The revenge of geopolitics: the space as a metaphor of fear in the clash of civilizations

Una de las obras que más ha contribuido a forjar el imaginario geopolítico del mundo occidental es el libro de S. P. Huntington El choque de civilizaciones. En este artículo pretendo evidenciar que este libro y su tesis son estrictamente geopolíticas, es decir, que entran en el marco de los análisis que adoptan un enfoque de ciencia geográfica aplicada, útil para los políticos y para orientar y movilizar a los lectores. De acuerdo con mi lectura, la interpretación de Huntington se encuentra alineada con el imperialismo de Estados Unidos y tiene un impacto insospechado en la política interna de los países occidentales; Por otra parte, la tesis del choque de civilizaciones se basa en una ceguera consciente de la naturaleza de la sociedad contemporánea y los efectos de la globalización. Esta “zona oscura” de la teoría de Huntington revela la preocupación principal del trabajo, a saber, la defensa de Occidente frente a la des-occidentalización. El objetivo de este artículo, por lo tanto, es demostrar en primer lugar que el modelo geopolítico de Huntington se deriva de una fuerte tradición de la historia de la hegemonía estadounidense; en segundo lugar, que su principal objetivo es reconstruir un orden y homogeneidad estables dentro de la civilización occidental; por último, que el incremento reciente en el uso de este modelo puede dar lugar a un aumento de las tensiones entre grupos y los individuos.One of the works that forged the Western geopolitical imagination was The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington. This book, which has been dealt with primarily as a political, sociological work, is imbued by schemes and categories coming from the geographical and geopolitical. My contribution shows that Huntington’s geopolitical approach, that enjoyed a huge success in the world, has an origin in USA imperialism and that it has a much stronger impact than usually noticed. Here I will argue that the Clash of civilizations thesis is based on a conscious blindness with regard to the nature of contemporary societies and by a strong internal contradiction between its description of the world market and its interpretation of culture. These blind spots reveal the main focus of Huntington’s approach: the celebration of homogeneity inside each civilization – and in particular the protection of the West against any de-westernization

Humanity in the State of Nature: Notes on José Saramago’s “Blindness” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

I examine two dystopian novels that share some common starting points: they both refer to afar-distant past, before civilization as such began; they attempt to describe the re-establishment of human moral behavior in the extremely hostile conditions such a pastentails; and their respective authors believe that the only possible basis for re-establishingmorality may be found in the relation of hospitality between the self and the other. The twonovels are Blindness, by José Saramago, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. In spite ofthe difference between the historical contexts in which these novels were written— Blindness was written in 1995 and The Road in 2006—and between the authors, they present strikingsimilarities, even though they ultimately seem to reach different conclusions. Indeed, the twonovels pose the same fundamental political and philosophical question: how is moralitypossible in a condition almost similar to the state of nature? Saramago’s answer issuggested in the behavior—not the language— of the doctor’s wife, the only character whokeeps her eyesight; McCarthy, on the other hand, chooses a child as the moral agent in aworld characterized by death and deprived of order

‘Missed Revolutions’: Historical Narratives During Italian Fascism (from Delio Cantimori to Camillo Pellizzi)

This article analyses some examples of historical narratives that, long before the emergenceof so-called postmodern history, had a specific narrative character: the reconstructions of‘missed revolutions’ taking into account a possible alternative history and tracing back thereasons for a social, political, and economic crisis to an interrupted process, one that, had itbeen completed, would have triggered some sort of progress. Even if this kind of historicalrepresentation cannot properly be classified as a form of alternate history, it can be placedbetween traditional historical accounts of the past and a more innovative pattern, whichentails a more speculative argumentation, and therefore has been used to justify or suggestspecific political claims. One of the most obvious examples of this literature are thenarrations of the ‘unaccomplished Risorgimento’, which was a highly debated theme in thepolitical, intellectual, and historical discussion from the period of the Italian unificationuntil the economic and political reconstruction following the Second World War. Thisarticle will stress four possible functions of the ‘missed revolution’narratives: first, as a wayto discover some currents that have been underestimated by the official historiography ormainstream political discourse; second, to observe the role assigned to particular eventsin altering the destiny of a nation; third, to show how political and intellectual actorsuse history to justify political actions or events; and finally, to reveal how, conversely,by reconstructing ‘missed revolutions’ individual historians and, more generally, publicintellectuals can take up a specific political stance while writing histor

Cultures of Populism and the Political Right in Central Europe

In their paper, Cultures of Populism and the Political Right in Central Europe, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte and Andrea Petö analyze the common points and differences in which imagined and mythologized histories are serving as a mobilizing force for extreme-right movements in three Central European countries, in Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The authors discuss how populist and right-wing political parties in these countries construct their conceptions of an alternative identity for the European Union. Further, the authors analyze the politico-territorial myths constructed by the three populist right-wing parties, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy, and the Party of Hungarian Life and Truth. The programs of the three parties assert the equasion of the German concept of Volk with territory: the Freedom Party propagates a particular concept of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa), the Northern League of Padania assumes to be the true nation of the reagion, and the Party of Hungarian Life and Truth builds on imagined and mythologized concepts of an ancient Hungary with a homogeneous society and culture. The authors analyze the construction of essentialist identities based on imagined historical communities and on the exclusion of the Other where anti-Semitism is a driving factor represent a sceptical ideology evident in the discourse of the said parties

Dall’Oecologie al Blut und Boden: interpretazioni ecologiste da Haeckel al Nazionalsocialismo

This contribution reconstructs a particular period in the history of ecological thought in Germany from the end of the 19th century to Nationalsocialism. Indeed, some key concepts used largely in ecological thought are formulated at this time: Oecologie, Umwelt, milieu and Lebensraum. The reconstruction of the meaning, use of these pivotal concepts, as the consideration of the political and intellectual milieus where they were developed are the object of this contribution, that considers their further development and appropriation during the phase of Nationalsocialism. In particular the changing meaning of the ideas of Oecologie, Umwelt, Oecumene and Lebensraum will be explored from the works by Ernst Haeckel and Friedrich Ratzel, to the Nationalsocialist ecological movements, supported by Rudolf Hess and Richard W. Darré

Changing fears in European geopolitical discourses from the First till the Second World War: Halford Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman and Arnold J. Toynbee

This contribution aims at exploring one aspect of the “production” of fears in the 20th century, analysing the period between the Two World Wars, namely a crucial turning point in the history of the geopolitical and political thought and reconstructing the genesis of the fears concerning the Western civilisation and Europe, that have originated from the end of the Second WW till now. Amongst the academics who dealt with the crisis of the European political system were three main intellectuals, who belonged to different disciplinary fields and were members of key political organizations in their countries: Halford Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman and Arnold J. Toynbee. In this article their ideas will be investigated from the perspective of the history of political thought: they will be considered as “political thinkers”, whose comments on contingent political facts were supported by their academic and intellectual expertise and whose ideas, at their turn, had a certain impact on the political ideas and praxis in the 20th century. In so doing, I will trace back to the genesis of the idealistic paradigm of IR during the crisis of the main institutions of the political national and international order, as well as its fragmentation into two main strains: the geopolitical and the “civilizational” paradigms of interpretation. I will demonstrate, on the one hand, the impact of the political transformations of their “geopolitical conceptual map” from the First to the Second World War – namely their ideas of Europe, America and the “Other” -; on the other hand, I will trace back to the origin of the split between these two main paradigms, used in order to explain the crisis of the order in international order and its possible “restoration”