Geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia: Themes,concepts,and geographies

GPE: From term to concept?

In suggesting that GPE has frequently been more a term than a concept, I am employing a distinction between words that are used merely to broadly designate phenomena making routine appearances in everyday language-games (like, for example, the term “air”) and words that are used with somewhat greater precision, within more theory-laden language-games that give the word some specific analytical power (like, for example, the term “oxygen”). In claiming that GPE has often been used more as a loosely construed part of general language-games than as an analytical concept within more theoretically restrictive language-games, I am suggesting that GPE has not always been developed in ways that can provide it with specific forms of analytical power. One of the goals of this special issue is to see to what extent the term can be further articulated so that it might provide more of such power.

A notable feature of GPE as a term is that it has had at least two distinct uses which, while not mutually exclusive, are somewhat different in the kinds of phenomena they foreground and, thus, in the emphases they provide. In one use, “geopolitical economy” is fundamentally a shortened expression of the term “geographical political economy.” In this use, the point is to call attention to the specifically spatial dimensions of political economy. For example, in Radhika Desai’s recent book on GPE, the “geo” is highlighted as calling attention to the global scale: “Unlike comparative political economy, geopolitical economy focuses on the world level” (Desai, 2013: 15; see also Desai, 2015). This contention is central to Desai’s production of a global political economy of capitalist development, framed largely by concerns with uneven and combined development on a world scale and focused on the roles that states play in global financial management—in the neoliberal era as well as in earlier historical periods. Desai also points out other dimensions of GPE; and as I will note below, other dimensions of GPE should include attention to the socio-spatial variegation and complexity of political economic processes, not simply emphasis on the importance of the global scale.

Deborah Cowen and Stuart Elden, in their introduction to a special virtual issue of Society & Space, articulate a variant on the use of GPE as shorthand for “geographical political economy,” while also emphasizing the spatial complexity that should be flagged by the prefix “geo” (Cowen and Elden, 2013):

Geopolitical economy is a notion that, broadly conceived, challenges some of the narrowly state-centric assumptions of conventional political economy, and yet does not simply work in the same register as international political economy. To both, it insists on the importance of the spatial register, the “geo” added to the political economy, in a way that includes, but cannot be simply reduced to, the international.

As Desai, Cowen, and Elden also point out, it is possible to tie the “geo” in GPE more closely to the “political”—that is, to emphasize the distinctively “geopolitical” moment within analyses of geographical political economy. Thus, a second distinct use of the term GPE pushes specific aspects of geopolitics more to the foreground. Such usage dates back at least to one of the earlier deployments of the term GPE within geography, in the work of John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was crumbling, Agnew and Corbridge announced a “new geopolitics,” one in which “geo-political economy is replacing classical geopolitics as the fundamental context for the constitution of foreign policy” (Agnew and Corbridge, 1989: 267; emphasis in original; see also Agnew and Corbridge, 1991, 1995: 6). Agnew and Corbridge did not provide a detailed explanation of the term GPE, identifying it broadly with the roles played by geopolitics in new political economic developments that they claimed decenter global power—specifically, eroding US hegemony (cf. Agnew, 2005)—while generating a much more globalized economy.

Agnew and Corbridge’s use of the term GPE drew enough attention that Gearóid Ó Tuathail devoted several paragraphs in a 1998 text on geopolitics to explaining GPE a la Agnew and Corbridge, describing it as blending “the Marxian political economy of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and the idiosyncratic writings on space of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre with a qualified antitextualist critical geopolitics,” thus creating “a hybrid of geopolitics and political economy” (Ó Tuathail, 1998: 18). On these broadly hybrid foundations, GPE with a geopolitical inflection gained some traction within geography, without the term GPE being elaborated in detail.

