The Banality of Geographical Evils
Liberalism, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism all leave Kant’s suggested requirement for an adequate foundation in a science of geography to one side. Their universal claims are transhistorical, transcultural, and treated as valid, independent of any rootedness in the facts of geography, ecology, and anthropology. Theories derived from these claims dominate fields of study such as economics (monetarism, rational expectations, public choice, human capital theory), political science (rational choice), international relations (game theory), jurisprudence (law and economics), business administration (theories of the firm), and even psychology (autonomous individualism). These universal forms of thinking are so widely diffused and so commonly accepted as to set the terms of discussion in political rhetoric (particularly with respect to individualism, private property rights, and markets) in much of the popular media (with the business press in the vanguard), as well as in the law (including its international human rights variant). They even provide foundational norms in those fields of study—such as geography, anthropology, and sociology—that take differences as their object of inquiry.
There are two independent but overlapping lines of critical engagement with these universal theories. First is the political critique that their fundamental propositions and abstractions are biased in tems of class or ethnicity (Eurocentric and imperialist, in the case of cosmopolitanism). In appealing so often to the Robinson Crusoe story to illustrate the natural basis of their universal arguments, Marx wryly noted, the classical political economists failed to register that Robinson was “a true-born Briton” who, having conveniently rescued from the wreck watch, ledger, and pen and ink, was already capable of keeping a set of books.1 The application of these universal theories therefore leads to the reinforcement of existing structures of class or geopolitical power, the production of increasing geographical and social inequality (with all of its attendant social stresses), and the plundering of the global commons. This was what Marx so brilliantly revealed in his deconstruction of liberal political economy (Crusoe myth and all) in Capital. The second line of critique focuses on the inherent faults of any theory formulated without reference to the realities of geography, ecology, and anthropology. If geographical knowledge really is a “condition of possibility” of all other forms of knowing, then how can it be so cheerfully ignored in universal theory? The two critiques become entangled when, for example, the tutelage administered by the British imperial regime in India in the name of John Stuart Mill’s liberalism is excused because of the geographical and anthropological conditions (the Indians are not yet mature enough to govern themselves). The geographical and anthropological conception in this case provided a mask for the preservation of class structures within the British imperial state apparatus, in much the same way that Bush protected the incomes and assets of the superrich in the United States while purportedly promoting a purist quest for universal liberty and freedom in the messy geographical and anthropological worlds of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East. In all those cases, recalcitrant geographical details seemed to perpetually frustrate a noble mission (if only Sunnis and Shias would rationally collaborate in a neoliberal democracy in Iraq, and if only the Palestinians would not show the bad taste to vote for Hamas, then all would be well!). The devil as well as the difficulties, it seems, all too often get hidden in the geographical and anthropological details.
How this works politically should be a matter of great concern. In his State of the Union address in January 2003, for example, President Bush dramatically depicted the greatest threat to the security of the United States as an “axis of evil,” constituted by certain states and their terrorist allies who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”2 The term axis, while it conveniently echoed the language of World War II, when the “free world” (albeit in alliance with the Soviet Union) confronted and defeated “the Axis Powers,” also suggested a coherently organized geopolitical arc of evil-minded powers threatening world peace in general and U.S. interests in particular. In a country where Star Wars and fearful threats from evil empires had been a standard feature of popular culture during the Cold War years, the immediate political impact of such an image leaves little to the imagination. The problem was that two of the states named, Iraq (then governed by Sunnis) and Iran (governed by Shias), had waged a bitter war against each other during the 1980s, with the United States broadly supporting the former (Donald Rumsfeld’s smiling handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 is symbolic) in spite of Saddam’s war crimes (Iraq’s use of biological warfare that the United States at the time downplayed). The third state, North Korea, for its part, was isolated from the other two both geographically and politically, but was nevertheless considered equally aberrant and therefore worthy of inclusion in the axis concept. Evil forces were, it seems, gathering in these territories. Designated as centers of evil, these countries had to be disciplined or, in extremis, subdued by main force.
