The European miracle. Environment,economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia

This article analyses the 1936 “Wotan” essay by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in light of one of its reigning motifs, Ergriffenheit. First, this term is examined within the works of Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto and Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who used it to describe what they claimed to be the original religious experience, a state of being deeply stirred or even seized by the “the holy” or by “the ultimate reality.” The article then examines antecedents in Jung's theory of states of psychic seizure, in which two halves of the psyche come into conflict, the resolution of which leads to an increased capacity to create the arts of culture. The analysis then moves to the “Wotan” essay itself, where Jung brings together his own theory of psychic seizure with the theory of the original religious experience as proposed by the above-named scholars of religion in order to suggest that, under National Socialism, the Germans were in the midst of a collective confrontation with their own inner divinity, which should lead to a national spiritual rebirth. The article then investigates the works of several of the men Jung mentions in the essay, as well as his use of ancient Germanic mythology, to support his claim. Through his portrait of the Germanic archetype Wotan, Jung psychologizes and thereby essentializes the Romantic image of the Germans as “a people of poets and philosophers” as well as that of a Nietzschean “master-race.” In conclusion, the article argues that, at least in 1936, Jung's attitude towards Hitler and National Socialism was much more favorable than has previously been recognized.     

The Transition to History in Southeast Asia: An Introduction

Studies of the transition from prehistory to history in Southeast Asia have traditionally relied primarily on documentary sources, which tend to emphasize foreign influences, rather than on the archaeological record, which suggests a series of indigenous developments. The papers in this journal issue and the next discuss strategies for using both documentary and archaeological evidence to study the transition to history and the emergence of early states in the region. These papers investigate how political units were structured and integrated in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South China, and illustrate how historical and archaeological data can cross-check each other to inform on Southeast Asian sociopolitical and economic developments during the early historic period.     

Territory,geoeconomics and power politics: The Irish government's framing of Brexit

The decision of the UK to withdraw from the EU's political and legal structures can be understood as a form of regional dis-integration. This had the potential to revive territorial power politics and geo-economic rivalry within Europe. In particular, it implied a major change to the status quo on the island of Ireland, where the existing border had been rendered invisible, partly due to European integration.This paper analyses how the Irish government framed this as a threat and how it was able to set the agenda in the crucial phase 1 of the negotiations. It applies a content analysis and a qualitative framing analysis to study how the government framed issues of territory and power in its language on Brexit . It considers in particular how it enacts different discourses of liberal internationalism, nationalism and Europeanism with reference to the multi-scalar power dynamics of Brexit.The Irish reaction was not to echo the nationalism and populism reverberating throughout Europe. Rather it asserted its place as an EU member and aligned itself with EU discourse and interests to protect the all-Island socio-economic space. Its eventual proposal to keep Northern Ireland aligned with the EU customs union and single market was politically controversial. It stressed that this was not a national territorial claim but if anything a transnational territorial claim (‘claiming’ Northern Ireland as a part of the integrated pan-European space). However as the negotiations developed the dispute took on some of the forms of a classic territorial dispute. Within a year Irish-UK relations had been transformed.     

Disciplinary geopolitics and the rise of international development studies in China

There has been a growing political and scholarly interest in the re-emergence of Chinese development cooperation and this work explores the construction of South-South spatial matrix of knowledge, power and imagination. The paper examines the critical geopolitics of producing international development studies in China as an intellectual project over the last 5–10 years, in close relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, it develops a political economic geography of individuals, institutions and ideologies that have shaped the geographically and politically situated processes of inventing Chinese international development studies. The paper traces the spatial genealogy of the disciplinary regime, making visible the rise of a division of social scientific labour at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux, especially against the backdrop of intensifying US-China rivalry. It also maps out the tensions and nuances in an uneven field of knowledge and power. The future of the nascent state-disciplinary apparatus is uncertain, not least dependent on China's ongoing reinterpretation of its national identity and national mission.     

