Ian Klinke

Chronopolitics A conceptual matrix

This article engages the platform of critical geopolitics through conceptual clarification of the debates around chronopolitics (the politics of time). It argues that the current literature has eit...This article engages the platform of critical geopolitics through conceptual clarification of the debates around chronopolitics (the politics of time). It argues that the current literature has either reduced it to the dynamic of ‘speed’ or the ‘modern’ time consciousness in geopolitics. After re-emphasizing a narrative understanding of temporality and a non-dichotomous conception of space and time, the article highlights the heterotemporality of geopolitical discourse. It suggests that chronopolitics should be understood not as an alternative to geopolitics but as one of its crucial elements – and one that can also be found in the project of a critical geopolitics.

Postmodern Geopolitics? The European Union Eyes Russia

Abstract The discourse on EU–Russia relations amongst practitioners, think-tank experts, journalists and academics has congealed around a postmodern–modern binary. It is frequently argued that whereas Russia is caught up in a ‘modern’ framework of fixed territory, national identity and traditional geopolitics, the European Union is driven by a ‘postmodern’ spatial mindset that transcends these ‘backward’ values. This article argues that the EUs supposed postmodern geopolitics remains enmeshed in a very modern temporality—a consciousness of time that valorises the present over the past. It also detects a problematic disillusion with the postmodern and questions its implicit normativity.

European Integration Studies and the European Union’s Eastern Gaze

European integration studies has recently seen the first signs of a belated critical turn. While new approaches have started to challenge the way the European Union is conventionally studied, they are yet to investigate in detail the relationship between the academic field and its primary object of study. This article draws on work in critical geopolitics to explore one of the interfaces of academic knowledge on European integration and the world of policy: the Jean Monnet Programme. In highlighting the scheme’s role in the EU’s Eastern geopolitics, it argues that European integration studies resembles other forms of area studies, such as cold war era Sovietology. This comparison elucidates both the field’s long-standing resilience to critical theory and its inability to anticipate the recent crisis of the European project.

The Bunker and the Camp: Inside West Germany's Nuclear Tomb

Recent research has located the camp as the paradigmatic space that emerges when geopolitics and biopolitics intersect. In doing so, it has neglected another space that is indispensable for an understanding of the nexus of these two modalities of power: the nuclear bunker. This paper explores the West German governments now abandoned nuclear bunker in the Ahr valley. Constructed on the site of a subterranean World War 2 concentration camp, the bunker hosted a number of NATO exercises, which simulated nuclear war on German soil. Through an analysis of the sites military–strategic context and its technical and security features, the paper relates it to its predecessor—the camp—and uncovers a number of spatial overlaps and inversions between the two. Whilst similarly situated within a context of legal exceptionality, logistics, and total war, the concentrated and confined living space of the nuclear bunker turned the camps logic of extermination inside out. The nuclear bunker was a concrete crypt in which sovereign power and total war sought to find eternal peace.

European Geopolitics After the Crisis

Recent crises in Europe have fundamentally shaken the continent’s selfunderstanding as a post-geopolitical space. In the early 2010s, the European sovereign debt crisis prompted a new rift between the predominantly Northern European creditor nations and their indebted Southern European counterparts. Symptoms of European disintegration ranged from economic nationalism to the rise of the Eurosceptic right. Moreover, the crisis management architecture that was devised to deal with this turmoil triggered fears, particularly in the South, that European integration had been hijacked by a new German hegemon. Whilst the European Union was still dealing with the most significant crisis in its history, the 2014 Ukrainian uprising showed the world that some Europeans were willing to turn to street-level violence in the name of ‘Europe’. It is in this political climate that I will review three recent books that take the dynamics of European integration and disintegration as their subject. The late Ulrich Beck’s short book German Europe is concerned with the post-crisis European order. In an attempt to update his famous thesis on the risk society, Beck holds that much like other crises that confront

Geopolitics in Germany – the Return of the Living Dead?

Are we witnesses to the resurrection of geopolitics in Germany? At first sight the recent emergence of a ‘new Cold War’ narrative on Russian energy appears as part of a wider renaissance of geopolitics. Yet, a closer look will reveal the presence of a stealthy quasi-liberal geopolitics, equally laden with spatial language that preceded the new Cold War. This article tries to unpack this earlier narrative of ‘strategic partnership’ that has remained popular within the German energy policy establishment. Here we encounter a story of cooperation between two former geopolitical rivals that are situated within a Europe that seeks to modernise a yet backward but adaptive East. Hence, what we could observe is not the death and rebirth of geopolitics, but merely a partial narrative transformation from one type of geopolitics to another. The article suggests that geopolitics could not have been dead, for it has always been undead.

Notes on the Desecuritisation of the Rhineland Frontier

During the first half of the twentieth century, the river Rhine constituted the key source of insecurity between France and Germany. Contemporary observers have claimed that the river lost this role in the 1950s due to the dynamics of Franco-German rapprochement and the emergence of the European Coal and Steel Community. This article tries to complicate this story in three steps. First, it shifts attention from early European integration to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its role in the desecuritisation of the Rhine. Subsequently, it discusses the river’s loss of strategic significance in West Germany due to the particularities of post-war statehood and the country’s idiosyncratic geopolitics. Finally, the article argues that it was only the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent capacity between 1966 and 1972 that ultimately took the boundary from France’s geopolitical map.

What is to be done? Marx and Mackinder in Minsk

This article is prompted by recent calls for a ‘Marxist geopolitics’. By exploring the case of contemporary Belarus, it argues that a Marxist geopolitics already (or rather still) exists in the world beyond the academic ivory tower. A dissection of foreign political discourse surrounding President Alexander Lukashenka over the last decade exposes two narratives that draw extensively from the repertoire of Soviet geopolitics. Whilst the first Marxist–Leninist storyline revives the early USSR’s geopolitical position as a young state in the midst of a dystopian Western capitalism, the second one is familiar from the dying days of the Soviet empire and tells the story of a state that lies at the centre of a utopian common European house. The conclusion assesses the neo-Marxist concept of the ‘anti-geopolitical’, but finds it to have difficulties in accounting for the struggle of the Belarusian opposition.

Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany

Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state. • A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geoand bio-politics • Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war • Zooms in on two types of structures the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo • Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures’ complementary nature