Noel Parker

Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies

The starting point of the ‘Lines in the Sand?’ programme is expressed in our title, the idea of lines in a shifting medium. The most common use of the expression today is to reject further concessi...

Picking and Choosing the ‘Sovereign’ Border: A Theory of Changing State Bordering Practices

We argue that the continued persistence of borders is an effect of their constitutive role for the many dimensions of a social particular. States cannot choose to have a border; but they can and do make choices amongst the materials available on the various planes of inscription for bordering. For contemporary states the planes have become increasingly disaggregated, in the sense that they do not fall into place at one and the same border. Thus, states have to pick and choose different articulations (often inconsistently) on different planes. We illustrate these ideas with instances, present-day and historical, of bordering. A corollary of there being more need to pick and choose is that articulations of sovereignty change. So, sovereignty is increasingly the material of ‘sovereignty games’, where sovereignty is used as a political instrument. In sum, our theory directs attention to state bordering on different planes of inscription.

From Borders to Margins: A Deleuzian Ontology for Identities in the Postinternational Environment

While concepts of a postinternational politics properly highlight the constant variance of entities in play in international relations, the approach lacks an ontology that shows how such an unstable variety of types of players can coexist in a common field in the first place. This article draws upon Deleuzes philosophy to set out an ontology in which the continual reformulation of entities in play in “postinternational” society can be grasped. This entails a strategic shift from speaking about the “borders” between sovereign states to referring instead to the “margins” between a plethora of entities that are ever open to modifications of identity. The concept of the margin possesses a much wider reach than borders, and focuses continual attention on the meetings and interactions between a range of indeterminate entities whose interactions may determine both themselves and the types of entity that are in play.

Imperialism, territory, and liberation: on the dynamics of empire stemming from Europe

This article tries to understand the deeply ambivalent role in modern global world history of imperialism originating from Europe. It follows a long, genealogical narrative, beginning in the inherent structure and tensions of empire per se on the European mainland. Nonetheless, there was a partially successful attempt at empire in the primarily spiritual ‘imperial’ power emanating from Rome, which in due course evoked a matching response in religious-ideological opposition of the Reformation. The subsequent weakening of the prospects of mainland empire encouraged maritime empires in the form of sovereign states, while the profound opposition to top-down power per se survived in the derivatives of Protestantism, primarily in North America. A compromise with that opposition was sketched in Protestant-inspired Lockean Liberalism, which saw virtue in territorial expansion in so far as a key motif from the start was a sense of autonomous liberation achievable through expansion into open territory as the pursuit of God’s purpose. That grew sharper in North America, as Europeans seeking progress in European society envisioned their own freedom from the state in the ‘empty’ space granted by the colonializing state itself for colonization and enclosure. Colonists’ and migrants’ aspirations for liberation thus found expression in a modern vision of territorial expansion as freedom. USA’s continental expansion in the nineteenth, and more sharply global expansion in the twentieth century, reiterated that vision in extending an intrusive liberal imperialism. There emerged a US-centered, Western oppressive dynamic of liberation, which is still present in the dissemination of values individual liberty and into the integration in global open space.

Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America

Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America Empires seem never to disappear. When the last self-proclaimed empires dissolved in the wake of decolonization, the USSR seemed to be the last remaining empire. But when it dissolved in the early 1990s, it did not take long to proclaim that the US was an empire. A few years later, the European Union (EU) started to be referred to as another empire. Individual empires come and go, but empire as a political form dies hard in the mind of observers, who seem able to discover new empires as soon as old ones collapse. The fact that we continue to use the notion of ‘empire’ to describe very different polities and political orders explains most certainly the difficulty which scholars of empire – or what we may call ‘empirologists’ – face when trying to define the concept of empire. The world of empirologists is indeed populated with very different political realities not only over time, but also across space. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hintze (1962 [1907]) already contrasted ‘old type empires’ with ‘new types of empires’: in other words, ancient empires such as the Roman Empire which had contiguous territories (also called ‘empires by land’) and modern empires, created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which were ‘empires by sea’ or ‘colonial empires’. Thus, it was already evident at that time that empires differed from one another; but Hintze was still dealing with empires that looked like empires, or at least called themselves empires. A century later, even if big polities do not really accept this label anymore, scholars continue to use it as a category in order to analyse them. The concept may even have experienced a revival in the literature during the past 15 years. However, while there are four contemporary contenders for the signifier empire (Russia, China, the US and the EU), at first the revival of the recent literature on empire concentrated on the US, with the result that there emerged a singular tacit understanding of empire. However, when empirologists started to focus on Europe and the EU, it became clear that a different, more nuanced, understanding of empire was called for. Explicit discussion of an American ‘empire’, which stems from William Appleman Williams’ impact on the revisionist school of American historical diplomacy from the 1970s (Lafeber 1994, Williams 2007 [1980]), has long been a dissident, or minority, component in the American foreign-policy analysis. Aside from this, the concept of empire has had a shadowy presence in debates on the US’s strategic position. Usually used to re-enforce a critique, it is found in expressions such as ‘imperial temptation’ (Joffe 2006) or ‘imperial wars’ (Bachevich 2008). Explicit accounts of the US’s strategic position as an ‘empire’ are predominantly damning and/or pessimistic about the US’s prospects (Bacevich and Mallaby 2002, Mann Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 331–336

Imperial rule and the art of managing diversity

Those content to scan the contents list of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference would altogether miss its object. It begins predictably enough: ‘Imperial rule in Rome and China’, and then ’After Rome: Empire, Christianity and Islam’ followed by ‘Eurasian Connections: the Mongol Empires’. But Burbank and Cooper are after a bigger prize throughout their, by turns, properly analytic and selectively detailed history. The title ‘. . . in world history . . .’ gives more than a hint of what is special about this book: the conceptual apparatus deployed is intended to situate empires in world history. Burbank and Cooper examine empires as constantly evolving entities that develop and adopt practices which are dependent upon existing circumstances in order to sustain their maintenance and growth. It is through the process of their developing these so-called ‘repertoires’ that empires survive and prosper (or not), and come to impact world history. The sub-title (albeit a touch byzantine) refers to the most interesting of their ‘themes’: a slightly muted claim that empires have a better track record in the management of difference than the state-form we have become so accustomed to. Let us take Europe after Rome as a classic example of what is different about this approach. Their first theme in chapter 4 (‘Eurasian connections: the Mongol empires’) concerns the replacement of polytheism by monotheism, which addresses the question of ‘how to solve [the] problems inherent in the structure of empire: to capture the imaginations of people across a broad and differentiated space and how to keep intermediaries in line’ (2010, p. 90). But there are three instances of recourse to this: Western Europe (with Charlemagne’s hijacking of Roman authority), Byzantium (where a version of Christianity developed in closest proximity to the state), and (plainly outside ‘Europe’, and furthermore a largely successful rival to it) Islam. Monotheistic religion was a distinctive feature in the repertoire of each empire. So empires as monotheisms effectively replace ‘Europe’, which is often used as shorthand for ‘Western’ Europe, as the historical object of interest. When it comes down to it, the monotheistic shift in imperial repertoires was most successfully managed in the former African parts of the Roman Empire. Yet, on the other hand, as much as monotheism ‘provided a moral framework transcending locality’, it also ‘opened the door to schism’ (2010, p. 90) – doubly dangerous where, as in Western Europe again, it was combined with a princely aristocracy. Europe in its classic period of the ‘great leap forward to modernity and industrialization’ becomes, in Burbank and Cooper’s story, a Europe attempting Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 451–455