Key Concepts:

UNITS OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

• Country: an identifiable land area

• Nation: a population with a single culture

  • Same as a culture group

• State: a population under a single government

  • Implies there is a sovereign territory

• Nation-state: a single culture under a single government

  • Sometimes, one culture group is represented by a singular government

  • None are truly made up of only one cultural group

  • Also applied to multinational states where the state has come to represent a singular and contemporary culture, as opposed to the ancient cultures from which the population originates

• Sovereignty: means that a state is fully independent from outside control, holds territory, and that it has international recognition from other states or the United Nations.

• Multi-national states: made up of a number of different nations represented by the multitude of culture groups who have migrated and intermixed around the world

  • Sometimes called multiethnic states, are most common in the Americas, where there are no nation-states

  • Also applied to multinational states where the state has come to represent a singular and contemporary culture, as opposed to the ancient cultures from which the population originates

• Nationalism: can derive from an existing culture group that desires political representation or independence, or from a political state that bonds and unifies culture groups

  • Used by politicians as motivation to support the state and oppose foreign or other political influences

• Stateless nations: where a culture group is not included or allowed a share in the state political process

  • (EX: full independence of Kurdistan is limited geopolitically due to Turkish government resistance to their sovereignty, based upon Kurdish Marxist rebels, the PKK, who have been fighting in Turkey for several decades)

ORGANIZATIONS OF STATES

• Federal states & confederations: provides military protection, administers foreign diplomacy, and regulates trade as well as a number of internal administrative (executive branch), legislative, and judicial services across the country

  • Common approach to government

  • Have their own governments, legislatures, regulations, and services with divisions of responsibilities

  • (EX: federal government regulates interstate trade, whereas states can make rules about the sale of goods within each state)

• Unitary system: a single centralized government

  • Ultimate authority lies with the central government

  • (EX: People’s Republic of China)

• Microstates: sovereign states that despite their very small size still hold the same position as much larger states

  • Island states, ports, or city-states, or they sit landlocked with no access to the sea

  • (EX: Andorra is landlocked)

• Autonomous regions: certain parts of certain nations have been granted freedom from central authority, usually for historical, geographical, religious, or linguistic reasons

  • (EX: the Basque region of northeastern Spain has its own language, Euskara, which is thousands of years old and is unrelated to any of the Romance languages that surround it)

• Semi-autonomous regions: have the same freedom as autonomous regions, but to a lesser degree

Multi-State Organizations

• Supranationalism: the concept of two or more sovereign states aligned together for a common purpose

• Supranational organizations: organizations formed for the purposes of trade alliances, military cooperation, and diplomacy

  • EX: European Union (28 members)

• The EU serves 5 main purposes:

• Free-trade union: No taxes or tariffs are charged on goods and services that cross the internal borders of the EU.

• Open-border policy: Between EU member states, there are no longer any border-control stations for immigration or customs inspections.

• Monetary union: In 2000, the first EU members began converting to the Euro and phasing out their old forms of money. This eliminated the costs of currency exchange fees.

• Judicial union: The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg provides a legal venue for cases between litigants in separate EU member states. A European Court of Human Rights has been established to preserve civil rights regardless of their member states’ local laws.

• Legislative and regulatory bodies: The 751-seat EU Parliament was established to propose and approve laws within the union.

• EU governance has been successful in creating a singular economy through free trade, open borders, free movement of labor, free exchange of currency, and a level playing field for business and labor in terms of laws and regulations.

Issues:

• The cost of EU governance has significantly increased the cost of many items in Europe

• European courts have threatened the sovereignty of national and local courts and laws

• Open borders have made it difficult to control crime and terrorism

• Fortress Europe: describes the concept of sealing EU borders

• A European Union Constitution was proposed for ratification in 2004, but was poorly understood by the citizens and members of parliament who had to vote on the constitution. It was ultimately rejected.