More generally, this sort of approach to GPE dovetails in many respects with the geographical literature on relations between geopolitics and geoeconomics (e.g. Cowen and Smith, 2009; Essex, 2013; Sparke, 1998, 2005, 2007). Matt Sparke, for example, positions the emergence of geoeconomics as part of “the reinvention of geopolitics in the context of economic interdependency,” a process that especially affects border politics insofar as it simultaneously de-territorializes and re-territorializes global economic space (Sparke, 1998: 66). In this context, geoeconomics does not displace geopolitics per se but forces a change in its specific characteristics, driving geopolitical calculation away from classic concerns about the security and wellbeing of general populations toward efforts at positioning state actors within global networks. Sparke elaborates on some of these relations between geopolitics and geoeconomics in his commentary for this special issue.

Some of the possibilities for a specifically Gramscian approach to the dialectics between geopolitics and geoeconomics are worked out by Seung-Ook Lee, Joel Wainwright, and Glassman in their contribution to this special issue. Their paper specifically assesses processes of territorialization, explaining why these processes not only need to be theorized in relation to capitalist productive and reproductive practices but need to be historicized. Historicizing territorialization, and thus seeing it in its varied possibilities rather than through the essentializing gaze of nation-state-centrism, enables us to critically assess the multiple and competing forms—and scales—of power relations shaping state boundaries. As Lee et al. show, moreover, Gramsci provides tools that help us work through the spatial dimensions of capitalist development in ways that go beyond merely associating geography with the inter-national dimensions of political economy, while at the same time preserving a space for the notion that states play crucial roles in capitalist development, including through geopolitics. They illustrate this point by briefly comparing US leaders’ previous promotion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with Chinese leaders’ ongoing promotion of the One Belt One Road strategy. (On the latter, see also Sum, 2015.)

In recent work on East Asia, Glassman, and Young-Jin Choi have likewise employed the term GPE in a way that—while largely anchored in a Gramscian approach—foregrounds some of the specifically geopolitical determinants of East Asian industrialization, as part of a broader geographical political economy (Choi and Glassman, 2018; Glassman, 2011; Glassman and Choi, 2014). In particular, building on the work of Jung-en Woo (1991; Woo-Cumings 1998), Vivek Chibber (1999, 2003), and Bruce Cumings (1984, 1999, 2005), Glassman and Choi suggest that the geopolitics of war in East Asia—and not merely the broad spatial dimensions of political economy—need to be foregrounded if we wish to understand phenomena such as the highly differential industrial development trajectories of countries such as South Korea, Thailand, and Philippines.

The third piece in the special theme issue takes up this specific geopolitical economic problematic. Jinn-yuh Hsu, Dong-Wan Gimm, and Glassman examine some of the differences between industrial development patterns in South Korea and Taiwan, showing that while war spending per se was far more important to industrial transformation in South Korea than in Taiwan, geopolitical decisions conceived more broadly were equally important to industrial trajectories in both countries. The authors also take up the spatial register explicitly, noting that South Korean/Taiwanese differences can be seen not only at the national level but can be theorized in relation to the specific, local development trajectories of industrial zones such as Ulsan and Kaohsiung.

GPE articulated

As the foregoing examples show a general emphasis on the variegated spatial dimensions of political economy and a more specific emphasis on the integration of geopolitical and political economic forces are not mutually exclusive, and in fact can be potentially complementary; but the difference in emphasis sometimes entails different conceptualizations of the processes being analyzed. Cowen and Elden, for example, rightly note the dangers of a state-centrism that may follow from placing undue emphasis on the activities nation-state actors, a challenge Desai meets by focusing especially on the activities of transnational capitalists. Yet it also needs to be insisted that major and highly consequential activities such as trade agreements and war—the latter of which has been especially important within the developmental history of East Asia—cannot be adequately dealt with if the nation-state as a complex entity is not adequately addressed and theorized. As Bob Jessop has long argued, moreover, it is not merely capital that acts in and through states, but broader groups of social actors (Jessop, 1985, 1990, 2002; Jessop and Sum, 2006). The “strategic coupling” of state and society produces specific ensembles of nation-state institutions that—in the reifying language common in neo-realist international relations theories—“act” to produce outcomes that include national state policies. Geopolitical actions, ranging from trade negotiations to war and intelligence gathering, are among these; and the specific processes that produce major state initiatives in such domains are the focus of GPE approaches that foreground the geopolitical. The differences in the accounts of urban development issues offered by Hsu et al., on the one hand, and Leitner and Sheppard, on the other, illustrate the different analytical emphases that potentially follow from adopting one or another emphasis within GPE. These kinds of differences are drawn out in two of the commentary pieces for this special issue, by Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, and by Leitner and Sheppard.

