Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination by Atsuko Watanabe

Author:Atsuko Watanabe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030043995
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Geopolitics and “geopolitics”

This contradiction in geopolitics is analogous to that in neoliberalism identified by Ong (2007). She asserts that there are two neoliberalisms: Neoliberalism and neoliberalism. The former, with a big “N,” is seen in critical analyses as a “unified state apparatus,” a “dominant structural condition” which overwhelms people like a tsunami. By contrast, the latter is a “migratory technology of governing that interacts with situated sets of elements and circumstances.” This neoliberalism with a small “n” fosters “self-actualizing or self-enterprising subjects” and compels less the “norm of efficiency” in emerging countries in Asia. For example, in China and Singapore, it was not necessarily the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank but their governments that approved the technology of governing. Following Ong, I want to analyze geopolitics in the small “g,” which travels as a technology traversing different structures. Because it is a technology, the ways it is used depend on individual communities. From a certain perspective, the phenomenon might be compared to a tsunami that engulfs everything. However, when the point of view is displaced to somewhere else, it becomes a technology that can serve for everyone in line with their various needs.

To date, the Anglo-American worldview is considered to represent the hegemonic worldview. As far as the purview of this book is concerned, to “undermine the tacit assumption of US (or Western) universalism” (Dodds et al. 2013: 8) must mean to treat it thoroughly as only one of the many possible narratives and not to obliterate it. What has constructed the world was not only the ascendant American Mission, that is, Geopolitics, but numerous missions of many states together, which constitute geopolitics. Even the superpower, not just Japan, has to be treated as a state and not the state (Agnew 2016) with its own geopolitics. This plurality is not found in representation, but in the everyday, or the “little things” as Thrift (Thrift 2000; MacDonald 2006) argues. Representations in world politics are not the product of a single dominant political practice, but a mere elusive point of node appearing in relation to diverged practices. As Slater (1999: 67) states, “the politics of representation is itself a terrain of contestation, within which what is remembered and forgotten will be molded by counterposed imaginations and visions emanating from different sites of experience and subjectivity.”

A promising way to tease out this neglected plurality is to investigate how a concept as “specific physical arrangements” (Barad 2003: 814) is mutated as it travels globally. The concept relevant in this discussion is the state as a living organism, because it is this concept that represents the power of geopolitics, and indeed, because it is a fiction (or fictions) that looks truer for someone. As Paasi (1990: 56) points out, the essence of classical geopolitics rests on “the unity of the state and man”—or to adhere to Ratzel’s original intention, it is on the unity of land and man (Iizuka 1935–36). However, ways of uniting the two have to be diverse depending on time and space.

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