Well again thank you for the very kind invitation and thank you for turning up during a lunch hour. My task is to talk to you about a field and a term that has enormous and in enduring popularity and seems, particularly as I worked through the third edition, which is coming out next month, to be ever more topical as I had to take on, whether I liked it or not, Trump. make America great again, Brexit, the rise of China, and countless other things that I think keep my area of interest exciting. Anyway, what I've decided to do is to try and give you a whistle-stop tour of geopolitics through 10 images, and then to offer a very quick little case study involving the Arctic, which I think, again, it's not unreasonable to claim that this is an area of the world that is really...
becoming extraordinarily important, not least because it's very hard, I think, to have a conversation about climate change without thinking of the Arctic and in particular thinking about the fate of ice and snow and the obviously essential role that it plays in helping to regulate the Earth's climate. However, I thought I'd start on a map that may be not very familiar to many people unless you have an abiding interest in geopolitics. This map was produced in in January 1904 by one of the most famous British geographers called Halford Mackinder.
He was actually a member of parliament for a short time, director of the London School of Economics, and a reader in geography at Oxford University. And this map he presented to the Royal Geographical Society over 100 odd years ago, purporting to give what he thought of as the major cleavages. and drivers that shape global geopolitics.
In a lecture entitled The Geographical Pivot of History, he argued that actually the pivot area, this huge area of the Euro-Asian landmass, was a key determinant of world politics. And he predicted that regardless of future technological change, and remember he's talking in 1904, when we're getting to grips with the railways, the telegraph, and increasingly, of course, as the 20th century would prove, flight of all kinds of things, missiles and planes notwithstanding, that nonetheless, he said, this is the area of the world you need to keep a lookout for. About five years earlier, the term geopolitics had entered into European political discourse. And the timing of all of this, if you will, from the 1890s to the start of the 20th century, of the 20th century I don't think is coincidental in the sense of that Mackinder was not alone in trying to make sense of a world that was undergoing fundamental state change. Although he didn't predict the onset of the First World War in 1914 he was nonetheless prescient I think to spot that there was tension in the air as imperial powers were beginning to rub up against one another.
He didn't use the term globalization globalization, but he does talk about a more intensely felt world. And actually if you read a lot of his work, I think you can see it as absolutely anticipating that term globalization that really becomes popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. Now this map has had an enduring popularity. And one of the interesting things, particularly after the fall of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the... the early 1990s was, Mackinder was discovered again.
And intriguingly, Mackinder has been translated not only into Russian and Chinese, but increasingly in Central Asian languages as well. Because one of the things that later writers and commentators seized upon was the idea that they found themselves as post-Soviet states in Mackinder's pivot area. And the idea, of course, which which excited a lot of these intellectuals in places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, was that actually they were going to become even more important in the future. So one of the interesting things about geopolitics is that it looks backwards to try and find patterns that it can then use to go forwards to try and anticipate future global politics.
It's a very... ambitious area of study. It loves maps. It really enjoys thinking globally and it's often not shy in making bold predictions.
However, sometimes that enthusiasm for being bold, for using maps, for making grand pronouncements can lead you into areas that you may not wish to enter into. So Image 2. On the one hand you have Karl Hosshofer. That's the person to the left.
On the right you have Rudolf Hess. One of the problems geopolitics had as an area of intellectual concern was that in the 1940s American magazines, American writers and intellectuals pointed at geopolitics and said that they had been an essential accomplish to Nazism, to National Socialism. That Hitler's ideas, for example, of Lebensraum, living space, was directly inspired by the by earlier geopolitical writing at about the same time that Mackinder was talking about the geographical pivot of history because in Germany and elsewhere other geographers such as a Ratzel Friedrich Ratzel were writing about the state as a living organism and whenever you talk about the state as a body or a living organism you should I think be concerned because then it becomes very easy if you're not careful to think of other places, other peoples, as undesirable, as potentially fatal to the health of the state.
So by the 1940s, geopolitics stood accused as being not only intellectually poisonous, but a handmaiden for national socialism. And in that period, from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, very, very few people in the English-speaking world wanted to be associated with geopolitics. It was seen as, as I say, poisonous and something to be avoided. No self-respecting academic... or intellectual would touch the top.
That was to change however when Henry Kissinger became increasingly prominent as a national security adviser and later US Secretary of State. Kissinger it's worth remembering has a PhD in 19th century European imperial rivalries and was at the thick of it during the Cold War in the late 60s and particularly of course markedly in the 1970s. when he was busy advising Richard Nixon about how the United States might balance their rivalry with the Soviet Union with potential rapprochement with China.
So if you remember the period, for those of you who weren't alive at the time, I was only relatively young in case you want to age me, you may remember notable things such as ping pong diplomacy as it was called at the time. It was really about the United States trying to reach out to China and really... Clearly, one of the arguments made was that Kissinger's vision for Nixon was a geopolitical one, that actually he was aware of Mackinder, that he was cognizant of the pivot area, and that he knew that the United States had to manage this relationship between the Soviet Union and China, which of course was unfolding on the Euro-Asian landmass.