SPATIAL CONCEPTS OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

• Territoriality: the expression of political control over space

  • Implies that the government controls land and the people who live there

• Citizenship: the legal identity of a person based on the state where he or she was born or where he or she was naturalized as an immigrant

  • When citizens go outside their state’s political borders, they retain their citizen status and thus become an extension of their state

Political Borders

• Political boundaries: as expressions of political control, must be definable and clear

• Finite lines: the borders between political states and political sub-unit areas (counties, parishes, parliamentary districts, and city limits)

• Physical geography, such as rivers or other water bodies, defines boundaries, and sometimes borderlines are measured surveys based on treaties or other agreements between states.

• Non-physical boundaries often reflect cultural divisions

  • Can be the result of aristocratic land holdings from Feudalistic eras

  • Can be the front lines at the cessation of armed conflict between states

• Expatriate populations: citizens living outside of their borders

• Countries have to provide consular services in large foreign cities

• It’s the government’s diplomats and military duty to get citizens who trapped in war zones or disasters in foreign countries them out

Enclave and Exclave

• Enclave: a minority culture group concentrated inside a country that is dominated by a different, larger culture group

  • (EX: enclaves were formally established within Bosnia to separate warring Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities)

• Exclave: a fragmented piece of sovereign territory separated by land from the main part of the state’s territory

  • Neighboring states occasionally attempt to claim exclaves in the name of cultural nationalism

  • (EX: Alaska is an exclave whose controlling state is the United States and is separated by Canada.)

Water Borders at Sea

• United Nations Conference on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS): proposal of standard oceanic boundaries for all UN member states that was fully ratified in 1994

  • Makes provisions for a UN arbitration board to settle disputes regarding boundaries at sea

  • Difficulty occurs when uninhabited small islets, exposed reefs, and sandbars above water are claimed by more than one country

    • (EX: The Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands, are claimed by China, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. They are areas of potential future armed conflict if arbitration fails.)

• UNCLOS border system is in two parts:

• Territorial sea: Sovereign territory that includes the area of sea from shore out to the 12-nautical-mile limit. Within 12 nautical miles, all the laws of a country apply.

• Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ): Exclusive economic rights from shore out to the 200-nautical-mile limit. Within 200 nautical miles of its shores, a state controls all aspects of natural resource exploration and extraction. This includes fisheries, oil and gas production, salvage operations, and permits for such activity.

• Territorial seas and EEZs create circular boundaries, especially around islands, which extends a country’s EEZ out another 200 nautical miles

• High seas are technically outside of the 12-mile limit

  • Past that line, cruise ships can open their casinos and ship captains gain the authority to marry couples or arrest thieves onboard their ships

• Admiralty law: a part of international law that dictates legal procedures on the high seas

• The 1986 International Whaling Commission: a moratorium on commercial whale hunts that banned whaling after centuries of hunting dangerously depleted populations

Boundary Origins

• Antecedent: Boundary lines that exist from prehistoric times

  • (EX: French-Spanish border along the Pyrenees Relic: Scotland-England border after The Act of Union in 1652)

• Relic: Former state boundaries that still have political or cultural meaning

• Subsequent: Lines resulting from conflict or cultural changes, such as war and migration

  • (EX: German-Polish border after 1945; Kaliningrad to the USSR in 1946)

• Superimposed: Lines laid down for political reasons over existing cultural boundaries

  • (EX: Sub-Saharan Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884; Yugoslavia and Iraq after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles)

Boundary Process

• When borders are claimed, negotiated, or captured

• Delimitation process: when borders are put on the map

• Demarcation process: when markers are placed on the ground to show where borders lie

Boundary Types

• Physical border: natural boundaries such as rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, or deserts

• Cultural border: estimated boundaries between nations, ethnic groups, or tribes

• Geometric border: boundaries surveyed mostly along lines of latitude and longitude

Border Disputes

• Definitional dispute: when border treaties are interpreted two different ways by states

