Book Review: Jeremy Black,Geopolitics

Jeremy Black’s Geopolitics reads both as an introduction to the history of geopolitics and as a defence of geopolitics against scholarship in Political Geography grouped around the label of critical geopolitics. The monograph offers a chronological approach to the emergence and development of geopolitics from the Roman Empire until the present, emphasising the many discontinuities in the history of geopolitics. Perhaps somewhat unsurprising to the readers of recent introductory textbooks on geopolitics, the author offers chapters on British geopolitics, German geopolitics, Cold War geopolitics and post-Cold War geopolitics, as well as two on geopolitics before the term emerged and one on the geopolitics of the future. The crux of Black’s argument is a repudiation of the explicit normativity of critical geopolitics, which he formulates mainly in the introduction and conclusion.

Although the argument presented at the outset seems to be of a primarily theoretical nature, the body of the text is heavily empirical and features for instance interesting discussions of the role of military and strategic maps in the centuries before the formal emergence of geopolitics. His insistence that geopolitics is everything but a monolith and that not all discourses of spatial power propagated conquest is a useful reminder to those who tell an overly linear story of the evil of geopolitics, but Black would not be the first to point this out. Instead, what this book is interesting for is its interdisciplinary approach – there is indeed much to be said about the need to bring history into the study of geopolitics.

That being said, readers of Geopolitics might feel that the book delivers incompletely both on theoretical mission and on its argument. For example, it remains unclear precisely what Black’s historical approach to geopolitics would bring into the debate, apart from more empirical detail, which is often presented as the history of statesmen and their decisions. Apart from Black’s go at critical geopolitics, the argument lacks clarity and remains somewhat descriptive, chapters are devoid of introductory and concluding paragraphs and his chapter outline at the end of the introduction is too vague to display a forceful argument that says more than ‘geopolitics matters’. His chapter on the future is neither connected to the others, nor does he give us any reason why a historian should (be allowed to) discuss the future. His many empirical examples, taken from over two millennia of world history, are interesting, but he can only claim the task of investigating the geopolitics before geopolitics to be original by largely neglecting Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics, ¹ which features a chapter-length discussion on this topic. Also, Black does not let his audience know why they should be surprised at the fact that spatiality, frontiers and maps mattered throughout history, even if they, as he rightly points out, changed their meanings over time.

But perhaps the most important problem at the heart of Black’s Geopolitics is its ontological and epistemological untidiness, as well as his cryptonormativity. Is geopolitics a perspective that views global space in a particular (critical geopolitics would say ideology-laden) way or is it something that just is throughout history? Is it, in other words, an active shaping of the world – or is it something that happens independently of the geopolitical gaze? The author seems to suggest both, which creates a number of theoretical tensions. He insists on geopolitics as a way of identifying the ‘objective factors’ (p. 3) behind global politics and at the same time argues that geopolitics is also a ‘belief system’ (p. 12), best investigated via its changing meanings. Related to this is his classical geopolitical acceptance of geography as a causal factor on world politics, whereby the historian largely neglects to address the process by which objects such as natural resources are framed as objective factors and used by geopoliticians to argue for particular political agendas.

These problems are aggravated by his ambiguous epistemological position that alternates between on the one hand claiming that all geopolitical knowledge (therefore including his own work) is culturally embedded and on the other between trying to exempt the discipline of history from this. Although not uncritical of classical geopolitics, Black loosely remains within its orbit, not least in his unawareness of his own (political realist) normativity. Hereby, he displays a certain naivety towards geopolitics; a set of discursive practices that, after all, has helped to legitimise some of the nastier episodes of 20th- and early 21st-century history.

Ian Klinke University College London