He confidently used the term geopolitics. And that was quite a departure when so much of intellectual life in Britain, America, and elsewhere didn't want to use the term, shunned it. Kissinger brings it back. Well, there are good reasons, of course, why geopolitics, when it did find favor, proved to be very attractive and enduring.
Remember, the detente of the 1970s gave way to what was called at the time the Second Cold War, the return of the intensification of Cold War rivalries, when, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union. Soviet Union in different ways worried about the precariousness of near neighbors and the vulnerability of entire regions. You may recall terms like the domino theory, the idea that the United States had to intervene in Vietnam because failure to do so might result in other countries like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia being vulnerable to Soviet or Chinese-backed aggression or insurrection. So, So there's this sense in which geopolitics provides a very vivid power.
...for language, as well as a kind of visual medium through maps of trying to make sense of big change in the world. And so you see a lot of these kinds of depictions during the Cold War that actually the United States and others have to act as an imperative act because the future otherwise is very, very dire. Geopolitics of course can be turned upside down.
It's a very, very dynamic subject. Before you know it, we're having to redraw and reimagine our geopolitical worlds. Borders, barriers can come down, as they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
They can also go up again, as we're discovering in the current era, when walls, fences and barriers are being restored or even expanded around the world. But in November 1989, of course, citizens on both sides of the city of Berlin took to the wall using whatever they could find. and started to dismantle it.
And we often think about that as ushering in the ending of the Cold War. Maps get redrawn, the Soviet Union disappears two years later. So geopolitics is very fluid and dynamic. But also geopolitics, of course, can take on very, very particular hues and dimensions.
Geopolitics is informed not only by popular culture, but it's also informed by... economics. So we often, for example, talk about geoeconomics and in the 1990s such was the wave of post-cold war euphoria that some were even as bold to suggest that we didn't need geopolitics anymore, it was all geoeconomics.
We were going to manage neoliberal globalization, everyone was going to become a market democracy. Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, Richard O'Brien predicted the end of geography, I should have been out of a job and indeed I thought I would be when I started my academic career in 1994. People said to me there's no need for geopolitics, deeply unfashionable. I thought let's wait and see. I think geopolitics has never gone away.
And indeed one of the arguments I want to make to you is that every time people meet in Davos it is an exercise in geopolitics. It is an exercise in imagining the world in very particular ways. And thinking about it, best how to manage it, whether it's through market intervention or certain state behavior.
But it also, I think, at moments like this, and hence the image, geopolitics is highly choreographed. It's not just a way of thinking and speaking about the world. It's also a way of performing in the world.
So this kind of performance, usually a whole group of white people from Euro-American states. is notable as a particular kind of performance of geopolitics. More on that in a minute. I also work on James Bond, because I think geopolitics is utterly rooted in popular culture.
That actually our ideas of geopolitics are often formed at an early formative moment in our lives through popular culture, also through play. Those of you of a certain age like me, no doubt, remember your action man. Your action men, I had two of them, I was very blessed. And the pleasure one took in imagining all kinds of Cold War era scenarios. I also consumed enthusiastically James Bond movies.
But it's not hard, of course, to see James Bond movies for what they are. A very, very particular imperial male fantasy figure going to do what Theresa May might describe as global Britain, albeit in a highly profitable way. Geopolitics can also, of course, be caught up in all kinds of other agendas, some of them explicitly environmental. Think about these kinds of images.
I've deliberately juxtaposed them for you. Emma Thompson and her gang standing in Svalbard lamenting the absence of ice, whilst on the other hand we have the precarious-looking polar bear on a particular ice. One at least is looking rather sad, the other mournful.. But geopolitics is, I think, made possible through the environmental, through the ecological, because in this sense, both of those images are inviting us to act, to actually do something to change the geopolitical situation or the system of power that we face ourselves.
One of the things I also caution you about, the kind of the imagery used here as well, is the often complete absence. ...of indigenous peoples who live in the Arctic. So often it's charismatic species like polar bears, whales, that prefigure. In some of this ordering of geopolitics, I'm in Google.
It would seem remiss of me not to think a little bit about big data, social media, and analytics that go with it. geopolitics makes itself felt through social media whether it's a commander in chief who seems incapable of resisting the urge to tweet in the early hours of the morning or whether it's the decisions that we are or are not able to make when it comes to accessing the internet is surely geopolitical. Last week I was in China.
I don't need to rehearse, I hope, that it's rather difficult to access Google, Twitter, Bing, all certain kinds of social media you can access. You then have to rely on your virtual private network to do other things. And there's a thriving industry in China helping you to do that.