Resort to this trick (for such it is) is not unique to Bush, nor is it confined to the United Statres. The government of Iran regularly reverses the compliment of being the incarnation of evil in the direction of the United States, and the influential Shi’a cleric in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, greeted the U.S. invasion with the memorable words that “the little Satan has been deposed and the grand Satan has arrived.” Ronald Reagan used to refer to the then Soviet Union as an “evil empire” that had to be fiercely resisted if not crushed. The demonizing of certain states, such as Cuba and Libya (followed now by Venezuela); the designation of this or that state as a “rogue state”; the dismissal of even erstwhile allies as representatives of some tired and stuffy “old Europe”: all become part of a discursive world in which global geopolitical alignments get mapped and color-coded in terms of good and evil, mature or immature, barbaric or civilized, old or new, or “with us or against us.” It has long been standard practice in the United States to take some territory, of which the public is woefully ignorant, and designate it as problematic or as harboring evil forces, in order to justify interventions, sanctions, or other prescriptive actions. The idea that international negotiations can be conducted or that economic and military wars can be waged on the basis of such flimsy geographical and anthropological conceptions is quite terrifying. The tension that arises between universal Enlightenment rationality (usually masking more venal commercial interests of the sort that Woodrow Wilson so explicitly revealed) and the geographical and anthropological details encompasses much of the world’s troubled history from the seventeenth century onward.
In this history, the political role of geographical and anthropological knowledge and ignorance requires serious reconsideration. In a poll taken in the United States in 1999, for example, it was shown that the more people knew about a country, the less likely they were to support sanctions or military action against that country.3 Interestingly, the poll was commissioned by Exxon, which at that time, with all of its oil interests, was developing a campaign for the lifting of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, which had been imposed after the hostage crisis and revolution of 1979. The dubious origin of this poll information reinforces the point that geographical knowledge has political implications, in this case for the state of public opinion, since Exxon clearly understood that changing the qualities of that geographical knowledge can have political effects. Part of the reason President Reagan got into so much difficulty over the illegal covert operations the United States sponsored in Central America, and the so-called Iran-Contra scandal, was that so many church groups in the United States had links to religious organizations in Central America (from Moravians to Catholics) and therefore knew that much of the insurgency there was about the popular search for social justice (with liberation theology at its root) and not a mere offshoot of Cuban communism, as the Reagan administration maintained. The State Department, for its part, was fond at that time of using maps that showed a red tide of Cuban-inspired revolution creeping northward from Nicaragua to threaten Texas (of all places!). The manipulation of maps to create a sense of threat from outside is a legendary tool for political propaganda. From this it would seem that elite groups, themselves supposedly well informed, might prefer a population to remain geographically and anthropologically ignorant and therefore easily manipulable. But elite groups themselves often make decisions on the basis of incredibly simplistic and often downright erroneous geographical and anthropological suppositions. When the full story of the Iraq War is told, it will almost certainly become clear that those (based in the Pentagon) who made the key decisions to start and implement the war had no idea what they were likely to encounter on the ground and blithely overruled all those within government (in the State Department, in particular) who at least had some inklings of what the problems on the ground were likely to be like. President Bush, in particular, seems to have been far too preoccupied with his role as an agent of God’s intelligent design on earth to pay any mind whatsoever to grubby geographical or anthropological details. If he registered the difference between Sunnis and Shias at all, he seems to have believed that it was analogous to the difference between Methodists and Baptists in Texas.4
Oversimplifications of this sort are not uncommon. Blair’s foreign policy adviser Robert Cooper, for example, provided a simplified geopolitical vision of the world in which he classified states into three broad types: premodern, modern, and postmodern.5 Postmodern states are those willing to submerge their national interest in pursuit of constructive international collaborations within a cosmopolitan universal rule of law administered through effective international institutions (such as the International Criminal Court, the WTO, and the United Nations). The modern state, by way of contrast, ruthlessly pursues its own narrow national interest in competition with, and at the expense of, other states within the interstate system, sometimes in such a barbaric manner (think of Libya and Iraq of yore) as to deserve the title of a “rogue” state. Premodern states are those that have yet to impose an adequate rule of law internally, whose institutions and political structures are so weak and shaky that they fall apart in the face of the mildest difficulties. There is still, Cooper argued, an enormous job to be done (including influence exercised by civilized external powers) in bringing such “failed” states into the framework of a workable interstate system. Cooper is here repeating, of course, the simplistic nineteenth-century distinctions between civilized, barbarian, and