Vilho Harle

The Critical Geopolitics of Northern Europe: Identity Politics Unlimited

Critical geopolitics today is a fairly well known body of literature bridging critically oriented aspects of political geography and international relations. Critical geopolitics is probably best known for its critique of the geopolitical practices prevailing at the global level. Issues ranging from global superpower and great power rivalry to technological transformation, global risks and economic and ecological interdependence have been studied in order to reveal the geopolitical factors producing them. As for individual states, we are learning more of how they still tend to monopolise and represent geopolitical identities. These important insights have opened up some fresh and greatly needed perspectives on the processes creating tension and inequalities at the global and the state levels that ultimately result in both state boundaries in the territorial sense and in the symbolic sense between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet, it is perhaps not too great an exaggeration to say that critical geopolitics has remained somewhat state-centric in its approach despite serious endeavours to the contrary. Surprisingly enough, the regional level has largely escaped the gaze of critical geopoliticians. Indeed, the regional level – as to how regional entities and formations are spatially delineated and identified – has only very slowly started to attract due attention. Other scholars in both political geography and international relations – operating with broadly understood social constructionist metatheoretical perspectives not too far from the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical geopolitics – have for quite some time been engaged with the patterns of region-building and regional characteristics in general. Studies of the institutionalisation of regions and on transitions from regional

On the interface: The Finnish geopolitical tradition in human geography and in IR

Geopolitical writing has been more extensive in Finland than in any other Nordic country in recent years. This rejoinder article is a contextualized reading of the development of Finnish geopolitics within both Finnish Human Geography and International Relations academia. It seeks to diversify an argument propounded by Ola Tunander, who scrutinized recent developments in Nordic geopolitical scholarship. Tunander gave some interesting evidence of how a few critical scholars practising geopolitics were able to have a direct impact on political events in Europe in the 1990s and how they challenged the ‘US victory school’ characterized by realist geopolitics. This rejoinder article suggests that the rise of Finnish geopolitics in the 1990s had surprisingly little to do with its policy relevance to region-building or otherwise shaping the political landscape in the European North. The rise of Finnish geopolitics should rather be regarded as an academic process that was inspired by the advances made in Anglo-American critical political geography. While interdisciplinary geopolitical scholarship made a promising start in Finland in the 1990s, recent developments give less reason for optimism. Some challenges for future geopolitical scholarship are also discussed.

Actional Distances between the Socialist Countries in the I960's

This paper examines the degrees of cooperation and conflict between the Socialist countries from January 1962 until the end of August 1968. The study is an experiment in the analysis of international interaction events. The sources of data are rather exceptional news media: the relevant editorials of five Finnish newspapers and the Chronology of Current History. However, the method is not a content analysis but an event analysis. The concept of actional distance is used to measure and combine (both explicitly and implicitly) cooperation and conflict. Actional distance between A and B includes both direct interaction between them and the behavior of A and B toward some object X. The distances among the Socialist countries are described in regard to the Sino-Soviet conflict. The bloc is found to be divided into two subgroups with the exception of five countries which do not belong to either of them. The theory tested is the Simmel/Coser cohesion hypothesis, which is strongly supported by the results. The results are compared with two content analysis studies and one transac tion flow study; the comparison confirms the validity of the results of this paper. The validity problem is also discussed.

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).

Convergent vs. Conflicting Interests in Processes of Armaments Acquisition: A Case Study of Two Finnish Decisions on the Procurement of Military Aircraft

Harle, V. Convergent vs. Conflicting Interests in Processes of Armaments Acquisition: A Case Study of Two Finnish Decisions on the Procurement of Military Aircraft. Cooperation and Conflict, XIV, 1979, 21-33. In 1976 the Finnish Government decided to replace the Finnish Air Force Fouga Magister jet trainers with advanced British HS Hawk jet trainers and its Saab Safir primary trainers with indigenous Leko-70s. The author suggests that these decisions cannot be explained by reference to the external environment of Finnish foreign policy, and therefore a more general framework based on the literature on the military-in dustrial complex is proposed. The theory can be criticized, however, for the assumption that the MIC segments exercise their influence in a more or less coordinated and mutually supportive way to achieve and maintain optimal levels of military expenditure. This also applies to the Finnish case: the decisions were made either against the interests of the Finnish aircraft industry or on the direct responsibility of the Finnish Government, and were not based on common MIC interests. Air Force interests conflicted with those of industry, and the role of the Government was to decide which interests were to be taken into consideration. The author hesitates to generalize his findings, but suggests that research be carried out along the same lines in other countries.