I also want to reinforce that geopolitics is part of the everyday and deeply, deeply personal and felt. So whether we're female, male, black, white, gay, straight, geopolitics... sticks to us, if you will, in very, very different kinds of ways.
So I've deliberately used here an image of Black Lives Matters from the United States because to raise the troubling issue about how, for example, the war on terror is conducted in some parts of the world, whilst in other parts of the world, citizens such as the African-American community are reminding other citizens that they have felt terrorized for centuries, not just a month or a decade or two. So geopolitics is what feminists would remind us, intersectional. There is absolutely no one singular geopolitics.
very quickly to finish off a quick case study. When I'm not talking about geopolitics more generally I tend to focus on the colder parts of the world particularly the Arctic and the Antarctic and some of the more recent work I've done has been looking at Arctic geopolitics so what is specifically geopolitical about the Arctic and so I wrote a book with a co-author called The Scramble for the Poles and then our newest one is coming out this month called The Arctic what everyone needs to know, which I'm slightly worried about because there's an awful lot to know and I'm not sure I've captured it all. So I'm expecting the criticisms to come left, right and centre about how much I've had to leave out.
Anyway, why is the Arctic interesting geopolitically? Well, one of the things that I think really helped transform the Arctic as a geopolitical space was a very, very particular act in August 2007. For those of you who can recall, a Russian flag was was very gently deposited at the bottom of the Central Arctic Ocean. And the flag was made of titanium, so it's rust-proof, and presumably, whether we like it or not, will endure in the coming years, possibly centuries.
But the key thing to bear in mind is that the flag was Russian. Had the flag been the United Nations, had the flag been the United Kingdom, on the one hand, we might have thought about the place differently. On the other hand, we would have laughed.
But it was a Russian flag. Russian flag. And the person you see before you is Arthur Chilingarov, a very distinguished Russian oceanographer who was responsible for piloting the submersible that traveled many thousands of feet under the water and depositing the said flag.
And he came to Moscow and elsewhere with a photograph of the flag and said, the Arctic is ours. On hearing that, Canada, Denmark, and others responded badly. In the sense of they found it rather troubling assertion that the Russian flag had been planted on a part of the world that they also thought might be potentially theirs. So what followed, of course, was an inevitable geopolitical tussle between Canada, Russia and Denmark through, of course, the Kingdom of Denmark, which is Greenland, all vying the North Pole, the Central Arctic Ocean, and thinking it is theirs. And you couldn't get a more fundamental...
expression of geopolitics, a kind of struggle, a rivalry over a territory that is so remote that is probably devoid of natural resources but nonetheless is hugely symbolically important. Everybody, at least those three states, wants to say the North Pole belongs to them. On the other hand, of course, on hearing this news that the Russian state possibly had ambitions to claim ownership over subterranean territory that very, very few people visited, let alone seen. Indigenous peoples around the Arctic gathered and produced an Inuit declaration on sovereignty, reminding settler colonial states, Denmark, Canada and Russia, that the Arctic was not exclusively theirs. that actually indigenous peoples had lived in the Arctic for millennia, well before those three states were created.
I would suggest to you that what you have here is an indigenous geopolitics, a very, very different way of thinking about the world, and one that is actively challenging the hegemony of the nation-state to divide the world up into particular kinds of ways. But that won't stop those nation states, aka coastal states. New maps are being produced of the Arctic as we speak.
On the one hand, on the left hand side, the rather garish set of colours, what you see there, just imagine imagine the colors, don't worry about the detail, is coastal states, Canada, Norway, the United States, Russia, Denmark, thinking that the Arctic Ocean belongs to them and all those colors represent their particular interests. in extending their rights over the seabed. And on the other hand, you have a more traditional oceanographic physical geography, if you will, of the Arctic Ocean that is being mapped ever more intensely both by militaries, eager, almost as if there was a return to the Cold War to make sure they properly understand this underwater space, but also scientists desperately trying to work out what on earth is going on in the central Arctic Ocean because the sea.
ice just keeps disappearing. And we know disappearing sea ice is bad news. So we're trying to find out more.
And such is the state of change in the Arctic, and the warming cannot be underestimated quite how dramatic it is. Sea ice is disappearing. And if sea ice disappears, what follows?
Well, what follows is is more open water. And what follows from open water is that more people, more states, corporations, and others think that you can do things there that previously you might not have thought about because Because the sea ice was blocking your interests. So for the first time, we are having to invent a new term to take into account the scale change in the Arctic. Ten years ago, we didn't talk about a central Arctic Ocean. We now do so.
And we've just recently signed an agreement where we are trying to set up a framework for regulating potentially commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean. That would have been apt. absolutely unthinkable to Halford Mackinder when he was writing about the geographical pivot of history and when, if you can recall back, you may not have seen it, he said in his map, or he described in his map, the Arctic as simply an icy sea.