savage societies (though with more respectable wording). The civilized postmodern states (such as those that have constituted the European Union) are charged with the heavy historical burden of bringing both the savage premodern states (like Afghanistan and the Congo) and barbarous modern states (like China and Iran) into a civilized (postmodern) world. Cosmopolitanism, for Blair, was the appropriate philosophical stance for a postmodern version of imperialism, with its doctrines of universal human rights in the foreground (as he indicated in his speech to the U.S. Congress). Geopolitical simplifications of the Cooper sort are occasionally useful, but far more often than not they turn out to be grossly misleading. That for so many other analysts the nation-state is no longer an adequate conceptual anchor for any kind of cosmopolitanism escaped Cooper’s (and presumably Blair’s) attention. And then there is the acute problem of how to fit actual states into such neat boxes. How do we categorize the U.S. posture when it seems to vacillate between rogue state and modern state with occasional intimations (when advantageous) of a supposedly civilized postmodernity? But then it turns out that that is the way that most states are, even those within the European Union that provide the model for Cooper’s definition of postmodern states. France and Britain, after all, are hardly models of subservience to ideals of international law, even though they readily evoke such law when it is in their interest to do so.
Geographical and anthropological knowledge therefore plays a very important political role, and from this it follows that struggles over the qualities of that information are integral to the political process itself. This is particularly true in the case of environmental politics, where much of the battle is fought over exactly what are the appropriate and truthful representations of the geographical and anthropological facts. In the long history of mega-dam projects supported by the World Bank, the bank was in the habit of picturing such projects as pristine and shining gifts of modernity to grateful backward rural populations who could now look forward to rural electrification, flood control, and irrigation possibilities for commercial agriculture. Opponents of such projects typically tabulated the wholesale displacements of populations, the disruptions of indigenous rights and ways of living, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity, commercial impositions, and unwanted transformations in social relations, at the same time as they pointed out that the lucrative contracts for building the dams benefited multinational corporations more than local inhabitants. In the face of such rhetoric, the World Bank found itself obliged to withdraw from funding, for example, the huge Narmada Dam project in India (in which the late lamented Enron corporation was involved) against the will or even knowledge of most local inhabitants. The World Bank has now largely ceased to fund mega-dam projects.6 We are currently exposed to similar controversies in which the nature of the geographical and anthropological information turns out to be critical to the forms of political judgment and economic action. Is global warming occurring, and with what effects and where (if not in my back yard, then who cares?)? How much of it is due to human action, and who is chiefly to blame? What can and should be done about it, and who will benefit or lose most from remedial policies? Where and in what form will the major impacts fall? A vast array of specialists from the scientific community has been mobilized to provide answers to these questions, and the nature of the answers is critical for politics. The problem is that this then opens up the prospect for the science to become, as it is said, “a fig leaf for policy,” which then explains why political forces mobilized within the Bush administration spent so much time trying either to doctor the science or to discredit it, when it pointed to unpalatable conclusions for certain corporate interests (primarily in the energy and transportation sectors).7
Even when unpalatable conclusions about global warming or global poverty become inescapable, the dominant response is to seek remedies within the framework of a universal theory of market freedoms and private property rights, supplemented by a hefty dose of imperial politics to protect dominant power structures. The global poverty problem will be solved, it is said, by the extension of private property rights and microcredit institutions everywhere, no matter what the anthropological or geographical circumstances or consequences (from Lima to Bangladesh and Cairo). An international trading system in pollution rights, plus a new wave of market-led technological innovation, will solve all environmental problems everywhere (this was and is Al Gore’s main promarket and pro-venture capitalist contribution to the debate on global warming). But here, then, is the paradox, for it is the main political powers, led by the United States and the European Union, that pontificate so freely on the importance of the universal principles of liberty and freedom (of the market) while imposing carbon sequestration forestation projects on impoverished countries that in effect have little choice but to accept them, while exporting arms (a trade that Blair and the “postmodern” European Union—Belgium in the lead—did nothing to discourage), barbaric forms of counter-insurgency training (a U.S. specialty), and benevolent forms of aid (dispensed through market mechanisms and often tied to particular commercial interests in donor countries) to many of the modern and premodern states. The lucrative contemporary arms trade into Africa, largely paid for by the loot of that continent’s natural resources, is an appalling form of contemporary neocolonial violence conducted in the name of the free market that makes John Stuart Mill’s paternalistic liberalism toward British imperial rule in nineteenth-century India look positively benign.
