various powers. Ó Tuathail (1996b) insists on
considering the writing of geopolitics as based
upon ‘geo-graphing’ – earth-writing – to empha-
size the creativity inherent in the process of using
geographical reasoning in the practical service of
power (Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992).
Linked to this then is a questioning of the
language of geopolitics, or ‘geopolitical discourse’.
Cultural geography has taught that language is
not a transparent form of communication some-
how simplydescribing what is there. ‘Geography’
is not an order of facts and relationships ‘out
there’ in the world awaiting description, but is
instead created by key individuals and institu-
tions and then imposed upon the world. There
is always a choice of words and metaphors.
The types of term used – the conceptual links
made – affect the meaning of what is being
described. There is, as a consequence, a politics
of language.
Finally critical geopolitics has uncovered the
previous overemphasis on the state as the main,
or only, actor in international politics. Clearly
other powers are involved both at the substate
level, such as ethnic, regional and place-based
groups, and at the suprastate level, such as trans-
national corporations and international organi-
zations including the UN and NATO. The
state-centred realist approach makes the state
seem uncomplicated, unified and ordered – and
safe (a point to which I will return). A more criti-
cal political geography offers an engagement
with the practices of geo-graphing at a number of
scales.
Critical geopolitical approaches seek to examine
how it is that international politics is imagined
spatially or geographically and in so doing to
uncover the politics involved in writing the geo-
graphy of global space. It therefore challenges
the links between spaces and identities that are
commonly accepted, and which act as the basis
of much theoretical and practical work requiring
an examination of the practices that maintain the
boundary of inside and outside. This means that
in the current world order, most often critical
geopolitics offers ‘counter narratives of the
nation’ (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998). The nation
is perhaps the most prevalent form of identity
despite, perhaps because of, the internationali-
zation of global politics and society.
Nationalist rhetoric is of an a prioriidentity, a
people with long and natural links to territory
achieving the rule that is naturally theirs. Most
theorists are of the opinion that this is not the
case but instead that the imagining of nations is
orchestrated as an ongoing process of boundary-
making which separates the members of the
nation from those outside. For BenedictAnderson (1991), the community is imagined
into existence. He argues that although any
member of a nation cannot know all other
members of the nation, he or she feels part of a
distinct community sharing history and certain
characteristics. A clear sense of boundedness is
part of this imaginary in that those who lie out-
side the nation are different. Nations are written
into the world not only as independent entities
but in relation to the international. There is a
clear sense of ‘our space’ and ‘their space’, us
and them, inside and outside. Rather than being
the product of the expression of some ‘natural’
identity tied to the territory of nation, then, it is
possible to see nations imagined against what the
nation is not, the outside. By defining the space
of outside (other nations, the international)
as ‘other than us’, a coherent sense of identity is
created (see Campbell, 1992; Dalby, 1990b).
The clearest example of this process can be
seen in the political culture of national identity in
the USA during the Cold War. It has been noted
that if all nations are imagined, then the USA
is the imagined community par excellence
(Campbell, 1992). More than in any other nation,
American national identity has been organized
around the impetus to articulate danger, the spec-
ification of difference and the figuration of other-
ness (1992: 251). This led to the production of
a Cold War moral geopolitical model of good
and evil in which, for example, the territory
reduced to the signification of ‘communist’
could be variously depicted as threatening, per-
verse and inhuman in distinction to the ‘demo-
cratic’ or ‘free’ space of safety, progress and
civilization (see Campbell, 1992; Dalby, 1990b;
Sharp, 2000b). Here the ‘imagined community’
of American citizens had a common goal, one
required of them because of their historical role
and manifest destiny. America was to triumph
over communism just as it had triumphed over
the wilderness in its original imaginings of the
frontier: a clearly inscribed battleground over
which American national citizens could triumph,
as could the values seen as identifying the
American national character. The USSR offered
a mirroring conceptual space to that occupied by
America: into this space was projected negative
characteristics against which a positive image of
American character could be reflected. This is
central to the stories Americans tell themselves
about themselves from the scripts of westerns and
war films, through the speeches of elite political
figures, to the narratives of school textbooks.
Hollywood films constructed the USSR as a
threat – these scripts were often quoted by politi-
cal figures (Reagan quoted Rambo, Quail looked
to Tom Clancy for inspiration) – and textbooks474 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch25.qxd 03-10-02 11:04 AM Page 474