation, hence “national interest,” which in some cases can be the same as the interest of the private corporation. Many corporations have been identified as the “jewel” or the “pride” of the nation such as luxury brands in France and Italy or automobile © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_5

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brands in Germany. Selling them to foreign groups is equivalent to a national catastrophe. Imagining Saudi Aramco no longer being Saudi anymore or Mercedes no longer being German. This would be difficult to accept for the Saudi and German populations. If corporations are beneficiary of the rules and/or money from the state, it is easy to ask them to support the state in return. This is how the term mercantilism was invented, by which governments used private corporations and banks to augment state power at the expense of other countries. The use of national economies usually starts with the control of strategically important natural resources, the nationalization of which is the first step to resource nationalism. According to Koch and Perreault, “we understand resource nationalism as a political discourse, applied to political and economic thinking about how a state and its population should manage and distribute profits derived from natural resources” [3]. The states are very jealous about the property of natural resources. They want to control them, especially if resources are valuable. However, states are not industrial operators. They need private companies to extract and process natural resources. States believe that it is easier to control these operations if the company is a domestic company because states have leverage over them. In exchange, domestic corporations enjoy protection from the state because they are not exposed to foreign presence. All this is nice and good when strong national corporate “jewels” exist. This is, unfortunately, not the case in scores of developing countries, so natural resource reserves are not exploited by domestic companies and the degree of control of the state is low. Geopolitical authors do not talk about business, they prefer to talk about economy. Companies can be aggregated in broad categories such as industries or clusters. It is easier for states to manipulate aggregate wholes rather than millions of individual companies. Geoeconomy, political economy, and international political economy are respectable terms while business is always suspected of pursuing some hidden and dark agendas. While geopolitics tends to reject and ignore businesses, the opposite is not true. Geopolitics is important for business, especially for investors who must identify, assess, and protect against risk. All surveys among business leaders indicate that geopolitical risk is the most important risk they face. Corporations are used to coping with risk. What is different nowadays is the pace of change. This record pace strains resources and poses new challenges for corporations. Many business leaders are not prepared for the assessment of geopolitical risk because “. . .almost all books and articles written on geopolitics are useless for investors. Political scientists are not trained to think like investors, and they are not typically trained in quantitative methods. Instead, they engage in developing narratives for geopolitical events and processes that pose risks and opportunities for investors” [4]. Business is often dismissed as a legitimate actor of geopolitics because of “hidden” motives, but if “geopolitics is a way of seeing” as proposed by John Agnew [5], it is important to see how corporations view geopolitics. Corporate leaders tend to identify geopolitics with “high politics,” big events like revolutions, wars, boycotts, and technological disruptions. Corporations also tend to identify geopolitics with big actors like states, religious organizations, or other large

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corporations that can have an influence on their own activity. From the corporate point of view, it does not matter if the storm or opportunity comes from political or economic sources, its job is to identify the storm or opportunity and make the most of it. This collision of commerce and business in the global geopolitical battle has generated new terms, more appropriate to business, such as geostrategy or geoeconomy. There are many interpretations of geoeconomy, but we will refer to Edward Luttwak, one of its most outspoken propagators. He outlined his understanding of geoeconomics in an article in National Interest in 1990, in which he described geoeconomics as “the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce—or, as Clausewitz would have written, the logic of war in the grammar of commerce” [6]. Contrasting geopolitics to geoeconomics, he asserted that the methods of commerce are replacing military methods in international relations, with capital becoming more important than firepower. He believed that commerce was more important than military-technical advancement, or that market penetration is a greater mark of power than the possession of garrisons and bases. Commerce and market penetration are the exclusive prerogatives of corporations while militarytechnical advancement, garrisons, and bases are the prerogatives of states. His statement from 1990 marked the triumph of globalization. According to him, “geo-economics is no more and not less than the continuation of the ancient rivalry of nations by new industrial means . . . Instead of fighting each other, France, Germany, and Britain now collaborate to fund Airbus Industrie’s offensive against Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. Instead of measuring progress by how far the fighting front advances on the map, it is worldwide market shares for the targeted products that are the goal” [7]. Consequently, private corporations “naturally” replace the states in geopolitics and international relations. If the movement is “natural,” there is no reason to oppose it. It is also “natural” to embrace it because globalization means the end of global wars. Regional and local wars will continue to exist, but globalization assumes that there will not be global wars involving nuclear powers. Since there is no WWIII on the horizon, the only rivalry that countries can entertain is the business rivalry where private companies play the prominent and proxy role. This also means that private corporations serve the interests of their nation-states. That postulate is hotly debated because many companies do not show loyalty to states. Who is serving the interests of whom? Is it companies serving the interests of nation-states, or are the states serving the interests of private corporations? In classical geopolitics, interests of the private corporations and states can go together. In critical geopolitics, this is not the case. For O’Tuathail, the nation-state as we used to know it after Westphalia is dead, and it has been replaced by transnational companies. He says: “The meaning of state sovereignty is questionable when even the most powerful of states depend upon the goodwill of private financial markets for their economic health and security. Similarly, transcontinental missiles, global satellite television, the Internet and global warming have rendered territorial integrity a problematic notion” [8]. It was not the first time that the possibility of corporations challenging national sovereignty was pointed out. Early in 1968, Raymond Vernon argued that there should be a way for states and corporations to cooperate because, “In the end,

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sovereign states will learn to live with a decline in their perceived economic power” [9]. When he revisited his article 10 years later, Raymond Vernon made three propositions for a necessary cooperation between multinational corporations and states. The first necessity comes from the fact that a significant part of domestic product is attributed to affiliates of multinational corporations, and nation-states cannot fully control that activity. The second necessity for cooperation is that multinational corporations have presence and activities in many countries. One single country cannot control all their activities. Finally, multinational corporations “cannot escape serving as a conduit through which sovereign states exert an influence on the economies of other sovereign states” [10]. All these three propositions are still valid today. As Raymond Vernon proposed 40 years ago, states and multinational corporations should abandon the idea that one of them will fully control the other. They should abandon the idea that corporations are strong enough to replace states. That was also the opinion shared by Joseph Nye in 1974: “To the common and oversimplified question whether multinational corporations are likely to render the sovereignty of the nation-state obsolete, the answer surely is a qualified ‘no’”’ [11]. The main reason for a “qualified no” is that states have coercive power and corporations do not. The best option for both actors is cooperation, but because they are strange animals, cooperation does not happen all the time. When he asked the question “How do the sovereign states propose to deal with the fact that so many of their enterprises are conduits through which other sovereign states exert their influence?” Vernon answered: “Perhaps they will not deal with the problem at all. There is plenty of evidence for the proposition that nation states are capable of tolerating ambiguity on a massive scale for long periods of time” [12]. The concept of ambiguity is very useful in Asia because the United States has entertained strategic ambiguity with Taiwan and China since the adoption of the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979. Pakistan and India still entertain a passive/active conflict over Kashmir since the partition of British India in 1947. There is still no formal peace agreement between Japan and Russia, but all this does not refrain these countries from cooperating with each other on occasions. If states are ready to accept ambiguity in inter-state relations, they can also tolerate ambiguity when it comes to the relationship they have with multinational corporations. In this chapter, we will analyze the relations between politics and businesses following the already seen triptych: space, state, and power. On the level of space, the relationship between corporations and their environment will be analyzed with the aim of finding the scale that is the most appropriate for business. On the level of state, the question is to know who the main actor is in geopolitics. Corporations as Non-State Actors have agency, and legitimate presence on the international scene, so the question is of importance. Finally, as far as power is concerned, some corporations are more powerful than others, and sometimes they are more powerful than states. The question is to know how corporations will use that power and what their intentions are. Each of these levels will be analyzed from the classical and critical/ feminist point of view to gain a comprehensive understanding of how businesses are included in the geopolitical conversation.

5.1

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Before the triptych, the business geopolitical conversation will start with the discussion of the place of business within a larger scope of politics and economy. Many states do not identify businesses as legitimate partners. They prefer to look at the economy rather than at business. Practically all states have a Ministry of Economy and Finance but don’t tend to have a Ministry of Business. Business is usually hidden somewhere in the Ministry of Industry and Trade or split among different ministries. The economy has a big advantage in aggregating activities and people. It is easy, for instance, to make a separate industry and services categories such as oil industry or software industry and put a corporation in the relevant category. It is also easy to separate blue-collar workers from white-collar workers and imagine separate statuses and contributions, depending on the status people have in the economy. States also have a propensity to privilege a particular understanding of economy, called political economy, which scrutinizes economic production and trade on one side and puts emphasis on national income and wealth on the other. Since their tendency is to look at the economy from the state, regional, or global perspective, governments, national banks, and insurance companies employ many economists, while the number of businesspeople and entrepreneurs in governmental structures and state institutions is not prominent. Since politics uses political economy as their main analytical tool when dealing with business, it is necessary to analyze the relation between economy, geopolitics, and business in the first part of this chapter. The analysis of interaction between economy, business, and states will be centered on positivist and post-positivist interpretations. The positivist approach is close to classical geopolitics while the post-positivist is largely represented by critical/feminist interpretations.

5.1

Economy, Geopolitics, and Business Resonance

As it was necessary to analyze in detail the concept of knowledge for critical geopolitics, it is necessary to analyze the link between economy and corporations for business geopolitics. Economy and business are often associated to the positivist school for two reasons. The first reason is that businesses share with positivists the love for science, rationality, and natural laws they use in their day-to-day activities. The second reason is that corporations entertain with the state a relationship that is rational and factual. States and corporations objectively assess the power of each other and engage in a relationship that follows the assessment. The ensuing relationship can be one of cooperation or one of conflict, but it is based on objective, rational information they have about each other. If a state, for instance, needs money to wage a war and money is held in private hands, the state can engage in cooperation (borrow money from private lenders) or conflict (seize the money), but the decision of the state will be based on the trade-offs induced by the decision. The most prominent defender of positivism in economics and business was Milton Friedman (1912–2006). In his collection of essays, “The Methodology of

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Positive Economics,” he emphasized the necessity that economics must be free from normative reasoning to be accepted as science. Normative reasoning or normative argumentation comes from norms, morals, ethics, and beliefs that can be based on science, but very often are not. Milton Freedman used the term normative reasoning in a restrained form as an antithesis to scientific reasoning. In order to stress the difference between the two, he quoted John Neville Keynes, “A positive science is a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science is a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be” [13]. For Keynes, positive economics is, or can be, an “objective science” in precisely the same manner as any of the physical sciences are. Economics is hence as hard as physics or chemistry because it rests on theories and hypothesis that yield valid and meaningful predictions about phenomena not yet observed, just as physics and chemistry do. According to Friedman and the Chicago School he was part of, the natural sciences are the only appropriate methodology in social sciences and economics should follow this model, with the emphasis on measurement, logic, and modeling. Only this approach can be universal because it is rational, and it is rational because it obeys natural laws. He argued that a good economic “model” is good if it leads to correct predictions, even if some of the assumptions are not heavily tested. Businesses and politics cannot live without assumptions because they guide hypotheses they develop about consumer and political behavior. Foreign policy also relies on assumptions about the behavior of other states. Many assumptions exist in economics and politics, but we will concentrate on assumptions commonly shared by economists and businesspeople as stated by Jan Horst Keppler [14]: 1. There are economic agents whose behavior can be meaningfully reduced to their reaction to the price, quantity, and quality signals that they receive from the markets. This is the realm of behavioral economics. Agents can be states, other corporations, or cooperatives, but in business the main agents are the final customers, so their reaction to signals is constantly scrutinized by marketing specialists. On the level of state, the economic agents are citizens and voters, so their reaction to price, quantity, and quality signals are scrutinized by political agents. On the international level, the agents from the classical geopolitics point of view are states, and they also scrutinize the signals coming from other states before deciding. 2. There are commodities, i.e., fully codified goods, services, or amenities whose use rights can be transferred between individuals at no or very low cost. This is the realm of gifts or non-market activities like the sharing economy, where the price of goods and services is nil or very low. Business does not intervene here in the transactional sense, but it does intervene in the operational sense because someone must design and offer services, or manufacture commodities, goods, or amenities. There is a cost for these commodities even if there is no payment for them. From the political point of view, the question is to know whether public goods and services should be delivered free or whether citizens and voters should pay for them. There is huge discussion about the cost of education, health

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services, or retirements schemes, the cost associated with them, and who should eventually bear these costs. On the international level, the question of cost is very important in case of war. Should the help to Ukraine be delivered free or should Ukraine at the end of the war pay for all aid delivered to it after the war started in 2022? 3. There exist markets in the sense of a place or a medium in which information about prices, quantities, and qualities is received and in which exchanges can take place at low transaction costs. This is the realm of the marketplace (material marketplace or e-commerce), where the availability of information can bring the transaction cost down (not the actual price of the goods and services, but the cost in making the transaction happen). The aim is to bring the transaction cost very low so more exchanges can happen. The transaction cost is important in politics because states need to decide whether the goods and services should be delivered to citizens and voters by a public institution or a private corporation. There are countless examples of privatizations worldwide and assessments about the cost– benefit of these operations. On the international level, the transaction cost is scrutinized by diaspora members when they look at the transaction costs for remittances when they send money to members of their family who stay in the homeland. The traditional (and old) understanding of economy as the realm of abstraction, quantification, logic, and mathematization was immediately translated in corporate management, which started to use applied mathematics in statistics, probability, and operations research. Today, this approach is obsolete. Digitization has transformed the economy, business, and politics because everything has become data-driven. Instead of producing theories, economy, business management, and politics have become experimental fields since there is enough of data, and it is possible to get data instantly. Experimental techniques coming from biology or psychology have entered business and politics, so today the dual impact of digitization and experimentation has replaced the quest for theory, and especially the “grand” theory, which could explain everything. Recent Nobel Prizes in economic sciences have been attributed in 2021 to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics” and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationship.” There is no more quest for a “grand theory,” but a drive for method and experiment. There is, however, a caveat because experimentation and identification of causality can lead to simplifications and aberrations and end up in presenting a single solution to all problems that political and corporate leaders have. The single solution or a “miracle solution” solving all problems can be, for instance, “Disruption” or “Diversity and Inclusion” in business, while in politics it can be the ban on immigration or higher taxation on high earners. Positivism is based on science, so the question on how to bridge science and politics is not easy to answer because scientists and politicians usually do not understand each other. Few economists and even fewer natural scientists seek a political career, so the number of natural scientists in parliament and the government is extremely low. Politics in a democratic environment is structurally a short-term

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activity because mandates are short, and if politicians want to be reelected or want to leave a mark during their term, they look for short-term results. In a typically 4-year term, politicians know that they can introduce reforms or new policies only in the first 100 days. After that, it is too late. Scientific reasoning on the other side is usually on a long-term basis and, depending on the branch of science, it can be dozens of years or hundreds if not thousands of years as in the case of geological timescale. This is in contradiction with the short-term obsession politicians have. The contradiction, however, must be resolved because politicians engage the state and the society for the long run when they decide, for instance, to move from fossil oils to clean energy or when they engage infrastructure projects that will have effects for future generations. Rush Holt was one of the very few scientists in the American Congress, and his comparison of political and scientific reasoning is interesting to look at: “Politicians (like everyone else) are often guilty of ‘short-termism’: the desire to enjoy rewards now rather than to invest them for later. Yet government actions—infrastructure projects, or education programmes—play over decades, long past the careers of individual lawmakers. Scientists are generally comfortable thinking about processes on different timescales,—of millions or even billions of years. Scientific thinking can thus build strong arguments for investments in roads, bridges, trains, and laboratories that will not produce profits tomorrow but will pay off powerfully in the decades to come” [15]. Even if they are not comfortable with the scientific timescale, politicians must make decisions for the long term and for that they need scientists. Politicians also need businesspeople because, at the end of the day, the solutions are proposed and realized by corporations, not the states and not the scientists. Despite their objectives (businesspeople looking for value creation and scientists looking for objective realization), they will work together because they both share the same methods of a world full of hypothesis, statistics, and probabilities according to classical geopolitics. Economy as natural law, economy as science, economy as rationality is the Holy Grail of politicians and businesspeople from the positivist point of view.

5.1.1

Economy as a Natural Law

From the very beginning of capitalism, the representatives of classical economics such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or John Stuart Mills advocated the idea of natural laws of production and exchange. If there are natural laws, they argued, there is no need for a great intervention of a regulator or a planner. A regulator can be a religious leader, the King, a corporation, or the state, or whoever is deemed to oversee achieving the common good (the scope of which is a matter of discussion) by smart planning or regulation. Politicians and media would often reject the idea that the corporation could be a planner or a regulator, but this is what the Merchant Kings from 1600 to 1900 used to be. The British East India Company used to be the regulator and planner in large parts of India while the Dutch East India Company did the same in Indonesia. As of today, there are many demands that GAFA (Google,

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Apple, Facebook, Amazon) companies regulate social media by appointing their own Oversight Board for Content Decisions like Facebook did. This way the social media giants regulate their own space, without the intervention of the state. This is, however, an exception to the rule. Regulator’s intervention in a capitalist society should be limited only to protecting property, enforcing contracts, and maintaining fair competition. All the rest should be governed by natural laws or “the invisible hand” as proposed by Adam Smith (1723–1790). The notion of “invisible hand” is mentioned in the works of Adam Smith only twice,1,2 but it is presented by the critics of classical economics as the advocacy of absolute selfish interest of agents, which automatically creates injustice and inequalities. This is not what Sherwin Klein thinks about Adam Smith’s proposal because for him, there is a deep moral facet of the “invisible hand”: “The ‘invisible hand’ as a characteristic of the ‘wisdom of nature’ guides self-interest towards the production of wealth for the benefit of all by means of a free market system, which creates a natural balance and equity” [16]. We do not live in the time as Adam Smith, but despite regular criticism about his work, the concepts and ideas that he proposed are still fundamental today in economics and business. In his magnum opus “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith paved the way for the most important prerequisites of the twenty-first century globalization: free trade, division of labor, and absolute advantage (to be generalized by Ricardo’s comparative advantage). If corporations go to China, it is because China has accepted some sort of free market (called socialism with Chinese characteristics). China made it easy to bring natural resources or components to one place and ship the manufactured good to another (hence the division of labor). The last motivation for corporations to go to China was a low cost of labor and other factors of production such as energy or capital (referring to absolute/relative advantage). For these reasons, globalization resonates with Adam Smith’s theory. Adam Smith was, however, not only an economist. He was also a philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. The kind of liberalism he proposed in the eighteenth century in the political and economic spheres is not far away from what liberals in politics propose today under the term “laissez-faire.” The laissez-faire is a big idea because it combines freedom for people to pursue their own happiness and their responsibility in this endeavor. The resulting conception of a minimal state interventionism is still prevalent in many economists’ treaties and political manifestos as well as corporations’ statements, which view state interventionism as a heresy. During colonial times, free trade and comparative advantage were imposed everywhere because they favored companies from colonial states that had supremacy in terms of financial, ‘The rich. . . consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity. . . they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life.’ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in 1759, reprinted by Arkose Press, 2015, p. 184 2 ‘The rich neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote and end which is not part of his intention.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Penguin Classics, 4th edition, 2000, p. 423 1

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manufacturing, and marketing capacities or simply because local competitors had been eliminated. Corporations of that time used the absolute/comparative advantage mainly by plundering resources from the colonized lands. After decolonization, Western states still imposed the laissez-faire and comparative advantage because it is presented as universal, modern, and natural. Globalization therefore is framed as an ideal form of laissez-faire, a magical formula benefiting former colonial and colonized lands alike.

5.1.2

Economy as Science

When the full swing of Industrial Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century presented science and rationality to managers, this was music to their ears. Natural science and industrial revolution were all they needed to transform their organizations into something rational and scientific and move from craftsmanship to mass production. Scientific organization of management, under all its forms, and rational choice theory are the main positivist theories that managers use, even today. Scientific Management Theory aimed to apply science to the process of manufacturing and management. It was propagated by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), who wanted to make production flows as scientific as possible. He summarized it nicely in his monograph from 1911: This paper has been written . . . to prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all human activities, from our simplest individual activities to the work of great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation [17].

The positivist assumptions were well presented: universal laws exist, and they can be applied to all fields of study: economy, politics, sociology, geopolitics, etc. The best way to boost productivity, Taylor argued, was to break complex jobs into simple ones and make workers specialized in some tasks, measure everything that workers do, and link pay to performance. Managers understood it and applied it immediately, among them Henry Ford, hence the invention of Fordism, a system designed to produce standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them. At the time when Taylor presented and practiced his ideas, mass production was the main concern for companies: how to bring costs down, how to increase productivity and output, and how to bring the highest number of items to the highest number of people at an affordable price. According to Peter Drucker, Taylor is misunderstood because he is presented as the person who was interested only in higher productivity and efficiency for the benefit of the capitalists. According to Drucker, “Taylor’s goal was not to improve efficiency. It was not to create profits for the owners. To his death he maintained that the major beneficiary of rising productivity had to be the worker, not the owner. His main concern was the creation of a society in which owners and workers, capitalists and proletarian, had a common

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interest in productivity and could built a relationship of harmony based on the application of knowledge to work” [18]. Scientific Management did influence a great number of neoclassical economists in the West only. It influenced Lenin and the Soviet Union, too, where the Bolsheviks invented their own theory based on Taylor. Bolsheviks called it the Scientific Organization of Labor (SOL) and transformed it into a political tool. The most prominent representative of Soviet-type Scientific Management was Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939). As the head of the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow, he made all sorts of experiments with the ultimate objective to transform man into a machine for the greatest productivity possible. Aleksei Gastev was a poet and his poem, “We grow out of iron,” is a clear, quasi-mystical connection between humans and machines. In his Institute, he analyzed to minute details ergonomics and wanted to create a “human robot,” something transhumanist today is not far from [19]. To prove that Scientific Management is indeed scientific, it must demonstrate that it is universal, and this is exactly what the Bolsheviks did. Scientific Management served concomitantly the command-type economy in the Soviet Union where Soviet leaders enthusiastically embraced Taylorism for their first Five-Year plan, as it served capitalism and the free market with Ford, Westinghouse Electric, and other industrialists in the United States. The Scientific Organization of Labor was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union, but its popularity started to wane before WWII approximately at the same time it started to wane in the West for roughly the same reasons: poor outcomes for the workers/employees and low levels of motivation. Despite all criticism and vicissitudes, Scientific Management is like a phoenix. It manages to rise from the ashes time after time. Many quantitative management methods such as analysis, synthesis, empiricism, productivity, or automation have been inspired by Scientific Management. In recent times, popular management techniques like Just-in-Time Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing, Kaizen, or Six Sigma have also been inspired by Scientific Management. The most recent borrowing from Scientific Management is made by Big Tech companies, under a new label, the New Taylorism, Digital Taylorism, or even Taylorooism [20]. At the time when all companies embrace digital transformation, it is worth remembering that some postulates of digital transformation are everything but new. In an article from 2001, Christian Parenti described the monitoring or surveillance implemented by UPS with its “Delivery Information Acquisition Device” meant to track UPS drivers: “Work starts when drivers log on to the DIAD with their personal ID. Using cell-phone technology, the DIAD board logs number, sequence and duration of stops; clocks the speed of each task; notes the driver’s location; and communicates all this to a receiver in the truck, which automatically relays all data to the local dispatch center and to a huge UPS database, where information is archived and kept for at least 18 months in one of the world’s largest computers” [21]. Articles, surveys, comments abound in describing a dystopian future where all employees’ moves are monitored. For some corporate managers, digitization, apps, and networks are a dream come true when it comes to the monitoring of their employees.

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While in the past, Taylorism 1.0 had to engage armies of people to dissect the tasks performed by workers and record them handwritten on paper. Today, computers do all these tasks. As expected, the tech companies are the first in line to implement these kinds of operations. In a long report from 2015, The New York Times portrayed Amazon as a purely Taylorian machine, where workers are scrutinized with a Big Brother exactitude, their task precise and automated, where the “Amazonians” (workers of Amazon) are nicknamed “Amabots,” becoming one with the system: “Amazon is driven by data. It will only change if the data says it must— when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense” [22]. An equivalent charge is given against another tech giant, Google, by Nicholas Carr in his book “The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” According to Carr, some management methods at Google point to Taylorism, such as the obsessive testing when it comes to software design or the way how pages are ranked with the help of a mathematical analysis of the number of incoming links to the page attracted and the authority of the sites as sources for ranking. The amount of data in question and the way to collect and analyze data can be done only if automated. Therefore, algorithms are kings ... or deities: “Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism . . . What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of mind” [23]. Automation is heavily present in many businesses (usually in operations management), but maybe the most extreme presence is in finance with High-Frequency Trading, where a microsecond counts for placing an order to buy and sell. A report to the US Congress in 2016 estimated that High-Frequency Trading accounted for roughly 55% of trading volume in US equity markets and about 40% in European equity markets, 80% of foreign exchange futures volume, and two-thirds of both interest rate futures and Treasury 10-year futures volumes [24]. Given the enormous advantages for brokers to use High-Frequency Trading, it is highly unlikely that these volumes will go down in the future. On the contrary, the speed is so fast that humans cannot register movements and cannot decide in such a short span of time. In the end, robots place transactions according to predefined criteria and robots control other robots. As tech develops, it is certain that Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, Internet of Things, and Big Data will proliferate on the wings of modern Scientific Management. Taylorism resonates greatly with business, but is it possible that it resonates with geopolitics? It is perfectly possible because of the automation of processes in many domains. Among them, the military is clearly on the front line. The number of weapons equipped and guided with automation features has developed dramatically. Under the umbrella name of “Lethal Autonomous Weapons,” there is a series of offensive and defensive weapons like unmanned vehicles, drones, or intelligent missiles, which do not need human control and decision to engage combat. There are so many automated processes in the military, especially digitized automation processes, that the whole military system is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. For that reason, there

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are attempts to go back to old-school techniques and devices that are not digitized and not connected to the Internet and telecommunication systems to prevent intrusion and damage. Facing invasion from Russia in 2022, Ukrainian forces did not write-off outdated systems of communications like the TA-57 field telephone, which is an analog, landline telephone. Nolan Peterson explains that this upgraded version of the FF33 radio telephone used by German military forces in WW II is equipped with wire spools several hundred meters in length. To make a call, one user handcranks a dynamo, which alerts the user on the other end of the line to an incoming call. The two operators then talk normally while their respective devices operate on battery power [25]. In the era of 4G, 5G, and very soon 6G dictatorship, these old-school tools have the tremendous advantage of being analog and not digital, so their conversation cannot be detected by directly tapped devices. Automation of processes can be used in the military, but also in politics. Treating the government as a machine is the subject of the book by John Agar, “The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer,” which shows how machines gradually made their way in the government and how they are given more and more importance today. John Agar analyzed the mechanization of the Record Office and Statistical Office in the United Kingdom, but the same trend has been observed elsewhere [26]. The idea that the state should be run like a corporation is not new. It assumes that it would be more cost-effective to use corporate methods and key performance indicators, rather than to rely on the bureaucratic apparatus that self-justifies itself at exuberant costs. Some countries (usually small ones) like Singapore are touted to be run like a corporation because of the use of corporate methods and remunerations for its leaders, among the best paid in the world. To have the best talents and motivate them to perform, the state apparatus in Singapore uses corporate benchmarks and methods. Singapore decided in 2012 to benchmark entry-level ministers’ salaries to 60% of the median income of the top 1000 Singaporean earners. This replaced the previous formula that pegged these salaries to two-thirds of the income of the top four earners in six professions, but still, the Singaporean remuneration for leaders in the public sector is the highest in the world [27]. Another way to run the state as a company is to elect people coming from the corporate world as heads of state or Prime Ministers. This performance-based criterium rather than ideology was one of the reasons for Donald Trump’s election in the United States or Thaksin Shinawatra’s in Thailand. Emmanuel Macron is another decision-maker who navigates public (he was a student of ENA, the National Administration School that trains the highest civil servants in France, and he was the Minister of Economy, and Finance) and private waters (he was a banker at Rothschild & Co before being appointed as a minister). In the Republican era (1921–1933), the US government was a business-man administration. President Calvin Coolidge (president from 1923 to 1929) in his address to the American Association of Newspapers Editors in 1925 said that: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world.” The quote has been

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transformed into: “The business of America is business,” to stress not only that the chief activity of Americans is business, but also that the role of the president of the United States is to preserve business as the main activity and motivation in the country. The original version is different in the sense that the president just acknowledged the fact that the main activity of American people is business. Nevertheless, the opinion that the president should defend the interests of the private corporations of their own country still prevails today and pushes presidents to pack their aircrafts with dozens of CEOs when making an official visit to another country. The dream of all bureaucracies is to anonymize and commoditize individuals and apply to them schemes and processes that can be automatized. Numerous examples of the misuse of scientific management during WWII abound, when genocide and physical extermination of people were planned and executed with “scientific precision.” In his book about the IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black recalls how the Nazis were obsessed with enumeration and tabulation of people, and for that they needed computers. Edwin Black refers to Friedrich Zahn, then president of the Bavarian Statistical Office, “Our Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler is statistics friendly. Zahn emphasized that Hitler’s ‘government not only demands physical fitness and people strong in character and discipline, but useful knowledge as well. It demands not only political and economic soldiers, but also scientific soldiers” [28]. In his book “Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to Today,” Johann Chapoutot traces back some management techniques we use today to the Prussian practice of the early nineteenth century when Prussia wanted to make its military and administration more efficient [29]. According to Nazi dignitaries, the most important was that the mission is accomplished, whatever it takes. By fixing the objectives and not the process, they gave huge autonomy to the executives. It inspired Auftragstaktik, the Management by Objective, or Mission-type tactics, a model well known in management circles. The buzzwords used nowadays like agility, flat hierarchy, or efficiency are nothing new. They have a dark past, but they are nevertheless feted as the most recent innovations in management.