The question is how many of these projects and so-called solutions to, say, the global poverty or global warming problem fail out of plain geographical and anthropological ignorance. The history of economic development projects dispensed by the United States and the European powers since World War II (and the “war” against global poverty has been going on intermittently ever since then), is littered with examples of grandiose schemes that failed miserably because of a misreading of the geographical and anthropological circumstances (one of the best documented is the ill-fated “ground-nut scheme” that the British colonial authorities launched in East Africa in the 1950s). The World Bank has, if the truth be known, a huge dossier of such failed projects in its archives. But in some sense failure does not matter, because the real issue of, for example, a program launched around environmental sustainability has nothing to do with the environment, any more than an antipoverty program has to do with poverty. The central purpose is to hold together the universal principles upon which liberal, neoliberal, and some version of the Blairite version of cosmopolitanism is based, in order to sustain the social power relations that are reproduced so effectively through such arrangements. Any good (and admittedly, the good results can occasionally be substantial) that arises from such projects in terms of reversal of environmental degradations or diminution of poverty is purely incidental. Even the launching of a substantial program of redistribution of wealth through institutional reforms and the construction of welfare arrangements in the United States after the disastrous experience of the 1930s had—as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for one, well understood—more to do with saving capitalism from itself than with improving the lot of the American people. It follows that foreknowledge of the geographical and anthropological conditionalities that may lead to success or failure does not matter too much, either, because the definition of success or failure has nothing much to do with what happens to people on the ground. From the viewpoint of the Halliburton company, for example, the Iraq war has been a great success. The war on poverty, made so much of in the U.N. Millennium project now shaped under the supposedly benevolent intellectual leadership of Jeffrey Sachs, is charged with the impossible task of curing global poverty without in any way touching the global processes of accumulation of wealth.
