Jacques Lévy - From Geopolitics to Global Politics: A French Connection

From Geopolitics to Global Politics

Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century
Nurit Kliot, Haifa University, Israel, and
David Newman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev (eds.)

Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity
David Newman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev (ed.)

Geopolitics: Geography and Strategy
Colin S. Gray, University of Hull, and
Geoffrey Sloan, Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth (eds.)

Geoproperty
Foreign Affairs, National Security and Property Rights
Geoff Demarest, United States Army

Land-Locked States of Africa and Asia
Dick Hodder, Sarah J. Lloyd and Keith McLachlan,
School of Oriental and African Studies, London (eds.)

FROM GEOPOLITICS TO GLOBAL POLITICS

A French Connection

Editor

JACQUES LVY

First Published in 2001 by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS

This edition published 2013 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2001 Frank Cass Publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

From geopolitics to global politics : a French connection.

- (Cass series in geopolitics ; no. 3)
1. Geopolitics 2. World politics 1989 3. Security, International I. Lvy, Jacques
327

ISBN 0714681458

ISBN 0 7146 5107 9 (cloth)
ISBN 0 7146 8145 8 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

From geopolitics to global politics : a French connection / editor, Jacques Levy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7146-5107-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8145-8 (pbk.)

1. World politics1989- . 2. Geopolitics. 3. Security, International. I. Levy, Jacques, 1952- .

D860 .F76 2001

327.101dc21

2001028985

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on
From Geopolitics to Global Politics: A French Connection of Geopolitics (ISSN 1465-0045)
52 (Autumn 2000)
published by Frank Cass.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher of this book.

Jacques Lvy

Claude Raffestin

Denis Retaill

Olivier Dollfus

Jacques Lvy

Bertrand Badie Marie-Claude Smouts

Zaki Ladi

Yves Lacoste

Michel Foucher

Georges Prvlakis

Franck Debi

JACQUES LVY

The ten texts selected for this special issue were first published in French during the last 12 years. This translation gives us the opportunity to make an overall assessment of a collective contribution. Although this period of time corresponds to a process of international opening up, namely to Anglo-Saxon works, among French academics, these papers and chapters have an indisputable consistency. This is all the more true since the collection has been put together in a clearly pluralistic perspective. Several of the authors represented here have frequently diverged from each other, and even sometimes engaged in verbal exchanges. Despite their differences we can still see some similarities.

Let us try to put them back into their context and explain this relationship between what are nonetheless wide-ranging perspectives, styles and personalities.

The State as a Blind Spot

What could be called French thought, a national mix of political ideology, humanities and common sense, has for decades, if not centuries, been created, lived and thrived under the tutelage of the state. This is not an exceptional phenomenon. During the era of the nation-states this occurred almost everywhere in Europe. In the case of France and geopolitics this situation had special consequences. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, and to some extent much sooner, France adopted a defensive stance towards its neighbours. Its vast territory was both a source and a sign of power but certainly was not easy to protect. Unlike Germany which, in its own existence and name, was marked by the need to create a state from scratch, that is, through the expansion or division of pre-existing states, France as a state had the privilege yet the burden of simply maintaining its territory. With the exception of revanchist activity to recover areas recently captured by the enemy (such as Alsace-Lorraine from 1870 to 1914), the French state did not need an explicit discourse on the necessary expansion, at the expense of its neighbours, of the national territory. This kind of stance was restricted to overseas colonial expansion and, in this case, accompanied by general discourse on the civilising influence of France on peoples who were still primitive. In order to establish the defence of French territory in the name of the law, naturalisation was the basic pattern of the argument: France was what it had always been and was bound to be forever. Furthermore, nature the geological and climatic structure of the background space was concretely invoked to justify the harmony and equilibrium of the French hexagon. As in many similar cases but with particular efficiency in the French example, ethics and aesthetics were combined to transform the ethno-territorial historical complex of a nation into a sacred, timeless object of worship and make the tragic master of a society, the geopolitical state, out to be its most devoted servant. In this perspective, neither politics (which inevitably divides the social body), nor geopolitics (which suggests that some territorial issues are not yet settled) were welcome. As a result, interest in geopolitics was marginalised within French geography. It is not by chance that Jean Gottman was the only mid-century French geographer to propose a consistent theory on this matter and to make a career abroad, in a sort of intellectual exile.

Death of a Taboo

The state as a spatial actor and geopolitics as positive knowledge have been a taboo in French geography. Discourses on geopolitics were monopolised by the field of international relations led by the figure of Raymond Aron, a brilliant social theorist but a conservative realist ideologist. Things changed thanks to two kinds of processes. In the real world, on the one hand, imperial decline, the relative weakening of the French state in the international arena, French involvement in European construction and the progressive lowering of state boundaries for goods, people and ideas in a country where post-war modernisation had been thought as an apogee of state power led the traditional French view into deadlock. In the academic field, on the other hand, we can observe the convergence of three major trends: the enhancement of the political dimension of social dynamics, the theoretical renewal of geography and a new kind of interest in the world scale.

The first change can be connected to the events of May 1968. One of the most famous slogans of the student protest movement was Tout est politique (Everything is political). During the post-68 years Yves Lacoste became popular among college students when he linked this general idea to the special contents of an academic discipline, geography. He denounced the falsely neutral and technical perception of a thinking kit (