So it is no exaggeration to say that we really are having to talk about a new kind of North Pole. And I'll end on that note because I hope that's just given you a real sense that geopolitics... Politics is a portmanteau word, geo referring to the earth, the writing of the earth, and politics really concerning itself with the struggle for power, resources, territory.
And that's why the two are brought together. And you see in the Arctic geopolitics writ large. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Gosh.
So, excuse me. The picture of the flag on the bottom of the ocean, what's the difference between that and, say, Japan or the US or New Zealand going and planting one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and claiming that to be theirs? I mean, they're both oceans.
Is there a difference in the Arctic Ocean that makes it, I don't know, somehow, in some way reasonable to do that? Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think the first thing to say is that whenever a flag is planted anywhere on the Earth's surface, it's not unreasonable, I think, to tie it into a longer history of colonialism and imperialism.
I mean, there is a very, very rich tradition, and I don't mean rich and necessarily good. I mean just rich and an awful lot of it, of flags being planted in various kinds of places. Edmund Hillary does it on the top of Everest, for example.
We know that. I think what's interesting about flag planting at the bottom of oceans, and you're absolutely right, this is not unique to Russia. The Chinese did it, for example, in the South China Sea.
Spain did it, for example, in the territorial waters of Gibraltar. You flag plant because you usually want to make some kind of statement, and it would not matter unless it was caught on film. more image.
If you can't see the flag planting then it's pointless. So I think what's so important is when Chilingariff is holding the photograph, it's as if to say we did it and we have the evidence. Now I think in both cases what's important is what we're seeing is at the moment is what I would describe as ocean grabbing.
That coastal states are investing millions of dollars, rubles, crowns, pounds, you name it, to map the seabed. And they're doing so because international law gives them, in a sense, the right to do so in order to generate what are called more sovereign rights over the seabed. It's a very technical, scientific, logistically expensive process, but that's what they're doing. So when the Russians did that, they were throwing down the gauntlet and saying, I think, to Canada and Denmark, we think the North Pole, if you will, or the Central Arctic Ocean is ours.
You know, we dare you. Well, that's exactly what Canada and Denmark did. They spent millions and millions of pounds of dollars and crown mapping the seabed. So when I showed you that map of that oceanographic physical geography map, in a curious sort of way, all this flag planting, empowered by law, is leading to ever greater mapping of the world's oceans. That may actually be quite useful scientifically, environmentally, but is also being powered by geopolitics.
People want territory and they want resources. Speaking of flags that have been planted, I'm thinking about the one that was planted on the moon surface and until a couple of decades ago it seemed like geopolitics extended outside of Earth going into space and then kind of died as an aerial conflict. So it would be good to hear a couple of words about that and if you see that becoming a new aerial conflict in the future. Yes.
No, it's a very important point. I'm sorry, with my ten images I kept... on Earth, but I could have easily gone into outer space, Mars, the moon, and elsewhere.
I mean, I think the key thing to bear in mind is when the Americans planted a flag on the moon in July 1969, they weren't necessarily claiming the moon for the United States. One of the interesting things about flags is they work in intriguing ways. So, you know, you remember Neil Armstrong and Boz Aldrin were talking about taking steps for mankind, but nonetheless planted... a US flag and not a United Nations flag, or maybe they didn't have to plant a flag, but they chose to plant a flag. So we kind of, we can see the flag as a really ambiguous signifier.
Now in the aftermath of that event, we then had international legal intervention through things like the Moon Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, that have tried to create this idea of these spaces being a common heritage of mankind. In other words, they should not be colonized by nation states. Complicating all of that.
I think, is the rise of high net individuals who can easily imagine themselves as future presidents of Mars, given half the chance. Or on the other hand, we've seen the space race massively expanded. And notably, of course, countries like India and China and the Europeans have become more prominent in the exploration of space. China has made it very, very clear it has ambitious plans for space in the next 10 to 15 years.
So I think that's a very good example. I think the idea of space being the final frontier, if you will, is really worth looking at carefully. Space has never stopped being a frontier. But what I think it happens is that it tends to go through amplifications.
So interest drops off. I think you're going to see it go on an upward trajectory from hereafter. So we can, I think, talk about an outer space geopolitics for sure.
And indeed, we should do. I think what's happening at the moment is there's a tendency now to go ever deeper, if you will. to the ocean sea beds to drill deeper than ever before but also to go out beyond earth and i think this is coinciding with a particular anthropogenic moment when we're actually once again thinking about as we did the 1970s the limits to earth hi thanks for coming and talking to us it's very interesting my question is do you think there will be a ...struggle at some point for the resources we have on the planet Earth.
For example, I'm from Brazil and we have, you know, a bigger part of the Amazon. And I feel like in the future people will be like, from all over the world, you have lots of fresh water, you have this massive forest, so it doesn't belong to this nation. And I think there will be like a new struggle, basically. The resources, they belong to everyone on the planet. We should share it.