5.1.3

Economy as Rationality

Scientific Management is a powerful tool to manage a company, to manufacture goods, to deliver goods, to optimize research, or to do the first screening among applications for a job. But it does not resolve the problem of selling, which is the crucial element in business. Without sales, there is no revenue, no business. This is where the second positivist theory comes to light: rational choice theory. Rational choice theory was the main theory for selling and marketing because it longs to analyze customers’ preference scientifically, with a secret dream to influence consumer choice with mathematical precision. According to Investopedia: Rational choice theory states that individuals use rational calculations to make rational choices and achieve outcomes that are aligned with their own personal objectives. These results are also associated with an individual’s best, self-interest. Using rational choice

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theory is expected to result in outcomes that provide people with the greatest benefit and satisfaction given the choices they have available.3

Since the time of Milton Friedman and his essays, “rationality” has played a central role in contemporary mainstream economics, not because everyone agrees on the definition of “rationality” but because the idea that human behavior is rational has become a dogma in economic analysis. Rationality in its strict sense means that people act according to reason and logic, and this reason is intrinsic to the individual. Some people can be guided by scientific reason while others can be moved by theological reason, but in both cases reason and logic it is. There are countless debates in natural sciences and social sciences about what rationality is, what reason is, and what logic is, but here we will concentrate only on politics and business. What politics and business do is that they make a distinction between theoretical rationality, which pertains to the rationality of beliefs, and practical rationality, which is the domain of actions, decisions, and intentions. Theoretical rationality answers the following question: is the belief that God exists a rational belief or not? Is the belief in a free market a rational belief or not? Is the belief that states have agency a rational belief or not? These questions are fundamental because depending on the answer, politicians and businesspeople can build rational, arational (which rejects rationality), or irrational (which does not fulfill the standards of rationality) justifications for political, societal, or economic systems. If, for instance, the free market is defined as a rational belief, political and business leaders will assume that actors (corporations offering goods and services on one side and consumers on the other side) will act according to some kind of reason and logic. It does not mean that they all share the same reason and logic, but there would be some reason and logic. If the belief that states have agency is a rational belief, it is expected that states will act according to their own reason and logic, and other states would like to identify that reason and logic and adopt their own stance according to it. If, on the other side, the belief that free market is arational, it means that it is outside of rational observation, so no logic or reason can be applied to it. In the domain of states, this might be the case of crazy heads of states whose behavior cannot be predicted because their behavior is outside of rational observation. In the domain of business, it is the case of consumers who do not follow any reason and logic in buying products and services. Finally, the last possibility is irrationality, probably the most difficult to analyse. In a situation of irrationality, actors display a behavior that does not use “adequate” reason. The term “adequate” can be vague, or ambiguous, according to definitions. Actors do not display “adequate” reasoning because they are subject to emotional distress or because they are prone to exaggerations, unrealistic expectations, or irresponsible conduct. It becomes more and more difficult to say if one behavior is rational or irrational. If, for instance, a state is attacked by conventional weapons, and it answers with nuclear bombs, that kind of defense can be labeled as irrational because it is completely disproportionate to the attack. It can also be labeled as rational because 3

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.asp

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the attacked state believes this is the only way to stop the attack. If an entrepreneur who has zero experience in the computer industry wants to manufacture a quantum computer, it can be labeled as completely irrational because the computer industry is supposed to follow a sequential path in innovation and invention. But it can also be labeled as rational, since quantum is a technology completely different from classical computer technology, so the experience, sequence, and path dependency do not matter. The concept of rationality is a powerful concept and maybe the only concept states and corporations can use because the alternative in the form of arationality has been excluded and irrationality has been made somehow rational. Gary Becker, the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 wanted to make a reconciliation between rationality and irrationality in his paper from 1962, in which he stated, “Even irrational decision units must accept reality and could not, for example, maintain a choice that was no longer with the opportunity set . . . irrational units would often be ‘forced’ by a change in opportunities to respond rationally” [30]. The postulate that people behave in a rational way offers the possibility for businesses to study this rationality and make decisions upon it. It places businesses in a certain comfort zone because decisions based on probability and optimization cannot be rejected outright, precisely because they follow scientific postulates. It does not mean that these decisions are necessarily successful, that is another story, but at least for the manager who must decide something or make a proposal to the board, it gives all the appearance of rational legitimacy that the manager needs. The way to study rational behavior of individuals is done through empirical studies, and companies are very fond of them. All departments in a corporation can use rational choice theory, but the main beneficiary is the marketing department. The marketing department has become an ogre, multiplying empirical surveys, and indulging in them. The two most-prized methods in empirical surveys are focus groups and oneto-one interviews. Social media disrupted them a little bit because it is possible to use text analysis now, meaning there is no need to interview people. It is enough to go to social media accounts and analyze what people do, what they post, and how they interact with others. With the help of algorithms, all this can be automated and quantified. Digitization has changed everything because an instant and mammoth quantity of information helps analyze the consumer behavior on the granular level. The fact that all consumers are now consumers of social media gives companies all the information they need to customize as much as they want. All governments are interested in having full information about what people think in their state. In the past, there were cases when the rulers in Europe or Asia went incognito to the market or to a place crowded with people just to hear what the population was saying about the leader, the government, or about a particular decision by the king [31]. With social media, there is no need to go incognito, because all information on the Internet is supposed to be open, free, and available immediately. The only thing needed is the storage capacity and analytical tools to make sense of the enormous quantity of data. All these methods, techniques, and tools coming from the positivist understanding of politics and economy being of service to business. The alternative, presented

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by post-positivists, can be of service to them, and this is something we are going to discuss now.

5.1.4

Post-positivists and Business Resonances

What kind of influence can post-positivists have on business and geopolitics? Political leaders are interested in finding out what the goal in life is for their citizens because, based on that assessment they can make decisions. They would like to assess the degree of patriotism, of nationalism, of faith-based motivations, of ideology, and of love–hate relationships with other people and states. Positivist techniques like polls and surveys help states to scrutinize public opinion, but the problem is that human beings often display versatile behavior on one hand and hesitate to disclose what is close to their hearts on the other. There is a black box of human behavior that cannot be opened and analyzed as we open and analyze theoretical model boxes. Too often, political, and military leaders are in the “unknown.” The only occasion to discover motivations of people is when actual conflict starts, when people take existential decisions. In the example of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was assumed from the Russian side that the Russianspeaking population of Ukraine would side immediately and unconditionally with the Russian troops and overthrow the government in Kiev. This did not happen. When an actual conflict starts, it is too late for a quick adaptation, because the state needs a military and political strategy ready for the conflict. If positivists cannot help the state in that case, post-positivists may do it. Criticisms about a positivist interpretation of rational choice theory in economy abound, not necessarily to refute the theory, but rather to complement and enrich it with additional elements. The criticism sometimes comes from unexpected sides. John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) himself observed in 1936 that people do not act rationally all the time, especially when it comes to stock market decisions. Humans are capable of rational and irrational decisions, but at the time when Keynes referred to human irrationality, the dual approach (mixing rational and irrational decision) was not the dominant theory. Before him, there was Scientific Management and, after him, rational choice theory. He was stuck in between two very strong positivist postulates. We had to wait until the 1970s for irrationality to come back to economics when Herbert Simon (1916–2001) objected to the assumption of the concept of perfect rationality in the lecture he gave when he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978: There can no longer be any doubt that the micro assumptions of the theory—the assumptions of perfect rationality—are contrary to fact. It is not a question of approximation; they do not even remotely describe the processes that human beings use for making decisions in complex situations [32].

Herbert Simon identified two elements limiting rational choice theory: access to information and computation capacities of the individuals. Access to information is

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crucial because it is impossible to make rational decisions, if there is no access to open, reliable, and complete information guiding the “economic man” to make decisions. On top of that, the person in question should also possess skills in computation that enable that person to calculate the alternative courses of action that are available to them, which will permit them to reach the highest attainable point on their preference scale [33]. In his article, Herbert Simon compares the “economic man” to the “administrative man” and wonders about the possibility of rational choice decisions. If we may, we can also add the “political man” or the “military man,” who also make rational and irrational decisions. Questions about rationality and irrationality are very much present in game theory. Game theory is very attractive for all strategists, be it in the corporate or political realm. It assumes a simply defined rationality among players in making decisions or at least consistent irrationality. With consistency (rational or irrational), it is possible to work on scenarios and predictability, which are the main activities of all strategists. Patrick O’Sullivan is among the very few writers who talk about game theory in a book about geopolitics. He explains the concept of “minimax,” which was first proposed by John von Neumann in 1928. In a nutshell, if there are two players, the minimum gain of one player (the primal player) is the maximum gain for the other player (called the dual player). The game is over when the equilibrium called “minimax” is reached, when both sides believe they cannot get a better deal. That approach is common sense in business as well as in politics. However, there are also serious drawbacks because of a certain number of assumptions and because the zero-sum game proposed by Neumann is not in vogue anymore. The assumptions are the following: all possible outcomes can be specified, each participant is able to assign a measure of preference or utility to all outcomes, all variables that determine the payoffs can be specified, the value of payoffs is known.4 It is easy to discover that these conditions are unlikely to be met in international conflicts or in the marketplace. The zero-sum game has been seriously challenged and practically replaced by the Nash equilibrium, according to which there is no incentive for one player to introduce a change or seek a better payoff because other players do not change their strategy or behavior. According to John Nash (1928–2015), “Any n-tuple of strategies, one for each player may be regarded as a point in the product space obtained by multiplying the n-strategy places of the players. One such n-tuple counters another if the strategy of each player in the countering n-tuple yields the highest obtainable expectation for its player against the n – 1 strategies of the other players in the countered n-tuple. A self-countering n-tuple is called an equilibrium point” [34]. Following Nash equilibrium, the corporation can believe that a technological disruption is a necessary step to overplay rivals, but if other players (regulators, competitors, customers) do not follow the disruptive technology, it will not work, so the corporation does not see any incentive in pursuing that disruption. Conversely, if all other players accept the next technology and one player does not, that player will

4

See the part on game theory in Patrick O’Sullivan, Geopolitics, pp. 42–48

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be isolated. It can continue to be a niche player, but it cannot pretend to be a significant actor in the game. In these cases, it is optimal for the player not to deviate from the initial strategy. This can lead to inertia and reluctance to initiate change or disruption, but on the other side it provides a better payoff. The problem of the Nash equilibrium is the assumption that players know each other’s strategy. Obviously, corporations do not know what the strategy is of other players and cannot predict exactly what the reaction of other players would be when they introduce a new technology or a new offer. It is also obvious that a state does not know what the strategy of other states is and cannot predict exactly how other states will react in the case of conflict. This, however, must be nuanced. Corporations publish their strategy because they need support from regulators, partners, investors, clients, etc. It is rare that a corporation does not communicate about its strategy, especially if it is a longterm strategy mobilizing huge resources and time to accomplish it. Apart from compulsory publications in the form of annual reports, a corporation needs to align bankers, suppliers, employees. This cannot be done without communication. It is possible to imagine a secret move, but this is a one-shot operation. It cannot be a strategic move of the corporation. States also know what the strategy of the other states is. In the military field, for instance, planning is the key word because it engages huge resources to equip and train an army. Practically all states publish their military doctrine or white papers so other states can guess what the intentions or red lines are they cannot cross. States can also make sudden moves, but the long-term military strategy engages so many people and actors for so long period that it is impossible to hide it. Nash equilibrium gives, therefore, stability to the marketplace and to international relations. It gives a frame within which actors can play with sufficient predictability. Sufficient predictability is not absolute predictability, so irrationality should have a place in the game. Daniel Kahneman (1934–) and Amos Tversky (1937–1996) were among the main defenders of the idea that human decision-making is not based on rationality alone, otherwise we cannot understand how some people make bad decisions, whether these people are managers, politicians, or customers. The culmination of their work is in the article, “Prospect Theory,” where they propose a critique of the expected utility theory, a descriptive model of decision making under risk. The expected utility theory assumes that all reasonable people would wish to obey the axioms of rational choice theory and Kahneman and Tversky recognize that most people do, most of the time, but not all the people, and not all the time [35]. They analyzed the behavior of people in a financial market and demonstrated that people do not behave necessarily rationally when they are exposed to potential loss or to potential gain. Kahneman and Tversky stop short of identifying the origin of the inconsistent behavior, but if it is not rational behavior, it can only be irrational. Irrational behavior means that emotional, social, cultural, and above all psychological factors, influence decision-making as much, if not more than rational choice. In their article they refer to behavior under risk in the financial and gambling environment, but it can be applied to any economic, political, or geopolitical situation. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein posited that small changes of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior. These small changes

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come from nudges, and nudges can happen anywhere [36]. It can be in a corporation, when a company’s cafeteria chooses to present healthier options for food on eye-level shelves, in nudging people to choose that option. It does not mean that other food options do not exist. They are not banned. They are simply not presented as preferred options. In politics it is the same thing. The government can give a choice to people to choose the health plan they want, but one health plan (government’s preferred plan) will be presented as the “default plan.” Other plans exist, people are free to choose, but the government will nudge for one specific plan. In international relations, a state can be presented with the option to join a military alliance. All states are sovereign, so they can make the decision that they want, but a military alliance like NATO will nudge countries like Finland and Sweden to join the alliance by presenting the benefits of doing so, or the inconvenience of not doing so. If people, corporations, and states practice nudges, this is because the combination of rational and irrational triggers has a positive impact on the lives of the individuals. Rational choice theory is, therefore, not the alpha and omega of human behavior. As Thaler and Sunstein have indicated: If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. But the folks that we know are not like that . . . real people are not homo economicus, they are homo sapiens [37]. If people are not homo economicus, some basic economic theories must be revisited and behavioral attitudes like heuristics (practical problem-solving method relying on the rule of thumb or educational guess) can be explored. It is assumed that for big ticket purchases and investment decisions such as buying a house or investing in education or military, heuristics is not so important. The cognitive approach will be determinant. Big numbers, however, represent a challenge because people cannot grasp the scope of it. When President Joe Biden announced an astonishing US $40 billion aid to Ukraine during his visit to Asia in May 2022, the amount was beyond any comprehension for people who were not involved in computing the exact amount of the aid. An amount of this magnitude should be made according to careful rational investigation, but many people fail to see why is it 40 billion and not 30 or 50, and what exactly the amount of 40 billion represents. By an extraordinary circumstance, the same amount of US $40 billion dollars was announced by TSMC, the Taiwanese manufacturer of microchips, for investments in Arizona in December 2022. If people fail to apprehend US $40 billion for Ukraine, they will fail to comprehend the same amount for a microchip venture. Big numbers, therefore, do not guarantee a pure cognitive understanding. Passed a certain cap, it can be 40 billion or 100 billion, people will not make a difference and a certain part of heuristics can be included in the process, not only for observers, but also for decision-makers [38]. After the discussion about positivist and post-positivist influence on business, we will now address the triptych space-state-power and, for each element of the triptych, we will see how geopolitics navigates classical, critical, and feminist understanding.

5.2

Business Geopolitics and Space

5.2

239

Business Geopolitics and Space

Space is of primary importance to businesses because corporations evolve in a certain habitat. They do not live in vacuum, so all questions about environment (physical and human geography) are critical to corporations. Environment is an ambiguous term because there are several levels of environment, and the question for the corporation is which environment it can choose to operate in. The corporation may choose the macro, meso, or the micro level, but the state cannot. The corporation can choose to have a local (sometimes a micro local presence) like a vending machine selling its products in one location only, or to have physical presence in multiple locations and countries at the same time. States like China or the United States, even if they want to play on the meso or micro level, or become isolationist, cannot do so for internal and external reasons. Singapore or Qatar, even if they want to play on the macro level, cannot do so because of their low power compared to the giants. According to objective criteria (size, resources, population, etc.) states are automatically sorted into different categories. Globalization has changed geography because it has changed the perspective of what is near and what is far. Everything went well for globalization until Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic. The cumulative effect of these events dealt a serious blow to globalization, but it was not sufficient to destroy it. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have this effect according to BlackRock. BlackRock is the biggest asset manager in the world, managing US $10 trillion in assets in 2021. According to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades” [39]. BlackRock not only decides where to invest the mammoth amounts of money it manages, but it also influences other investors and assets managers. In the latest geopolitical risk dashboard from May 2023, three risks are singled out according to their high likelihood: Russia-Nato conflict, US/China strategic rivalry, and major cyberattacks to critical physical and digital infrastructure.5 The invasion of Ukraine does not create a global geopolitical risk according to BlackRock. The potential conflict between Russia and NATO is of much higher magnitude.

5.2.1

Classical/Business Geopolitics and Space

Because classical geopolitics praises itself on being in the real, tangible, factual, and rational world and businesses have the same claim, classical geopolitics resonates well with business. Corporations want to know what geographical constraints they face, because they operate in a world where the availability of factors of production 5 www.blackrock.com/corporate/insights/blackrock-investment-institute/interactive-charts/geopolit ical-risk-dashboard

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is essential to their existence. Constraints are given and determinant to human action as explained by Marko Papic: Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, while constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences [40]. This leitmotiv is present several times in his book, in which he puts emphasis on constraints that cannot be moved, and which determine behavior rather than the opposite. Among the constraints, geography (physical and human) is determinant because it has an impact on the availability of natural resources, supply chains, transportation, and communications. Everything that corporations produce is counted, is visible, and can be stored for a long time (except for the perishable goods). Since these items are real (like chairs, cars, computers), all questions related to availability of natural resources like water or land, supply chains, manufacturing, distributing, etc., resonate well with the corporations. Physical geography (topography, climate, distance, transportation routes) has a decisive consequence on the nature and location of business. But physical geography is not all. Human geography is important too. All questions relating to the availability of workers, the cost of labor, sufficient or insufficient training of employees, their motivation, the style of leadership they expect and accept resonate with corporations, too. Therefore, any disruption happening in the physical or human geography will have huge consequences on the ecosystem of corporations and their supply chains. In a capitalist system, states do not produce. This is the job of private corporations. All wealth of the state, all budget for the military and education comes from the activity of the corporations. This production is real and is the domain of classical geopolitics. What corporations produce has traditionally been divided in three categories: primary sector (extraction of raw materials, i.e., mining, fishing, and agriculture), secondary sector (manufacturing of finished goods, infrastructure, and utilities), and tertiary sector (intangible goods and services to consumers). At first sight, classical geopolitics, which favors materiality, should be principally interested in the first two sectors, because agriculture and industry deal with the “tangible” and “real” economy. If the economy moves inexorably to the intangible world (services and digitization), the importance of classical geopolitics for businesses should also go down. However, the situation is more complex than that. Agriculture used to dominate economic activity worldwide until the emergence of industry in the nineteenth century. For more than 10,000 years, the lives and livelihoods of people depended entirely on topography and climate and people did not have any agency on them. Only in the last 200 years, the preeminence of agriculture went down for the benefit of industry and services, albeit not everywhere.6 According to the World Bank, 21.78% of the workforce was still employed in agriculture in Asia in 2019, 43.39% in Africa, and only 7.14% in Europe. There

6

According to David Grigg, in the pre-industrial economy 70–80% of the workforce were engaged in agriculture, and 40–60% of the GDP was derived from it. See David Grigg, ‘Agriculture in the World Economy: an Historical Geography of Decline’, Geography, Vol. 77, N° 3, July 1992, pp. 210–222, p. 212

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are huge disparities of workforce engaged in agriculture between countries like India (42.6%), Pakistan (36.92%), China (25.33%), the United States (10.9%), or Japan (3.38%) while the share of agriculture in total GDP of a country varies considerably too. It can be as high as 54% in Guinea Bissau, 22% in Pakistan, 16% in India, 7% in China, or 5% in the United States.7 Agriculture is real, tangible, and difficult to relocate and replicate because crops and livestock depend on topography, climate, or latitudes. The war in Ukraine in 2022 has shown how the entire world was dependent on the exports of cereals coming from Ukraine and Russia. The main cereals are wheat, corn, and barley. When it comes to wheat, Russia and Ukraine combined represented more that 25% of wheat exported to the world in 2019. Industry too depends on tangible, real items. It needs natural resources or ingredients that usually come from nature (water, fruit, or natural additives) or from synthetic or chemical origin. There is a twofold tendency nowadays. The first trend is to replace everything synthetic or chemical with natural, mainly vegetal ingredients and the second trend aims at replacing ingredients from animal origin like meat or milk with vegetal origin ingredients or cell-grown products. In both cases, one “real” product or ingredient is replaced by another “real” product or ingredient. Today, agriculture and industry together represent less than one-third of the world GDP, while services, according to Deloitte, represented 74% of total GDP in highincome countries and 56.9% in low-income countries in 2015 [41]. The notion of services is sometimes misleading because the biggest component of the service industry in the United States is real estate and leasing (about 15% of total services) while retail trade and wholesale trade represent 7% of the services industry each. Real estate is real, while trade in the great majority deals with tangible goods. That is why the definition of the services industry as a non-material sector has to be nuanced. The first two sectors (agriculture and industry) rely very much on physical geography because resources are not present everywhere, so corporations must go where resources are to process them. The service sector is theoretically intangible and can be moved anywhere, but this is not true because the definition of services and their components can be material, so they are fixed in space. To these three sectors a fourth one was added in the 1960s, the knowledge sector. Even though the term “knowledge-based economy” has been coined by Peter Drucker at the end of the 1960s [42], the concept of knowledge sector or knowledge workers is older [43]. Today, the Internet combines velocity (the speed of spreading knowledge), volume (the quantity of knowledge disseminated), and variety (the huge diversity of origin of knowledge) to unprecedented levels. As of today, the quaternary sector, which consists of the knowledge economy, education, research, and development employs about 1 billion knowledge workers [44].

