The historic intertwining of things political, military, and geographical are tight and many. To take but one example, the term “region” comes from the Latin regere—to rule. Historically, geographers have been among the key knowledge producers for and analysts of politics. When geographers largely dropped out of political sight during the Cold War, it was an historical anomaly. With the upsurge in critical geopolitics, they are back with a vengeance.
This book, which concentrates on the power differentials of globalization and on the continued importance of space to politics, is a valuable contribution to the literature on critical geopolitics. Its closest predecessor seems to be Simon Dalby's work on the geographical aspects of American neoconservative foreign policy thinking. Although it hardly betters Dalby's criticism of neoconservative thought, it updates his critique. The main contribution of the book, however, seems to lie in its argument about how globalization does not annihilate space, but rather reconfigures its meaning.
The book's readings of the lingering importance of space are highly convincing. Chapter 1 is a meticulously researched case study of clashes between the Canadian legal system and two of its First Nations over the meaning of maps, history, and, of course, space itself. Matthew Sparke addresses the issue in a way that will speak to both social anthropologists and political scientists. Chapter 2 is an equally meticulously executed, if perhaps more predictable, reading of a region-building project across the northwestern chunk of the U.S.-Canadian border called Cascadia. The key theme is how, while wanting to relativize the old state boundary and partly succeeding in doing so, this ecology-tainted neoliberal project “flattens the geography” of the area and creates new boundaries based on ethnicity, class, and, perhaps not equally immediately convincing, gender. An isomorphic discussion of the same processes at the level of NAFTA serves as an elegant extension. The analyses of Cascadia and NAFTA are well grasped and well placed, but it remains unclear to me why Sparke has decided to read and interpret them with theorists Arjun Appadurai and Timothy Mitchell, respectively. It is, of course, the well-proven and apposite thing to do to let one theoretical perspective lead the investigation, and then to round off with a critique of the limits of that perspective. The problem here is that the use made of the ostensibly highlighted perspectives is perhaps too scant and the critique exerted too obvious for them to dominate the chapters in the way that they do. This goes for all five chapters of the book, and is perhaps most conspicuous where the first chapter is concerned. Without the evocation of Homi Bhaba, which does not seem to add any value, it would have been flawless.
The main problem with Chapter 4, where Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe meet James Tully and David Hollinger, is yet another variant on this theme. The key idea is to read a theoretical treatment of hegemony up against two texts that Sparke finds to be interestingly infused with concerns specifically Canadian and American, respectively. This dialogue is a difficult one to navigate. The readings of Tully and Hollinger are informative (although it may be a bit rich for a book that is exclusively concerned with North America and that strikes a European reader as highly Canada-centered to attack Tully for being so preoccupied with the country he knows best). But if hegemony is everywhere, then why Tully and Hollinger, and why together? The main theme of the chapter is supposed to be how hegemony reconfigures the state/nation nexus. One could rattle off a whole series of postfoundational theorists (beginning with Jean-Francois Lyotard) who would be closer to hand. The list of critical perspectives seems endless.
Sparke's critique of neoconservatives in the fifth and last chapter is lodged within a sustained theoretical attack on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's key view that the “empire” that exists today is not one where the United States plays a key role. Post-9/11, this argument has a whiff of gratuitous violence about it, but is nonetheless appropriate. Sparke focuses on the imperial aspect of American foreign policy, and stresses two aspects. First, in terms of geoeconomics, by which he seems to mean the thinking about and practices making up global economic structures, he sees continuity over the last decades. In his parlance, the presidencies of “Bill the Benign” and “Bush the Bold” are of a piece where geoeconomics are concerned. Second, in terms of geopolitics, understood mainly as strategic thinking about things military, he also notes certain continuities, but highlights the shift in intensity toward more, and more massive and sustained, direct military interventions. He gives a key quote from Arundhati Roy to the effect that American capitalism and arrogance have been unmasked under the clumsy and dubious helmsmanship of Bush the Bold. There is a tension here between the traditional Marxist trope of how the fair-weather support for democracy exerted by colluding capitalists and statesmen falls away, on the one hand, and the alleged postfoundational and immanent critique of the present world order that Sparke seems to announce in the subtitle and throughout the book, on the other. Either production should be treated as a foundation, or it should not.
At the end of the read, however, this reader was left with the same question as before: Why would the world's leading power shoot, or rather bomb, down a world order of its own making that served them so very well? Impatience, post-9/11 rage, the neoconservative waiting for and use of that rage, Israeli influence, and a docile body politic may all be parts of the answer, but this book is not able to make them come together in an overarching reading that I find convincing. Furthermore, Sparke's choice of style seems to owe more to old Marxist types like Sartre, who took it upon themselves to be engaged in just about everything and to point fingers everywhere, than to later French postfoundationalists like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze who were programmatically parsimonious and local when it came to picking targets of critique. Epithets like Bill the Benign invite charges of frivolousness and may easily detract from the scholarly and political effectiveness of the text. As a result, it may mainly preach to the already converted (and please count me partially in here).
This book's geography-centered problematique is highly apposite, the empirical scholarship very interesting. It does, however, come across as being a bit disjointed.