Do you see that coming? It's like the struggle for the space, you know, outer space belongs to everybody. We need to explore it. They're doing it now with the ocean.
Are they going to do that with the other resources as well? So I think that's a really excellent question because I think it's so complicated. So, for example, in your own country, you know, you could quite reasonably, I think, point to a kind of indigenous geopolitics.
And you could say, well, you know, when the military came into power in the 1960s, for example, There was lots of interest in militarising and securitising the Brazilian Amazon. And there was this idea that, you know, part of the reason why Brasilia moves to where it's established is this idea that Brazil has to move westwards, that the Amazon is a frontier and it has to be filled because if it's not filled, then neighbouring states are going to take advantage, possibly inspired by communist Cuba and the Soviet Union. Well, if we talk about resource wars, indigenous peoples have been bearing the brunt of resource wars for centuries. So this is nothing new.
There is a long and I'm afraid continuing history of dispossession. On the other hand though, if you're asking a more general question, which is about humanity and how we manage the world's resources, I think legal concepts like the common heritage to mankind were an attempt to go some of that way. And we're also seeing a growing appetite for things like marine protected areas.
Fundamentally though, what we have is a paradox. How do we manage life? With a 7.5 billion population that's going to rise to 10, possibly 12, in a world where also we're divided into 200 nation states that we know make no ecological sense, you know, and that's our challenge. And then if we want to try and inculcate and encourage a cosmopolitan geopolitics, where we think of ourselves as a humanity, as we do, for example, as we're encouraged to do through the Anthropocene, to think of human beings as a geological force, is the argument.
My worry is that in doing that you quickly wash over, literally whitewash you might say, colonialism, imperialism, inequality, you know, and what do we say to the citizens of Brazil who go, as they did in the 1990s, stop telling us that we have to protect the Amazon for the sake of humanity and the Earth's ecologies. You know, it feels like a kind of neocolonialism. that just doesn't give up, that you're kind of bullying us into doing things, because Brazil, if you will, modern Brazil, has been blessed with high levels of biodiversity. So I think there's an enormous suspicion of those kinds of arguments. And I think the Paris Accord, I mean, there's no way around it.
You know, there's a lot of discussion that needs to happen, which is fundamentally rooted in inequality, I think. There's no easy answer. You know, it's all very well for people like me to go, oh, we all need to be cosmopolitan.
Yeah. Well that's fine, but actually it doesn't really deal with the complex realities of Earth. You've talked at times about international efforts to create legal frameworks around the Moon.
I think there are international treaties around the Law of the Sea, that type of thing as well. And obviously the UN has at times tried to make. Dictates about conflicts. As a geopolitician how successful do you think kind of international cooperation and international laws have been or will be at preventing nation-state interests from overriding them? Thank you, that's a really good question as well because I think we do have some stunning examples I think of where things go well.
So for example I think the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 is a remarkable achievement. In creating the world's first nuclear-free zone, in demilitarizing a continent, and trying, I think, and succeeding, more or less, in making peace and science the primary drivers of activity. Where it's had difficulty, I think, is dealing with commercial drivers.
So, for example, when fishing intervenes, or when the specter of mining intervened in the 1980s, then suddenly those principles seemed a little bit more fragile. The Law of the Sea, which was negotiated in the 70s and 80s, is also, I think, a remarkable attempt. To try and balance exploitation rights of coastal states with the rights of non-coastal states and conservation and I think what you see in international law is both success and failure but that success and failure is in a sense representative of wider humanity that we are struggling to balance these competing demands you know we know for example we should be eating less meat. and adopting a more vegetarian diet.
But on the other hand, we're also dealing with not only growing demand and liking for meat, but also powerful industries and corporations that also help to generate things. Well, law and geopolitics are no different. You've got these different stakeholders and different pressures. So I think if you go back to marine protected areas for a second, there's a classic case of where you're trying to meet both agendas.
And in the Southern Ocean at the moment, On the one hand, we want to create marine protected areas like the Ross Sea. But on the other hand, we've only been able to get agreement on that because we've also acknowledged that these marine protected areas are subject to review. We've just had one in the Central Arctic Ocean, a sort of agreement, a moratorium on fishing. And here's a really interesting thing. Some of the parties to that agreement wanted that moratorium to last for only three or four years.
Some of the other parties wanted the moratorium to last 30 to 40 years. In the end they compromise and they agree on 16 years. That has got no ecological basis whatsoever.
It is an utterly arbitrary figure that was absolutely plucked out of thin air as a gesture of consensus. I'm not going to tell you which country wanted four years. But I don't think you would have to think terribly hard who might have just gone for four years and who might have gone for 30 or 40 years once you know the 10 signatories. And interestingly, by the way, this is a Brexit point, one of the signatories is the European Union to that agreement. So if we do leave the European Union, then actually it's an interesting point about whether Britain would become a new signatory to that agreement or whether anybody would have us.
as a new signatory to that agreement. All of that's a moot point, but it's just to make the thing that, again, geopolitics changes. Very conscious of the fifth man to ask a question.