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Data from www.theglobaleconomy.com

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Critical/Business Geopolitics and Space

Corporations borrow two concepts from critical geopolitics: the refusal of the foreign/domestic dichotomy and the power/knowledge nexus. Contrary to classical geopolitics, physical territory is not a pertinent space for critical geopolitics. Because globalization has expanded so fast, national physical territory has lost its relevance. The consequence of this revolution is the porosity of boundaries. Everything is at the same time domestic and international. Nothing is far enough away to be declared as foreign. It is possible from Australia to declare the war in Ukraine a European war because Ukraine is in Europe, and it is far away. Taking the opposite view, it is possible to declare that the war in Ukraine is an African war because it is difficult to export cereals from Ukraine and Russia to Africa, and this may cause revolutions in Africa. It is also possible to declare the war in Ukraine as an Asian war because China is looking attentively at how the situation is unfolding, and this might have an influence on its assertiveness and engagement in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Globalization has made people close, so wars are close, too. There is no longer a distinction between domestic and foreign. Something that is presented as purely small and local can have global significance. As an example, the Chinese presence has changed the face of Africa. According to McKinsey, there are thousands of Chinese companies operating in Africa, and they are engaged in everything: infrastructure, mining, manufacturing, retailing, etc. [45, 46]. These companies have changed a country like South Africa where there are 18 Chinese-run shopping centers in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. The Chinese shopping centers and telecommunication giants like Huawei are only the tip of the iceberg. The massive presence is also in the form of mom-andpop small stores selling everything from plastic goods to food and textiles, which can be found even in the most remote villages. Chinese one-man shops are visible in the developed world too, especially in the United States. This country is a melting pot of diverse populations, and it has been built by successive additions of immigrant populations. This is not going without problems. An example is given by the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. This is how Shirley Better analyzed the riots: “The 1992 Los Angeles uprising was in part a response to the tension created by the competition for the scarce resources and the internal tensions of dissimilar racial and cultural groups occupying the same space. Some Latinos and African Americans resented the fact that Asians were increasingly assuming ownership of small mom-and-pop stores in ‘their enclaves’; further there was resentment among some African Americans and Latinos that Asians failed to hire employees from the community” [47]. This sentence has many implications. The first one is that the racial groups in the United States continue to maintain their distinctiveness regardless of whether they came to America hundreds of years ago or yesterday. In that sense, there is no distinction between domestic and foreign because these populations are at the same time. The second point in the sentence is that space is understood as “their enclaves.” It means that these spaces “naturally belong” to one of the communities and any attempt to get ownership of that space is considered as an act of aggression. This way

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wars for space are recreated in the United States, and they can mimic wars in other parts of the world, so the populations are importing wars that exist somewhere else. Sinhalese and Tamils can export their conflict from Sri Lanka to Germany and France, people of Kurdish and Turkish origin can export their conflict to Sweden and the Netherlands, people of Maghrib and Sub-Saharan origin can export their conflict to Belgium or Spain. Since there is no distinction between domestic and foreign, anything happening in Africa, Asia or Latin America has repercussions in Europe, Canada, or Australia according to critical geopolitics. Corporations are very attentive not to reproduce conflicts happening in some parts of the world in their own corporate space. Employing nationals of People’s Republic of China and Taiwan in the same shop or nationals of Ukraine and Russia in the same workplace can be extremely volatile. We can expect that the corporations during the hiring process will not only look at the efficiency, experience, and credentials of candidates, but they will also look at the nationality and ethnic or religious origin of candidates [48]. No corporation will acknowledge that kind of recruiting policy because it goes against equal opportunity measures in hiring, but the hiring officer may simply be afraid of bringing potential problems to the workplace. In their opposition to classical geopolitics, critical authors aim to displace scale and make space malleable. The country-of-origin effect is very effective in that purpose. This very well-known concept in international marketing explains how choices are made and what it means to have a country or place of origin. If we take the example of the Renault car, it can be declared French because it is a French company headquartered in France. It can be an Italian car because the Italian design studio Pininfarina has designed it, and this might be the reason why consumers will buy the car. Finally, it can be a Turkish or Slovenian car because it is assembled in one of these countries, and there might by a patriotic decision of Slovenian or Turkish consumers to buy a car that has been assembled in their own country. There are plenty of opportunities for the marketer to displace the space and put the emphasis on one part of the country of origin and not the other. The company Paris Baguette sells bread and croissants in many parts of the world without telling consumers that the company in fact comes from South Korea. The company entertains an illusion in the minds of consumers by prominently showing places such as the Eiffel Tower on the logo when in fact the original place of the company is something else.8 In another example, the brand Canadian Classics sells winter clothes by proudly showing the Canadian flag even though the company is from Italy. The strategy to play on the country-of-origin effect is not without dangers. The Chinese retailer Miniso has more than 5000 stores in China and abroad. For years, it described itself as a “Japanese-inspired lifestyle product retailer” and has been compared to the Japanese retailer Muji. The chain did not hide that it came from China, but it did its best to style itself as a Japanese designer brand. With the recent tensions in East Asia, the brand was forced to exhibit its “Chineseness” and suppress any reference to Japan [49]. There is very often no legal obligation to disclose full

8

www.parisbaguette.com

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information about the country of origin for some products and brands, so corporations can pretend to come from a country when they do not. The second point corporations borrow from critical geopolitics is the power– knowledge relationship and discourse analysis. The question for critical geopolitics and corporations is the same: what do we know about space or geography, where does this knowledge come from, who builds the knowledge about space, and what is the aim of building a particular understanding of space? From the critical geopolitics point of view, all knowledge is situated. If most of our knowledge about space comes from satellites and telescopes, there are only a few countries disposing of satellites permitted to build the knowledge about earth or about other planets. Only 12 countries have independently launched satellites on their own, but three countries clearly dominate. The United States is the biggest originator of satellites with more than to 5500 satellites circling around the globe, while Russia is second with 1550 and China third with 600 satellites [50]. These three countries have decisive influence on the knowledge creation about Earth and planets. The knowledge is, therefore, situated geographically in a small number of countries, but also in time, since the first satellites were launched only in the 1950s. Among thousands of satellites, there are dozens of military satellites, Knowledge produced by the military about space exists, but it is not necessarily disclosed to the public. Practically all satellites and telescopes are built by private companies supplying communication material, observation material, transportation, fuel, etc. It could be perfectly possible that US private telecommunication providers restrict communication and store it independently from NASA or other public operators. This is conspiracy theory, but technically it could be possible. If hackers can take control or steal data from a computer or a server, it is perfectly possible to imagine a snitch, which constantly records all the data and sends it to a certain place. In that case the private company may have data about space and geography, but it will not disclose it to the public. Finally, there are increasingly more private corporations going to outer space like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. If they collect data, they can make data public, but they can also keep data for themselves. The case in point is given by SpaceX. SpaceX is leading the private race, with their Starlink satellite program planning to send hundreds of new satellites into orbit every year. As of 2022, there were 1650 SpaceX satellites, outpacing by far other private organizations such as One Web satellites (288 satellites) and Planet Labs (188 satellites) [51]. All these satellites harvest data, which is not necessarily disclosed. Discourse analysis is very often rejected by classical geopolitics because discourse analysis happens to be in an imaginary world while bombs are real, mining is real, money is real. Martin Sicker defends classical geopolitics because its aim is to “apprehend and comprehend the real world within which foreign policy functions, and not about postulating imaginary albeit desirable worlds in which the realities of power politics simply evaporate” [52]. From the critical geopolitics point of view, the world is an agglomeration of assumptions about what is far and what is near, what is mine and what is yours, what is valuable and what is not. All these assumptions come from human decisions, not from nature. There is nothing natural in saying that domestic policy and foreign policy should be separated. It is just a

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decision people make, and they can decide otherwise if they want to. Saying that something is domestic or foreign presupposes that the domestic space and foreign space exist separately, and this space has been defined as mine or yours. This is exactly what critical geopolitics challenges. There exist political parties with a specific understanding of space. For instance, some political parties have ideologically a preference for short supply chains in food production and distribution, and they push distributors, public canteens, and restaurants to supply their agricultural products from local producers and growers. This policy has a profound impact on space imagination because the imaginary about the world shrinks and limits itself to parochial space. Politics can have an impact on space imagination by building a discourse that is firmly against some distances. It is possible for politicians, or corporations to decide that if a meeting necessitates a journey superior to seven hours or air flight, that meeting should be done via video conferencing. This way the world is shrinking, but this time not according to physical distance as in the case of the short supply chains for local agricultural products, but in time. The world is, therefore, limited to seven hours flight radius. Everything else becomes foreign or unknown. Knowledge creation and discourse are fundamental elements in business because businesses do not sell only products and services. They sell primarily a story, a narrative. Corporations can have the best product, but if the story is bad, the company cannot sell it. Conversely, there are scores of products that were not the best in their category, but they have proven to be best-sellers because the story was an attractive one for customers. In a typical argument between the engineer and the marketer, both working in the same company, the engineer says to the marketer, “I made the best product in the world for you, it will be a piece of cake to sell it,” and the marketer says, “it might be the best product, but I cannot sell it because I cannot build a story around it.” Who is more important, the marketer or the engineer? This is an ongoing rivalry within many corporations. Examples are numerous, and we will refer to the example of Concorde. Critical Geopolitics, Storytelling, and Concorde There are many corporations in the world, in which the engineering component is the most important one, and engineers praise themselves for being scientists, the best scientists in the world. That was the case with the Concorde aircraft, which was dubbed the best aircraft ever built. It was a marvel supersonic commercial aircraft and by far the best in the world in its time [53]. However, because of its fuel consumption, the noise it created and especially the dramatic crash that happened in 2000, which killed 113 passengers, Concorde was grounded. Fuel consumption and noise pollution have been improved over time, and that crash was the only one in the history of Concorde. There have been many more crashes involving Boeing, Tupolev, and other McDonnel Douglas aircraft than on Concorde, but these aircraft (continued)

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have not been grounded. According to a report by Clifford Law Offices, which made an analysis of 37 years of airplane crash data, there were 82,727 crashes and incidents with more than 42,000 fatal injuries between 1982 and 2018. Boeing registered 8203 crashes and incidents, compared to 2297 by Airbus, 1322 by McDonnell Douglas, and 509 by Tupolev [54]. Compared to competitors and their track record of crashes and incidents, it could have been possible to save Concorde, given its technical superiority to other aircrafts. That is not what happened, and one of the reasons was the narrative. When it was launched, the engineers were so happy that they did not pay attention to what marketers said. And marketers said: “I do not need the best product. I need the product the customers want to buy or a product I can persuade them to buy.” The fact that the product is the best, or the most performant, is irrelevant from the marketing point of view. And in this very case, the clients (airline companies) are not the final users (passengers). The final users were very happy with the aircraft, and there was a steady booking of the flights. The clientele was composed of the happy few [55]. The storytelling for passengers was perfect (jetsetters company, fastest travel, highest comfort possible, etc.), but the discourse for the clients (airline companies) was not good. The airline companies were appalled by the high cost of operating the aircraft. The opposition to Concorde came also from environmental groups and people living nearby airports and especially governments, among them the US government, which at first denied the permission for Concorde to land in the United States. The lesson is that without the right discourse for the client, without the right story, marketers cannot sell the product, even if the product is the best in its category, even if end users love the product. Discourse is very important especially for industries that are falling into disrepute. For instance, corporations dealing in fossil energies, rare earth metals, tobacco, gambling, and so on, want to change the bad image associated with the industry. It is essential for them to change the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of discourse to survive. This is where the couple knowledge/power is interesting. Corporations strive to identify authoritative sources of knowledge that can give them the power to change the discourse. Authority can be of technical or scientific origin. Lobbying can be used when corporations engage political leaders, former union leaders, Nobel prize winners, or celebrities of any sort. If necessary, they will buy the media outlet to control the production of information and knowledge. The concentration Facebook–Instagram–WhatsApp is very powerful in controlling the discourse about social media in general and Facebook in particular. Google can block posts and hits that criticize Google on all its platforms (the main ones being Google Search and YouTube). As far as traditional media are concerned, they are almost all private. It would be difficult for the biggest French TV Channel (TF1) to criticize the company Bouygues, its owner, or for The Washington Post to criticize its owner, Jeff Bezos. Celebrities, experts, testimonials are routinely used by brands in building

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their credibility, but this is not all. The past actions of corporations are also taken into account by customers: “Credibility is defined as the believability of the product information contained in a brand, which requires that consumers perceive that the brand has the ability (expertise) and willingness (trustworthiness) to continuously deliver that has been promised” [56]. In the political world, the term brand can be replaced by the name Hillary Clinton for instance. Hillary Clinton is a veteran politician in the United States. There were, therefore, plenty of occasions to judge her expertise and trustworthiness, while Donald Trump was a novice in the electoral race of 2017. Before 2017, he did not have any credibility from a political point of view. If we follow brand credibility as the main criterium for being elected or for selling clothes, Donald Trump would never have been elected in 2017. Likewise, a new brand without any history like Zara would not have become synonymous of fast fashion when it started operations in 1975. It happened nevertheless, so explanations must be found somewhere else.

5.2.3

Feminist/Business Geopolitics and Space

Feminist geopolitics proposes this something else. Feminist geopolitics proposes the individual and the physical body as space for geopolitics. Bodies and individuals have a huge resonance with the business world. The individual is very important for businesses because individuals and their bodies are translated into employees on one side and customers on the other. Both are indispensable for corporations. Corporations need labor as a factor of production, so the manufacturing process is designed according to what a human body can or cannot do. Corporations are interested in ergonomics, which is the science of workplace adapted to human working capabilities. The central place in ergonomics is the body and its functions, how long a body can work, what tasks the body can perform, what is the efficiency the body, etc. The space around the body is the working space. It is important to decide how that space is distributed and arranged, where to place the toilets, the canteen, or the vending machine, where employees can smoke, all considerations already analyzed by Taylor. For observers, these are trivial concerns, but not to the employees who must spend eight hours per day in the workplace. The workplace is a physical environment, the architecture of the building, the amenities in the building such as nap rooms, entertainment rooms, glass doors, open or closed offices, music, or fragrance distributors, etc. These are all real, material. The physical environment, therefore, fits well with classical geopolitics, but it is not the only thing employees are interested in. In their study about creating the best workplace on earth, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones do not talk about physical space [57]. They refer to emotional space in which culture, people empowerment, and shared meanings represent the most important elements. Emotional space is a space where people feel comfortable, and for that, psychologists come to the rescue. In psychology, emotions are classified according to the possibility to activate or to deactivate emotions on one side and if they denote

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pleasure or displeasure on the other. Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, whereas arousal refers to its intensity. James Russel has described them as the core affect in the construction of emotion [58]. He identified three core emotions: fear, anger, and happiness. The workplace is expected to foster happiness, but fear and anger are also present on occasion. The workplace of the fire brigade or the military barracks must entertain the emotion of urgency and violence because they must answer quickly to an accident or a threat. There is no necessity to entertain happiness or well-being in these particular environments. On the other side, in the age of the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, or Conscious Quitting following COVID-19 pandemic, or when corporations struggle to attract and retain talents, the workplace can play a decisive role. “Mental health,” “emotional intelligence,” and “emotional space,” important for feminist geopolitics, are important also for corporations. Individuals are essential to corporations because individuals are also consumers. In a capitalist society, individuals must have sufficient purchasing power, otherwise they cannot become consumers. The question of revenues, rich and poor individuals, is thus very important for corporations. Classical geopolitics has a very convenient and narrow definition of who is poor and who is rich. It looks at the total cost of essential goods an average person consumes per year in a country, and this sum is divided by the number of days in a year. The World Bank is the source of reference because it collects data from all countries in the world and classifies countries into categories. The current threshold is US $1.90 per person per day. This is the international poverty line for the lowest-income countries, while the threshold is US $3.20 for lower-middle income countries and US $5.50 for upper-middle-income countries. Money is, therefore, used as the main indicator for being rich or poor. It is convenient because it is possible to count money and store it. Money is not the only definition of being poor or rich. For instance, Gray and Mosoley have looked at how wealth and poverty are not always, or even best, reflected in the amount of monetary savings a person holds. They consider that Northern conceptions of poverty, defined in terms of monetary wealth and income, do not correspond to developing countries. Wealth, in some rural communities, may be better “reflected in cattle holdings, the quality of agricultural implements, housing materials, labor resources, access to land and the ability of the households to produce food” [59]. In other words, categories of poverty or wealth are better translated in terms of assets rather than money. An alternative indicator to being rich can be “entitlement,” a collection of bundles or rights/claims to a set of goods and services, which does not equal to ownership. People cannot sell these goods and services because they do not own them, they only have access to them. Proposed by Amartya Sen, the concept of “entitlement” is frequently presented as a solution to famines because the respect of absolute ownership does not permit starving people access to land or food even though land or food is available [60]. In many places, especially in Western countries, when one person buys something, this something is exclusively owned by the buyer. It is impossible to imagine communal property of a house, of a TV set, or of a fridge, except in a co-living environment. Things change though, and in Western countries the “sharing

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economy” has prospered. The shared economy is where people do not own the property but enjoy the usufruct of it. Companies like WeShare offer the possibility to share office space, while bike sharing and car sharing companies offer a possibility to use transportation devices without owning them. People can share an apartment, they can share a car, or a garden. In that case, the concept of space changes drastically. Instead of fixing the space as a narrow, exclusively owned asset, the “feeling” of ownership can be extended to all the space a person is entitled to use. “Owned” or “entitled” space becomes a fluid category when the “feeling of ownership” of the individual is more important than the “title of property.” That “feeling of property” sits more with the feminist understanding of geopolitics rather than with classical geopolitics. Students can say “this is my school/University” even if they do not own the school. Customers can say “this is my restaurant/bar” because they go there every week. They feel at ease, they know the barman, they consider it to be their space. Football club supporters can say “this is my stadium” because they attend all matches, they know all the venues and players, and so they consider that they are “entitled” to that space. The question of property (land, resources, machines, etc.) is at the heart of social systems. All systems address the issue of property, be it to make it completely private, completely collective, or a middle model, which satisfies both options. People used to kill for property in the past. They do so today and will probably continue to do so in the future unless the concept of property changes radically. Capitalism considers private property of the means of production as sacrosanct, but it does not mean that all property should be private. In the case of land property, classical geopolitics maps the land and identifies the exclusive owners of the land. They are inspired by Garret Hardin’s (1915–2003) concept of the “commons.” In his paper “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garret Hardin explains how sharing the land does not benefit the people who share that land. He posits that if every person sharing a common resource overuses it bit by bit, the whole commons becomes degraded. Feminist authors contest this assumption by saying that although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even end up in creating “perfect order.” In their study of different social-ecological systems, including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging, Mark Moriz et al. argue that the use of common-pool resources seems to be sustainable over the long term (i.e., current resources use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations) [61]. This is contrary to what Hardin argues: “Each man is locked in into a system that compels him to increase its herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in commons brings ruin to all” [62]. The root of the ruin for him comes from the infinite increase of population in a finite world, which is a classical argument brought by Malthus. He continues the argument by stressing that persuasion will not limit the “breeding” of people, so coercion should be used to stop

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the increase of population in order to guarantee the freedom of the commons. That proposal is very close to the concept of Lebensraum, where there are only two options, increase the territory (commons) or decrease the population. Hardin stops short in suggesting how to decrease the population, which populations should be decreased, who is taking that decision, etc. That clash between an increasing population and finite commons is regularly put forward by right-wing parties in the Western world. These parties oppose immigration on the grounds that the new immigrants will overuse the “commons” or stretch them, while the commons resources are finite. It is a classical zero-sum game, where indigenous population suffers from the fact that part of finite resources will be given to migrants, who supposedly do not contribute to the enlargement of commons. Conversely, if migrants contribute to the enlargement of commons, that kind of statement does not hold, because the enlargement of the commons benefits everyone, domestic population included. Hardin also assumes that since individuals are moved by self-interest and do not care about commons for the others, only state-stablished, centralized control of commons can avoid the tragedy of overuse, overharvesting, and the decline of a resource [63]. The centralized control in the mind of Hardin is performed by the state, but it is possible to imagine that it is performed by a private corporation. Why is the state necessarily a better steward of natural resources than the corporation, a cooperative, a co-management system, or another type of selforganized resource government system built by the users of that resource? Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) challenged Garret Hardin in her book “Governing the Commons.” She listed examples of how local communities were able to progress without top-down regulations or privatization. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and her book proposed an alternative model to Hardin, in which “the herders themselves can make a binding contract to commit themselves to a cooperative strategy that they themselves will work out” [64]. This way, herders (users) demonstrate that they are not bound by selfish attitude and maximization of gains. They can work together for the benefit of all. The second part of Ostrom’s proposal is that herders do not need a centralized entity to regulate the use of the commons. They can organize themselves in a variety of polycentric organizations, so the central government or the state is not needed, since citizens are able to set up not just one but multiple governing authorities at different scales, such as ejidos in Mexico, where community members have usufruct rights rather than ownership rights of the land. When the centralized entity (the state as proposed by Hardin) is regulating the use of commons, it can be a disaster as Jonathan Rowe has shown in the case of “water temples” used for centuries by rice farmers in Bali, just to be scrapped by the government in the late 1960s [65]. There are nowadays different definitions of commons. In a modern economic context, “commons” is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office

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refrigerator.9 In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules. In modern times, it can be a trust, a legal entity having property rights from outside, while inside there are no exclusive rights to members. The question of commons is extremely important for geopolitics because it challenges the exclusive ownership of individuals or the state. The first socialist states experimented with “commons,” with the introduction of state property (like sovkhozes) and collective property (like kolkhozes). In both cases, there is a nominal owner (the state or the farmer). Socialist Yugoslavia experienced another type of property, much closer to the original concept of commons because the property was neither state, collective, or individual. Property belonged to the whole society. Since there is no nominal owner (the whole society is the owner), it cannot be managed by the state. It should be managed by society. Hence, the concept of self-management, theorized by Edvard Kardelj (1910–1979) and widely studied by many countries in the world as an alternative to the capitalist and socialist systems of their time [66]. The concept of self-management was particularly interesting for the French Left when it took power in 1981. According to Bernard Brown, “The stated goal was eventually to achieve economic democracy, summed up in the slogan ‘autogestion’ (literally self-management). Roundly condemning both capitalism (Socialists agreed with Communists on the need to break with this evil system) and Russian-style communism (Communists agree with Socialists that the Soviet Union represented a form of authoritarian socialism that had to be transcended), the united Left pledged to enable workers to become masters and shapers of their own destinies” [67]. At that time, the two “Third Way” doctrines, namely self-management and non-aligned movement generated strong interest from the leftist parties worldwide, but it was short-lived interest. With the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, self-management has disappeared as a system in one country, but some companies or organizations in different parts of the world still believe in it. Maciej Workiewicz gives the list of self-managed companies called “bossless organizations,” most of them being start-up companies from the Silicon Valley but also some traditional companies such as Morning Star, a producer of tomato pastes from San Francisco.10 According to their website, “Morning Star is organizationally structured through a system we term Mission Focused Self-Management. Our company is operated by colleagues without titles or an appointed hierarchy of authority.”11 The difference with the Yugoslav model is that, in the case of Yugoslavia, there was no 9

A common-pool resource as defined by Elinor Ostrom is a natural or man-made resource from which it is difficult to exclude or limit users once the resource is provided and one person’s consumption of resources makes those units unavailable to others. See Elinor Ostrom, ‘Coping with Tragedies of the Commons’, Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2, No 1, June 1999, pp. 493–535, p. 497 10 See his blog on www.maciejworkiewicz.com/post/2015/02/23/a-growing-list-of-bosslessorganizations 11 www.morningstarco.com

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owner, the whole society is the owner. In the case of the Morning Star, there is the sole owner, Chris Rufer, while the management of the company is left to the employees. Employees of the Morning Star can say that they are entitled to the whole company, the entire space of the company is theirs, but they do not have property rights.

5.3

Business Geopolitics and the State

Corporations are Non-State Actors (NSAs). Classical geopolitics recognizes their importance, but since they do not dispose of coercive power, corporations are only mentioned in books about geopolitics. They exist, but they are not sufficiently strong to impose something on states, so they are not thoroughly investigated. This is a mistake because corporations directly influence states’ economic positions. As an example, John Agnew quotes the Big Three credit-rating corporations. Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings are private corporations that give credit ratings to private and public corporations and states. If they decide to downgrade a state, that state will have problems getting loans, and even if it gets the loan, the interest rate will be high. According to John Agnew, “They (the Big Three), exercise ‘fields of power’ and I would claim, authority, acceptance of their decisions as at least quasilegitimate in the eyes of investors, political elites, and segments of the mass public, that can be seen as displacing the authority of public agencies with democratic or governmental accountability” [68]. The Big Three are not the only private entities constraining the actions of states. Allianz, Coface, and Lloyd’s, among others, propose insurance policies against foreign trade vicissitudes while AXA, Tokyo Marine, and AIG insure ships. If there is no foreign trade insurance or ship insurance, international trade would not exist. Private accounting companies such as Deloitte, KPMG, E&Y, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers audit and certify accounts of private and public entities, while international banks such as Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and HSBC provide loans to public entities and community groups. Globalization pushed law firms to globalize, too. Since there is no unique legal system worldwide and a plethora of different law degrees, there was a demand for a uniform legal process in writing contracts for global operations such as mergers and acquisitions, capital markets operations, and corporate deals. Anglo-Saxon companies were the first to enter globalization, so law firms from the United States and the United Kingdom were the first to expand overseas. They have imposed a particular legal system and their degree standards. It is not even the whole United States and the whole United Kingdom that dominates the global legal space. The New York/London nexus dominates the field, and that nexus also imposed a particular version of common law and the LL.M as a law degree of choice [69]. Chambers and Partners publishes every year a ranking of global law firm networks. There are nine elite global firm networks in the 2022 edition. Seven law firm networks out of nine are headquartered in the United States, one in London, and

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another one in Canada.12 Professional services firms such as lawyers, auditors, accountants, or credit rankers have direct contact with public authorities because of the nature of their business. However, they are still independent, private companies.

