Understanding Foucault by Tony Schirato

Author:Tony Schirato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Geopolitics and colonialism

Foucault’s work on the reason of state and the articulation between mechanisms of discipline and biopower has significant implications for understanding the relationship between different nation-states and areas of the globe as they have evolved throughout the modern age. Perhaps most significantly, geopolitical relations have been shaped by the long period of western colonisation of other parts of the earth. Edward Said notes (1978: 41) that direct European control over the earth’s surface increased from 35 per cent in 1815 (the year marked by the Congress of Vienna which decided the shape of the world after the Napoleonic wars) to 85 per cent in 1914 (the year marked by the beginning of World War I).

This history of colonisation is significantly influenced by transformations within the reason of state with regard to European countries. We have seen how mercantilism involved a competition between states to maximise wealth as a mark of the sovereign’s prestige. Since the Treaty of Westphalia limited the internal territory of European states, colonisation of overseas territory became a means of satisfying mercantilist ambitions. Thus many European countries were engaged in fierce competition to colonise foreign territories, and monopolistic state corporations—such as the East India Company in England’s case—exploited the wealth of those colonies. However, the shift towards a liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century was based on the principle of mutual enrichment—the idea that, through trade, different nation-states could prosper alongside one another. An important element of such trade was access to a global market. Thus European nation-states might import raw materials such as cotton from their colonies, and in turn export manufactured goods such as clothes throughout the world.

When Foucault wrote about colonialism, he rarely did so directly— for example, there are no books of his on the implications of the French colonial occupation of Indo-China, the Pacific and Africa. Rather, he was interested in the way in which bodies were colonised by various forces, such as the disciplinary forces discussed above. Foucault was also interested in which discourses played a colonising role in ordering experience, making sense of these experiences and distributing people within these orders. Using the terms coined by Paul Virilio, we might say that Foucault was more concerned with endo-colonialism than with exo-colonialism (Virilio 1991): endo-colonialism refers to the ways an internal territory is colonised, while exo-colonialism refers to the means whereby other territories are colonised and brought within the control of an imperial power. These two processes meet in the age of western colonisation.

The endo-colonial forces helped produce a civil order and economic and administrative apparatuses recognisable as a nation-state. It is evident that the European nation-states of the nineteenth century, having colonised and disciplined their own people and territory, were equipped with the technologies, techniques and will to power to do the same with other peoples and territories, resulting in the great period of colonial expansion. At the same time, the task of pacifying, organising and regulating peoples and territories in the colonies provided colonial administrators and organisations with invaluable information and experience, which they ‘put to work’ back home in Europe.

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