And yet all my students who study geopolitics are often women. Hi, thanks so much for coming in. I was just wondering if you thought enough was being done to protect smaller or poorer countries from maintaining their own kind of sovereignty on their land when faced with the economic power of other big countries.
I ask that only because I spent last year in Laos and I was struck by how much of the infrastructure was increasingly owned and run by Chinese. I'm sure it threw sort of proper... legal agreements, but they felt somewhat vulnerable.
It's a really important point. I mean, I think one of the things that I think Brexit reminds us is that sovereignty is a very powerful myth and no country in the world, including the United States, has ever enjoyed complete sovereignty. And what you see around the world, particularly when smaller states enter into relations with countries like China...
through the Belt and Road Initiative, for example, and Laos would be a really good example of this, is that Laos enters into these agreements knowing perfectly well that there's a kind of, what I would call, sovereignty bargaining going on. But what Laos has also discovered is that, and it's true of, I think, a lot of trade agreements, is that they produce both intended and unintended consequences. So for example, you know, if you enter an agreement with China, for example, over rubber production, it will then have knock-on consequences for how, for example, you organise rural life or how agricultural systems change and shift.
Zimbabwe discovered this when it entered into economic relationships with China. One of the interesting things that actually happened, and the Chinese were very worried about this, was it generated actually expressions of anti-Chinese racism. in some of these countries because actually people at one stage were thinking actually this is really welcome investment opportunity and then it shifts to resentment and anger so I think one of the interesting things about geopolitics as well is it's also about moods and those moods can be about anxiety that can be about fear that can be about hope dread and anxiety and fear I think is what you might have seen or felt in Laos because actually you realize that you are doing a deal with a country that is incredibly upfront about the kind of relationships it wishes to have and when When China talks about a Belt and Road Initiative and when China talks about Silk Roads, China doesn't just have one Silk Road in mind.
It doesn't just have two Silk Roads in mind. It has probably about six or seven Silk Roads in mind. And they are going to stretch and extend all over the Euro-Asian landmass.
They are going to extend across Africa and Latin America. This is a global project. So I think what you heard in Laos, you're going to hear in many other parts of the world.
But remember this. The Laos government did agreements with China. It wasn't as if China said, right, that's it.
We're not listening to you. We're just making these relationships. And I think we have to be very careful about that, is don't take the agency away from small states entirely.
You know, I think I would have far more sympathy for low-lying small states that face inundation from sea level change or sea level rise. You know, that's something that's really very difficult to deal with and confront. But in other cases, these are bargains. These are packs. Thank you.
As a woman who studied geopolitics and international relations, I felt compelled to also ask a question. Being aware there are so many conflicts and so many military conflicts around the world, Of course we discussed the dichotomy between geopolitics and geo-economy. Do you foresee or what else needs to happen for any of the conflicts, whether in Africa or Middle East or anywhere else?
to be resolved? Do you see any kind of positive news coming from those conflicted areas? Well, I think we should take heart in the sense that we have examples of where peacekeeping and peace initiatives can and do work. In my experience travelling the world, most of the conversation I end up having where peace actually takes a hold and a grip is often and through everyday locally driven initiatives that work for example with cross border communities and where things like culture, trade begin to replace militaries, security, barriers and militarisation more generally.
What I think is really tough at the moment is that there are many, many parts of the world, the Middle East would be a very grand example or the worst kind of ways of where actually actually parties have every incentive not to seek peace. I don't need to rehearse all those parties, but there's an awful lot going on where actually geopolitical rivalries suit both regional and extra-regional actors. And that's incredibly tough, because what we do know, and for example the Yemen really illustrates this incredibly well, tens of thousands of people have died, two to three million people I think have been internally and externally displaced.
displaced, you move on to other parts of the world, like Syria, for example. These are incredibly, incredibly depressing stories where geopolitical schisms are being amplified and made worse by all kinds of decisions, whether it's about supplying military weapons or whether it's by using inflammatory rhetoric and having all kinds of ambitions, both regional, as I say, and global. So I think you're absolutely right.
Right, one of the challenges we face in the field of geopolitics is to retain a sense of hope in humanity that actually things like peace, justice, ethics don't disappear from our auditing of geopolitics. Because it's incredibly easy just to focus on grievance, inequality, hardship. But on the other hand we have to talk about those because then there's a danger, as I say, we forget ongoing injustices and inequalities and violence. And I think that's why I showed you the image of Black Lives Matter.
Lives Matters to make the point that geopolitics is not always about the world outside the nation state. It can also feel very, very everyday, embodied, as we would say, and very much part of your day-to-day reality. So when the United States talks about a war on terror, well, I can understand why black folks go, we feel like we've been facing a war on terror for the last couple hundred years.