5.3.1

Classical Geopolitics, States, and Corporations

Can the corporation be a state? If yes, the Westphalian rules should be applied to the corporation as they are applied to the state. At the heart of the contention invariably lies the question of sovereignty and intangibility of borders. Corporations can have one or several physical addresses, but in all cases, territory is clearly identified. The company can be a stall in a hawker center in Singapore (5 square meters for instance) or a very large corporation owning plantations, farms or forestry, the territory of which can be bigger than some state members of the United Nations. For corporations with multiple estates in different countries, this is not so much different from the case of countries like France, the United Kingdom, or the United States having islands or territories far away from the homeland. France has, for instance, 12 overseas territories, compared to 14 for the United Kingdom. This compares to corporations having dozens of subsidiaries on various continents. The territory belonging to corporations is easy to measure because they have property rights on the territory, and these property rights are not disputed. What is problematic is when the corporation does not have property rights. Instead, they have the license to exploit natural resources or the right to exploit the land for farming purposes. The territory does not belong to the corporation, but it has exclusive rights on that territory and can establish fences, restrict entry, employ security personnel, etc. One example is when a company builds a road and has exclusive rights to collect tolls on the road and restrict the use of the road if the toll is not paid. The company does not have property of the land, but it has the property of the highway, the railway or the port built by the company. The Chinese project “One Belt One Road” has been often accused of creating the debt-trap policy when a given state accepts Chinese companies and capital to build infrastructure projects but eventually cannot repay the loan. So, the Chinese companies ask for the collateral (the infrastructure) to be given to them for usage and management. Land is usually owned by the state, but it can be privatized. It can belong to corporations, religious associations like the Catholic Church, groups of indigenous tribes in Canada, or individuals like Bill Gates. The percentage of land belonging to private entities varies enormously from one country to another. About 11% of land in Canada, 60% in the United States, 44% in Brazil, or 79% in South Africa is in private hands. For many countries, statistics do not exist about the exact percentage of land belonging to private entities because either the land rules are not clear (the state does

12

https://chambers.com/legal-guide/global-2

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Table 5.1 Largest corporate landowners or users compared to states Name Zhongding Dairy Farming/Severny Bur Austria Weyerhaeuser Modern Dairy Switzerland Albania Swedish Cellulose Company Anna Creek Mondi Group Slovenia Stora Enso Kuwait Clifton Hills Alexandria J.D. Irwing Jamaica Sime Darby

Business Farm

Country of origin China/Russia

Conglomerate, forest Farm

United States China

Cellulose Farm Packaging and paper

Sweden Australia South Africa

Forest

Finland

Farm Farm Forest

Australia Australia United States

Conglomerate, palm oil

Malaysia

Size in sq. km 91,051 83,879 45,511 44,511 41,851 28,748 26,001 24,281 24,001 20,151 20,001 17,818 16,991 16,181 12,891 10,991 10,001

Source: The world’s biggest landowners, www.lovemoney.com; websites of companies and www. listofthecountriesoftheword.com, retrieved on 11 March, 2021

not collect information of that sort) or the information is not consolidated. Let’s look at three separate rankings. In the first one, we will compare corporations controlling large estates with the territory of some countries (Table 5.1). It is quite difficult to use the term “private corporations” for Chinese companies because definitions of what is private and what is public are not the same as in Western countries. Additionally, Chinese companies usually do not own the land, they lease the land, or the land is given in usufruct. Despite that, if we consider the size of the land they control, some Chinese farms are among the biggest in the world. In the second list, we will look at other non-corporate NSAs like religious organizations or indigenous populations. They are not corporations, but they behave like them. They want the highest turnover and profit possible considering the constraints (moral, ecological, sustainable) that they decide to put on themselves. They also appoint professional fund managers to look after their estates. In that sense, they are also business sensitive. The biggest landowner is the Catholic Church, but contrary to other NSAs, its possessions are scattered over the world. When all the possessions (churches, monasteries, schools, farms, real estate, etc.) are put together, the total land is larger than France, but since it is scattered, there is no awareness about the size of land possessed by the Church. The Russian Orthodox Church is also a big landowner. It also possesses large swaths of land worldwide,

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Table 5.2 Largest non-corporate NSA landowners compared to states Name Catholic Church France Spain Germany Inuit People of Nunavut Malaysia Inuvialuit settlements Jordan Russian Orthodox Church Belgium The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association Harvard University Inuit of Nunavuk Azerbaijan Brunei Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints National Trust Luxembourg

Activity Religious organization

Country Vatican

Indigenous people

Canada

Indigenous people

Canada

Religious organization

Russia

Trade Union Pension Fund Higher Education

United States United States Canada

Indigenous people

Religious organization Conservation charity

United States United Kingdom

Area in sq. km 716,001 640,153 505,941 357,386 353,001 330,361 91,001 89,342 40,001 30,528 8501 8501 8152 6961 5765 4051 3261 2586

Source: The world’s biggest landowners, www.lovemoney.com; websites of entities and www. listofthecountriesoftheword.com, retrieved 11 March, 2021

especially after the reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate in 2007 (Table 5.2). Finally, we will look at the land that belongs to families or individuals. Sometimes the distinction between the individual and the corporation is not clear because they are melted into one. It is notoriously difficult to assess the territory owned by the royal families because in some cases the whole territory of the state theoretically belongs to them. If royal families are counted, King Charles III is the biggest landowner, followed by King Abdullah from Saudi Arabia. Australia is by far the country with the biggest individual or family landowners, so the Top Ten of the biggest private landowners in the world would invariably be composed of Australian individuals. That is why it is preferable to look at the Top Ten landowners per country rather than to look at landowners in absolute numbers (Table 5.3). After territoriality comes the question of sovereignty. Do corporations have internal or external sovereignty over their territory? Internal sovereignty means that the state has full control of its territory through different powers, mainly the legitimate coercive power (army and policy). Do corporations have private security

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Table 5.3 Largest individual/family landowners compared to states Name Gina Rinehart Portugal Hungary Ireland Montenegro Matte family Ravazzotti family Linnik brothers Nurlan Tleubayev and Zhangeldy Mukhakhanov Romeo Roxas Cyprus John Malone Benetton family Logemann family Hugh Grosvenor Mauritius

Activity Mining

Country Australia

Forest Cattle Meat Farm

Chile South Africa Russia Kazakhstan

Real estate

Philippines

Forest and cattle Cattle Farm Real estate

United States Argentina Brazil United Kingdom

Area sq. km 97,001 91,119 89,681 68,883 13,452 11,001 10,901 10,501 10,001 9651 9241 8901 8901 4481 2251 1031

Source: The world’s biggest landowners; www.lovemoney.com; websites of entities and www. listofthecountriesoftheword.com, retrieved 11 March, 2021

forces permitting them to effectively control the territory they own? They do. Do corporations have laws different from the laws of the land they operate in? They do not. The laws of the state must be enforced, and the law enforcement structures can come only from the state or an entity enjoying autonomy. One example of entities enjoying autonomy is the law enforcement in Indian Country (Indian reservations) in the United States where police officers come from various institutions and structures, including from the Indian communities themselves. There are more than 200 police departments in Indian Country, and in the majority, the Indian nations establish their own government functions (including police) by contracting with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (federal institution) [70]. The business dimension of tribal sovereignty is significant when it comes to casinos and other gaming/gambling operations on Indian reservations. Given the fact that police departments in Indian Country are small, it can happen that the security departments of casinos are more powerful than the police enforcement of the areas where they operate. The annual revenue from all Indian gaming exceeds US $32 billion and represents 43% of all casino gaming revenue in the United States, so the security part of that venture is extremely important [71]. The bulk of the revenue from casinos and resorts in Indian Country goes to the improvement of the Native Indian community infrastructure and schools. For the Indian Country, this is the most important revenue generation, the security of which is paramount.

5.3

Business Geopolitics and the State

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Corporations understandably want to protect their investment. In countries where police enforcement functions, there is no need to reinforce private security. In countries where the police enforcement is not so strong, corporations must organize their own security to protect their investment, their employees, and families of the employees when there is a threat of kidnapping, for instance. The US think tank Fund for Peace gives the list of “Fragile States” (formerly called Failed States) in the form of its “Fragile States Index.” According to the latest edition from 2021, Finland is the least fragile state while Yemen, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo make the top of the most fragile states in the world.13 It is obvious that if a corporation gets a license to exploit oil, gold, or diamonds, it would like to avoid thefts coming from its own employees or attacks from outsiders. Countries can give large autonomy to corporations and even the possibility to fund their own armies to protect their concessions from loss. As an example of loss, The Ministry for Mines and Steel in Nigeria estimates that illegal mining with the help of security officers is worth US $9 billion per year. With this amplitude of theft, all companies want to secure their investment and they hire private security. The private security companies, composed primarily of mercenaries, operate in an opaque manner, giving room for all kinds of law trespassing rumors. Once exclusively hired by states, the private security companies are now increasingly hired by private corporations. There were attempts to regulate the use of private security forces in conflict-affected areas on the global level, but they failed due to insistence on national sovereignty of states. As a result, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which cover many important areas such as human rights, environment, and bribery, do not have a chapter on security in conflict-affected areas.14 States can also control economic activity through regulations or through the implementation of a command economy. A command economy happens in a totalitarian regime when the state confiscates or nationalizes corporations and does not permit private ownership of the means of production and free market but, even in that case, there can be frictions between the “politicians” and the “managers.” The Soviet Union was the example of a command economy, but it did not mean that “politicians” and “managers” agreed on everything. The political commissars typically demanded production units to be moved from Moscow or Leningrad to the countryside to develop the underdeveloped areas in the Soviet Union, but “managers” had means to oppose. They could not use profitability and cost-effectiveness as reasons to justify the non-transfer because the political commissars were not sensitive to these arguments. They, therefore, put the emphasis on geographical and climate conditions, the inexistence of supply chains or ecosystems (research centers, universities). If Soviet “managers” could not oppose the transfer of an existing plant or the establishment of a completely new plant from scratch, a new city would be built, like Magnitogorsk, built around the large reserves of iron ore. Magnitogorsk was built before WWII using the examples of Gary (Indiana) and Pittsburgh

13 14

https://fundforpeace.org/what-we-do/fragile-and-conflict-affected-states/ See the Guidelines on https://www.oecd.org/daf/inv/mne/48004323

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(Pennsylvania) and with the help of American experts. Another example was given by Tolyatti, the capital of car manufacturing in the Soviet Union, named after the Italian communist leader Togliatti, who facilitated the cooperation with Fiat. Other attempts did not prove to be successful and were named “Potemkin villages” that sit well with the propaganda but had zero economic justification and utility [72]. Command economy can also happen in democratic societies when the state is forced to engage in war effort, for example, but even in that case, the state does not hold shares of private corporations. It simply assigns to private companies the task of manufacturing something (military equipment, for instance), and the state is the only customer. Scores of companies in Germany and Japan were enlisted for the war effort during WWII, some of them more than obliged. These corporations participated willingly because they believed in the war targets set by Germany and Japan, and after the defeat they had huge problems to explain their behavior. It is obvious that in a state of war, states do not want private companies to engage in commercial operations with corporations from enemy states. This is simple on paper while it was far from being clear in practice. Nadan Feldman relates an example of cooperation with the enemy by giving the example of a cartel arrangement between DuPont from America and IG Farben from Germany, which permitted Germany to make synthetic rubber, a material vital for the military industry [73]. Conversely, patent arrangements between Bendix from the United States, Zenith from the United Kingdom, and Siemens from Germany constricted British production of aircraft carburetors at the same time [74]. Corporations can wage an economic war on behalf of the state (that would be part of geoeconomy), but they can also be engaged in direct military operations in the form of private armies. There used to be mercenaries in the past. They still exist today. The US military increasingly uses private military contractors (PMCs) or Private Security Companies (PSCs) alongside its regular soldiers. The Defense and State Department (the latter for the protection of its diplomatic staff) are the main employers of PMCs, though all intelligence agencies plus the Department of Homeland Security and Energy hire PMCs too. According to Eugenio Cusumano, the increasing deployment of foreign service officials in fragile and post-conflict environments boosted the need to protect diplomatic premises and personnel. Consequently, several states have resorted to PMCs as providers of diplomatic protection [75, 76]. Corporations, too, need to protect their own employees. According to Wikileaks documents, Shell is believed to have spent over US $383 million between 2007 and 2009 protecting its staff in Nigeria. This is part of a total amount of $1 billion that Shell spent on worldwide security between 2007 and 2009. If it were a country, Shell would have the third highest security budget in Africa, after South Africa and Nigeria [77]. In the same documents, it is mentioned that in 2009 alone, US $65 million was spent on Nigerian government forces, and US $75 million on “other security forces,” a mixture of private security firms and payments to individuals. The market for private military contractors expanded very quickly. According to Market Vantage Research, the global market stood at US $241.7 billion in 2021 and

5.3

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259

is projected to reach US $366.8 billion by 2028.15 With a growth of 7.2% per annum, many countries and many entrepreneurs want to get a slice of this lucrative market. At the beginning, there were only American PSCs. Now they are competing with the Russian Wagner, Chinese PSCs, and soon to come Indian and Japanese PSCs. The Chinese PSCs usually protect Chinese companies working on the One Belt One Road initiative. So far, they have not been engaged in combat activities for the benefit of one country, be it China itself [78]. The Indian government introduced the Agnipath scheme for its conscripts in 2022. They can now serve short-term (4 years) and then leave the Army. These people will be trained and be involved in combat before being released. Many of them can, therefore, become mercenaries for Indian or foreign companies [79]. Japan cannot have a big standing Army because of its constitution, so it cannot develop PSCs. Nevertheless, the underworld Yakuza groups are seriously thinking about branching into a legitimate business of PSCs [80]. If Americans, Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians can do it, why not the Japanese? The symbiosis between a coercive power of the state and business also happens when the military is effectively involved in day-to-day business. In Pakistan, for instance, the military runs a business empire valued at GBP 10 billion making everything from cement to cornflakes through a network of enterprises. In her book, Ayesha Saddiqa refers to “Milbus” (military business) as “to military capital that is used for the personal benefit of the military fraternity, especially the officer cadre, but is neither recorded nor part of the defence budget or does not follow the normal accountability procedures of the state, making it an independent genre of capital. It is either controlled by the military or under its implicit or explicit patronage” [81]. In the example of Pakistan, the military controls about one-third of all heavy manufacturing in the country. Its business assets often benefit from loans and free land provided by the state, exemption from paying taxes, making any clear distinction between military, business, and the state meaningless [82]. Military Inc. is so present in Pakistani economy that any economic strategy of the country must incorporate that part of the activity. Otherwise, the assessment of the size of economy will not be complete. The military also runs business empires in other countries like Iran and Myanmar. The Japanese company Kirin had to pull out of Myanmar because of the coup d’état in 2020. Kirin was in fact partnering with the military before the coup and had to retract because of political and media pressure [83]. In other countries like China or North Korea, the military is also probably involved in business, but since information is scarce, it is difficult to analyze it. The second point for internal sovereignty is to see if state laws are applied on corporate territory. It can happen that the state gives an exemption to a certain corporation. For instance, alcohol is prohibited on the Maldives islands, but hotels and resorts can serve and sell alcohol on their premises. Gender segregation was enforced in Saudi Arabia for a very long time, but it was not enforced on some

15

https://www.vantagemarketresearch.com/industry-report/private-military-security-services-mar ket-1578

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Aramco compounds because the country needed foreign experts, so the Aramco compounds were practically the only places in Saudi Arabia where women did not wear a hijab, where alcohol and non-halal food were authorized, and were cinemas operated. These gated communities flourished after the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and served not only to preserve the Western way of life for Western expatriates, but also to limit and control the cultural influences of Western foreigners on Saudi society [84, 85]. It is possible to negotiate with state authorities the level of autonomy the corporation can enjoy in many areas: labor laws, investment laws, repatriation of profits, operations management, prohibited activities and products, etc. Can the corporation issue documents permitting employees and visitors to enter and stay on the corporate land? This is routinely done. The corporation can issue different passes for different activities and declare off-limits some strategic and confidential areas. For example, R&D activities are systematically off-limits in many corporations, even for the employees of the corporation. External sovereignty is when other states recognize the independence of one state. Can states recognize the independence of some corporations and enter a diplomatic relationship with them? That does not happen. However, Denmark decided to open a consulate in Palo Alto to have direct access to the giants of the Silicon Valley. So far it is the only state deciding to open this kind of facility. Usually, consulates are open to care for the citizens of that country living in another country. For instance, if Denmark opens a consulate in Chicago, this is because there are many Danish citizens living in Chicago, and Denmark decides to be close to them to facilitate all administrative issues they may have (passports, identity cards, marriage certificates, visas, etc.) This is not what is happening here. The website of the Consulate explains its mission in the following way: “The Consulate General and Innovation Centre Denmark in Silicon Valley represent Denmark on The West Coast of the U.S. and is located in Palo Alto. The Consulate provides services to companies, research and educational institutions, public stakeholders and Danish citizens and society. We build bridges for a sustainable future.”16 Denmark is the only one to be present in Palo Alto with Canada having a Trade office but not a consulate. Denmark’s initiative comforts some Marxist authors for whom it just illustrates the shift of power from states to corporations. According to Spyros Sakellaropoulos, the state has evolved from a social state to a headquarters state: “The headquarters state—the state form that both surrenders to the private sector part of the economic functions it has until recently exercised, and focuses on planning policies to help shift the balance of power in favor of capital” [86]. According to him, there is no opposition between corporations and states in a capitalistic society because the capitalist or “bourgeois” state has always been there to help the interests of capital. If there is an opposition on the global scale, it will be one state protecting the “national interest of its own bourgeoise” against another state protecting another “national bourgeoisie.”

16

https://usa.um.dk/en/about-us/danish-missions/consulate-general-of-denmark-palo-alto

5.3

Business Geopolitics and the State

5.3.2

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Critical/Feminist Geopolitics, Corporations, and the State

Critical geopolitics does not consider that the state is the “natural” container of social life. It is a social construction that does not have legitimacy per se. A corporation is also a social construct. As such, the legitimacy of the corporation to be a container of political life is the same as for the state. Feminist geopolitics goes further because it is “individual-centric.” The main question for feminist authors revolves around rights and duties of individuals in corporations. In corporations, shareholders have the right to decide about the strategies and the future of the company. They can close the company if it suits them. This is close to sovereign rights because they can decide everything about the company and no intervention from outside can influence them. The state can impose on corporations but if corporations respect the laws and rules of the country, like its hiring and firing policy, pricing policy, no collusion with competitors, accountancy rules, etc., corporations are practically shielded from the intervention of the state and the state cannot intervene in the capital structure of the corporation. The holder of the capital is sovereign and has the power to decide everything about the company. When Elon Musk announced that he was ready to buy Twitter for US $44 billion in April 2022, there were immediate concerns about freedom of speech and content the moderation he wanted to change. Concerns about the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk have been voiced by many politicians, but the state cannot prevent the sale. Twitter is a private company owned by private shareholders, and a private person wanted to buy it. Nothing can oppose the sale of Twitter except shareholders who do not want to sell their shares. Shareholders and employees do not enjoy the same rights in a corporation. Usually, one person works for only one corporation. That same person cannot work for another corporation, especially if the other corporation is a competitor. There are many labor laws that consecrate exclusivity of employment, but this is valid for employees only. It does not apply to shareholders. It is possible for a shareholder to hold shares in various companies, including competitors. It looks like the employee can have only one nationality (that of the corporation they work for), while shareholders can have dual or multiple nationalities because they have shares in other companies. Shares are on free sale. Employees can also buy the shares of competitor’s firms. That is a theoretical equality of treatment of managers, shareholders, and employees. The reality is that buying shares is possible only to individuals who have the money to buy shares, while nationality is granted by the state to all citizens, regardless of financial consideration. There is therefore discrimination de fait among “people” in the corporation. Some people in the company are more “sovereign” than others, which is understandable because the corporation is private space based on hierarchy. Hierarchy is consecrated and protected by law in a corporation. The legal situation deserves to be discussed in detail. The legal aspect of corporations is of utmost importance because the state wants to regulate corporations, assign them a

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place in society and control their activities. Since there is no universal legal system for corporations, every country designs its own system. In this part we will refer to two radically different cases, the case of France and the case of China. France is a country with one of the oldest legal regimes for private companies. The Napoleonian Civil Code, which regulates the economic activity of firms was adopted in 1804 and has been amended several times since its promulgation. Despite successive amendments, more than 50% of articles are still the same as 200 years ago. When it was promulgated, the Code was celebrated as the achievement of liberty for individuals and commerce. Individuals had the right to do whatever they wanted with their property and the contract between individuals was the law that the state could not break, except in the case of illegal provisions. That is essential for companies because the Civil Code does not put limitation to the choice of partners, to what the company can do with property and profits, to what partners can bring to the venture (intellectual property, money, machines, etc.). Corporations are, therefore, sovereign. There is also a flip side to the coin because the Code regulates how the company can hire employees (what is a temporary contract and unlimited time contract), what the company can produce (prohibited activities, products, and services), how the company can fix prices on the market, etc. France has experienced many regime changes and constitutions since 1804, but the Civil Code perdured, showing the attachment of France to one of its oldest institutions. That is why one of its most eminent jurists, Jean Carbonnier, considered the French Civil Code to be “the real French constitution.”17 Having a legal system 200 years old is not common because many countries are relatively new, so they had to build their legal system from scratch, with different kinds of assemblage. In the example of China, for instance, there is mutual influence of German-based code law system together with elements of socialist law and traditional Chinese law [87]. The Chinese Company Act goes back to 1993 and it has been amended several times, the latest time in 2018, but the main provisions still subsist. In a country like China, it is assumed that private companies are subdued to the state, much more than in Western countries, due to the nature of the regime. China allegedly treats companies as purely instrumental transmission of orders and co-opts some leaders of these private companies into the Communist Party. The Party seems to be all-powerful, but the reality is different. In their book, Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert describe a complex system of state-business relations in China, where private companies are solicited by the state to help improve the economic situation in the country and export the model abroad. In exchange, the companies independently propose new products, processes, and services on the market without seeking prior approval by the state. Private companies can also organize in informal groups to exercise influence and agency on the state. They do not create a counter-power, but the relationship in China is much more based on mutual influence than it appears to be at first sight: “In contemporary China, private entrepreneurs increasingly pursue

17 Jean Carbonner is quoted by Perre Mazaud in ‘Le Code civil et la conscience collective française’, Pouvoirs, 2004/3, No. 110, pp. 152–159, p : 155

5.4

Business Geopolitics and Power

263

their interests as a group in an uncoordinated and yet strategic way by working through formal and informal communication channels . . . Large entrepreneurs constitute a core elite within the wider constituency of private entrepreneurs, which we call a ‘strategic group’ . . . Their strategic weapons do not challenge the power of the CCP, but rather help to bring about business-friendly policies and promote the privileges and opportunities of doing business in China” [88]. Nominally the state has full sovereignty in China but, in practice, private corporations are not without power. The relationship between the state and private corporations in China has its ups and down with frequent run-ins with start-up entrepreneurs like Jack Ma, who mysteriously disappeared for a couple of months at the end of 2020 [89]. Corporations sometimes consider that they are excessively constrained by states. They would like not to have state supervision, but this is not possible nowadays because of the Westphalian regime. The European Union is an exception to the rule because it is possible to opt for EU status rather than a state status. The European Union introduced the status of a European Company (SE-Societas Europaea) in accordance with the corporate law of the European Union in 2004. This status allows companies easier transfer to or merger with companies in other EU states. So far, more than 3000 joint-stock companies have chosen that status, among them Airbus, BASF, LVMH, and Schneider Electric.18 Having European status makes operations easier within the European Union. It is not surprising that thousands of companies have opted for this status. Moving to power, the last component of the geopolitical triptych, we will start with classical geopolitics, because for corporations, this is the most important branch of geopolitics it can identify with before we address critical and feminist geopolitics.

5.4 5.4.1

Business Geopolitics and Power Classical/Business Geopolitics and Power

Classical geopolitics is the realm of choice for business activities because of its insistence on hard power and soft power. The relationship between the power of the state and economic power is clear, according to Laurent Bibard: “. . . there is a direct relationship between the power and influence of the State and the economic power that the latter is able to harness. An economy’s strength is measured by its means: money” [90]. The relationship is complex because some companies do not hesitate to display their disagreement with the leadership of their country as it was shown by many tech companies and media outlets in the United States with President Trump. Asian companies usually do not act against their governments because these are

18

How to set up a European Company (SE) is given on https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/ running-business/developing-business/setting-up-european-company/index_en.htm

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often authoritarian regimes. Richard Carney and Michael Witt describe a variety of étatist states in Asia in all shades, starting from developmental to predatory when it comes to their paternalistic relationship with business [91]. Companies in Asia usually align with the state. Alignment can be a wise behavior at home, but dangerous abroad. The identification of Chinese companies or CEOs with Chinese origins does not help them in some countries, particularly in the United States and India. Companies like Huawei, TikTok, or Tencent are routinely accused of collusion with the Chinese government, so they face sanctions. The battle between Zoom and Discord is a case in point. Zoom vs. Discord Zoom Communications is a company providing video call and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer platform and is primarily used for work meetings. The company was launched in 2013, but it skyrocketed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was a necessity to work from home. Suddenly, companies, schools, and government organizations discovered Zoom and used it massively, reaching 300 million daily participants as of April 2020. Back in 2017, it was already a “unicorn” (collecting more than a US $1 billion revenue) and now it is even bigger. Discord on the other side is a freeware instant messaging, VoIP application, and digital distribution platform created in 2015. It has primarily been created for gamers who did not have the possibility to chat in real time with each other while playing video games. With Discord, they can create group chats, communities or “servers” for various gaming, educational, or social purposes. Both Zoom and Discord had technical issues and privacy problems such as no end-to-end encryption. Discord platform has also been hijacked by some far-right groups and ISIS-related groups. That is why some institutions, governments, and companies banned temporarily the use of the two platforms. Both companies have now resolved security issues and they compete strongly with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet for the after COVID-19 pandemic business, educational, and social online meetings market that is valued at US $5.2 billion annually. Zoom and Discord are American companies, but the geopolitical battle is based on the two founders. Both are American citizens, but the founder of Zoom is Eric Yuan, an American of Chinese descent and this was enough for some people to question his loyalty and connections with China. Having American citizenship in this case is irrelevant. Being of Chinese origin was much more important as the case of Chew Shou Zi, the CEO of TikTok, proved. He had to answer to US congressional hearing, in March 2023 about his alleged connections with China even though he is Singaporean by nationality [92]. (continued)

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The University of Toronto released a survey on Zoom in April 2020 and found that even though the company has employees all over the world, the three main software companies providing support for Zoom are all based in China. The University of Toronto could trace the location of two of them, but the third. On top of that, the encryption key used by Zoom was not strong enough: “Zoom app uses non-industry-standard-cryptographic techniques with identifiable weaknesses. In addition, during multiple test calls in North America, we observed keys for encrypting and decrypting meetings transmitted to servers in Beijing, China” [93]. Since that time, Zoom has allowed users to choose the data center their calls are routed from to avoid any ambiguity. On the other side, the founder of Discord, James Citron, stresses the fact that he is born and raised in the United States and does not have any connections with China, no rerouting, no servers, no software companies based in that country. In a situation when China is considered increasingly a rival and not as a partner of the United States, even the smallest suspicion can be enough to reconsider the use of one platform over another. The base of hard power is invariably military and money. The more military and money that countries have, the more powerful they are. It is, therefore, important to see how corporations compare with states when it comes to the military and money. As far as the military is concerned, corporations do not dispose of the legitimate coercive power expressed in the military and the police, which is the prerogative of the state. Military power, however, does not pop up out of nowhere. Weapons, equipment, systems, uniforms for the soldiers, food, etc., all must be manufactured by someone. It can be either a state-owned company or a private company. It is understood that in a socialist, command economy, in which all companies belong to the state, research, design, and manufacturing of these products and equipment are performed by state companies. For example, the Ministry of Heavy Industry can be tasked with the duty to manufacturing tanks, aircraft, or boats, while the Ministry of Energy (nuclear subdivision) can be assigned the task to manufacturing nuclear warheads. But in fact, the Communist Party is the decision-maker for everything. During the Cold War, there was just one address for the arms industry in the Soviet Union. It was the Ministry of Defense Industries (Minobornprom), established in 1936 and composed of four divisions (aviation, shipbuilding, weapons, and munitions) while the situation in the United States was more complex because of the interlocked interests of the public and private entities. Vernon Aspaturian reminds of the President Eisenhower caveat against the possible emergence of a militaryindustrial complex in the United States which “might acquire unwarranted and potentially dangerous political power.” This kind of threat existed also in the Soviet Union. Party leaders wanted at all costs to control the military side. According to Aspaturian, if the military-industrial complex implies an interlocking and interdependent structure of interests among the military, industrial and political

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figures resulting in an independent organization having influence on politics, then such a military-industrial complex was found neither in the Soviet Union nor the United States [94]. North Korea is probably today the only country where everything is in the hands of the state, but China is not far removed. Even though the country has opened to market principles, strategic operations are still in the hands of the state. For instance, the aircraft carriers in China are built at Dalian Shipyard and Jiangnan Shipyard, both companies being state-owned enterprises. As far as the latest generation of fighter jets in China is concerned, they are produced by Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group, a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). China might be interested to promote the market economy, but when it comes to military and defense, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and the State Council have the upper hand. It is different for the United States, where there is a tradition that military equipment is built by private contractors such as Newport News Shipbuilding (a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries) which is the sole designer, builder, and refueler of United States Navy aircraft carriers and one of two providers of US Navy submarines, the other one being General Dynamics Electric Boat.19 Military aircrafts are produced by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, but while the first two groups depend on defense orders for more than 85% of their turnover, this is not the case for Boeing (29%). The US arms market is a tripartite market. The Pentagon, Congress, and private companies engage so much effort in lobbying to defend their own interests that the market is frequently opaque, especially when generals use the wild card of “Secret Defense” and keep information for just a limited number of persons. The latest Army Modernization Strategy was first presented in the US Congress in 2018, and it plans to transform the US Army into a multi-domain-ready force only by 2035.20 It will take 17 to achieve. The Army has identified seven priority research areas including Disruptive Energetics, RF Electronic Materials, Quantum, Artificial Intelligence, and Synthetic Biology. None of these can be achieved without the significant contribution of private corporations and private research. Private corporations engaged in the military sector are not restricted to the domestic market. Since there are very few companies that can export their weapons, the choice is limited for countries that do not have their own production. The size of the market and the ranking of the most important manufacturers is given by SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). According to its latest publication, the first five companies come from the United States (Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics) followed by BAE Systems