Popular geopolitics of Chinese Nanjing massacre films: a feminist approach

This article attempts to deconstruct the masculinised contract among the war narrative, popular culture, and Chinese nationalism by exploring the roles of women in Nanjing Massacre films with war narratives and Chinese audiences' emotional ‘readings’ of these women. Based on the analysis of City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011) and audiences' comments on these two films from Douban Movie, this article has mapped a popular geopolitics of these two films through a feminist approach. The main argument of this research points out that, through the production and consumption of these two films, the women of the Nanjing Massacre can be territorialised as Nanjing/China and used to represent China's attitudes towards both the historical and current Sino–Japanese relationship. In this way, the women of these films can be considered an articulation of popular culture and politics, and they are empowered to establish Chinese nationalism and construct anti-Japanese identities in Chinese society. To a wider extent, this article can be read as a contribution to the literature on gender, nationalism and popular geopolitics.     

Waging terror: The geopolitics of the real

Against the background of the broad intellectual response to the events of 9/11, the paper examines the complicity of the media in the West's so-called War on Terror. Rejecting erroneous conceptions of a conspiratorial state control of the media (and consequent distortion of the picture of a given reality), the paper focuses primarily on the form of the media: its role in distorting the nature of reality itself. By elucidating problems with the kind of media analysis that portrays the media as a propaganda machine, the significance of the mediasphere itself is highlighted. The paper considers the media's role in promulgating the myth of antagonistic collective identities (‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’); in promoting a desire that subjugates the individual to the social formations that feed off it; in sustaining a range of fundamentalisms; and in characterizing terrorism as Evil incarnate. The paper thus offers a sympathetic reassessment of Baudrillard's consistent attempt to engage with the geopolitics of the real, measured against a contrasting range of responses from Badiou, Latour, Žižek, and others.     

Introduction: Financialisation and Development in Asia under Late Capitalism

Abstract

Multilateral development agencies have increasingly focused attention on underdeveloped countries in Asia as potential new sites for financial capital. Often referred to as “emerging markets”, these economies are seen as ripe for private sector investment and, at the same time, in need of foreign capital to support rapid industrialisation, modernisation and poverty reduction. For development agencies, this confluence of interests suggests a means for quickly closing the “development gap”, primarily through mobilising techno-managerial modalities designed to reduce barriers to capital entry and other institutional inefficiencies seen as inimical to investment. Thus development agencies now encourage the construction of “enabling environments” to support “market driven development” through processes of “financialisation”. Development, in this sense, is no longer state-led or state-centred, but rather financially driven and privately procured.

As we highlight in this special issue, however, financialised modes of development are highly contested and problematic. Indeed, the diffusion into the underdeveloped world of essentially developed world financialisation agendas that seek to instil a broad-based market rationalism that downloads new costs and risks to populations is of significant concern. This Introduction sets in context and introduces a much needed set of articles that bring clarity to financialisation in developing Asia and its implications for development as a process of substantively improving material conditions.     

The geopolitics of Arctic melt

The rapidity of Arctic melt is no longer the phantasmagoria of B-grade movies, such as the 'Day after tomorrow', but is occurring at a rate unimaginable just a few years ago. In 2007, more than one million square miles of ice melted, leaving the region with only half the ice that existed in 1950. The Arctic has been propelled into the centre of geopolitics as global climate change has transformed the region into a maelstrom of competing commercial, national security and environmental concerns with profound implications for the international legal and political system. The prospect of longer ice-free periods in the Arctic has momentous implications for the region's commercial development, in itself a further risk to melting Arctic ice. This article argues that Arctic melt does and will continue to pose economic, military and environmental challenges to the governance of the region and explores the role of technological factors as both a barrier and an enabler of access. Working within existing institutions and building capacity is preferable to the proliferation of new institutions, although the full structure and scope of the legal and regulatory frameworks that may be needed are, at present, unclear. But what is clear, is that Arctic melt is on the increase.     

Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand

This paper explores the geopolitics surrounding the “modernization” of the formal property rights regime in land in Thailand (formerly Siam) from the mid 1850s to the late 1930s. The paper argues that this weak, peripheral state, in pursuit of international recognition of territorial and jurisdictional sovereignty, employed a strategy of “counter-spatialization” in order to mitigate or deny claims for control over natural resources and population groups by imperial powers. The intertextual dimensions of this “spatial” mode of resistance are elucidated through a close reading of the ways in which diplomatic negotiations of a series of unequal treaties, beginning with the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1855, shaped—and were shaped by—the formulation and implementation of regulations governing formal property rights in land in Siam. The political economy of land rights at the large scale (local implementation of land titling) and the medium scale (enactment of national land laws) was nested within a process of geopolitical contestation over land rights at the small scale (international recognition of Siamese territorial sovereignty).