Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: the case of Robert Strausz-Hupé and ‘American geopolitics’

Cybersecurity, race, and the politics of truth

“…Since democracy appears not only as the object but also as the medium of cyberwarfare, contemporary cybersecurity demands a ‘post-political’ foreclosure of democratic excesses that challenge the stability of political order (Swyngedouw, 2018). While cybersecurity actors thus position themselves as ‘truth-tellers’ deciphering underlying realities (Crampton and Ó Tuathail, 1996), the politics of truth they advance appear less concerned with parsing true from false, and more with questions concerning the shape and possibility of democratic politics. Practices of ‘securing truth’, though framed in terms of esoteric technical analysis, have on the contrary tended to assert authority where evidence is wanted.…”

“Protracted Conflict”

“…The keen interest manifested by Strausz-Hupé, Possony, and Kintner for the role played by “race” during the Cold War seems to betray their fear that Haushofer was right and that lack of racial homogeneity would indeed compromise the U.S. bid for global leadership (Glaser and Possony, 1979). It is indeed difficult to understand Strausz-Hupé’s work without taking into consideration the way in which Nazi geopolitical theories informed his racialized approach to the Cold War (Crampton and Tuathaila, 1996; Raffestin et al, 1995). Nazi Geopolitik —with its concept of a dynamic frontier and perpetual international instability fostered by the dynamic of growing, expanding versus shrinking, and dying, states—was interpreted by Strausz-Hupé in terms of an opposition between the stable, “civilized order” of Europe and “the Asiatic aversion to fixed boundaries” (Strausz-Hupé 1942, p. 220).…”

Reflexive Geographies of Europeanization

“…More generally, however, it is the spatial underpinnings of various processes of Europeanization in various contexts we have briefly hinted at above in the context of the four dimensions, that we seek to point attention to as being underresearched, and as a field in which geographers can significantly contribute to wider debates on Europeanization. Moreover, in light of the dominant focus of Europeanization as an academic research agenda on the elitist EU project and its reliance on corresponding political discourses, it can be viewed as a geopolitical discourse and practice (Moisio 2011), as a contemporary variety of geopolitics, similar in its scope, although not necessarily in substance, to its historical counterparts of, for instance, imperial writings by Halford Mackinder (Kearns 2009) or Cold War narratives by Robert Strausz‐Hupé (Crampton and Tuathail 1996). This mainstream scholarship legitimizes a particular vision of power relations in Europe and beyond through its hegemonic fixation with assiduously reifying certain “ways of doing things” (Radaelli 2000, 4) in its discourse, effectively boiling down the ‘European’ in Europeanization to the contemporary EU practices.…”