19

The two companies have been awarded in 2019 the biggest order ever for 9 nuclear submarines worth more than 20 billion dollars. See: Franz-Stefan Gady, ‘$22 billion for 9 Attack subs: US Navy Signs its largest ever shipbuilding contract’, The Diplomat, December 3, 2019 20 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34818-SD_08_STRATEGY_ NOTE_2021-02-000-WEB-1.pdf

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from the United Kingdom, and Leonardo from Italy.21 When a country wants to buy a defense system, it is expected to choose the best offer in terms of price and quality, but this does not happen all the time because everything depends on whether the country already has an alliance with another country. The best example is the rivalry between the private Patriot anti-missile system developed by the American Raytheon and the state-owned S-300 and S-400 anti-missile systems developed by AlmazAntey from Russia. Turkey is a member of NATO, and it would be unheard of that it was willing to buy a Russian system instead of the American one. However, this is exactly what it did [95]. Saudi Arabia is the biggest importer of arms in the world, and it was very close to buying the Russian system in 2021 after the attacks by drones on its Eastern province in Abqaiq and Khurais, attacks that the Patriot system did not prevent [96]. Eventually, Saudi Arabia decided not to purchase Russian systems, probably because of political pressure from the United States. Corporations share with politics and the military their love for strategy and tactics. In books about corporate strategy, references to military strategists are legion. They can be Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Napoleon, or Julius Caesar. These strategists have their place in books on business strategy from Henry Mintzberg to Michael Porter. In the next lines, we will refer to just two of them: Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Among strategists, Sun Tzu shines with a particular brightness. Sun Tzu (544–496 BC) was a Chinese general, military strategist, and philosopher, best known for his book “The Art of War,” an influential work on military strategy and his quotes have become a common feature in any book about strategy. Sun Tzu said, for instance: “An army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness.”22 It means that an army or a company should avoid striking the enemy where it is strong, it should attack where it is weak. It would be, for instance, useless for Chinese companies to attacks the semi-conductor chip producers in the United States where companies like Qualcomm or Intel are very strong. It is better for Huawei to attack the 5G infrastructure market, where America does not have many companies. In another very famous quote, Sun Tzu says: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” This way he stressed the importance of intelligence in army, but it can be in business as well. Going on, he also stated that it is preferable to win without a battle rather than engage in one: “Generally in war, the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this . . . For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Not only is the army and the resources of the attacker preserved, but the market will also be preserved and not destroyed. Finally, there is a statement about the morale of the troops: “When one treats people with benevolence, justice and righteousness, and reposes confidence in them, the army will be united in mind, and all will be happy to serve their leaders.” Morale is an important imperative for leaders, be they in politics or in business. To

21 22

See the SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing and military service companies, 2021 at www.sipri.org All the quotes are coming from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Arcturus, 2020

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build morale, fighters or soldiers need to understand why they fight, why they should sacrifice their lives. Lieutenant General Ben Lear, who commanded the US 2nd Army in 1941, wanted an education program to produce what could be described as an intelligible and understanding discipline in his soldiers: “The soldier who understands what America means, what America will continue to mean, who understands his responsibility to preserve and carry on the traditions of the Republic will be a soldier who will undertake the rest of his military duties with greater zeal to perfect himself as a soldier.”23 This can, word for word, be applied to business. The terms “America” and “Republic” can be replaced by “corporation” and “solider” by “employee”: “The employee who understands what the corporation means, what the corporation will continue to mean, who understands his responsibility to preserve and carry on the traditions of the corporation will be an employee who will undertake the rest of his business duties with greater zeal to perfect himself as an employee.” The second very often-quoted strategist is Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), a Prussian general and military theorist, known for his book “On War” [97]. Willie Pietersen from Columbia Business School has identified some lessons for the modern strategies coming from Clausewitz [98]. The first one is “The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive points and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignore lesser objectives.” A lot could be written on that sentence, but we will just single out the term “identify.” It means that business intelligence, like military intelligence, is the key. In today’s world, where there is too much information, identifying the right information is not easy. Two Nobel Memorial prizes have recently been awarded for their research on information.24 Information can be bought if necessary. For instance, BMW and Volkswagen hired key managers from each other with the aim to acquire information. The second lesson is about tactics and strategy. Clausewitz said: “Tactics are the use of armed forces in a particular battle, while strategy is the doctrine of the use of individual battles for the purpose of war.” This means that business leaders should identify and fight the right battles. This approach is not easy because corporations can identify a global rival but maybe the real challenger is hiding behind a subterfuge and corporations do not even register it. Who is my competitor? This is the usual question companies ask themselves. It is easy to say that Pepsi is the competitor to Coca-Cola, but if we extend the definition of the market, the real competitor for Coca-Cola might be a fruit juice brand or Danone with bottled water. Everything depends on how one defines the market and the competitor. Comparing Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, one thing is agreed: the importance of intelligence. Intelligence was important in the past, and it is still important today, Quoted by Meyer Bergercamp Forrest, ‘They Meet Gengis Khan; At General Lear’s camp school soldiers learn about dictators, the art of war, why we fight’, The New York Times, February 8, 1942 24 In 1996, a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to James A. Mirrlees and William Vickrey for their ‘fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information’ and another one awarded in 2001 to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph E. Stiglitz for their ‘analyses of markets with asymmetric information’. 23

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so it says something about its consistency and resilience. Some other fields are contrasted. When Clausewitz considers that it is useful to go nuclear, and launch a disproportionated, all strength attack to annihilate the enemy, Sun Tzu prefers to strike the weaker side of the enemy, without seeking complete destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, some business leaders prefer an all-out attack, while others prefer a more subtle, low profile, long-term approach. To some extent, Clausewitz’s fight with all means in a cut-throat battle can be assimilated to the Red Ocean Strategy, while the war without fight, opening the untapped markets and favoring collaboration, can be related to the Blue Ocean Strategy. The Blue Ocean Strategy concept launched in 2004 has become very quickly a dominant strategy concept in business over the last two decades [99]. It is easy to compare the market to the battlefield because the competitors are well defined, and they have the same goals: “Business resembles nothing so much as war itself. Takeover attacks, market invasions, price wars, merger maneuvers, and territorial gains: the language of war is now an integral part of every executive’s vocabulary.”25 Vocabulary in strategy is heavily militarized, so corporations routinely use expressions such as: deterrence strategy, guerilla warfare, ambush marketing, and nuclear option. In their article published in 2004, Stalk and Lachenauer describe five different hardball strategies used by corporations [100]. The first strategy: Devastate rival’s profit sanctuaries means that the company is not only defending its own market, but it is bringing war to areas where profits for the rival come from. This way they cut the grass of the competitors and the rival cannot launch an attack on another market. Attack before being attacked is a preventive attack and it has been used by countries and companies alike. Preventive attacks were justified by some countries in the Middle East or in Japan because these countries feared that the competitor or the enemy would become so strong that it would be impossible to counterattack at a later stage.26 The second strategy: Raise competitor’s costs focuses on the cost structure and supply chain of the rival. By acquiring a key supplier of the rival or by restricting the access to critical raw materials, processes or products, the cost structure of the rival becomes so heavy that it cannot survive. The third strategy: Plagiarize with pride was heavily used by Asian countries (Japan or China). They believed that it was faster and cheaper to copy or plagiarize rather than to develop something by themselves until they acquired technology good enough to launch their own innovation.

Douglas Ramsey quoted by Albert Madansky: ‘Is War a Business Paradigm? A Literature review’, The Journal of Private Equity, Vol. 8, N° 3, Summer 2005, pp. 7–12, p. 7 26 The end of the nineteenth century was the time of Western colonization in Asia and Japan. As it feared to be the next on the list to be colonized, Japan was thrown in the ‘Seikan-ron debate’ about the necessity to invade Korea and prevent a possible Western invasion of Japan. One of the reasons explaining Japanese imperialism and Korean invasion can be found there. See Kun Lee, ‘Political Culture in the ‘Advocacy of an Expedition to Korea’ in the 1860s: An Aspect of Japanese Imperialism,’ Korea Journal of Population and Development, Vol. 23, N°1, July 1994, pp. 97–116 25

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The fourth strategy: Deceive the competition is launching fake news, manipulations, using all kind of maneuvers to hide the real intention and action of the company. The fifth strategy: Unleashing massive attack is a disproportionate attack when a company is using the “terre brulée” approach. The underlying postulate to play hardball is to consider that the marketplace is a war zone and that there are only two options, to kill or to be killed. There is nothing in between, so the company will unleash a massive and overwhelming force looking for a knock-out of the competitor. This is a debatable postulate today when cooperation and alliances are widely accepted in business. Is it possible to have peaceful coexistence in the business world? Definitely. Peaceful coexistence happens when there is an agreement between competitors not to engage in a war. The rationale behind that is that war can be expensive, and corporations are not sure who is going to win the war. If the market is big, there is no necessity to engage in a costly war and gain one or two percent of the market share. It might be better to have an agreement. How can they do that? Companies can decide to share or divide territories by deciding not to engage competition in a certain territory, in certain products or processes. They can decide not to engage in a price war and maintain a satisfactory price for all participants in the game. They can decide not to buy from a certain company or sell to a certain company, this way leaving the market free for the competitor. They can also decide not to incorporate some raw materials, semi-finished goods, or technologies in their products and clear space for competitors. It seems that the list is without end. Many of these initiatives can be characterized as cartels or price collusions, which in free market conditions can be prohibited by law because they go against fair competition and are detrimental to consumers [101]. The European Union tracks non-competitive activities and does not hesitate to inflict huge penalties when collusions are discovered. Among the most important fines, there was a mammoth fine of 2.93 billion € on a group of truck manufacturers in 2016 for cartel practices and price collusions. The three main truck manufacturers involved in the cartel were Daimler (Germany), Scania (Sweden), and DAF (Netherlands).27 It is hard to prove the existence of cartels because companies do not have buildings written in big letters: ‘This is the home of the cartel of diapers.’ If cartels are illegal, we can expect that evidence is not easy to get, so it takes time to prove the existence of these cartels. States can operate public cartels, but these ones are not illegal. The most famous cartel is the OPEC grouping of oil public companies and many of them come from the Middle East. Since it is a grouping of public companies, this cartel is authorized to fix prices and production, but when it comes to private companies, cartels are prohibited [102]. The second reason for cooperation between companies is common defense. There are very few mining companies in the world. Not only do these companies need to

For the list of the ten highest cartel fines issued by the European Union see https://ec.europa.eu/ competition-policy/system/files/2022-07/cartels_cases_statistics.pdf

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invest huge amounts of money to pay for a license to exploit a mine, but they also need the know-how, the machines, and access to the market that cannot be invented overnight. When a new mine is discovered and the tender is issued, mining companies can be tempted to build a cartel and decide among themselves who is going to exploit a certain mine so they will not bring the price high for the license. The opposite can also happen. Since there are a few competitors, the government of a certain country can play one company against the other, especially if the mine is hosting valuable reserves that do not exist in other places. In that case, there is no gentlemen’s agreement between companies. They will have to bid higher and higher. It may also happen that a government changes its decision (usually after the opposition wins the elections) and considers that the previous license is not valid any more on accounts of corruption and cronyism. In that case the company that invested millions of dollars suddenly discovers that all investment is lost. Since countries are sovereign, it will be difficult for a company to complain. Cancellations or revocations of licenses can happen for a variety of reasons, the main one being the fact that the company did not start mining operations after getting the license. That is why the Federal Government of Nigeria has revoked thousands of licenses given to mining companies [103]. To avoid this situation, the mining companies can decide to boycott a mine or a country, and decide no company is going to bid unless fair conditions are set up. Many consultants, law firms and insurance companies give advice on how to cope with cancellations and revocations of mining licenses, for instance through negotiation and mediation, but certainly not by building a cartel.28 Building a cartel is, however, an easy temptation for mining companies. They can band together and boycott a country if the country does not respect its engagements. To have negotiation power in dealing with sovereign states, the CEO of Rio Tinto suggested the building of the United Nations of the mining world in which the mining companies will stand together [104]. This is, however, a typical example of something that can be called a cartel. Another reason for cooperation is when companies have a common enemy. This is what is happening in cybersecurity today. When a bank is attacked by a malware or DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service), the bank deploys resources to counter the attack, but if the attacker is targeting several banks at the same time or one after the other, it would be much more useful for banks to work together and, share information for a quicker and cheaper recovery from the attack. It can be done in an ad-hoc manner or systematically. In such case, they built associations that aim is to analyze attacks worldwide, establish the patterns, look at the probability of attacks, trying to find the perpetuators [105]. These associations are not cartels because they do not fix production levels and prices. They simply want to protect themselves. However, if one company is not accepted in the alliance, for whatever the reason, this might be a cartel in disguise because that corporation is excluded from information sharing and common action [106]. Several alliances exist such as the Global Cyber Alliance

Fieldfisher is one of the law firms that published a guide how to cope with mining licenses revocations. The latest guide is from October 2021. It is available on https://www.fieldfisher.com

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(GCA) grouping companies like Sony, Adobe, and Microsoft. Corporations can be part of several alliances at the same time as demonstrated by Microsoft, which is part of GCA and the National Cyber Security Alliances (NCSA), a unique alliance where private companies, governmental agencies, and universities sit together.29 The military is the first base power while money is the second. When it comes to money, corporations generate money through sales while states get the money for their budgets from taxes (corporations, employees, taxes on goods and services, customs duties, etc.) on one side and government activities on the other. Even countries with a significant public sector like India and China obey to this rule. In the case of India, public administration, defense, and other public services contributed to 15.42% of GDP generation in 2020–21 according to Statistics Times [107]. In China, there is no estimate about administration contribution to GDP, but there is information about State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). According to the World Bank, the SOEs’ contribution to Chinese GDP was 23–28% of total in 2018 [108]. This means that even in a communist country like China, the part of private corporations represents most of the economic activity, more than 70% of GDP. The control and maintenance of a territorially uniform and exclusive currency is often regarded as one of the main attributes of state sovereignty. Benjamin Cohen offers a concise statement of monetary sovereignty: “The creation of money is widely acknowledged as one of the fundamental attributes of political sovereignty. Virtually every state issues its own currency; within national frontiers, no currency but the local currency is generally accepted to serve the traditional functions of money— medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value” [109]. While sovereignty of the state is hard to depict, having banknotes and coins of a certain state in pockets, looking at them, and using them every day is perhaps the only material and tangible element of sovereignty that people are exposed to. The other elements of sovereignty such as the borders or the military are not seen every day. People might be illiterate or uneducated, or living in faraway areas, so they are not exposed to elements of state sovereignty. Therefore, the only thing reminding them that they live in a certain state is the currency they use. Yet over the past decades several events have challenged the notion that every state must have its own currency. The first example is a common currency for several states and the best example is the Euro, which has been adopted by 20 states of the European Union as their currency (Croatia was the latest one to join the club in January 2023). This is also the case with the CFA franc adopted by 14 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are countries and entities without their own currency, so they adopt a foreign currency. This is the case of Kosovo and Montenegro, which unilaterally adopted the Euro as their currency. The Deutsche Mark does not exist as a currency in Germany, but it survives in Bosnia Herzegovina under the name “Convertible Mark (KM).” Initially, the KM was pegged to the German mark at par. Since the replacement of the German mark by the euro in 2002, the Bosnian KM

29

https://www.globalcyberalliance.org and https://staysafeonline.org

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uses the same fixed exchange rate to the euro that the German mark had in 2002.30 An interesting case is represented by the Brunei dollar. Under the Currency Interchangeability Agreement signed in 1967 between Singapore and Brunei, the Brunei Darussalam Central Bank, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore accept the currency notes and coins issued by the other, and exchange them at par, without charge, into their own currency. It is therefore possible to pay with Singaporean dollars in Brunei and vice-versa [110]. Corporations can earn all the money they want, but the state can expropriate or confiscate private assets or decide to devaluate its currency, bringing the revenues of corporations down. Turnover, profits, ownership of natural resources, and technology make the great source of hard power of a corporation. But this is not all. Human capital is also part of hard power. While states count the number of its soldiers or potential fighters, the corporation counts its employees. A company like Walmart has more employees than the total number of inhabitants in Slovenia or Latvia while Amazon has more employees than the total number of inhabitants in Estonia or Cyprus. Why would dozens of small countries which have less inhabitants than the number of employees at Walmart or Amazon have a seat in the United Nations and companies such as Volkswagen or Accenture do not? If we are only looking at the number of employees vs. the number of inhabitants, many corporations should have a seat in the UN (Table 5.4). According to many metrics, corporations are more powerful than some states, and that topic has received due attention [111]. This is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1994, Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh already noted that “the emerging global order is spearheaded by a few hundred corporate giants, many of them bigger than most sovereign nations. Ford’s economy is larger than Saudi Arabia’s and Norway’s. Philip Morris’ annual sales exceeded New Zealand’s gross domestic product” [112]. We have seen previously the size of territory controlled by corporations and their number of employees. Corporations are powerful according to their economic performance or value. Comparing value of corporations to economic performance of states is like comparing apples to oranges because the metrics are not the same. In the case of corporations, several valuation methods can be used. It can be the brand value, it can be market capitalization, sales, or profits. By comparing some of the leading corporations in the world, their ranking depends on the criterium (Table 5.5). Some corporations are asset rich, but cash poor compared to other. Some of them have high sales but poor profits or brand valuation. Some companies still perform well across the board. These companies are tech companies, giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, especially when it comes to brand valuation. The problem with this valuation is that it is completely hypothetical. The brand in question is supposed to be on sale, which is not always the case; and all players should agree on the valuation of the brand, which is also far from being the case. The second possible

30 An explanation of KM banknotes is available on the website of the Central Bank of Bosnia Herzegovina at https://www.cbbh.ba/content/read/19?lang=en

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Table 5.4 Comparison of the number of employees vs. inhabitants for selected countries Corporations/states Walmart Gabon Lesotho North Macedonia Slovenia Amazon Estonia Mauritius Cyprus Djibouti Comoros Hon Hai Precision Industries (Foxconn) Bhutan Accenture Volkswagen Montenegro Luxembourg Tata Consultancy Services Suriname Deutsche Post Cabo Verde Maldives UPS Kroger Home Depot Gazprom Agricultural Bank of China Malta

Employees/inhabitants 2,300,000 2,250,001 2,142,000 2,083,000 2,078,000 1,544,000 1,326,000 1,271,000 1,207,000 988,001 869,601 826,608 771,608 738,001 641,901 628,066 625,978 616,171 586,632 583,816 555,987 544,544 500,001 500,001 500,001 468,001 455,174 441,543

For the number of employees see ‘Leading 500 Fortune companies based on number of employees in 2022,’ Statista, 2022

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Table 5.5 Biggest corporations according to most important metrics in 2022 (in millions of USD) Apple Berkshire Hathaway ICBC Saudi Aramco Alphabet Amazon Microsoft JPMorgan Chase China Construction Bank Walmart

Brand value 241,201

207,501 135,401 162,901 13,701 29,501

Market cap 2,640,321 741,481 214,431 2,292,001 1,581,721 1,468,401 2,054,371 374,451 181,321 431,641

Revenues 378,701 276,091 281,131 400,381 257,491 469,821 184,901 124,541 202,071 572,751

Assets 381,191 958,781 5,518,511 576,041 359,271 420,561 340,391 3,954,691 7,746,951 244,861

Profits 100,561 89,801 54,031 105,361 76,031 48,891 71,191 42,121 46,891 13,671

Source: Fortune Global 2000, edition 2022, and Forbes Most Valuable Brands 2022

valuation is market capitalization. The total number of shares is multiplied by the value of one share. This method is also hypothetical because all shares are not on sale and the value of one share can fluctuate with a very high volatility in a short span of time. The figures given below come from Statista 2023 and IMF. They may fluctuate very much, but this is one of the few ways to put into perspective the power of one state versus the power of one corporation (Table 5.6). Another method of valuation looks at the revenue of the company. This is the real money corporations receive and can engage. As for states, they usually do not engage in commercial activities, except when their utilities and public companies sell something like electricity, post office services or arms. There are two ways to assess the economic activity of one state. The first one is to use the GDP. Even though it is not a perfect indicator, it has existed for more than 70 years and has proven its resilience [113]. It is a simple way to compare corporations and states. The

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Table 5.6 Total GDP of states vs. market capitalization (in millions of dollars) United States China Japan Germany India United Kingdom France Apple Saudi Aramco Canada Russia Microsoft Italy Iran Brazil South Korea Australia Alphabet Amazon Mexico Spain Indonesia Tesla Saudi Arabia Netherlands

25,035,000 18,321,000 4,300,000 4,031,000 3,468,000 3,198,000 2,770,000 2,640,321 2,292,081 2,200,000 2,133,000 2,054,371 1,996,000 1,973,000 1,894,000 1,734,000 1,724,000 1,581,781 1,468,401 1,424,000 1,389,000 1,289,000 1,038,731 1,010,000 990,501

Turkey Taiwan Switzerland Berkshire Hathaway Poland Argentina Sweden Belgium Thailand Israel Ireland Norway Nigeria United Arab Emirates Meta Platforms TSMC UnitedHealth Group NVIDIA Johnson & Johnson Egypt Austria Bangladesh Visa Malaysia Walmart

853,001 828,001 807,001 741,481 716,001 630,001 603,001 589,001 534,001 527,001 516,146 504,001 504,001 503,001 499,861 494,601 490,151 489,831 477,381 469,001 468,001 460,001 436,491 434,001 431,641

Source: Statista and IMF

World Economic Forum used, for instance, results from 2017 presented by Global Justice Now, in which corporations dominate states [114]. Total GDP is the indicator of choice but there are two caveats. The first refers to the currency. The GDP is expressed in the local currency, and it must be converted to the US dollar for comparison purposes. The exchange rate is, therefore, very important because it can lower or increase the total GDP. The second problem is that the GDP is not the amount of money a country can engage. It is the total amount of wealth produced by all players (public and private) in a country for 1 year. The GDP is not a state’s money. For the sake of the comparison, we will use the total GDP at current exchange rate as given by the International Monetary Fund just to have an idea of the economic activity in one country. In Tables 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9, states are given in italics while corporations are given in bold. According to the Table 5.7 showing the biggest 50 entities, the italics entries dominate, by far. It means that the states are more powerful than companies when it comes to total GDP vs revenues. What is also interesting is that traditional companies like Walmart (retailer) and State Grid (electricity) are the most important ones.

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Table 5.7 Total GDP of states vs. revenues of corporations in millions of dollars (first 50 entities) United States China Japan Germany India United Kingdom France Canada Russia Italy Iran Brazil South Korea Australia Mexico Spain Indonesia Saudi Arabia Netherlands Turkey Taiwan Switzerland Poland Argentina Sweden

25,035,000 18,321,000 4,300,000 4,031,000 3,468,000 3,198,000 2,770,000 2,200,000 2,133,000 1,996,000 1,973,000 1,894,000 1,734,000 1,724,000 1,424,000 1,389,000 1,289,000 1,010,000 990,501 853,001 828,001 807,001 716,001 630,001 603,001

Belgium Walmart Thailand Israel Ireland Nigeria Norway United Arab Emirates Amazon Egypt Austria State Grid Bangladesh Malaysia Singapore Exxon Mobil Vietnam CNPC South Africa Sinopec Philippines Saudi Aramco Shell Denmark Pakistan

589,001 572,801 534,001 527,001 516,146 504,001 504,001 503,001 469,801 469,001 468,001 460,601 460,001 434,001 423,001 413,681 413,001 411,701 411,001 401,301 401,001 400,401 386,201 386,001 369,486

Source: Total GDP at current exchange rate for 2022 by the International Monetary Fund and revenues for companies for 2022 by Forbes 500 Global

The list of the next 50 entities is completely different, with the bold entries much. This one shows bold emphasis much more present. It means that corporations cannot compare to the biggest states in terms of total GDP, but they can easily compare to the middle-sized and smaller states. The second metric more suitable for comparison is the budget of a state. This one is the real money a state can engage, like the amount of money corporations can engage from their revenues. The budget of one state does not need to be constant or in equilibrium. It can change drastically during the year. Depending on circumstances, it can go down because of war, and the case of Ukraine is indicative because the country has practically lost all its budget resources and depends on aid coming from abroad. The European Union decided in December 2022 to give 1.5 billion euros per month to Ukraine in 2023 to help Ukraine sustain its budget deficit. In that case, the state’s budget is extremely volatile. The budget of one state is smaller by far than the total GDP. In this case, we will only list the first 50 entities, where corporations show their strength, and the bold entry is more important.

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Table 5.8 Total GDP of states vs. revenues of corporations in millions of dollars (second 50 entities) Hong Kong Apple Colombia UnitedHealth Group Chile Romania Czech Republic Volkswagen CSCE CVS Health Alphabet Iraq Finland Berkshire Hathaway China State Construction Toyota McKesson Glencore Portugal New Zealand BP Peru AmerisourceBergen Samsung Trafigura Group

368,001 365,801 342,001 324,001 310,001 299,001 296,001 295,801 293,701 292,101 282,836 282,001 281,001 276,094 274,761 267,021 263,966 255,981 255,001 242,001 241,392 239,001 238,587 233,131 231,308

Costco Wholesale Kazakhstan Greece Qatar Hon Hai Precision Ukraine Microsoft Algeria Hungary Kuwait Cardinal Health Cigna AT&T Mercedes Benz Ping An Insurance Home Depot China Railway Group China Baowu Steel Group Walgreens Boots Alliance Kroger China Railway Construction Morocco ICBC EXOR Group China Life Insurance

226,954 224,001 222,001 221,001 215,841 199,001 198,271 187,001 184,001 183,568 181,364 180,511 168,864 163,321 159,598 157,401 155,911 150,731 148,579 148,301 148,211 142,001 141,811 136,185 131,407

Source: Total GDP at current exchange rate for 2022 by the International Monetary Fund and revenues for companies for 2022 by Forbes 500 Global

According to all these figures, corporations can easily say that they are more powerful than states, especially smaller states. The influence of corporations is nevertheless far from being limitless because states have the monopoly of coercive power that corporations do not have. Hard power (military and money) is not the only power at disposal of corporations. They use soft power equally, even if it is not immediately visible. According to Joseph Nye, soft power is composed of human rights, democracy, free market, culture, and benevolent foreign policy. Just as states play the soft power card, corporations do the same, but it is difficult for corporations in the engagement of defense of human rights, democracy, or a benevolent foreign policy, because these values are exclusively the domain of public policy and not the domain of business and private corporations. Things have changed though, and corporations are more and more involved in these domains too. As far as human rights are concerned, corporations put the emphasis on CSR, sustainability, diversity, and inclusion activities. This can be risky for the company.

