Sami Moisio

Competing Geographies of Sovereignty, Regionality and Globalisation: The Politics of EU Resistance in Finland 1991–1994

European integration is often naturalised, so that the movement of a particular state towards integration, or away from it, is understood as being underpinned by eternal and everlasting national forces. The political struggles within the EU applicant states have not inspired scholars to produce sensitive studies of the “national debates” carried on in applicant states, even though this is exactly the field of political action where politico-geographical categories such as national identity, sovereignty and security come to be enthusiastically articulated. This paper both seeks to explain the struggle over Finlands decision to join the EU by focusing on the argumentation of those actors who “lost” the political struggle, and introduces the geographies that the opponents of Finnish EU membership produced. It is therefore aimed at illustrating the politics that underlay the geographical articulations which referred to either “national identity” or “sovereignty”. The purpose of doing this is to trace the competing geographies involved in the Finnish EU struggle and to point out that they were indeed based on long historical traditions which competing political actors used as a source of legitimation in their political action. Most of the themes highlighted by the No-EU camp are prominent in contemporary EU debates, too.

Finland, geopolitical image of threat and the post‐cold war confusion

This paper describes the ability of the modern state to reproduce the state idea in the post‐Cold War Europe. The concept of the geopolitical image of threat is presented as a discursive tool used in mastering the internal space of a state. A state idea based on a geopolitical image of threat is suggested to have been a medium with which the alliance between the Finnish state and nation was historically constructed. By excluding threats linked to the public enemy ‐ the existence of which is crucial for the very existence of the state ‐ the state prevents the breakdown of societal order and strengthens its own idea. In the 1990s the represented geopolitical image of threat possessing the potential of breaking the Finnish societal order includes several factors, all linked to the excludable other, Russia. The represented threat is composed of refugee flows, Russian crime, environmental pollution, the possible return of Communism, a strong Russia, a weak Russia, military attack and many other features linked...

From Enmity to Rivalry? Notes on National Identity Politics in Competition States

Abstract This paper examines what it means to study national identity politics in an age during which state-to-state relations are being conceptualised increasingly in terms of economic rivalry and less in terms of political enmity. It is suggested that this transformation has not been sufficiently taken into account in the study of national identity politics that continues to operate on the basis of the friend-enemy distinction. It is also suggested that the ‘old school of national identity politics’ with its emphasis on territorial exclusion and geopolitical images of threat and enmity has done highly important work in deconstructing security discourses and it is noted how they are linked to a specific, realist understanding of the world. That is, they have disclosed how what Alexander Wendt calls the ‘Hobbesian culture of anarchy’ has motivated national identity politics. Further using Wendts characterisation of the three cultures of anarchy, the paper suggests that in the practices of contemporary national identity politics the logic of economic competitiveness and the logic of political enmity continue to co-exist but that ‘state survival’ is being increasingly understood as a matter of economic competitiveness and decreasingly as that of military power. On this basis it is argued that the era of competition states begs an analysis of the conflictual and often contradictory articulations of the Selfs relation with the Other. It is proposed that a fruitful road of enquiry would open up if national identity politics was examined within the framework of political struggles whereby the national survival and Self/Other relations are played out against the background of the global marketplace paradigm which resonates more with the Lockean than the Hobbesian culture of anarchy.

Structural Setting for Global Environmental Politics in a Hierarchic International System: A Geopolitical View

According to the state-centric image of world politics, foreign and security policy is a field of action on which states practice diplomacy and wage wars, struggle for relative power, and maximize their power resources by appropriating territories of great strategic importance and natural richness. In this image, foreign and security policy is based on state sovereignty coupled with sharply demarcated territorial containers that exist in the space of anarchy (Schmitt 20031). The beginning of the Cold War gave the final blow to this anarchical international system of Westphalian states, where states had been free to form alliances against any aggressor or in order to check and balance the power of any state pursuing hegemonic supremacy over the others. The Cold War established instead two hierarchical blocs: the Western and the Eastern.

Language Games on Security in Finland: Towards Changing Concepts of the State and National Survival

‘Security’ is a contested concept covering an expanding area through conceptual widening (up to climate change, unemployment, poverty, etc.), conceptual deepening (from state-centred to common international and human security), and conceptual expansion to various sectors of social and economic life (energy, water, health, food, etc.). The so-called Copenhagen School opened up the concept of security by introducing ideas such as ‘societal security’ and ‘securitization’ as a particular type of ‘speech act’ (Austin 1975), suggesting that the logic of security may be introduced and accepted in many issue areas beyond military matters (Buzan 1991; Buzan/Waever/de Wilde 1998; Williams 2003).

Book Review: The New Shape of Global Power

Political developments since 9/11 have been followed by a large number of articles and books dealing with the power structure of contemporary world politics. The role of the USA has been at the centre of these studies: Is the USA best described as an empire, a super power, a hegemon or something else? Many of these studies also explicate whether the overwhelming influence of the USA is based on economic assets, military power or soft power, and whether the international system is moving from a state of anarchy to one of hierarchy. In his recent book, John Agnew, one of the leading political geographers, brings a set of fresh ideas to the debate. The author develops a systematic political-economic argument as to why the analytical concept of hegemony better grasps the current dynamics of world affairs than the concept of empire, which is much used in contemporary literature. He argues that it is misleading to call the USA an empire, because the concept signifies territorial coherence, supreme rule, absolute power and domination. In analytical use, empire is a territorial polity in which many peoples and territories are united administratively under a single ruler. Agnew reminds us that the republicanism deeply rooted in the history of the US state has not been about territorial expansion. Agnew suggests that the concept of American hegemony better describes the contemporary global condition in which the USA has set the rules for economic and political interaction, but has not created a territorially coherent empire in which the US government is able to act as the supreme ruler. His Gramscian treatment of hegemony is a response to world-system scholars whose claims about hegemony are state centric and somewhat deterministic in their emphasis on the correlation of the emergence and decline of the hegemonic states with the long cycles of the world economy. The author rather points out that hegemony may exist even without any hegemonic state. Agnew insists that the USA is not just another case in the long list of hegemons. Instead, he seeks to unfold the exceptional nature of the American society and the US state which together have brought into existence the most influential logic of the contemporary world economy: transnational liberalism. The marketplace society is the key concept in Agnew’s explication of American hegemony. The author seeks to convince