Small wonder, then, that there is so little incentive within the sciences and the social sciences (let alone within the media or in those arenas where public opinion is shaped) to place anthropological and geographical knowledges in the “propaedeutic” position that Kant thought they should in principle occupy. At best, the geographical and anthropological conditions are introduced to explain the particular failure of this or that project in a particular place and time (while always leaving the universal principles unscathed, off limits to criticism). But proponents as well as opponents of the universal theories invariably find themselves obliged to comment in some way on the anthropological and geographical “conditions of applicability” if not “conditions of possibility” for their own arguments. Martha Nussbaum, as we saw, asserts categorically that some new educational strategy in geography, anthropology, and ecology is needed for her cosmopolitanism to work, but she refrains from inquiring into what such an educational strategy might entail. David Held inserts local “situatedness” and “hermeneutical complexity” into his Kantian cosmopolitan frame, but then passes on as if nothing significant is implied thereby. S. Benhabib sees nothing wrong with admitting a great deal of latitude to local interpretations of universal ethical principles, but apparently this in no way interferes with how the universal principles are to be articulated. Ulrich Beck, for his part, reassures us that the spatial issue is all worked out (though his commentary is simplistic beyond belief) and unproblematically supports a universal theory of global individualized human rights, at the same time as he worries that the cosmopolitanism of time badly needs to be addressed. U. Mehta, while vociferously opposing the universalisms of liberalism, says, without justification, that no one has specified what spatial theory is about, and goes on to embrace Burke and Heiddegger (problematic figures both) as providing the necessary answers. Thomas Friedman, of course, just assumes the world is flat and horizontally networked (for rich entrepreneurs) and that the realities of unflatness (for the rest) is just a passing phase, an unfortunate local manifestation of cultural backwardness that will surely pass. Jeffrey Sachs is emphatic that the systemic theories of development economics are fine in themselves but cannot be applied without “a commitment to be thoroughly steeped in the history, ethnography, politics and economics of any place where the professional advisor is working.”8 Parenthetically we might note that-Sachs knew little or nothing about these facts when he involved himself in the disastrous policy of “shock therapy” neoliberalization imposed upon a Russian economy in total turmoil in the 1990s. He has since denied any responsibility for what happened there. But then this is also standard practice. When something works because of special anthropological and geographical conditions, then it is claimed as a triumph for universal theory; if it fails, it is explained away by appeal to exactly those same conditions. When the developmental economies of East and Southeast Asia were chalking up remarkable growth figures in the 1990s, for example, they were depicted by the World Bank as triumphs of neoliberalism lubricated by local Asian values of networking (which the rest of us should consider emulating, as Friedman continues to urge upon us, as a universal principle), but when they crashed in 1997–98 they were universally scorned as examples of crony Asian capitalism that had so violated the tried-and-true principles of neoliberal individualism as to require the ministrations of the IMF to bring them back to good health.
An uncomfortable impression arises out of all this. The facts of anthropology and geography (to which we should also add history), rather than being viewed as systematic conditions of possibility for all other forms of knowing, are being opportunistically appealed to in order to discredit unfavored or promote favored universal positions. This strategy can work successfully precisely because of the inherent positionality, which Kant detected but could not act upon, of geographical and anthropological knowledges in relation to all other ways of knowing. It also happens to be convenient that the facts of geography, anthropology, and history can be mustered so specifically as to be hard to refute. While the general theory would suggest one outcome, the particularities in this place and time are so special and so strange as to generate something entirely different. In this way the principles of the general theory, like the standard “structural adjustment” prescriptions of the IMF (to say nothing of all the standard teaching in the social sciences), can endlessly be protected against refutation at the same time as the failures can be plausibly explained away as local aberrations. The anthropological, historical, and geographical circumstances, the argument seems to go, did not properly collaborate with the universal rationalities of the theory. Bush was right to lead the world into a freedom struggle against tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq (no one, after all, is in favor of tyranny except tyrants), but the locals did not collaborate properly and live up to rational expectations. They were so irrational, in fact, that everyone from John Locke to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill could be invoked to justify their being placed under the yoke of some version of imperial tutelage until they became mature enough to recognize tyranny as evil.