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Table 5.9 States’ budgets vs. revenues of corporations in millions of dollars United States China Germany Japan France United Kingdom Italy India Canada Walmart Spain Amazon Russia State Grid Australia Exxon Mobil CNCP Sinopec Saudi Aramco Shell Brazil Apple South Korea Netherlands UnitedHealth Group Volkswagen

5,923,000 3,622,313 1,729,224 1,666,454 1,334,944 966,407 863,785 620,739 598,434 572,801 481,945 469,801 468,651 460,601 459,546 413,681 411,701 401,301 400,401 386,201 382,441 365,801 363,121 352,603 324,001 295,801

CVS Health Alphabet Berkshire Hataway China State Construction Toyota McKesson Glencore Mexico Belgium Sweden BP AmerisourceBergen Poland Switzerland Trafigura Group Costco Group Hon Hai Precision Austria Samsung Microsoft Norway Saudi Arabia Turkey ICBC Cardinal Health

292,101 282,836 276,049 274,761 267,021 263,261 255,981 254,256 251,395 251,009 241,392 238,587 236,464 234,445 231,308 226,954 215,841 209,667 233,131 198,271 196,144 193,054 188,258 182,794 181,364

Source: IMF and CIA World Factbook for the 2020 states’ budgets and Forbes 500 Global for revenues of corporations for 2022

For instance, if companies like Nike, H&M or Uniqlo take the decision not to use cotton coming from Xinjiang, China anymore, because of the alleged mistreatment of the Uyghur population, that will certainly have an appeal for some customers (in the Western countries) but also act as a repellent to others (in China) [115]. There might be a ban on cotton from Xinjiang initiated by the United States, forcing American companies to follow the ban. But, in the absence of an official ban in Japan, Sweden, and Spain, the actions of Uniqlo, H&M or Zara are unilateral actions, decided by the companies themselves. Using moral or political reasons for boycotting a country is not new as the example of the boycott of Israel shows. “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) is a coalition of Palestinian Organizations. The NGO is very active in pressing foreign companies (mainly Western companies) to boycott Israel. There is no necessity in boycotting Israel from the American perspective. It can also be illegal according to some American laws, but it did not prevent Ben & Jerry’s from stopping selling its ice cream in Israel and the West Bank. The company decided to announce the decision publicly on its website in

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2021 in the following terms: “Ben & Jerry’s Will End Sales of Our Ice Cream in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).” The decision has nothing to do with business. It has to do with morals. But who is more powerful? Ben & Jerry’s or its parent company Unilever? When Ben & Jerry’s decided to cancel its licensee in Israel the right to manufacture and sell its products, the licensee engaged in a long battle to continue the business and eventually reached an agreement with Unilever to manufacture, sell and use the Ben & Jerry’s logo in Arabic and Hebrew in Israel. According to this agreement, Ben & Jerry’s has lost control on its products, brand and logo in Israel and the West Bank because it cannot go against its owner (Unilever) [116]. There is a big problem for multinational companies when they need to harmonize their values in the West and in Asia. For instance, if a company is a proud sponsor of LGBT communities in London, can it do the same thing in a country where homosexuality is still banned or where the society is not ready for promotion of these rights? Does a company have a set of values that it wants to impose to other countries? Usually, the company does not want to do so because it wants to be present on every market and must abide by the rules and values of that market. In terms of values, a company should have just one: bringing the highest profit to the shareholders as Milton Friedman used to say: “In my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called [CSR] a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’” [117]. Back in 1970, Friedman already identified the most salient elements of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): providing employment, eliminating discriminations, and avoiding pollution. These priorities are still valid today. Friedman’s approach was a dominant approach to business in 1970 because there was a clear separation between the public good (provided for by the state) and private good (provided for by free enterprise). Gradually, the frontier between public and private good faded away and largely disappeared due to the introduction of concerns such as ethics in business, stakeholders’ equity and diversity and inclusiveness on one side and acceptance of management practices in the public sphere on the other. The mission of the company has changed, and many companies have embraced an active role in society by stating that they also should take care of society and not only their profits. This is a fundamental change, because the key performance indicators to evaluating the success of a company do not reflect only financial results anymore. The company must promote social justice in the form of the triple bottom line. The concept is quite old, but it has become very prominent of late with demands coming from stakeholders about the involvement of corporations in domains of social, and environmental goals. John Elkington, who coined the term more than 25 years regrets that the Triple Bottom Line has become an accounting tool, while he had in mind a deeper transformation of capitalism: “The TBL (Triple

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Bottom Line) wasn’t designed to be just an accounting tool. It was supposed to provoke deeper thinking about capitalism and its future, but many early adopters understood the concept as a balancing act, adopting a trade-off mentality” [118]. In the past, it was easy to compartmentalize private from public entities. The state could easily assign to public entities non-market or non-profitable goals, including social and environmental goals. For private entities that was not easy because either the corporations self-regulate and declare by themselves that they want to follow these goals or the regulation must come from the state, usually through a form of law, otherwise private corporations would not be forced to implement them. CSR is a daily concern for corporations because unexpected events can put a light on corporates’ practices. If Coca Cola has a license for water catchment in India and there is a severe drought and the local community does not have enough water to survive, what will Coca-Cola do? Will it consider that it is the responsibility of the regulator that gave Coca-Cola the right to catch water to find a solution for the local community or will Coca-Cola consider that it is its own responsibility to ensure sustainable access to water for the local community. In the past, the company would probably defer responsibility to the regulator but today it is hard to do so because the nature of power has changed. Social pressure is getting more and more traction today, especially with the emergence of the Internet and the possibility for the whole world to have access to information immediately. In that case, it is hard to hide something, and emotions escalate very fast. It is expected that there would be immediate pressure on Coca-Cola to take care of the interests of the community first and the interests of the company second. In the case of India, the local traders’ association boycotted Coca-Cola for “straining the water resources” [119]. CocaCola answered with a 58-page document stressing its commitment to guarantee water security in all the countries where it operates, India included [120]. CSR is a portmanteau term grouping all kinds of initiatives initiated by corporations, including ethical and moral initiatives. There are companies that put morals first like the religious investment funds such as Ave Maria Mutual Fund, the Timothy Plan, or the Islamic Amana Mutual Funds Trust in the United States. These funds screen investment opportunities according to religious requirements and constraints that ban investments in vice activities such as alcohol, gambling, tobacco, pornography, etc. Apart from these “pure players” in morality, other companies can establish moral rules too. Google used to have a slogan “Don’t Be Evil” in its Code of Conduct and the phrase sticks even today as a pillar of Google culture. It was removed in 2015 and replaced by “Do the Right Thing,” without explaining what exactly that means [121]. When Joseph Nye talks about culture, the corporate world thinks corporate culture first. Many books have been written on the subject starting from the seminal work of Edgar Schein. This is how Edgar Schein sees the relationship between culture and leadership: “On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate

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act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional” [122]. If one corporation has a culture, can it impose its culture to other countries and/or societies or people? The typical example comes from McDonald’s. Asian eating habits were based on fast food, long before McDonald’s imposed the concept of fast food in the West. In Asia, food courts, hawker centers, night markets, and street food are a common feature, and they are one of the reasons that they are popular tourist destinations. So, the concept of fast food, which was a novelty for some European countries, and which triggered resistance in France, was not strange to Asia. However, the Asian diet is based on rice and a combination of meat and vegetables. This was a formidable challenge for McDonald’s, but ultimately it succeeded in imposing its concept of burgers, buns, French fries and very little, if no vegetables at all. The company paved a way to numerous competitors like Five Guys, Burger King, and Shake Shack, but the local Asian fast food continues to exist, so it was not a replacement, it was an additional food option for customers. This added option was viewed as exotic or fashionable for many Asian consumers. Fashion is a key world in the food business and new countries of origin for food are popping up all the time. Korean and Japanese cuisine are absolute hits in Asia nowadays [123]. They replaced the traditional strongholds represented by Thai and Chinese food. In Western countries, Korean and Japanese food have also developed, but not at the same pace as in Southeast Asia. If Korean and Japanese cuisine are so popular, can a Western company pretend to be Korean or Japanese and sell this kind of food? This is a difficult question because it opens the debate of cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation. Under cultural appreciation, anyone can say “I love sushi and I want to open a sushi restaurant with all inscriptions in Japanese and staff and cooks dressed in traditional Japanese apparel even though I have nothing to do with Japan.” In the United States and Canada, citizens of Japanese descent might protest that move because they perceive it as cultural appropriation. This means that if you are not Japanese you should not have this kind of venture, while in Asia this is accepted, except in Japan of course. A company called Jollibee from the Philippines, one of the biggest competitors for McDonald’s in the region, with more than 1000 restaurants worldwide, sells its signature Yumburger, but also local specialties like chili chicken in Vietnam. Jollibee does not pretend that it is Vietnamese when it sells its local dishes in this country. Everybody knows that the company comes from the Philippines. Consumers take it as cultural appreciation and there is no problem. McDonald’s is famous for adaptation of its menus in the Middle East, India, China, and Southeast Asia. It also tries to localize in Europe, but while its pasta and pizza was received with cold responses in Italy, McDonald’s Prosperity Burger for the Chinese New Year and nasi lemak brought huge queues of customers in Singapore. As for now, the question of cultural appropriation is not a hot issue in Asia except when Kim Kardashian launched its new line of underwear under the name “Kimono.” The mayor of Kyoto had to write to her and suggest abandoning the name, which she ultimately did. She switched to “Skims,” a more neutral name [124].

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Finally, as far as foreign policy is concerned, a corporation is not expected to invent and pursue its own foreign policy. Very often corporations are pushed to adopt an independent foreign policy because their states are not clear about what to do or because the states are too slow to take a decision. Diplomacy time and corporate time are not in unison. While states can engage in multilateral discussions and wait for the United Nations to reach a decision, corporations must decide here and now because they are exposing their employees, partners, and clients to huge upheavals, sometimes to life and death situations. That is why they cannot wait, and they must move first. John Chipman in his article suggests that corporations must develop geopolitical due diligence and corporate diplomacy to be ready for upheavals that cannot be forecasted or regulated by states: ‘The reality of the 21st century is that companies cannot escape politics, nor can they consistently pretend to be politically neutral. The answer is to embrace the need to engage politically and diplomatically. Today’s corporate foreign policy has two components: geopolitical due diligence and corporate diplomacy’ [125]. Chipman mentioned the example of Google. Google usually plays safe. On its Google Maps, the company gives some areas in dotted line because it considers that the status of the territory is not clear.31 Google therefore gives the territory of Jammu, Kashmir, and Aksai Chin in dotted lines, waiting for the area to acquire a definitive status that Pakistan, India, and China agree on. Western Sahara is also given in dotted lines, waiting for a referendum to be held. The situation in Ukraine is also testing the resolve of Google because it must decide what to do with Crimea and the Donbass. Should it put it in Russia, Ukraine or in dotted lines? Whatever the decision on Palestine or Ukraine, it is sure that one party in conflict will not be happy [126]. The second option for Google is to change the maps according to the IP address [127]. The IP address which identifies where the device is, can incite Google to show Crimea as part of Russia if the IP address is in Russia or to show it as part of Ukraine if the IP address is in Ukraine. This is an easy way to resolve the problem, but even in that case, the losing party can accuse Google of duplicity and double standards. The third option is to give users the possibility to choose. That is what Facebook decided in 2013 when it awarded Kosovo the status of an “approved location” and allow users to switch from Albania or Serbia as a location to the Kosovo location. That year, about 200,000 users chose to “transfer” from Serbia, or possibly from Albania to Kosovo. For Petrit Selimi, “having your state listed on Facebook, being recognized in the Eurovision song contest, or having a team in the Champions League are just as important markers of identity as having a traditional passport document” [128]. Facebook did not look at the IP address and unilateral assignment of location. It just let users chose whatever location they wanted, something like the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which also allows a user to choose a server in another country as the starting point for connection.

31

According to David Yanofsky, there were 32 countries in the world with unclear borders for Google. See David Yanofsky, ‘Here are the 32 countries Google Maps won’t draw borders around’, Quartz, June 10, 2014

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Critical/Business Geopolitics and Power

Corporations borrow many things from classical geopolitics, but they do not forget that critical geopolitics also has some valuable analytical tools, the main one being the power/knowledge nexus. Critical authors are especially interested in finding out how knowledge is created, how it is used as a source of power and how power shapes knowledge in return. Knowledge is essential for states and corporations because it permits the corporation to reduce costs, to increase production, to innovate, and to adapt to the customers’ demands and needs better than the competition. Corporations do not seek knowledge for knowledge. They look for some knowledge they can apply in their activities. As for the source of knowledge in corporations, it can be either individual or collective. The individual level is when a corporation relies on scientists, visionaries, and innovators in their organization or outside the organization. The collective level is when corporations capitalize on the accumulated knowledge within the organization. Individual knowledge is very important in the first stages of the corporation, at the entrepreneurial level. Since the corporation does not have a history, it cannot use accumulated knowledge. The only accumulated knowledge it can use is the individual knowledge of entrepreneurs or innovators who started a business. The knowledge and reputation of the entrepreneurs are determinant success factors of a new venture [129]. Accumulated knowledge comes from a serial entrepreneur (a person who has a history of launching new and successful enterprises), a serial scientist or engineer (a person who has a history of launching solutions for consumers) or a serial manager (a person who has a history of successfully management). As such, they become figures of authority and bring accumulated knowledge to the corporation. The figures of authority can be the founders of the corporation who are regarded as the gurus of management and business. And the world is not short of them. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, and Elon Musk can all pretend to be visionaries and authorities when it comes to business and innovation. Their authority comes from the success and knowledge they amassed during their career. The CEO is not necessarily the founder or the innovator, but the CEO can be viewed as the best in the industry. Carlos Ghosn used to be the CEO in the automotive business, while Jane Fraser from Citibank and Sundar Pichai from Google are not only highly respected CEOs. They can also be role models for people coming from diverse communities. The superstar CEOs enjoy respect because of accumulated knowledge or because of charisma. As for the latter, there is no need for accumulated knowledge, there is only a belief, sometimes an irrational belief, in the leadership qualities of a certain person. But even in that case, a track record is often used. Rakesh Khurana has analyzed CEOs and their connection to charisma. According to him, “in the sphere of business, the faith of entrepreneurial leaders and ordinary employees in a company, a product, or an idea can unleash tremendous amounts of innovation and productivity. Yet today’s extraordinary trust in the power of the charismatic CEO resembles less a mature faith than it does a belief in magic” [130]. Credentials, reputation, and religious devotion can greatly help the

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CEO to lead people, but they can also backfire and generate megalomanic and narcistic behavior. The narcistic behavior is particularly dangerous for the corporation because narcistic CEOs will not only seek self-publicity through a need for acclaim, but they will also address the need to dominate others by appointing top management teams who are lower-deferential and dependent on them [131]. When that particular CEO leaves the corporation, all the knowledge accumulated by the CEO vanishes because knowledge is vested in one person and if that person disappears or falls into disrepute, the knowledge disappears also. The only way to transmit knowledge is to pass it to someone else before the CEO disappears or falls into disrepute. The second source of accumulated knowledge for a corporation can come from the organization itself. Brilliant individuals who have worked for or still work for the corporation can pass on their knowledge to the corporation. For instance, Satya Nadella can pass on his leadership qualities to Microsoft like Ellen Ochoa can do for NASA and the National Science Board. More than 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla worked for the Continental Edison Company, so his knowledge was passed on to the company, especially in the form of patents. Several recipients of the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics used to work at Bell Labs, IBM, or DuPont, so they passed on their knowledge to these companies. When it comes to the world of design, it is unclear who was more important for the success of Chanel for the last four decades. Was it the “spirit of Chanel” (Gabrielle Chanel, the founder of the house who died in 1971) or was it Karl Lagerfeld, the designer who led the creative part of the house from 1983 to 2019? It is common sense to admit that designers are critical elements of success in the fashion or luxury industry, but design is present everywhere, in cars, in Coca-Cola bottles or in cereals packaging. However, as the McKinsey survey found out, more than 90% of companies do not recognize the importance and the full potential of design in the success of their companies [132]. That is why customers know who the lead designers in fashion houses are, but they do not know who Johan Ejdemo and Eva Lilja Lowenhielm are (the lead designers at IKEA), or Kevin Rice, the Chief Creative Officer at Pininfarina. Customers do not know them because their respective corporations do not communicate very much about them. Finally, the accumulated knowledge and authority can come from the corporation itself, not from the individuals who are the employees of the corporation. Knowledge has been accumulated in corporations by successive waves of employees. It is, therefore, necessary to study the history of the corporation and not the history of its managers [133]. Employees of Goldman Sachs (even recent hires) ‘naturally’ enjoy the authority in the finance community, not because they are excellent in their domains. They possess authority because they work for Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or McKinsey, regardless of their individual qualities. If people work for any of the GAFAM companies, L’Oréal or Unilever, they will be treated as gurus in the tech and Fast-Moving Consumer-Goods space . . . In that case, there is a transfer of authority from the corporation to the individual and no-one cares who the employee is in terms of age, ethnic origin, religion, or academic background. What is important is the company this person works for, and that point gives the individual all the authority they need.

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States recognize the authority of corporations in their respective industries. States also seek help from corporations in designing state policies. The United States and the European Union have institutionalized the practice of lobbying through which the public sector seeks the expertise coming from corporations. This expertise is actively sought after by the members of the European Parliament who are not experts in some domains, yet they must decide about laws and rules with far-reaching effects. It is in their interest and the interest of the citizens that they get the most relevant information, and that information can come from private corporations that are the leaders in their domain. The EU Parliament is a target of choice for lobbyists because members of parliament who are rapporteurs have only a few months to prepare a draft or a resolution. Members of the European Parliament simply do not have the time and knowledge to prepare proposals in detail: “Lobbyists are, therefore, welcome guests in the offices of busy MEP . . . Rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs in particular, rely extensively on interest groups to provide them with information and to translate complex and technical information into brief ‘digestible’ notes” [134]. Lobbyists who work for private corporations, therefore, instill management concepts in the public sphere. This is what critical geopolitics suggests when Sami Moisio says: “Management knowledge and related ideas have not only been disseminated into the realm of politics during the past decades, but also that management knowledge and related ideas are in itself deeply geopolitical in nature” [135]. Management knowledge has become geopolitical because it is hegemonic. States believe that it is relevant to transpose the analogy of the corporate world to inter-state competition. A state, a ministry, or a military garrison is an organization like any other. The corporate world has analyzed organizations for quite a long time and has solutions and tools to make them work in an efficient way. The public sector also wants to be efficient. It is, therefore, very interesting to see if the solutions and tools from the corporate world could be applied to the level of the state and public entities. Political leaders suddenly discovered management professors like Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, and Henry Mintzberg, or management consultancy companies like McKinsey or BCG. States started to apply concepts such as value creation, competitive strategy, clusters, the 7S Model, the Blue Ocean Strategy, and the BCG Matrix to the level of the state. In the end, we do not know who rules states. Is it the elected representatives or consultancy agencies and management gurus hired by the states? Corporations and states exercise power but in a free market and democracy, corporations and states are at the mercy of customers and voters. This is where the real power is. In classical geopolitics, states are vested with hard power and soft power. Through coercion and influence, they can impose something on their own population or to other countries. For corporations this does not work. Even if they have vast hard power in terms of revenues like Walmart or Amazon, or enjoy vast soft power like Netflix or Nintendo, competition still exists and this competition happens to be fierce at home and abroad. Corporations cannot prevent a foreign competitor from coming and challenging them in their domestic markets. Competition is everywhere. Because competition is at home and abroad, business geopolitics is close to critical geopolitics, which does

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not make a difference between inside/outside, us/them or between domestic actions and foreign policy. For corporations, this is bread and butter of everyday operations to mix home and foreign operations. Even if customers differ from one locale to the other and often force corporations to adapt their offer to different markets, there could be commonalities between customers. The commonality can be expressed by a similar status-symbol demand across geographies, a similar price-demand elasticity, or a similar problem-solving requirement. The quest for the “global customer” is the Holy Grail of corporations because if that customer exists, the corporation can tailor an offer according to commonalities, while the end-product may differ according to local preferences. The world leader in soft power according to George Modelski is a country which can offer an “innovation” to provide geopolitical order and security: “. . . it is not innovation for the sake of innovation, but innovation linked to global reach and world trade: innovation for the adaptive upgrading, in the first place, of the global system that shaped the role of the lead economies” [136]. Innovation breeds “big ideas,” which permit a country to coalesce with other countries. The power of the leader rests in his capacity to offer a “big idea,” how to organize the world and innovate on a global scale. Other countries spontaneously follow the leader because they like innovation or because they are forced by the leader to accept the “big idea.” In other words, the power of the leader rests in his agenda-setting capacity and its ability to enforce it. The “big idea” in the past was, for instance, the Bretton Woods Conference which laid ground to the establishment of the World Bank, the IMF, and GATT (transformed later into WTO). The main values (multilateralism and benevolent help) were not particularly new at the end of WWII, but the fact that these values were backed by instruments (monetary and trade) and by the most powerful country at that time (the United States) was decisive in building unprecedented global economic growth. Another “big idea” was the building of the European Union. It started with the Treaty of Paris in 1951. It was a simple treaty meant to regulate coal and steel industries. It was not the first time that treaties of that kind had been established. But the “big idea” was to make “war not only unthinkable but also materially impossible” through irreversible integration. Integration is based on multilateralism and negotiation (the European Union negotiations are famous for that) and successive additions of new members and institutions. The fact that the Union is backed by the most powerful countries, France, and Germany, is a guarantee that the Union will function. Rather, it was a sufficient guarantee until Brexit and the war in Ukraine. These events challenged stability and irreversibility of the European project. The concept of “big idea” is frequently used in the corporate world because the leading corporation has a duty to launch some ideas and has the power and willingness to regulate the market. It was the case with De Beers, from South Africa, the undisputed leader in the diamond business for decades. The company not only had a practical monopoly in the diamond trading business, but it also handpicked a few buyers who could buy the stones (the sightholders) and these buyers were given boxes filled with gems with information about the quantity

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and quality of stones. The buyers from Anvers, Paris, or London could see the stones only after buying the boxes [137]. Anne Andrews explains that curious situation of hegemony: “De Beers selects buyers, limits the quantity it will sell to each, determines the diamond’s quality, and sets the price. The buyers may either accept or decline the entire groupings of diamonds they are offered. De Beers does not permit negotiation, and in practice, no buyer refuses” [138]. De Beers today is no longer the leader since the Russian company Alrosa took over that position on the world level. However, Russia can be the object of sanctions, so De Beers can become the leader again. The “big idea” of the diamond industry is the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) under which gems are identified, certified, and traced, so the possibility to have “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds” is theoretically eliminated. The KPCS, officially launched in 2002, was the culmination of initiatives from various NGO’s, some countries, and the United Nations, but it could not be implemented without the active participation of De Beers, the main player in the game at that time. Its participation in the KPCS has given De Beers the opportunity to wash out some accusations of cartel-like behavior and brought back luster to the whole diamond industry. When the United States issued anti-trust charges against de Beers in 1994, the company chose to ignore them and closed its American business. The corporation was more powerful than the United States at that time. Without the international community’s support or a self-regulatory body, the United States was powerless. When the Kimberley Process started, De Beers also chose to ignore it in the beginning. The logic was that if the company could defeat the United States, it could defeat a group of NGOs. Gradually, the reputational risk became so important that De Beers changed its policy. It simply applied the proverb “If you can’t beat them, join them.” So, De Beers decided to abandon its hegemonic position and joined other producers and NGOs. This is not surrendering. This is working from inside to ensure its interests are best defended.

5.4.3

Feminist/Business Geopolitics and Power

Feminist geopolitics has a considerable influence on power in the business environment because it involves a different definition of power compared to classical and critical geopolitics. When classical and critical geopolitics look at power from the coercive and influence position, meaning how people or entities can impose something on others, the feminist approach does the opposite. It aims to find out how people can be empowered to resist the influence of coercion coming from the outside. Influence and coercion happen everywhere, in the political party, in the military, in the classroom, but also in corporations. Questions about gender, inclusion, diversity, and equality have become central parts of any business discussion and can be decisive in choosing where to invest, whom to hire and fire, or what offer the company should propose. It is not a question of choice. It has become a must for the corporation to take a stand.

