Mahan, Halford Mackinder, H.G.Wells, Karl Haushofer, and John Dewey.^17 These
figures disagreed about much, but they all assumed that the dynamics of security
politics would henceforth be played out on a global scale by actors such as the
United States and Russia which dwarfed the older European great powers, and that
the European state-system would be consolidated.^18
These theorists, while not totally forgotten, are certainly outside the mainstream
of what contemporary realism thinks of as its predecessors and they are almost
completely ignored by Waltz. These writers are commonly lumped together as
‘geopoliticans’. Closely associated with the horrific excesses of Nazi Germany,
‘geopolitics’ became something that American realists (many of them émigrés and
refugees from Germany) widely shunned in the period when the realist-dominated
‘American social science’ of international relations was developed in the years
surrounding (and particularly after) the Second World War. Unfortunately, a lot of
baby was thrown out with this bathwater. With this body of work banished to the
margins, the realist tradition rather oddly jumps from the late Enlightenment to the
late interwar period more than a century later. Of course, the events of this period
have been the central topic of international theorizing, which makes it even odder
that the theorists from this period have been so neglected.
When these theorists are recognized as one group, as the industrial globalists, we
see a sprawling and uneven body of work animated by a common set of general
assumptions and approaches, and grappling with a common set of problems, all
stemming from the spread of industrial revolution as it produced unprecedented
levels of interaction and interdependence on a global scale. At the centre of their
theorizing is the variable of violence interdependence. The common goal of the
industrial globalists was to understand the impact on world order of the material
capabilities of transportation, communication, and destruction produced by the
industrial revolution (most notably railroads, steamships, telegraphy, chemical high-
explosives, and aeroplanes) interacting with the largest-scale geographic features of
the earth. In approaching these questions, the industrial globalists exhibited great
diversity and many disagreements. These writers commonly emphasize, often
breathlessly, the novel and revolutionary aspects of the emerging world and the
technological forces propelling it, but in their theoretical conceptualizations they
are more evolutionary than revolutionary, and they largely employ pre-industrial
structural materialist concepts and arguments, particularly about violence inter-
dependence. They essentially take Montesquieu’s (and thus Rousseau’s) argument
about topographic variations in violence interdependence and apply it to the global
scale. Thus if Rousseau (and Montesquieu) are ‘Hobbes set to nature’, the industrial
globalists are ‘Hobbes set to history’.
The debates among the industrial globalists were highly charged and addressed
very basic political issues. Although the various dynamics of anarchy as a force were
part of the mix, their main focus was on something arguably more elemental and
certainly more new. While disagreeing about many secondary issues, they all
emphasized that the global arrangement of loosely coupled or quasi-isolated regional
state (or imperial) systems had come to an end, replaced by a global state-system
Anarchy and violence interdependence 25