I think we have to have those honest conversations. I'll come back to you. Go over there. Yeah. Thank you.
I'm just curious. I think, obviously, humans kind of have this currency bias where we think of our time as being different in some way. So I'm just curious if you think, relatively speaking to history, is this a relatively unstable time geopolitically? And if so, what do you see as the most exacerbating, destabilizing forces that are at work?
I mean, I think on the one hand, it would not be unreasonable to say that we have never had it so good, to channel my inner Harold MacMillan, in the sense of that in a lot of the indicators, like global life expectancy, health, humanity appears to be in relatively good health. So I think that that's the one obvious caveat. I think there's a tendency of every generation to think that they live in interesting times, to channel somebody else, and I think we what we kind of you know have here is a very interesting debate going on that you can see that kind of terms of public intellectuals like Steven Pinker making an argument about that actually we're you know we're in relatively good good health in terms of for example levels of violence.
My point is is that Depending on where you are, those levels of violence, of course, are either ongoing and endemic. Talk to, as I have done, Aboriginal women in Canada. The violence is ongoing.
You know, they don't see any generational shift. But on the other hand, you know, factor in other parts of the world, like Syria, for example. They've been absolutely catastrophically hit by a really awful civil war.
then it feels like I'm quite certain that generationally this is unprecedented. I think what we're really coming up against, however, is a growing recognition that not only is this violence enduring, in other words, we can identify periods when there has been, for example, fewer deaths due to violence. Yes, we can do that, but nonetheless there is a kind of ongoingness, if you will, to violence.
But I think what we're also coming up against, which is I think the real kicker, is a sense of this anthropogenic moment. That actually, not only is it shocking that we still have levels of human violence in some parts of the world that is truly eye-watering, but I think we're coming to terms with an ecological violence. That actually, you know, over a really remarkably short period of time, we appear to be jeopardising.
the fate of the earth and I think it's that I would say is probably ultimately the most troubling aspect of all of this and the reason why it's troubling is because also those very communities are often born the brunt of a very human violence are likely to be hit a second time with climate change related violence and that violence can be for example being a climate change refugee which we're going to see more of not less I suspect But it also might mean when you're asked to be resilient, for example. You have to ask yourself, well, what kind of resources does a community or an individual have to be resilient? And that's very unevenly distributed. So I think one of the jobs of geopolitics is to constantly remind people that there is no collective vulnerability here. It's very, very unequally shared.
And I think depending on who you are, where you are, your views about these broader trends, I suspect, will be very different. I think it's really... That's my point, I think, at its most simplest.
Just my question is, in an increasingly connected and complicated world, do you see states as surviving as the main actors within geopolitics, or do you see some kind of viable alternative, for example, sort of non-state actors or some kind of pan-humanism in the next sort of 50 years or so? Really good question. I think on the one hand, I think the connectedness and the networkedness, if I can put it in a rather clumsy term, that most of us experience and no doubt enjoy, is enabling us, of course, to hollow out the state anyway. I think we're all doing a terrific job at hollowing out the state, destroying the state.
I think we're doing that, for example, in our purchasing patterns. We're terrifically good. ...seeking all kinds of things from around the world at the cheapest price or the most accessible manner. We're terrifically good at generating... transnational, cosmopolitan relationships.
I don't have a Facebook account, but presumably some of you do. No doubt you're very, very good at generating intercontinental relationships. You might be sending your money to families all around the world. You're finding ways to work within and beyond the nation state. So I think the nation state is responding to that.
And indeed you can see the European Union. as a very, very particular experiment in terms of trying to collectivise the state. And clearly in this country we're having an interesting conversation about what we think about that collectivisation. Do I think the nation-state will last? No, I don't think it will last.
I think it would be an utter conceit of the most extraordinary manner to think that the nation-state will survive indefinitely. I'm quite certain there were many people at one stage who thought the British Empire. would last. But that's where actually the longer perspective does help us, remind us, that actually things have often a shelf life.
Are we all quite as enthusiastic about liberal democracy as we once were? Well, you know, one of the interesting things about the rise of popularism and nativism is that actually you're getting these very, very competing, different understandings of politics and the state. And we're seeing it in our own country as well. I actually think we're having a national conversation about the future of the nation-state.
Do we expect the United Kingdom to be united? I'd be very surprised if we could still talk about a United Kingdom in ten years'time. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'd be very surprised. So I think in a sense we're seeing it before our eyes, that the nation-state, if it does survive, is going to mutate.
I mean, I sometimes think London really should just declare independence and admit we're Singapore and get on with it. Because the City of London has also hollowed out the nation-state. It's done it beautifully in the last 30 or 40 years.