  • (EX: Russian-Japanese Kuril Islands under Soviet control in 1945)

• Locational dispute: when the border moves, like a river changing course or a lake drying up

  • (EX: India-Bangladesh territory along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta)

• Operational dispute: when borders are agreed on, but passage across the border is a problem

  • (EX: New passport requirements for entry into the United States after September 11, 2001)

• Allocational dispute: when a resource lies on two sides of a border

  • (EX: Mexico-United States river allocations for irrigation and drinking water on the Colorado River and Rio Grande)

• Frontier: open and undefined territory

  • The only remaining large land frontier is Antarctica, that has been set aside for scientific research and prohibits any military action and commercial mineral or energy extraction

Tyranny of the Map

• The Conference of Berlin (1884) was a diplomatic meeting between the European colonial powers to set the internal political boundaries in Africa.

• The main problem with the European-set boundaries in Africa is that they do not match the cultural boundaries.

• This superimposed boundary situation is what Africans refer to as the Tyranny of the Map.

Territorial Morphology

• State morphology: the shape of a country that also impacts its society and external relations with other countries

Territorial Change

• State territory can change shape through decolonization by reducing the area and number of territorial and colonial holdings

• Annexation: the addition of territory as a result of a land purchase or when a territorial claim is extended through incorporation

  • (EX: The United States originally purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 for $7,000,000 in gold and it became a full state in 1948.)

Capitals

• States have a capital city as a seat of government where political power is centered

• Politicians need a place to have organized exchanges of power

• Federal states can have several scales of capitals

  • (EX: Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States at a national and federal level.)

• Some countries have more than one national capital to share power across different regions of the country

• Countries occasionally change the location of their capital due to a shift in political power or congestion in the old capital

• Planned capital cities: cities located in places where cities did not previously exist

  • (EX: Sydney was the old capital of Australia. It’s new capital is Canberra.)

Electoral Politics and Internal Boundaries

• Suffrage in terms of age, race, and gender has varied historically from state to state.

  • In most countries, women gained voting rights in the 1900s.

  • In South Africa, racial segregation existed in almost all aspects of life and residents were denied the voting rights of non-white citizens.

• All democracies have some form of parliamentary system in which at least one lawmaking body or house has popular representation

• Each country has its own system regarding the number of seats and the size of voting districts

  • EX: In the U.S., presidential elections are decided through voting by the Electoral College.

  • Every ten years following the census, the United States reapportions the 435 seats of the House of Representatives.

• Gerrymandering: the irregularly shaped districts that are highly elongated and prorupt

  • In 1990 and 2000, a number of gerrymanders were attempted that tried to stack votes guaranteeing congressional support for one particular party.

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Feudalism

• Aristocracy: a peerage of lords, earls, marquis, barons, dukes, princes, kings, and queens

  • controlled vast majority of land and wealth in feudal political economies

• The majority of the population were peasants, commoners, serfs, or slaves who worked the land controlled by aristocrats

• Debt peonage: peasants paid rent and had their harvests taxed for the right to live on and work the land, keeping them in a cycle of debt

• Absolute monarchy: where the supreme aristocrat, a king, prince, or duke, was both

• Head of state and head of government, and therefore did not share power with anyone

• Revolutions and wars from the late 1700s to the 1900s forced many feudal states to accept some form of democracy

  • (EX: the French Revolution of 1789 inspired many monarchs to accept power-sharing with commoners to avoid losing control)

• Constitutional monarchy: where the supreme aristocrat remains head of state, but the leader of the elected parliament is the head of government, with integrated legislative and executive powers

  • The monarch retains the power to: dismiss parliament; appoints judges, ambassadors, and other officials; is commander and chief of the military; and retains significant land holdings and estates

  • Mostly diminished to a symbolic role

• Prime minister (premier): one who appoints senior members of parliament to be ministers or secretaries of executive-branch departments

  • EX: The current form of constitutional monarchy in Great Britain has been in place since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

