I am very grateful to all of the contributors to this symposium – Emily Eaton; Julie Guthman; Nik Heynen, Peter Hossler and Andrew Herod; and Mazen Labban – for their generosity, not just in taking time to pass comment on Uneven Development (UD) but to do so with such critical magnanimity. I will resist the [...]
When Tony Blair was re-elected in 2001, he promised to continue the moral crusade of ‘‘New Labour’’ as a force for political and moral regeneration in Britain and the world. Workers, women, immigrants, Asian and Caribbean Britons, many in the middle class, all caught the wave. The nightmare of Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s was still visceral in many people’s minds, and a sweeping majority still thought Blair the best of a motley crew. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, to a wide swath of people including disaffected members of his own party and eventually cabinet, that Blair was not the answer to Thatcher but was in many ways continuing her neo-liberal policies. Not only did he not roll back Thatcher’s travesties but he sought to complete various ambitions of the Thatcher government in a way that neither the Iron Lady nor her successor John Major could ever have hoped for. Blair’s second term in office consummated many of these goals, further shambolizing a Thatcherized National Health Care system and initiating university privatisation with student fees.
This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a “geopolitical social”, which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic.We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in “critical geopolitics” nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.