Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village

Chapter Eight FEDERALIST GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS Today, for the first time, the habitat of each separate human being is this global earth. —Halford J. Mackinder1 THE FIRST GLOBALISTS In the broad sweep of five centuries of multidimensional globalization, the first fully global security system emerged as the industrial revolution spread and accelerated in the later-nineteenth century. High levels of material interdependence previously present only in smaller spaces began to be experienced at continental and increasingly global scales, and this primal development transformed the loosely coupled global political and economic systems of the early modern era into much more tightly coupled and increasingly interactive ones (recall figure 1.4). This second phase of globalization was extremely tumultuous, as European imperialism crested and then receded, as the European-centered international system descended into catastrophic world wars, and as the great ideological and military struggle between the Soviet empire and the American-led free world alliance sharply polarized world politics.2 Within this context of accelerating globalization and extreme turmoil, the position of republican polities radically changed. During the ‘Long Peace’ stretching from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I the two leading Liberal states, Great Britain and the United States, enjoyed unprecedented economic and demographic expansion, and together they gave republican polities a salience in international politics unmatched since the late Roman Republic. Over the course of the twentieth century the liberal democracies were embroiled in a series of titanic struggles in which they decisively vanquished their imperial, fascist, and totalitarian adversaries. In the course and wake of these struggles Great Britain experienced steep decline, as the far-flung pieces of its empire gained independence. For the United States, this was the ‘American Century,’ marked by a shift from hemispheric isolationism to great power balancing and internationalism, the establishment of a large military and national security apparatus, and the assumption of the role of leader of the free world alliance. The number of liberal democratic states also skyrocketed from a handful at the turn 216 CHAPTER 8 of the twentieth century to dozens at the turn of the twenty-first century, and the spatial domain of liberal-democratic government expanded. As their strength and numbers grew, the Liberal states slowly and unevenly created a cumulatively great increase of international organizations, regimes , and transnational activities, moving the core region among Liberal states partially out of anarchy. The global-industrial period, stretching from roughly the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, occupies a strikingly uneven position in contemporary international theory. On the one hand, the political events of this period have been subject to an unprecedented level of investigation and analysis. Whatever their intellectual pedigree, international theories largely rise or fall on their ability to illuminate the events of twentieth-century international politics. In contrast, most of the actual international theory from this period is either ignored or marginalized , and both Realists and Liberals locate their foundational formulations in the eighteenth century or before.3 During this period, stretching from the advent of the railroad, steamship , and telegraph in the middle of the nineteenth century through World War II, a sprawling roster of figures wrote with at least some substantial theoretical ambition. In addition to Wells, Angell, Muir, and Dewey, the list includes Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford Mackinder, John Seeley, Otto Hintze, Karl Haushofer, Friedrich Ratzel, Archibald Coolidge, Henry Adams, Nicholas Spykman, Homer Lea, Frederick Teggart, Frederick Jackson Turner, James Burnham, E. H. Carr, Vidal de la Blanche, and many less-well-known figures.4 To the extent these writers are engaged by international theory of the last half century, they are characterized in misleading and easily dismissed ways. On the one hand, some of these figures are cast as theorists of ‘global geopolitics’ characterized as starkly materialist, hyper-Realist, and thoroughly antiliberal. On the other hand, some are cast as theorists of ‘Liberal internationalism’ characterized as ‘idealist,’ ‘utopian,’ and antimaterialist . Thus grouped and labeled, these theorists are more shunned as embarrassments than hailed as precursors by contemporary Realists and Liberals. American Realists, still seeking to distance themselves from the excesses of Nazi Germany and the ‘geopolitical’ ideas associated with it, largely ignore this literature. For Liberals, these writings raise the specter of the ‘naive’ and ‘utopian’ episode of the League and the interwar years. However well established in the contemporary narratives of the history of international theory, these groupings, labels, and characterizations are substantially misleading. Contextual material factors played, as we have seen, pivotal roles in the arguments...