‘scale-jumping’ creates opportunities for
particular interests to transcend certain prob-
lems and political stalemates. Businesses, for
example, can disinvest in certain communities
where they are experiencing labor strife
and relocate to communities where the
power of local labor is very weak. Local social
movements, in contrast, can nationalize or
internationalize a particular local struggle in
order to break stalemated struggles of power
in particular places. Scale-jumping creates
opportunities for transforming power rela-
tions. The chapter considers two different
ideological attempts to imagine and promote
transnational regions: a Cascadia across the
Pacific north-western US–Canada border, and
the Caribbean Common Market and Commu-
nity (CARICOM). In both instances, these
efforts are suffused with contradictions and
traces of alternative scale-jumping ‘imagi-
nations’. The chapter also considers the
subaltern scale-jumping of Hispanic migrants
traversing the US–Mexican border and the
cultural geographic landscape they have
created to recognize and memorialize their
struggles to transcend the dominant order of
scalar relations.
The final chapter in the section develops a
critical geopolitical critique of the dichoto-
mies that inform not only orthodox geopoliti-
cal thinking but modernity in general and
contemporary urban life in particular.The per-
sistent separation and denial of nature at the
expense of ‘culture’, Dalby argues, has created
a planetary ecological crisis that requires new
ways of thinking and living. Humans do not live
in cities but in complex ecological networks
that have planetary ramifications and impacts.
They are not on planet earth but of planet
earth. The history of geopolitics is a history
not only of great power imperialism and
struggles for primacy but also of ecological
imperialism and the triumph of an environ-
mentally unsustainable urban form of life that
is polluting the planet and proliferating risks of
unknowable consequence. It is this deeper
ecological form of imperialist geopolitics that
requires exposure and challenge by political
and cultural geographers.The crucial geopolitics
of the twenty-first century lies not in the
world of states but rather in the world that
technoscientific modernity has wrought.
Already we see evidence of this with a coalitionof major states declaring war against global
terrorist networks that are exposing the
vulnerabilities of technoscientific modernity
and seeking to acquire the weapons of mass
destruction once monopolized only by states.
Dramatic struggles with terrorists are likely to
capture media interest but it is the slower
structural struggles to address the global energy
demands and pollution of technoscientific
modernity that will condition the interplay of
political geographies, geopolitics and culture in
the twenty-first century.FUTURE ISSUESFuture research in a culturally informed criti-
cal geopolitics will inevitably be shaped by the
developing culture of the geopolitical world
order. The 11 September 2001 terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon and the subsequent delivery of
anthrax to the US Capitol appear to have
provoked a significant change in that order.
The 11 September was a global media event
that implicated a worldwide television audi-
ence in America’s trauma, generating a signifi-
cant outpouring of sympathy for the United
States. The geopolitical culture of the United
States appears to have been significantly
altered, with its sense of distance and invul-
nerability from the routine violence of world
politics shattered. The attacks were com-
pared to ‘Pearl Harbor’ and widely accepted
as a ‘wake-up call’ for the United States. In
their wake US Secretary of State Colin Powell
declared the ‘post-Cold War era’ over, antici-
pating a new epoch defined by the US as
the world hegemon leading an international
coalition of states against terrorist networks
with global reach. Events associated with
the 11 September have justified passage of
‘counter-terrorist’ legislation in many states,
stimulated new levels of spending on ‘home-
land defense’, and forged a general consensus
for aggressive military operations against
those deemed to be supporting or aiding
‘terrorists’. They have also led to a surprising
alliance between the United States and Russia
against radical Islamic terrorist networks,
with both states actively cooperating to topple
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.INTRODUCTION 459Section-8.qxd 03-10-02 10:43 AM Page 459