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Feminist geopolitics considers that some gender and race-based communities and race are the most visible categories of unrepresented people. Many countries have quota systems by which they promote these groups. There is an irresistible movement to transfer these practices from politics and society to corporations because this is the place where people socialize most, and this is the place where structurally some groups are privileged compared to others. Victor Ray in his article explains how white privilege in the workplace is not accidental. According to him, it is historically and structurally built into the workplace: “Understanding this context is vital to seeing organizations for what they really are: not meritocracies, but longstanding social structures built and managed to prioritize whiteness” [139]. What counts for white privilege, counts for masculine privilege, too. The International Labor Organization (ILO) is concerned with discrimination at the visible gender level. ILO does not stop there. It goes deeper and seeks to debunk the unconscious bias toward women in corporations based on the supposed propensity of women not to be interested in promotions or higher salaries, or a supposed fixation on work-life balance that could be detrimental to their performance. The unconscious bias becomes apparent with the semantic use of male-stereotypic or female-stereotypic words: “Research conducted in 2005 in the United States found an association between women and adjectives such as ‘emotional’, ‘mild,’ ‘pleasant,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘warm,’ ‘affectionate,’ and ‘friendly,’ and between men and adjectives such as ‘dominant,’ ‘achievement-oriented,’ ‘ambitious,’ ‘self-confident,’ ‘rational,’ ‘tough,’ and ‘aggressive.’ If leaders and job descriptions for leadership roles in an organization are described with words commonly associated with the male gender, such as ‘dominant’ and ‘ambitious,’ then male applicants may benefit from an unconscious bias in their favour. Men would be regarded as a natural fit for the job, while the unconscious bias would work against women” [140]. Privileges tend to accumulate, and discriminations tend to accumulate, too. For women of color, it becomes even more difficult to climb the ladder in the organization, as shown by a survey conducted by McKinsey. According to the study, “at every step of the corporate ladder, women of color lose ground to white women and men of color” [141]. Faced with the situation of privilege, corporate shareholders must do something. One way to address this issue is to consider that all personal matters should be decided on a case-per-case basis. The corporation can decide to apply full meritocracy (principle of equality of treatment). In that case, the corporation can decide to be blind to everything (race, color, gender, age, etc.), and consider that meritocracy can help people destroy discriminatory towers built by privileged groups in the corporation. The same corporation can have a completely different attitude and opt for positive discrimination and help an employee who did not benefit from the same resources, environment, or experience (principle of equity in treatment). The employee does not have all the competence or experience needed, but the corporation believes that it is right to nudge that person because that person already suffers from open or hidden discrimination. Shareholders are keen to promote unprivileged groups in the corporation, but to do so, they must identify the said groups. It seems to be easy to identify groups from

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the outsider’s point of view. This is what classical geopolitics does. Classical geopolitics uses deterministic criteria and assigns people to pre-defined boxes. They name boxes in the following terms: white people, people with disabilities, young people, people with experience, people with a specific college degree, people who live in a specific place, etc. They use neutral criteria and a gaze from nowhere to identify and sort people. This is exactly what critical and feminist geopolitics rejects. From the critical geopolitics point of view, the observer and the observed are not separated, so every time the observer claims objectivity and neutrality in observing phenomena, this is posing a problem. It means that bias in corporations cannot be eliminated. From the feminist point of view, it is up to people to declare who they are, to accept or not a classification imposed from outside and to accept or not any kind of classification. It appears that it is easier to adopt case-per-case decisions, but even in that case subjectivity and preferences can pop up during the decision process. Shareholders need a policy for employees, but they also need a policy for the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee. This is where the real power in a corporation is, the last domain where empowerment, diversity, and inclusion stay at the door. The Board of Directors is coopted by the shareholders. The primary aim of the Board is to set the strategies and make the corporation work. The shareholders are, therefore, very sensitive to the efficiency and performance of the Board members. Diversity and inclusion are not their primary concern and shareholders do not want politics to force them to choose members of the Board based on gender or race. If this was the case, there would be no more free enterprise or free economy, according to them. The situation has changed though. The Harvard Law School monitors every quarter the evolution of Boards regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices. Their Forum on Corporate Governance surveys more than 120 public (meaning private publicly traded) companies in the United States and the report from 2021 shows that 88% of companies provide information about DEI strategy to the Board versus 64% in 2021. At the same time only 3% of companies reported that no DEI information was supplied to the Board versus 12% in 2020. This means that US corporations have incorporated DEI as a structural element in their policies at all levels of the company [142]. Gender issues are important in corporations as far as employees and Board members are concerned. However, when it comes to customers, gender differentiation is as old as the business is. There have been forever products labeled “for men” and “for women.” The primary justification was based on sexual dimorphism where the two sexes exhibit different characteristics. The power of sexual dimorphism was such that it had a determining influence on companies to launch products for men or products for women. These characteristics can be of physiological nature, differences in morphology or metabolism, but also differences of human brain in the production of testosterone or estrogen. Corporations, therefore, launch specific products for men and women because they acknowledge sexual dimorphism [143]. Corporations for instance manufacture differentiated underwear products, and because of the difference in metabolism, corporations have a cocktail of hormones, vitamins, and other ingredients that are specific for men or for women. Unless there is massive gender transition and/or massive emergence of transsexual

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customers, companies will continue to think in binary terms because of sexual dimorphism. The company Victoria’s Secret, well known for its line of women’s lingerie, decided in 2022 to open a new “gender-fluid” line of products called “Pink” with the same products for men and women. Pink’s statement is the following: “As we focus on expanding our gender-free offerings and continue to evolve as a brand, we want to ensure our partners not only represent the diversity of our customers, but also embody individuality and self-confidence” [144]. The Pink line, however, provides only unisex tees, hoodies, sweatpants, and joggers, while the company still maintains the exclusivity of its lingerie and underwear line for women. There is also consumer gender differentiation when the society or the corporations claim that a product or a service is for men or women only, while the differentiation cannot be backed by evidence coming from sexual dimorphism. All razor manufacturers for instance have a line of products “for men” and a line “for women.” The products can be the same, but the packaging, the message and colors are different. These companies also innovate in labelling because they do not write “razors for women.” Gillette calls them the Venus line, while Philips call them “Gentle Electric Shavers.” Make-up products or perfumes are a case in point because these products have nothing to do with gender. Every person can use any make up or perfume. Companies just believe that they will sell more if they say that a certain perfume is for men, for women, or unisex, while there is usually no physiological differentiation justifying that decision. There used to be in the past an obligation for gender segregation decided by political authorities that reserved some products for men and other for women. As Grace Ziegler explained in 1932: “In spite of the inability of cosmetics to make all women beautiful, their use has grown prodigiously in recent years, and doubtless will continue to grow as long as women are women and men are men and the wherewithal is available to pay for them” [145]. Perfume has always been a product of passion. It was an essential part of religious rituals, so gender roles were clearly distributed about who had the right to produce and use anointment or fragrant oils, also deemed to be the origin of lust, exciting people’s desires and linked to alchemy or witchcraft. Even if perfumes have nothing to do with gender, there is still a marketing differentiation, especially about the type of fragrance (musk or floral mix) for men and women. This differentiation comes from social pressure, but also from the will of corporations to pursue the stereotypes attached to certain fragrances [146]. Corporations are also interested in pursuing the production of gender differentiated products because of the pink tax, the price supplement women are forced to pay for equivalent products when compared to products for men. Price differentiation between products for men and products for women can range from 8 to 13% according to a study done by the City of New York in 2015 [147]. Classical and critical geopolitics look at power from the power base perspective, the means used to coerce or influence, whether these means come from the material world or from knowledge. Feminist geopolitics looks at power from the people’s point of view and this is of interest to corporations. The distinction of hard power and soft power can produce “hard power workers” and “soft power workers.” In his book about the network society, Manuel Castells identified four types of workers: “the

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producers of high value, based on informational labor; the producers of high volume, based on low-cost labor; the producers of raw materials, based on natural endowments; and the redundant producers, reduced to devalued labor” [148]. A comprehensive and inclusive society needs and values all types of workers. It is, however, clear that the four types of workers are presented by Castells in a hierarchical order, in which the informational labor (knowledge) clearly dominates all other types of labor. As Peter Drucker said many years ago: “Knowledge is the only meaningful resource today. The traditional ‘factors of production’—land, (i.e. natural resources), labor, and capital—have not disappeared but they have become secondary. They can be obtained, and obtained easily, provided there is knowledge” [149]. When Drucker presented his vision, it was a bold and innovative idea. Today, it is common sense because the consensus of media, and the political and the corporate worlds have identified the knowledgeable worker as the main contributor to the national economy to the detriment of any other type of work. The danger with that kind of hierarchy is that it can end up in social engineering by pushing young people to this type of labor while other types of labor are disregarded and negatively connotated. The second danger is that this group of people builds a separate social class supposedly endowed with a superior talent, creativity, and risktaking attitude, so it can become the elite of the nation. As early as 2004, Richard Florida called this group of people the “creative class,” composed of engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets, and programmers [150]. This is not the class of the “wisest” as defined by a noocracy, but a class of the highest contributors to the national economy. The “creative class,” or the “knowledgeable workers” are not necessarily the most important people in every society. Socialist revolutionaries in Russia, China, Cuba, and other communist countries considered, on the contrary, that peasants and workers are the most valuable contributors to the national economy, so the power should pass from the capitalists to the proletariat. During the COVID-19 pandemic, states (and the public at large) discovered the existence and the indispensable contribution of the “non-creative class,” represented by electricity workers, cleaners, food delivery workers and others. All leaders rushed to thank them and praise their contribution for saving the lives and livelihoods of the communities. It remains to be seen how the post-pandemic world will look at the four types of workers defined by Castells. In the case of Castell’s or socialist hierarchies, people are powerful according to what their contribution to society is. It can be a material, artistic, or spiritual contribution, but in all cases, it can be measured and justified. What is not measured and justified is the power attributed to people based on stereotypes, especially gender stereotypes. Feminist authors recognize that stereotypes are socially and culturally constructed. This stereotype feminine deep misunderstanding between men and women, not because they are men and women, but because they do not share the same meaning of gender and because the realities that they see are different [151]. Feminist geopolitics allows corporations to get out of the binary approach and integrate the feminine values as a complement to masculine values when it comes to the elaboration of strategy or tactics in a company. In the business world,

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the most common definitions of masculine and feminine values come from Geert Hofstede. His dimensions of culture are very present in marketing, and they cover all elements of the marketing mix such as gender roles in product, price, distribution, and in the advertising industry. Even though masculine and feminine values are routinely attached to gender differences, masculine and feminine values have nothing to do with sex or gender. They have to do with a typology of values that are called feminine or masculine. For instance, if a client negotiates with a supplier, the client can look for the maximization of profits and pressurize the supplier to the point of rupture. Alternatively, the client can try to find a win-win strategy that would satisfy both parties. The first strategy, focusing on individualism, domination or maximization will be labeled as masculine, while the strategy focusing on inclusiveness, harmony, and mutual satisfaction will be feminine. Robert Keohane gives a masculine definition of the corporation by saying: “Firms are assumed to act as rational egoists. Rationality means that they have consistent, ordered preferences, and that they calculate costs and benefits of alternative courses of action to maximize their utility in view of these preferences. Egoism means that utility functions are independent of one another: they do not gain or lose utility because of the gains and losses of others” [152]. There are many women who opt for the masculine strategy and many men who opt for the feminine strategy. Contrary to some situations in political or societal life, there is no exclusivity in gender-values relations in business. A concrete example of a strategy based on mutual satisfaction is the alliance. Military alliances are the legal expression of a relationship by which one actor’s military forces can be “borrowed” by another for the use of protecting the latter from being attacked or invaded. No military alliance would ever be established between two actors who are not intimately related. It reflects a shared accessibility through relational connections and social ties [153]. This statement by Yaqing Qin is debatable because the most important military alliance (NATO) puts together countries that are not necessarily intimately related like Greece and Turkey. Another military alliance was the Warsaw Pact. There was no intimate relationship between the Soviet Union and Romania, Hungary, Poland, or Bulgaria in the past. The Warsaw Pact was in fact a domination of the Soviet Union under the name of an alliance. Why do states engage in military alliances? The more powerful state is willing to cooperate because it knows that the outcome will favor it more and the less powerful must cooperate because it has no other choice once the more powerful decides. Stephen Krasner, who worked on international regimes, points out also the possibility that the most powerful state simply imposes on others: “Where there have been disagreements about basic principles and norms and where the distribution of power has been highly asymmetrical, international regimes have not developed. Stronger states have simply done what they pleased” [154]. Politics and business use the same term (alliance), but they may not have the same understanding of the term. Companies do not enter an alliance because they like the partner, as proposed by Yaqing Qin. They enter an alliance because partners are available for the alliance, and because they are willing to participate. It has more to do with an opportunistic approach rather than with a carefully planned strategy. The

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Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance is a case in point. It started not because Renault and Nissan had good relations before or because they liked each other. It happened because Nissan was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1999, and Renault acted like a white knight to rescue Nissan and establish a presence in that part of Asia [155]. If a corporation in the car industry owns several brands, it is expected that it would like to rationalize and reduce the unnecessary diversification of car parts. It will ask the different brands belonging to the corporation to cooperate. For instance, the Volkswagen group initiated in 2012 the MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten), a modular platform that allows to share many parts among its brands. The MQB platform is used to build the bulk of VAG’s products, from its lower-end brands like SEAT and ŠKODA, all the way to middle-of-the-range Volkswagen and smaller Audi models. As far as the luxury end of the spectrum is concerned, VAG’s MLB platform (Modularer Längsbaukasten) equips Audi and Porsche models such as Audi A7, Porsche Macan and Phideon cars. Other groups do the same, like Stellantis, composed of Fiat-Chrysler Group and PSA (Peugeot-Citroen) with its own EMP platform (Efficient Modular Platform). What is striking is that a car manufacturer does not hesitate to cooperate with competitors. This was the case with the MercedesNissan cooperation which shared many parts like gearboxes and engines. The Mercedes A200 and the Nissan Qashqai, for instance, had the same jointly developed 1.3l turbocharged engine [156]. Mercedes eventually gave up the partnership with Nissan to concentrate on its strategic alliance with the Chinese company Geely, one of its main shareholders. In the Formula One World Championship, there are ten teams but only three engine suppliers and one emergent manufacturer (RedBull). Mercedes, Renault, and Ferrari supply eight teams and it can happen that the Mercedes team is competing with the McLaren and Williams teams which use the same engines developed by Mercedes. It is hard to imagine the United States, Russia and China working together on new weapons and military technologies, but this is exactly what happens in the automotive world.

*** State actors acknowledge the importance of business in geopolitics, but they do not analyze it thoroughly. Classical geopolitics accepts corporations in the globalization drive because corporations produce real products and technologies, and classical geopolitics is about real, tangible elements. Without corporations, there is no globalization, there is no Internet, there are no ships, planes, trains, cars, trucks, or supply chains creating the availability of tomatoes out of season. So, classical geopolitics recognizes corporations, but they usually amalgamate them into one industry. Classical geopolitics prefers to talk about the car industry, the tourism industry, the Big Tech, Big Pharma, or Big Mining. Alternatively, classical authors put all corporations together and call it the national economy or political economy. They stick to macroeconomic indicators to show big tendencies. This is what Wallerstein and Modelski do when they study long economic cycles on a world level. Classical geopolitics seldom ventures in microeconomy, except when a company has a direct impact on geopolitics. It would be, for instance, difficult to talk about Saudi Arabia without mentioning Saudi Aramco or to talk about South

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Korea without mentioning the Korean chaebols like Samsung or LG. Classical geopolitics considers that the state is above corporations. Hence, it sometimes attempts to exclude corporations from important decision-making processes, which have a definite impact on the economy and business. The same is done by scholars in international relations, who refer to classical geopolitics and who also exclude corporations as legitimate actors. This was a pity according to Susan Strange: “That is why it seems to me that so many writers and teachers in conventional international relations are like the orthodox theologians in Galileo’s time. They are like Flat Earthers who refuse utterly to recognize that the earth is round and revolves around the sun. Similarly, they refuse to see that the relations between states is but one aspect of the international political economy and that in that international political economy, the producers of wealth—the transnational corporations—play a role” [157]. Susan Strange pointed out a very important element. In a capitalist society, states do not create wealth. Wealth is created by private corporations. If wealth is an important element of power, in that case, corporations are also important agents. Corporations cannot be ignored in geopolitics. Critical geopolitics has a rather negative view about business as a Non-State Actor. It follows classical geopolitics as it amalgamates all companies into an anonymous group of companies, industry, or macroeconomy. John Short in his book has a whole chapter on global economy and globalization called “Becoming,” but he never quotes the name of a single corporation, or a possibility that corporations are in competition, that they do not present a uniform group of companies fighting against states or for customers [158]. Similarly, Robert Saunders in his chapter ‘The Hollywood culture as an interlocutor in world politics’ talks about movies and audiences but never about the studios, producers, budgets, and revenues, as if movies are shot without money and without a commercial objective in mind [159]. Critical geopolitics usually makes a distinction between two types of NSAs: the transnational business and the transnational social movements, but the importance given to them is not the same. As an example, Colin Flint writes 20 pages on transnational social movements (terrorist groups included) while spending only three pages out of a total of 307 talking about the geopolitics of transnational business [160]. He quotes three corporations (Google, Amazon, and Starbucks) in a negative context of “creative accounting” and transfer of money from one country to the other; while the only other companies quoted are the private military contractors (mercenaries), armies fighting for money. But these three pages are worth looking at because they illustrate how critical geopolitics views business. Flint first posits that a corporation, like a state, like any other social organization is a social construct. As a social construct, it does not have legitimacy per se, it can be deconstructed on the same grounds as the state, or another social organization is deconstructed. The second hint is that business has a goal, and this goal is to make profits. In pursuing this goal, corporations interact with and modify places, states, and regions. If it is possible for corporations to modify places, states, and regions, it is because they have money in abundance, sometimes money that states do not have.

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Private companies are routinely presented negatively by critical geopolitics, as entities that cultivate opaque and secret actions with the aim of pursuing their specific interest, if necessary, by resorting to corruption, bribery, and all kinds of criminal activities. In their book about economic diplomacy, Bayne and Woolcock recognize the role of NSA, corporations included. According to them, “business firms exerted their influence mainly behind the scenes, though recently the financial sector has been forced into the limelight” [161]. Corporations, therefore, prefer to engage in murky business. According to critical geopolitics, there is a necessity to expose corporates’ (secret) activities to the public. This action cannot come from the business itself. There must be a coercive agent willing to bring them to the light. This coercive agent can only be the state. The state, which is usually challenged by critical geopolitics, is suddenly presented as a paragon of virtue fighting against the evil side of business. The reality is much more complicated, because there are scores of examples of companies working for the common good on one side and there are scores of states in which the leaders only look after their own profit and not the common good. Feminist geopolitics shares with critical geopolitics a reluctance to accept corporations as a legitimate actor in geopolitics but contrary to critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics do not hesitate to engage in microeconomy. They deconstruct the functioning of a company with a clear aim, which is to expose the situation of the most exploited and disadvantaged individuals, who unfortunately happen to be women. One of the first feminist geopoliticians, Cynthia Enloe, analyzed the role of women in the garment industry, especially in Bangladesh after the important Rana Plaza fire in 2013: “The big names like Gap, H&M and Tommy Hilfiger scrambled to devise a slightly revised formula that would allow them to do two things simultaneously: to continue to seek out the world’s lowest-cost apparel manufacturers and to assure consumers in North America and Europe that they are taking responsibility for their subcontracted employees’ safety and rights. When the two goals conflicted, more often than not, the first goal trumped the second” [162]. According to feminist geopolitics, marketing is an important tool to make the disadvantaged employees invisible and to mislead consumers. Under the umbrella of “cause marketing,” Nicola Pratt sees many occasions of genderwashing, greenwashing, or pinkwashing. These terms “derive from the term whitewashing,—that is effort to hide from public view certain facts that would reflect poorly on the organization, group, or individual” [163]. For example, pinkwashing and greenwashing are terms that refer to the ways in which corporations position themselves as leaders in the battle against breast cancer or environmental degradation, respectively, while simultaneously engaging in practices that generate these same social problems. For Nicola Pratt, corporations are hypocritical, they use deception and want to hide their real interest: maximization of profits at all costs. Comparing the three branches of geopolitics, business is by default associated with classical geopolitics, because business and classical geopolitics share common elements such as the “materiality of the world,” “realistic performance indicators,” and “accounting principles,” which do not vary according to interpretation. At the same time, businesses are very much open for critical and feminist approaches, and

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we will briefly discuss how critical and feminist geopolitics help to reinterpret materiality, realistic indicators, and accounting principles. Corporations routinely question the materiality of the world because corporations can change the world by introducing new techniques and technologies, or by abandoning some energy sources like fossil fuels. “Materiality” is not given, it exists because corporations have decided that one type of materiality is valuable. The “realistic performance” from classical geopolitics is also something that can be interpreted because indicators such as diversity and inclusion, community-oriented strategy or clean energy substitution can hamper the financial gain of the company from being in tune with the mission of the company. Corporations can change their Key Performance Indicators and include diversity indicators if they want. Finally, “accounting principles” are presented by classical geopolitics as iron-clad principles that cannot be changed, but this is not true. As statisticians used to say, “you can make statistics say anything you want.” Countries can use new formulas for measuring enterprise, financial position, and operating performance. When it contributes to enhancing the triple bottom line, “creative accounting” is seen as something positive even if it usually garners bad press because, under “creative accounting,” corporations follow the letter of the rules of standard accounting practices but deviate from the spirit of these rules, very often with questionable ethics [164]. Terms such as “massaging the figures” or “cooking the books” refer to creative accounting with the aim of showing different revenues, costs, or profits in certain jurisdictions, while sometimes using intra-company transfer prices to transfer profits to other jurisdictions.

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92. Leong Chan-Hoong, ‘Should TikTok chief exec’s S’porean nationality matter?’, The Straits Times, March 31, 2023 93. Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, ‘Move Fast and Roll Your Own Crypto, A Quick Look at the Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings’, Citizen Lab Research, Report N° 126, University of Toronto, April 2020 94. Vernon Aspaturian, ‘The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex—Does it Exist?’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1972, pp. 1–28, p. 1 95. Amanda Macias, ‘Turkey’s multibillion-dollar arms deal with Russia casts a shadow over NATO summit’, CNBC, December 2, 2019 96. Alvaro Escalonilla, ‘Saudi Arabia makes an offer to Washington with the potential purchase of Russia’s s-400 anti-missile system’, Atalayar, September 17, 2021 97. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Abridged edition, 2000 98. Willie Pietersen, ‘Von Clausewitz on War: Six Lessons for the Modern Strategist’, Columbia Business School articles, February 12, 2015 99. W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, first printed in 2004, reprinted by Harvard Business Review Press, 2015 100. George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, ‘Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Competition’ Harvard Business Review, April 2004, pp. 62–71 101. Arthur Grass, Douglas Greer, ‘Market Structure and Price Collusion: An Empirical Analysis,’ Journal of Industrial Economics, Vol. 26, No 1, September 1977, pp. 21–44 102. Gurcan Gulen, ‘Is OPEC a Cartel? Evidence from Cointegration and Causality Tests’, The Energy Journal, Vol. 17, N° 2, 1996, pp. 43–57 103. Amarachi Orjiude and Sami Olatunji, ‘Federal Government revokes 5,793 mining licences in six years, operators blame insecurity’, Punch, September 30, 2021 104. Barbara Lewis, ‘Rio Tinto CEO calls for ‘United Nations of the mining world”, Reuters, May 16, 2018 105. Daniel Dobrygowski, ‘Why Companies Are Forming Cybersecurity Alliances’, Harvard Business Review, September 11, 2019. 106. Ari Hyytinen et al., ‘Cartels Uncovered,’ American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Vol. 10, No 4, November 2018, pp. 190–222 107. ‘Sector-wise GDP of India’, Statistics Times, June 17, 2021 108. Chunlin Zhang, ‘How Much Do State-Owned Enterprises Contribute to China’s GDP and Employment?’, The World Bank Working Paper, July 15, 2019 109. Benjamin Cohen, Organizing the World’s Money, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p. 3 110. ‘50th Anniversary of The Currency Interchangeability Agreement between Brunei Darussalam and Singapore’, Brunei Darussalam Central Bank, available on https://www.bdcb.gov.bn/ currency-interchangeability-agreement 111. Parag Khanna, ‘These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries’, Foreign Policy, March 15, 2016 112. Richard Barnet, John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, p. 14 113. Elizabeth Dickinson, ‘GDP: a brief history. One stat to rule them all,’ Foreign Policy, January3, 2011 114. ‘69 of the richest 100 entities on the planet are corporations, not governments, figures show,’ Global Justice Now, October 17, 2018, available on https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/ 69-richest-100-entities-planet-are-corporations-not-governments-figures-show 115. Alexandra Stevenson, Sapna Maheshwari, ‘Escalation of Secrecy: Global Brands Seek Clarification of Xinjiang’, The New York Times, May 29, 2022 116. ‘Ben & Jerry’s lose bid to block sales of ice-cream in Israeli West Bank Settlements’, The Guardian, August 22, 2022 117. Milton Friedman, ‘A Friedman doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’, The New York Times, September 13, 1970.

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118. John Elkington, ‘25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line’. Here’s Why It’s Time to Rethink It’. Harvard Business Review, June 25, 2018 119. Vidhi Doshi, ‘Indian traders boycott Coca-Cola for ‘straining water resources”, The Guardian, March 1, 2017 120. The Coca-Cola Company—Water Security 2020, available on https://www.cocacolacompany.com/content/dam/journey/us/en/policies/pdf/sustainability/2020-cdp-waterresponse.pdf 121. Shirin Ghaffary and Alex Kantrowitz, ‘“Don’t be evil” isn’t a normal company value. But Google isn’t a normal company.’, February 16, 2021, www.vox.com 122. Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th edition, Wiley, 2016, p. 11 123. Rachel Loi and Avanti Nim, ‘The Japan syndrome’, The Business Times, July 16, 2016 124. Mehera Bonner, ‘Kim Kardashian Finally Changed Her Solutionwear Name, So It’s Not ‘Kimono’ Anymore’, Cosmopolitan, August 26, 2019 125. John Chipman, ‘Why Your Company Needs a Foreign Policy’, Harvard Business Review, September 2016, p. 40 126. Nayeli Lomeli, ‘Fact check: Google does not have a Palestine label on its maps’, USA Today, May 21, 2021 127. Greg Bensinger, ‘Google Redraws the Borders on maps depending on who is viewing them’, The Washington Post, February 14, 2020 128. ‘Trending: Facebook recognises Kosovo as a region’, BBC, November 26, 2013 129. Esther Hormiga, Desiderio Juan Garcia-Almeida, ‘Accumulated knowledge and innovation as antecedents of reputation in new ventures’, Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 23, N° 2, May 2016, pp. 428–452 130. Rakesh Khurana, ‘The Curse of the Superstar CEO’, Harvard Business Review, September 2002, pp. 60–66, p. 66 131. Arijit Chatterjee, Timothy Pollock, ‘Master of Puppets: How Narcissistic CEOs Construct Their Professional Worlds’, The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 42, N° 1, October 2017, pp. 703–725 132. Melissa Dalrymple et al., ‘Are you asking enough from your design leaders?’, McKinsey, February 19, 2020 133. George Smith and Laurence Steadman, ‘The Value of Corporate History’, Journal of Forest History, Vol. 26, N° 1, January 1982, pp. 34–41 134. Maja Kluger Rasmussen, ‘Lobbying the European Parliament: A necessary evil’, Centre for European Policy Studies Policy Brief, N°242, May 2012, p. 2 135. Sami Moisio, Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy, p. 10 136. George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 223–224 137. Cecilia Jamasmie, ‘De Beers sale shows stronger US and Chinese demand’, June 22, 2022, on https://www.mining.com/de-beers-sale-shows-stronger-us-and-chinese-demand/ 138. Anne Andrews, ‘Diamond Is Forever: De Beers, the Kimberley Process, and the Efficacy of Public and Corporate Co-Regulatory Initiatives in Securing Regulatory Compliance Note’, South Carolina Journal of International law and Business, Vol. 2, N° 1, Fall 2006, pp. 177–213, p. 196 139. Victor Ray, ‘Why So Many Organizations Stay White’, Harvard Business Review, November 19, 2019 140. International Labour Organization, ‘Breaking barriers: Unconscious gender bias in the workplace’, ACT/EMP Research Note, August 2017, p. 6 141. McKinsey, ‘Women in the Workplace 2021’, McKinsey and Company, September 27, 2021 142. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Board Practices Quarterly: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: One Year Later, January 12, 2022 143. Sylvie Borau, Jean-François Bonnefon, ‘Gendered products act as the extended phenotype of human sexual dimorphism: They increase physical attractiveness and desirability,’ Journal of Business Research, Vol. 120, November 2020, pp. 498–508

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Geopolitics creates phantasms and approximations. Phantasms proliferate because geopolitics invariably revolves around death, wars, and conflicts of all kinds. The morbid fascination started with the very beginning of the discipline because the term geopolitics has frequently been tainted with war, and even identified as the instigator of war, as the following diatribe from Foreign Affairs shows: “Few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and likely to start a third world war as the theory of geopolitics” [1]. Phantasms can originate from nationalistic or religious sources as mentioned by Saunders and Strukov: “Geopolitics is more like a religion. It has its doctrines, denominations, rituals, and liturgies; its institutions and structures of power; its holy places and distant gods; its believers and clerics; and—of course—its schismatics, heretics, and critics (and we should not forget its victims)” [2]. It took one single person, General Karl Haushofer, to bring geopolitics into disrepute or even to make the discipline disappear. Geoffrey Sloan links the disappearance of geopolitics after WWII to the perceived close relationship between Haushofer and the Nazi leadership. There were no books published on geopolitics in the English language between 1945 and 1977, even though there were pleas for its post-war utility. Is the discipline so weak that it cannot resist the misbehavior of one, single person? Apparently not since we still talk about geopolitics today. Geopolitics creates approximations because there is no standard definition of geopolitics, so it can be called military strategy, economic warfare, geo-strategy, geo-economy, international political economy, international relations, political struggles, etc. Every writer or decision-maker can define it in their own way. This is not new because, since the beginning of the discipline, geopolitics has been struggling to establish itself as a legitimate discipline on one side and to define its content on the other. Geography and political science are well-defined branches of science and humanities, so a combination of the two should be easy to define as geopolitics. As for the method, geography is part natural science and part social science while politics is pure social science. Analytical methods for natural sciences and social sciences are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Č. Nestorović, Geopolitics and Business, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45325-0_6

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well known, so it should be easy to implement them. Unfortunately, this does not happen because the debate is fierce about which part dominates. Is it geography, or is it politics? Geography used to dominate the debate. Among the earliest fathers of geopolitics at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the claim was that geopolitics was a natural science. The paroxysm of this approach was to declare that geography has a determinant influence on people and politics and that we should analyze geopolitics with mathematical precision according to universal natural laws borrowed from physics or biology. Very soon, that approach was abandoned, even by Karl Haushofer, the main proponent of the German Geopolitik: “Geopolitics will always be a subjective science. It is never neutral, and it is always influenced and guided by some kind of political philosophy” [3]. The illusion to give pre-eminence to deterministic geography and natural sciences over politics and social sciences dissipated after a few decades. Many observers before and during WW II have pointed out that politics is more important in geopolitics, especially when it became clear that geographical distances and constraints were not so deterministic after all: “Geopolitics is not a natural science, not even in the same sense as anthropogeography can be considered a natural science. Geopolitics, being a branch of politics, partakes of the moral sciences” [4]. Hugh Clokie in a review of more than 10 books on geopolitics published during WWII stated: “The geographers who have attempted to create a new super-science of geopolitics, have failed because they do not understand what the political issues are. Geopolitics is and will apparently remain a fiction. At best it can be no more than statecraft, with emphasis on the craft. Geographers can, of course, contribute to the study of international affairs, but they cannot take it over boldly without ceasing to be geographers and becoming political scientists. Is there a master-science? If there is, its name is political science” [5]. It is widely assumed nowadays that politics has pre-eminence over geography. This is because geography has been recalibrated by critical and feminist geopolitics in various concepts of space and scale on the one hand and because of the globalization frenzy on the other, to such an extent that geography practically disappeared from the discussions about geopolitics. Geography in fact did not disappear, it is still there, but it has been side-lined for the benefit of politics. Since politics revolves very much around the idea of the state and power, battles around the state as the container of political life and actor of geopolitics have been fierce. There was a temptation at the end of the 20th century to consider that the state had lost its pertinence and its sovereign attributes. Supranational bodies such as the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, and the European Union have created the illusion that states will disappear, slowly but irreducibly. States, however, have shown that they are remarkably robust, especially in times of crisis. They demonstrated their utility during the financial crisis in 2008 when states came to the rescue of the economy and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–22 when states were asked again to rescue the population and help companies reestablish supply chains and engage in a race to vaccines. States are still a key player in geopolitics, and nothing has replaced them.