Any resultant incentive from this dismal history to treat geography and anthropology as foundational is blunted by two major barriers. First, it would undermine the capacity for selective opportunism and thereby remove the mask that so conveniently and effectively conceals and protects the particularities of the class or ethnic nationalist power hiding behind the noble universal principles. Second, when theorists have ventured very far in this direction, they find the insertion of geographical and anthropological perspectives disruptive for how the universal theory actually works. The mere introduction of spatiality (let alone environmental dynamics and the politics of place formation) into economic theory, for example, has a powerfully disruptive effect upon its foundational propositions. In 1957, T. Koopmans and A. Beckman published an article that threw “serious doubt on the possibility of sustaining an efficient locational distribution of activities through a price system.” The “decisive difficulty,” Koopmans reported, is that the “dependence of one man’s [locational] decision criterion on other men’s decisions appears to leave no room for efficient price-guided allocation.” Throw spatiality into the hopper of economic reasoning, and the whole logic falls apart because prices cannot do their proper work of coordinating activities in an efficient and optimal manner. Koopmans and Beckman were so distressed by the result that they delayed publication for several years.9 Koopmans got his Nobel Prize, and most economists have cheerfully avoided the paradox ever since. Only recently did Paul Krugman return to the question in order to offer at least a partial mathematical solution. But that solution is neither complete nor foundational, and in any case it is marginalized within economics as a special kind of geographical applicability precisely because of its troubling implications. Given the hegemony of economic thinking, it is passing strange that a discipline that cannot incorporate raw spatiality (surely a universal conditionality of all economic activity), let alone real geography or anthropology, into its fundamental propositions, and which still cannot adequately explain geographical differences in the wealth of nations (except by crude versions of geographical determinism), has such a profoundly influential position in our knowledge structures, over public policy as well as in the media. That this theoretical apparatus ends up obscuring the class character of capitalist accumulation through market exchange is not entirely accidental.
This acute difficulty of incorporating spatiality into general theory is not confined to economics. Consider the work of a leading political theorist like William Connolly.10 His laudable radical intent is to critique what he considers the false universals of political theory (such as rational choice) that protect concentrated political power (particularly within the state). He introduces spatiality into his argument as a vehicle to achieve this goal precisely because, as Koopmans had found earlier, the introduction of spatiality is disruptive of received wisdom. He uses spatiality strategically to attack the universals and argue for “a more cosmopolitan, multidimensional imagination of democracy that distributes democratic energies and identifications across multiple sites.” But when faced with defining what “a more multiplicitous spatialization of democratic energies” might mean, he says little about any kind of material geography or anthropology and merely reviews what other political theorists have had to say about space (which is not much) and territory, concluding that it is impossible to identify theoretically “the place that might, if not supplant loyalty to the state, compete with it so that sometimes a new ‘we’ finds itself bestowing allegiance on constituencies and aspirations in ways that contest the state’s monopoly over political allegiance.” Connolly accepts the disruptive consequences for political theory in general (and Kant’s cosmopolitanism in particular) of rapidly shifting spatialities, but sees this primarily as an opportunity to argue for a new kind of “rhizomatic” and “fragmented” cosmopolitanism in which the Internet figures large as a vehicle for democratic possibility. To complete his project Connolly needs some sense of how spatialities and geographies (the actual places he is looking for) are actively produced and with what anthropological consequences. He appeals to a general principle of “time-space compression” as a disruptive force, but fails to register that “speed-up” in modern culture has been and continues to be produced by a capitalist-military alliance, exacerbated by the revolution in financial powers as a means to preserve and enhance specific class and territorial powers. The Internet has no liberatory potential whatsoever for the billion or so wage workers who, according to the World Bank, are struggling to eke out an existence on less than a dollar a day. Exactly at the point where tangible geographical and anthropological knowledges are essential Connolly’s political theorizing breaks off. We get no further with key concepts of “site,” “spatiality,” “speed,” “territory,” and “place” than their use as convenient metaphors to deservedly disrupt received wisdoms (rational choice theory in particular) within political science.