At the same time, I want to suggest that one way to develop GPE as part of a specific conceptual framework, rather than merely as a loose signifier of an array of ideas, is to focus on the intertwining of the geopolitical and the socio-spatial within GPE. I choose here to refer to this way of focusing as the construction of an articulated GPE—articulated in the dual sense that the geopolitical and the socio-spatial are always already intertwined, and that the one gives expression to the other, geopolitics always being expressed spatially and socio-spatial relations always being expressed in part through forms of geopolitical power. GPE as articulation foregrounds the ways that geopolitical and socio-spatial dimensions of GPE are always already intertwined and mutually constitutive. Several theoretical provisos attach to this way of seeing GPE.

First, it is important in making out the case for the deep intertwining of geographical political economy and geopolitics that the conception of socio-spatial relations deployed is suitably flexible—not simply a variant on the common nested scales approach to social space. As Sheppard (2002) has argued in surveying the space-times of globalization, the spatial forms of globalizing capitalism are not exhausted merely by a listing of different scales; rather, the spaces of globalization include heterogeneous forms ranging from blocks of territory to different types of networks—and even “wormholes,” where activities taking place in one location (e.g. financialization in Northern cities) seem to quickly disappear and reappear in other, non-adjacent locations (e.g. Southern property markets).

Moreover, it can be argued that these variegated political economic morphologies have been characteristic of international, transnational, and globalizing political economic processes over very long periods of time—including in early capitalist commodity chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1986), complex socio-spatial relations between sovereigns and territories in “pre-capitalist” Europe (Teschke, 2003), “mandala” forms of state power in early and early modern Southeast Asia (Wolters, 1999), and many other political economic processes. It is precisely for this reason that Gramsci’s sensibilities about territoriality in a 19th-century Europe marked by the unevenly developing activities of different capitalists, state leaders, workers, peasants, and organic intellectuals provide an important resource for thinking about general issues of socio-spatial flexibility in political economy.

Second, it is particularly important in articulating geographical political economy and geopolitics to foreground the point made by Jessop, that states are institutional ensembles, rather than allegedly unified actors ruling—or exercising the juridical monopoly of legitimate violence—over unified blocks of territory. The “territorial trap” of construing transnationalized economic activities as if they took place within national containers applies as well to conceptions of the state that lock them conceptually into territorial spaces, which are in reality far more fungible (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995; Glassman, 1999). The general morphological flexibility of political economy is not something standing in opposition to rigid state forms but rather something that is realized in and through states, including through their own socio-spatial variegation—this encompassing transnational governance institutions, imperial political and military alliances, sub-national political structures, and overlapping legal and/or communications jurisdictions.

Third, and this basically summarizes and synthesizes the above two points, the geopolitical socio-spatial flexibility and variegation that needs to be foregrounded in an articulated GPE is not the flexibility and variegation of political economy and/or geopolitics in the abstract, it is the flexibility and variegation of what Kees van der Pijl calls concrete “state/society complexes” (van der Pijl, 1984, 1998). Concrete state practices and political economic processes are not two different kinds of things but, rather, the same thing, viewed through two different lenses. Geographical political economy constitutes one such lens, geopolitics plus political economy another. Articulating the two by foregrounding suitably spatially flexible notions of political economic and geopolitical processes builds a foundation for a GPE approach that provides considerable analytical leverage, thus promising to elevate GPE from a loose term to a generative concept.