| Publication |
2010.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyses the ingredients of empire as a pattern of order with geopolitical effects. Noting the imperial form's proclivity for expansion from a critical reading of historical sociology, the article argues that the principal manifestation of earlier geopolitics lay not in the nation but in empire. That in turn has been driven by a view of the world as disorderly and open to the ordering will of empires (emanating, at the time of geopolitics' inception, from Europe). One implication is that empires are likely to figure in the geopolitical ordering of the globe at all times, in particular after all that has happened in the late twentieth century to undermine nationalism and the national state. Empire is indeed a probable, even for some an attractive form of regime for extending order over the disorder produced by globalisation. Geopolitics articulated in imperial expansion is likely to be found in the present and in the future - the EU, and still more obviously the USA exhibiting the form in contemporary guise. This does not mean that empires figure in geopolitics simply by extending their own order, however; they are at least as much purveyors of other dynamics and orders, which possess their own discrete effects. The article ends with stipulations regarding the variety of forms that empires may take: neither fully bounded nor centred; neither straightforwardly self-serving nor easily made legitimate.
|