    • Feudal rents to local aristocrats are still paid in a number of rural areas of the United Kingdom, (symbolic and small fees)

    • House of Lords: the upper house of parliament, which also serves as the supreme court

    • Since the late 1600s, the power of the House of Commons, the lower house of parliament, has steadily increased

    • The PM is the political leader of the party with the most MPs

    • Other senior MPs from this ruling party serve as ministers of the executive branch of government

• Commonwealth of Nations: independent former parts of the British Empire that retain the British monarch as their head of state

  • Have their own parliaments and prime ministers as head of government

  • Have a royally appointed governor-general as the crown representative in the country

  • Considered independent sovereign states

  • Have parliamentary governments, which integrate executive, legislative, and judicial powers

  • Provides special trade, education services, government funding, and preferred immigration status between member governments and citizens

    • India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Kenya are commonwealth members that do not claim the British monarch as head of state.

• Free-market democracies: countries with elected-representative parliamentary systems commonwealth countries, and other constitutional monarchies or republics

  • Relies upon balancing the relationship between the elected-representative government, its citizens, and business interests

  • There is a variable system of regulation and taxation by the state

• Government regulatory influence of the private lives of its citizens and practices of businesses is usually limited to areas concerning public safety and economic protections

• Republics: governments free of aristocracy or monarchical control and are fully under the control of the “common” people, as opposed to hereditary monarchy

  • Some are centrally governed from a single capital

  • Others are confederations that apportion some government power of legislation and administration to their component states or provinces

• Separation of powers: where the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government are held by separate groups of people that keep each other in check

  • Reduces the potential for corruption of the whole government

  • The other branches can act to correct problems or replace leadership if necessary

  • Written constitutions of these governments need to be flexible enough to allow governments to deal with political and other crises when they occur

  • Wealthy businesspeople and corporations have replaced the aristocracy in terms of the control of money, land, and resources

    • Their personal and corporate political influence overshadows that of many thousands of private citizens

    • Created uneven power relations in free-market democracies

  • A type of separation that is sometimes employed to blunt the power of the executive branch is to have separate presidents and prime ministers

  • Executive separation can be when the president is head of government and the prime minister is head of state, or vice versa

Marxist-Socialism

• Communism: Karl Marx’s political-economic theories attempted to right the wrongs of feudalism and inequalities of capitalism in free-market democracies

• Marxism: the goal to create a class-free society where there were no inequalities in terms of wealth or power

  • The state would own all land and industry, the government would direct economic productivity, and everyone would earn the same amount of money regardless of labor position

• Planned economy: an economy that does not rely on supply and demand like capitalism

  • The central government would calculate the economic needs of the state, its industries, and people

  • Set quotas for each individual operational unit of agricultural or manufacturing production to meet these needs

  • The productivity of the economy would result in a collective wealth that would be shared equally across the population

  • Communism in practice failed to reproduce Marx’s utopia

Example: The Soviet Union

• The first Communist country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union), was established in 1917 with the fall of the czar’s absolute monarchy in Russia

  • A number of unintended consequences to the Russian revolution, including a protracted and bloody civil war, human rights violations, murders on the part of the Communist government, and forced resettlement of over a million citizens result from Soviet Communism

• Five-Year Plans: comprehensive long-term economic plans that dictated all production in minute detail that were developed by the USSR

The Devolution of the Soviet System:

• Three classes of Soviet citizens emerged early in the Soviet Union who were mostly workers that Marx envisioned to be his proletariat

• Communist Party members made up about 6 percent of the USSR population and enjoyed many perks

• A military officer class emerged that had a similarly high quality of life in comparison to the regular working class

• Secret police and laws that made public protest punishable by hard labor in prison camps

• Creativity and economic productivity stagnated because of a lack of incentive in the system that would motivate people to have better lives

  • Resulted in a lack of surplus, leaving many stores with few items on the shelves and lines of people waiting to receive rations for food and clothing

Positives:

• Socialism meant that everyone had a right to health care, and hospitals, clinics, and rural travelling doctor programs were established.