And of course what we thought was national government thought there was some really clever bargaining going on here. But property markets, money flows, languages spoken tell you that London is a global city. And I think many, many Londoners probably feel more affinity to elsewhere exactly what Theresa May was trying to get at in a slightly clumsy sort of way. But she was kind of recognizing that citizenship and identity politics are just so much more complicated than simply mapping neatly onto nation states.
Any of you from mixed backgrounds, for example? I am. I've always had three countries in my everyday life. Britain, Austria, and South Africa. I've had multiple languages in my house.
So trying to pin me down as a British citizen is quite tricky. And I think that matters a lot as well. in terms of their identity politics and how these things map on and don't.
One more. Please. Thank you very much for your talk. It was really interesting.
In regards to territorial changes, I'm very concerned about Eastern Europe because I'm coming from Moldova, which is a very small country, ex-Soviet country. And we all saw what happened to Crimea not so long ago. And now I heard recently on TV that Georgia said that if Brexit wants to leave the European Union, they don't mind taking the place. I was wondering, shall we expect such an aggressive reaction from Russia in regards to Georgia's claiming that they want to be part of the European Union? Because I think that Eastern Europe is not very stable.
I would say mostly those small countries that are surrounding Russia. So what are your thoughts on this? Well... I think we should take very seriously what President Putin says. And of course the whole flag planting moment, if I take you back that to answer your question, occurred in 2007. About the same time President Putin said that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of his lifetime was the ending of the Soviet Union.
And you know, as you know, Russians also speak about the near abroad. And it has a slightly ambiguous meaning. But. I think it's quite clear that Russia sees your country of origin and others as part of its, a classic geopolitical term, sphere of influence. Now that's, that is also a problematic term because what exactly does influence mean?
Because to a lot of citizens in Eastern and Europe, including the Baltics as well, influence often means destabilization, it often means interference, and it often means cultivating an enduring sense of fear and anxiety. And I think it's no accident that many Eastern European states, as well as Nordic states, reacted with alarm to the annexation of Crimea. And we know, for example, Ukraine provides a sobering story of when a country wants to gravitate more closely towards the European and NATO, and then also faces a very, very large neighbour that does not want to see Ukraine gravitate towards the EU and NATO. From Russia's point of view, if I can try and channel the view from the Kremlin, I might say to myself, if I was sitting there, since 1991, Let's just think what's happened.
We collapsed. We tried to embrace market economics. Bit of a disaster for many, many citizens, although others got fabulously wealthy. Some of that hot money goes to the City of London and elsewhere, and doing all kinds of work through property and elsewhere.
In the meantime, Eastern and Central Europe, that used to be part of the Warsaw Pact, is no more and is now safely enveloped. in the European and NATO. And what's left?
A few countries like Moldova, Belarus, for example, that are kind of not quite there yet. Then you factor in, you have the war with Georgia, where, of course, the Russians then started to occupy and expand their influence in the autonomous region. Ongoing conflicts in various parts of Russia, places like Chechnya, for example.
It's a pretty disturbing view from your point of view possibly, but from Russia's point of view it's part of the pushback against what they would see European Union and NATO opportunism. The other thing as well to bear in mind is Russia was absolutely furious about what happened in Libya in 2011, where it felt like it was tricked by the NATO powers. So there's a lot of I think anger and resentment but also determination.
to restore Russia's great power status. And what I worry about is that those Eastern European states, I'm afraid, are very, very much on the front line. And I don't have to tell you, but you know the use of asymmetric warfare is one thing, but the digital, the cyber has proven an incredibly productive way of trying to network that sphere of influence. And that's deeply, deeply disconcerting. Hence the reason why British troops were sent to Estonia, for example.
So I think Moldova is in a really, really difficult position. And I think the other thing is that a lot of NATO countries in Eastern and Central Europe will look upon with immense concern. ...is what does it take to trigger an Article 5 moment? In other words, what does it take to trigger a collective defense response? And at the moment you're managing anxiety and fear, you have a President of the United States...
Who does not appear to be as signed up to NATO as his predecessors were. Deeply disconcerting. And does anybody think in Eastern and Central Europe that if the United States is not involved, it's going to end well? to bear in mind, and you will know this of course, I'm sure, but in Eastern and Central Europe a really major day of celebration, here's a bit of everyday geopolitics for you, is what is called NATO Day.
It's a big, big deal in places like the Czech Republic. People really do. fly NATO flags, posters, flags.
It is an immense moment of celebration. So a ditto with the European Union. I mean, you will see these flags fluttering everywhere. It really is that important. So yes, I don't think, you know, NATO's in a bind in terms of expanding the membership when you've also got a commander in chief, as I said earlier, who is proving a little bit ambivalent.
whose mind might be more preoccupied on Iran, for example, than Southeast Europe. I think we're out of time now. But Klaas, thank you so much for coming in and really a good talk.
Thank you. KLAAS HENDRENBERG-Thank you very much.