6.1

Why Business Geopolitics?

307

The battle about power is not less fierce, especially when there is a comparison between established and emerging powers. Does the rising power induce automatically an assertive, sometimes hostile behavior? That is a question many people ask about China. There was a time when Deng Xiaoping launched his famous maxima in 1991: “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership” [6]. Xi Jinping’s China is not Deng’s China, and he can be tempted to say: “if we are powerful, why should we play nice?” This kind of assertiveness, based on the Western (especially American) practice of power in international relations, is a dangerous step, leading to potential conflicts. Space, state, and power are common elements to all definitions and discussions about geopolitics. The interpretation of these terms and the importance given to them are not common. Classical geopolitics bases its analysis on reality and materiality, while critical and feminist geopolitics challenges the very existence of materiality and objectivity in the geopolitical analysis. They tend to displace the object of analysis by introducing new scales in space, alternative structures to the state and a completely different definition of power, based on knowledge and discourse. Is a reconciliation between these branches possible? Judging by their frontal opposition, this will not happen any time soon. Because of their entrenched positions, it is difficult to imagine reconciliation between them or initiated by them. If there is a reconciliation, it will come from outside, in that case from business geopolitics, because businesses are practical, and they will take from all branches what is good for them.

6.1

Why Business Geopolitics?

In the second part of the twentieth century, multinational corporations had three important roles in the day-to-day process of world politics, according to Joseph Nye [7]. The first one was the direct role in world politics, when the corporation designed its own foreign policy and negotiated on a business-to-government level and influenced or coerced the state where it operated. That was the time of United Fruit domination in Latin America or of Union Minière du Haut Katanga active support of the secession of Katanga from newly independent Congo. The second role was to be an instrument of the state. Corporations operating abroad were asked to share information and intelligence with the state on occasion. Finally, Joseph Nye mentions the indirect role of corporations in setting global agendas. This is when corporations and states work together in setting multilateral, bilateral, or domestic agendas for the promotion of free trade, or support for some nascent industries. Dennis Ray called the last role a general influence. He especially looked at the opaque appointment of high-level foreign-policy officials at the government level who came invariably from big business and law firms: “The process of tapping highlevel foreign policy officials from the business community biases the structure of decision-making towards business, for government is not just conscripting the

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talents of the businessmen; it is buying his ideology, his values, and his orientation towards the world” [8]. The general influence was a method of choice for corporations, but this was 50 years ago. The difference with the situation today is that the expectations of the states, of the corporations, and of society about the precise role of business in society have changed, giving birth to business geopolitics. “We cannot let private interest rule over public interest” is the leitmotiv encountered on all latitudes and longitudes. There is, however, a question about the validity of this axiom because of the meanings of private and public interest. What is public interest, for example? Is it state interest, societal interest, community interest, or civil society interest? And who defines it? Depending on the answer, the relationship between private corporations and public interest will be radically different. Prior to capitalism, it was common to mix private and public interest because kings did not make a distinction between their personal interest, the interest of the Crown, or the interest of the country. As for the Church, everything on Earth obeys God’s will, so there is no public or private interest either, there is just God’s will. It is only with the advent of capitalism that the state found an interest in letting the free market regulate itself while the state restricted its activities to political functions of the government. Since that time, the state has been struggling constantly in defining private and public interest and the role of private corporations in society. As for the second part of the axiom, what is private interest? Is it the interest of the individual, of the corporation, of a group of people organized in a cooperative, in a lobby, or an NGO? Is private interest a legal term, a political term, or an economic term? And who defines it? Again, depending on the answer to these questions, there will be radically different options to identify and implement private interest and combine it with public interest. The dilemma between public and private interest is encapsulated by Barry Buzan when he talks about natural orders and openaccess orders. The natural orders or the natural states are characterized by absolutist rule and a melting of private and public interest while open-access rule order is marked by impersonal (contractual, rule-governed) relationships, giving people individual rights, and allowing mass access to government, and private organizations to exist on their own right [9]. While today, practically all countries are open-access societies, this is a relatively new phenomenon, originating from the industrial revolution. Having open-access societies is not irreversible as the COVID-19 pandemic management has shown. Many countries rediscovered the natural state and its corollary in the form of restriction of individual liberties and choices for private corporations. The same thing happens with wars, sanctions, and embargoes when the state limits the access to markets because of sovereignty interest, labeled as public interest. The dichotomy between the two interests is today geographical and civilizational. The countries of the Global North have all embraced globalization and open-access regimes while many countries from the Global South are sympathetic to natural states regimes. Even if they do not advocate absolutist rule, some of them are more comfortable with authoritarian restriction of liberties for individuals and corporations than in the Global North. They are more comfortable with Westphalian novelties such as sovereignty, territoriality, non-intervention, or nationalism, which were tailored for natural states rather than for open-access regimes.

6.1

Why Business Geopolitics?

309

Private interest and public interest have been thoroughly analyzed by scholars from disciplines such as economy, law, politics, sociology, or philosophy, but not very much by scholars coming from management. The main reason is that business has been assigned the role of recipient of analysis coming from other disciplines, so it did not have a proactive role in the analysis of private and public interest or of geopolitics. The intention of this book was to point out the relevance and resonance geopolitics has with business and why a business approach is pertinent in analyzing geopolitics. Three main reasons exist for the appearance of business geopolitics. First, businesses opportunistically look at geopolitics and take anything that is of interest to them. Second, businesses are pushed by the state and society to have an active role in society. Finally, corporations can also be the container of geopolitical life, on the same grounds that the state is. As for the first reason, there is an interest among corporations to pick and choose among the different branches of geopolitics what is beneficial for them. Corporations spontaneously show an interest in the redefinition of space, state, and power. For that, they scrutinize the options proposed by classical, critical, and feminist geopolitics. From time to time, they propose their own redefinitions of space like virtual reality. Corporations can also redefine the geopolitical actors by putting the emphasis on the individual/customer, or they can redefine power with their own private security companies. The implication of corporations in geopolitics, however, is not only the result of an opportunistic attitude. It has more to do with the will of the state and society to involve corporations in the definition and management of the common good and society. This is a relatively new phenomenon because corporations have been systematically excluded from public life, and now they are actively courted to engage it. All stakeholders (customers, employees, regulators, etc.) seem to converge in asking corporations to settle all political, economic, ecological, social, and cultural problems in the workplace and in society because, the role of companies today in society has nothing to do with the role they had in the past. Stakeholders expect that companies contribute decisively to the elimination of economic inequalities and poverty by introducing progressive hiring, promoting, and remuneration policies. The companies and organizations are the place where all policies about hiring and salaries are decided, so companies are on the frontline. Stakeholders expect also that companies contribute decisively to the elimination of social and cultural biases by promoting inclusiveness and positive discrimination. Companies are pushed to engage in cultural wars with cancel culture policies and progressive policies in advertisements and communications. They are asked to be careful about cultural appropriation for instance. Stakeholders also expect that companies contribute decisively to the ecological transformation of the society by abandoning fossil fuels and promoting alternative sources of energy to fight climate change. If the expectations are high, corporations can ask something in exchange like in any other negotiation. For the sake of the argument, let’s look at the radical, maximalist demands that can come from the corporation. If corporations are requested to fully engage their resources in changing society, they also need to be given political power to accomplish that change. We cannot expect that corporations take the responsibility to change society and at the same time they are barred from the decision-making process on the political level. On the

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national level, why is Kellogg’s or Whole Foods not given the responsibility to lead the Department of Agriculture, or why is Microsoft not given the responsibility of the Department of Education? Corporations could have seats in the parliament, they could head ministries and governmental agencies, and they could run political parties. The usual rebuttal is that private companies pursue private interest while public institutions have public interest in mind. This dichotomy does not work if private companies are given more and more public responsibilities. In that case, power also must be shared, not only responsibilities. The second rebuttal is that in a democratic regime, politicians are elected, while managers in corporations are appointed by the shareholders. If managers do not have democratic legitimacy, they cannot hold public office. Well, this works only for the elected politicians, not for the appointed ones. Ministers, heads of department, and civil servants are not elected. They are appointed by democratically elected persons. They are not directly elected by people. What is the difference of an elected President or an elected Parliament appointing a person as a minister or appointing a company as a minister? In both cases, the democratic legitimacy stems from the elected president or parliament. It might be an insult to consider that managers in private companies are motivated by greed only and that they cannot have public interest in mind. Many of them have proven through their deeds and actions a higher commitment to public good than many politicians who are supposed to be motivated by public interest. While politicians must present checks and balances of their actions every 4–5 years depending on the electoral cycle, companies are scrutinized and assessed daily by shareholders and stakeholders.1 The stock value is their daily plebiscite. Members of parliament or presidents cannot be ousted from their position before the next elections, unless they have done something bad, or if there was a change in coalition. Corporate managers are used to Key Performance Indicators, they know how to manage teams, they know what responsibility is, while rookie members of parliament need to learn about their duties and responsibilities, and by the time they learn how to function, they are replaced by some other rookies. If corporations wanted to influence the public sphere for their own benefit, that would be rightfully labeled as corporatocracy, the will of corporations to rule states. There were cases when corporations directly ruled countries as it was in Brazil. When the First Republic was established in 1891, the executive power alternated between the oligarchies of the dominant states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. This regime was referred to as “café com leite,” “coffee with milk,” after the respective agricultural products of the two states. That is not what is happening nowadays. The initiative for a higher corporate engagement comes from the state and the society, not the corporations. It is, therefore, normal for the corporation to check threats and opportunities of their engagement [10].

According to Marko Papic: ‘Unlike academics, investors cannot be rigid. Our performance is measured in real time’. Marko Papic, Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future, p. 16.

1

6.1

Why Business Geopolitics?

311

Maximalist demands from corporations do not stop at the national level. On the international level, why not have companies like Facebook or Walmart take a seat in the United Nations? They have more employees than some countries have inhabitants, and they have a higher turnover or brand value than many countries have a total GDP. Many states in the United Nations are in fact dictatorships. Many states are non-free, or they are partially free according to think tanks, many states are run by corrupt politicians, or the whole state is plagued by corruption according to Transparency International.2 So, why are these leaders better placed to lead the states than companies? Companies having presence in many countries know what it means to work in multicultural societies. A company like Coca-Cola is present in more than 200 entities worldwide. It works simultaneously in Palestine and Israel, in China and Taiwan, in Pakistan and India. Why is this company not given the mandate to resolve conflicts in some places in the world? Companies know what is needed for the wellbeing of the populations because they operate in cooperation with local entrepreneurs, they employ local manpower, and they address local customers they know very well. In some cases, the company is older than the state and much older than some political leaders. Some companies have a proven record of active and beneficial participation in the economic and social life that can be traced for generations, and that record is assessed and checked by third parties.3 Giving corporations seats in the United Nations would bring long-term stability to the concert of nations, because many politicians who sit at the UN are concerned with their reelections, and in most cases, they cannot have more than two consecutive mandates. That means they are obsessed with short-term results and imperatives while companies are not subject to these short-term vicissitudes and can engage in much longer-term considerations. States believe they have the upper hand because of the coercive power they dispose. The state can impose many things to the corporations but not everything, because the company also has weapons. The first thing the corporation can do is to stop its activities. If the trade-off in one country is bad, the company can simply say, we cannot continue with conditions imposed on us and we close the shop. This can happen if taxes are too heavy or if there is a request for corruption and bribes that the company does not want to comply with. There is no way that political authorities can impose on a company to offer something to the market that the company does not want to offer. There is no way in a free economy that public authorities can force the

2

According to Transparency International, the progress on a global scale or in a region is stalled when over 70 percent of countries score below in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). That is exactly what happened for Asia Pacific in 2021. Even if the region has high scorers like New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong, there are also many, among them big countries like India and China with a score lower than 50. See https://www.transparency.org/en/press/2021corruption-perceptions-index-press-release-regional-asia-pacific 3 The article ‘A Brief History of Corporate Social Responsibility’, gives examples of industrialists from the nineteenth century who were engaged in public good actions, long before the concept of CSR has been proposed. Article available at https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/history-ofcorporate-social-responsibility

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company to continue to operate if the company does not want to. There are exceptional cases such as the state of war, when the state adopts exceptional legislation confiscating or nationalizing private companies. Other than that, there is no possibility to force companies to do anything. The second weapon is that the company can relocate its activities to another country. Due to the globalization drive, openness of countries, and free-trade arrangements, the company can decide to terminate its activities in one country and move operations to another. The world is not short of states that would be very happy to welcome major companies that can bring turnover, profits, and employment to their countries. In the post-COVID-19 world, people are now used to being digital and work-from-anywhere (WFA) nomads. Many states like Honduras or Greece want to lure people to work for Silicon Valley giants from their shores. In that case, the Tech Giants do not stop their activities in the United States, they simply transfer their workforce to other countries. They reduce the workforce in the United States, and they weaken the whole ecosystem. Rental places, restaurants, and overall consumption suffer. This also puts pressure on salaries in the United States because employees, especially employees who can work remotely, will now be in competition with employees from anywhere. These are serious consequences that no politician wants to explain to their constituency, but it shows that in the dance between the state and corporations, the corporation is an equal dancer, not a follower.

6.2

Corporations Are Containers of Geopolitical Life

If the corporation is expected to have a more active role in the society, why isn’t the corporation the container of geopolitical life? From the classical geopolitics point of view, the state is the container of choice. From the critical geopolitics point of view, other scales can be imagined such as supranational bodies or cities, while from the feminist point of view, the individual and the body can be the containers. There are several reasons why the corporation can be the ideal container of geopolitical life. The first reason is that employees spend most of their time in the workplace, so the workplace is their life place. According to human geography, places are the settings of people’s everyday lives, and people’s everyday experiences contribute to their understanding of the world. If we accept that the place of living, the place of commuting, and the place where people attend exhibitions are geopolitical places, why cannot the workplace be a geopolitical place? Critical geopolitics has introduced new spaces for geopolitics, like the virtual place for video games, and all kinds of visual culture places (TV, advertisements, movies), but the working place is notably absent from the list [11]. The knowledge about geography, states, and power is produced everywhere, in the classroom, in the living room, or in the Oval Office. Why not in the workplace? Millions of people can learn about Somalia in the school or on TV, but they will never go there. What happens if a Somali refugee is employed by the corporation and now becomes a coworker? In that case, the other

6.2

Corporations Are Containers of Geopolitical Life

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coworkers will be exposed to the experience and knowledge about Somalia in flesh and bones rather than on TV or in the classroom. Often, employees spend a long time commuting to the workplace and back home, so the time they spend at “home” is reduced to their sleeping time and nothing else. If people work 35 hours per week, it adds up to 1795 hours per year, if there are no holidays. In total, employees spend one-third of 24 hours per day at work. It seems that there is plenty of time for other activities, but according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics in the United States, people spent on average 8.95 hours per day sleeping in 2021, only 2.00 hours on organizational, civic, and religious activities, and 1.96 hours per day on socializing [12]. The time spent on working-related activities is by far higher than anything else. These figures are valid only for the United States, where, according to Statista, in December 2022, the average working week for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls in the United States was at 34.3 hours.4 It is expected that in emerging countries, time spent on working related activities is even higher. Since employees spend so much time in the workplace, the workplace is their “home.” The workplace is their space, the corporation is their state, the corporate’s hierarchy is their power. This is where employees exchange information, this is where they play politics when they want to be promoted or change the position that they have, this is where they discuss domestic or foreign political events. Corporations do not like it when employees discuss politics at work because they fear that this could be detrimental to their performance. That is why some HR departments come up with rules about politics at work. But, despite all the efforts of HR departments, people continue to talk about everything, politics included [13]. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 26 percent of Americans admit to talking politics in the workplace on a regular basis (at least 15 minutes per workweek) [14]. Fifteen minutes per workweek does not seem much, but if people do not talk about politics at all outside the workplace, if they randomly (or never) meet their representatives in the Parliament, if they do not participate in elections, if they do not watch political talks on TV or on the Internet, this is the only time when they are exposed to politics. The second reason why the corporations can be a geopolitical space is that employees do not chose who they work with. In their private life, people can choose their friends, they can choose the political party they want to join, they can choose the football club or the dance team. In a corporation, they cannot choose the people they work with. The only possibility for them to change is to resign, and the year 2022 has been called the year of the “Great Resignation,” because many people started to question their engagement in one company, not necessarily because they had problems with other employees, but because their concept of work–life balance had shifted. Employees cannot choose people they work with, they are exposed to differences in opinion, especially political opinions that they do not necessarily encounter in their private life. Since companies are increasingly promoting Diversity

‘Monthly length of the average working week of all employees in the United States from December 2021 to December 2022’, www.statista.com

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and Inclusion, it is expected that diversity in terms of ethnic origin, race, age, or gender will translate at some point to a diversity of political ideas and transform the workplace into a political arena. It can happen that employees do not support the idea that their management imports cotton from Xinjiang. They can put pressure on their own company to stop that practice. If employees do not agree with the war in Ukraine, they can put pressure on their own company to boycott Russia, whatever the cost. Events happening in foreign countries have an impact on the workplace at home, so there is no binary policy, so dear to classical geopolitics. Finally, transnational corporations have a presence in many countries at the same time. They are the only entities to do so. States cannot be present in other states because of sovereignty rules. Diplomatic representations are the only extraterritorial entities for states. The laws of the host country do not apply there, but these activities are extremely small compared to the activities of transnational corporations. Some states like the United States have military bases in other countries. These US bases are enclaves in another country, so the laws of the United States apply there. Corporations are not diplomatic representations. They do not have military bases requiring a specific legal agreement between two countries. Corporations are entities that must respect the local laws of the countries for all their operations (workplace conditions, selling, hiring, advertising, etc.). There is no out-of-base and base status for their employees. In turn, corporations do not live in isolation, they have the knowledge, they have the experience, they have the good practices that have been proven successful. These practices have not been imposed on anyone because, at the end of the day, the customer is the king and votes with their wallet. If a corporation like Coca-Cola or Nestlé has a continuous presence in so many countries, it means that they know their job. There are cases when corporations did not play by the book and used bribes or corruption to acquire one market. These examples exist, but in the great majority of cases, corporations simply do their job, and their objective is customers’ satisfaction in all countries where they operate.

6.3

CEOs as Heads of State

For all these reasons, a corporation can be seen as a possible container of geopolitical life, while their CEOs could be compared to heads of state. CEOs and heads of state have huge power and huge responsibility. It is possible to compare the CEO to a conductor (orchestra director). They have a certain number of musicians who are experienced and competent in their own instrument. Musicians cannot work without the conductor, and only the conductor knows how to assemble them in harmony. In an orchestra, roles are clearly defined. There is a violin I, violin II, the inside player at the first desk, the inside player at the second desk, etc. The complexity of a symphonic orchestra is that the musical hierarchy is topped by the administrative or leadership exercised by orchestra committees, section principals, or personnel managers [15]. All musicians know the partition by heart, and there are rehearsals before the show goes on. Everything is planned, every member knows what their

6.3

CEOs as Heads of State

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role is. But what happens if one musician does not come? Can a tuba musician replace the violinist, or the pianist replace the guitarist? The conductor does not play all the instruments, but they must be in a capacity to reorient the orchestra in the way that the missing musician does not put in peril the whole ensemble. This a very common situation in corporations when people suddenly do not show up, especially after holidays. The practice of Mudik in Indonesia is observed when millions of people leave the cities and go back to their villages during Ramadan and especially for Eid al-Fitr. It is estimated that more than 25 million people migrate from cities to villages at that time [16]. Many of them do not come back to their workplace, so the corporations are left to guess who will come back. Corporations prepare contingency plans, they hire more people than necessary, just to be on the safe side. According to Deutsche Welle, around 14,000 Romanian doctors and nearly 50,000 nurses have left the national medical system to work elsewhere in the EU, while each year around 450 doctors and around 1000 nurses leave Bulgaria in search for better job opportunities in Western Europe [17]. Having a contingency plan to replace dockers or agricultural workers is easier than replacing doctors and nurses, but still, whole industries are impacted if some workers suddenly do not show up. Going back to the orchestra analogy, what happens if the instruments change, for instance, if a guitar replaces a violin? Both are string instruments, but they do not produce the same music. This is exactly what happens in the case of upgrading of technology, tools, and methods in a company. If upgrading happens to be in the IT department, it does not mean that employees in that department can follow the upgrading. They might be lost. What happens when the musical partition changes? This is the case when regulators (political or industrial) impose new regulations, and companies must adapt while playing the music. Finally, what happens when there is no musical partition? This is the case of disruption, when a major change in technology, natural resources availability, or in consumer demand completely modifies the rules of the game. There are no scenarios or models that can be used because the event is a Black Swan event. Faced with such uncertainties, the orchestra conductor can say “I am sorry, we cannot perform because some musicians, some instruments or some partitions are missing.” That is a luxury a CEO or a head of state cannot afford. Whatever the situation, they must find a solution. They cannot just give up and say: “I am done.” Ultimately, they can resign and abandon ship, but this is not something CEOs and heads of state with great responsibility can do. The resignation of Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand in 2023, was an exception to the rule.5 Situations faced by the CEO look like situations faced by the head of state because they must answer challenges on an everyday basis. The CEO can, for instance, be exposed to a racial problem because suddenly a group of activists accuses the company of racial stereotyping while for decades the product or the brand did not pose a problem. That was the case of the brand Uncle Ben’s that had to

She said that she ‘no longer had enough in the tank’ to do the job. Tess McClure, ‘Jacinda Ardern resigns as prime minister of New Zealand’, The Guardian, January 19, 2023.

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be renamed. Just after the death of George Floyd in the United States, Mars Food company (the parent company of Uncle Ben’s rice) decided to change the name to Ben’s Originals and to remove the white-haired Black man from the packaging [18]. The CEO can be exposed to a religious problem because the advertising company has used as an illustration a house of worship that did not cater to most of the population in one country. That happened to the Jordan Dubai Islamic Bank when it used a photo from a Shiite Mosque and not a Sunni Mosque in its advertisement [19]. The CEO can be exposed to a sexual orientation problem when in one country the corporation openly sponsors Gay Pride events while in another country it cannot do so if homosexuality is forbidden by law. Many companies operating in Central European countries hesitate to engage in gender and sexual issues because of political pressure. Alternatively, the company is asked not to sell “LGBT” products in their country as Amazon was requested in the United Arab Emirates in 2022. When asked about the ban, Amazon replied: “As a company, we remain committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we believe that the rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected. With Amazon stores around the world, we must also comply with the local laws and regulations of the countries in which we operate” [20]. It is not sure that the Amazon’s employees in the United States would accept this kind of statement. The CEO can be exposed to several of these issues in one or several countries at the same time. These issues are not business issues, they are political issues. The corporation lives and breathes geopolitics. It does not observe it from outside. Russian citizens in their great majority have never been to the United States. The only thing about America they know is McDonald’s, Nike, or Netflix. If the United States decides to support Ukraine by sending weapons in large quantities, the Russian citizens do not see that. On the other side, when US brands decide to pull out of Russia, they resent it immediately. Many of these brands were not forced to boycott Russia. They decided the boycott on their own. It was a political decision. Only corporations can display such a hybrid geopolitics, combining elements coming from all branches of geopolitics (Table 6.1). Classical geopolitics dominates the understanding of geopolitics from the statecraft point of view, and since states are still the main actors in geopolitics, corporations take that. Critical geopolitics is nowadays the dominant form of academic geopolitics in Western countries. Table 6.1 Branches of geopolitics

Space

State

Power

Classical geopoltiics Physical geography, human geography, virtual geography Main actor and container for political and social life + NSA Hard power and soft power

Critical geopolitics Scale: globalization/regioncity State: social construction Power/Knowledge Power of discourse

Feminist geopoltics Scale: individual/body

State: individual sovereignty, communities Gender, racial, religious domination, epistemological enquiry

Business geopolitics Corporate space Corporation and sovereignty Economic power/ Social power

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Corporations go there for disruptions, power/knowledge nexus, and discourse analysis. Finally, feminist geopolitics dominates the discussions about individuals and underprivileged groups on one side and the alternative definition of knowledge on the other side, elements that can be beneficial for corporations in identifying new markets or new ideas. The corporation is the geopolitical space because this is where people live and interact with other people. The corporation acts like a state on occasion. The corporation has the power to impose some decisions. It is not any Non-State Actor, it is the Non-State Actor, and business geopolitics has a legitimate place in the suite of geopolitical branches.

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