• Infrastructure programs for public schools, free universities, drinking water, care for the elderly, and public transit were established to improve the efficiency and quality of life in communist society.

  • Have since been incorporated in Western free-market democracies

GEOPOLITICS

• Geopolitics: the global-scale relationships between sovereign states

• Centripetal forces: factors that hold together the social and political fabric of the state

  • Overabundance of centripetal force may lead to nationalistic movements and xenophobia

• Centrifugal forces: factors that tear apart the social and political fabric of the state

  • The survival of the state is at risk when the balance shifts to far and indicates the likelihood of armed conflict—in the form of an internal civil war, or the possibility of conflict spilling over into external cross-border war

• Number of forces at work that both reinforce and destabilize the state

• EX: Josip Tito became a centripetal force representing the two largest ethnic groups in the country. A strong nationalist belief in Communism among Yugoslavians helped Tito build an economically strong and socially harmonious multiethnic society.

  • The lack of an effective multiethnic leader to replace him created a political power vacuum that opened the way for different nationalist leaders representing different ethnicities to attempt to seize power for themselves and their constituents.

  • Ripped apart the Yugoslav social and political fabric and, in combination with the fall of Communism in Europe, doomed the country to ethnic violence and dissolution

• Balkanization: a situation in which the political landscape goes from a larger state to several smaller states

• Europe has geopolitically gone from being dominated by large empire states to being dominated by several small nation-states

• Early cases of balkanization after World War I were due to a realignment of German borders and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into six sovereign states

• Irredentism has two definitions:

  • When a minority ethnic group desires to break away from a multiethnic state and form its own nation-state

  • Or when break away and align itself with a culturally similar state.

• EX: Chechnya was granted limited local self-governance by the Russian Federation. After the fall of Communism, Chechens began to declare independence from Russia. A regional conflict ensued between Chencens and the Russian government due to fear of losing oil resources and other autonomous republics pushing for secession.

• Some nations or culture groups were torn apart as a result of war, but they reunified

• Neocolonialism: a contemporary form of colonialism based not on political control, but on economic pressure

  • (EX: While the United States possesses very few political territories, it has long waged economic control over nearly every nation in the Western Hemisphere, by granting favored-nation trade status to those neighbors who play by its rules.)

MODELS

• Heartland-Rimland model: designed to define the global geopolitical landscape and determine areas of potential future conflict

  • British geographer, Mackinder identified agricultural land as the primary commodity that states were interested in.

• Eastern European steppe: a very productive area of grain cultivation that was mostly controlled by the Russian Empire; Mackinder identified this as Heartland

  • States bordering Rimland, such as the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania might invade this area

• Primary commodity of conflict: the thing that countries are willing to fight over

• American geographer Saul Cohen proposed the Shatterbelt theory in 1950

  • He modified Mackinder’s Heartland into the Pivot Area, Rimland into the Inner Crescent and the rest of the world became the Outer Crescent

  • Land-based concept was that Cold War conflicts would likely occur within the Inner Crescent

• Buffer states: lands that would protect hostile countries by creating a surrounding buffer of sympathetic countries

• U.S. diplomat George Kennan proposed the strategic policy of containment to the American government in 1947

  • The proposal stated that the United States and its allies would attempt to build a containment wall around the core communist states

  • The U.S. and allied states had to contain these Soviet-supported satellite states to prevent Communism from spreading like a domino effect

  • Communism was limited to a large degree to the Pivot Area and a number of buffer states

  • The containment effort had a devastating effect on the economy of the Soviet Union

  • The United States arming Afghan Mujahideen rebels with arms was a centrifugal force that reverberated throughout the USSR, leading to its government failing

• Terrorism: planned violent attacks on people and places to provoke fear and cause a change in government policy

• State terrorism: when governments use violence and intimidation to control their own people