M. Shapiro, to take another example from political theory, runs into similar difficulties. He sets out to explore the Kantian ethics of hospitality in the midst of global difference. Kant, he points out, “envisioned a world in which an enlarged ethic of hospitality would diminish the significance of the bordered world.” The problem was that Kant did so in a way that “effaces much of the difference that the Kantian ethics of global hospitality is designed to appreciate.” In particular, Kant, by taking a bounded view of space (my formulation, not Shapiro’s) and treating the state as the only relevant institution, could not attend to internal differences (of religion, ethnicity, or merely lifestyle preferences) within states: “Because Kant’s moral map enclosed states as abstract ‘societies of men,’ he lacked a sensitivity to peoples and nations that were not organized in the form of states. Kant’s practical map is strictly geopolitical, recognizing no nations that are not also states. . . . Recognizing a plurality of ‘islands,’ Kant sought a means for creating a peaceful milieu, a tranquil sea within which these islands could become a harmonious archipelago. ‘Peace,’ for Kant is, therefore, primarily a relationship between state entities. Although he advocated a hegemony-resisting form of republican governance within states, his notion of war did not recognize contested terrains—for example, the struggles between settlers and indigenous peoples—within states.” 11
The problem, Shapiro correctly suggests, is to reconcile Kant’s cosmopolitanism with anthropological and geographical differences that are far more complex than a system of nation-states. But instead of investigating the problem through geography and anthropology, Shapiro merely resorts to a self-referential study of the variety of spatial, geographical, and territorial metaphors deployed by the usual philosophical suspects (Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard—though, interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari get passed over). This leaves to one side the active terrain of production of space and of real geographies and anthropologies (as if the only thing that matters is getting the metaphors right, rather than investigating the material processes whereby human populations get together or get disaggregated and differentiated). Had Shapiro read Kant’s Geography, he might also have worried more about Kant’s recorded “sensitivities” to people and places. As it is, Shapiro’s account is learned, and interestingly so, precisely because it recognizes the potential significance of anthropological and geographical conditionalities, but it is sadly deficient in understanding the contingencies that arise “from the interactions of space and discourse” within the contemporary political economy of globalization.
The blurring of the boundaries between anthropology and history achieved by the subaltern studies group in India might offer a friendlier terrain upon which to address these issues. Their insistence on seeking to reveal history from below, as it occurs in actual places through individual lives irrespective of class or culture, does indeed yield important insights. But while their handling of history shows a good deal of skill and depth, their treatment of spatiality and geography is peculiarly wooden. S. Deshpande, working in the contemporary version of this tradition, provides an instructive example.12 He investigates the relations between globalization, conceptions of the Indian nation, and the construction of “Hindu-ness” (or “Hindutva”) as a locus of distinctive identity and meaning across the Indian subcontinent. He sees the history of these relations as “closely and crucially intertwined with a geography,” though it also has a class character. Nehru’s secular developmental model depended, for example, upon a “privileged pan-Indian elite that could, by and large, afford to cut loose its regional moorings.” It entailed a distinctive spatial logic (the history of which “has yet to be written”) of “multi-dimensional relations of domination established along the inter-regional, rural-urban, and city-megacity axes.” A distinctive social geography was superimposed upon the Indian national space. But this spawned a variety of regional-ethnic oppositional movements. Hindutva, as invoked by the BJP Hindu nationalist party, exploits “the ideological vulnerability of the placeless universalism of the Nehruvian nation-space” and seeks “to rekindle a personalised commitment to particular places that are nevertheless embedded within the abstract social space of hindutva.” Hindutva appeals to what Deshpande calls “the sedimented banalities of neighbourliness—the long-term, live-in intimacy of residential relationships among persons and families and between them and their local environment.” Deshpande’s terms are interesting; it is the banality of mundane, everyday local experiences in the streets and residential areas that defines truths that acquire the status of “self-evident common sense.” This forms the basis for a politics (including pathological expressions of intercommunal violence) that is far removed from Kant’s cosmopolitanism. The “banalities” of local geographical loyalties disrupt the cosmopolitan ideal of Nehruvian developmentalism (just as spatialities disrupt the grand harmonies of neoclassical economic or rational choice theories).
This seems a productive line of inquiry until Deshpande looks for some way to better understand the role of spatiality. “One way of understanding spatial strategies,” he writes, “is to think of them as ideological practices involved in the construction of heterotopias.” Spatial strategies “attempt to tie an imagined space to a real place in such a way that these ties also bind people to particular identities and to the political/practical consequences they entail.”13 The formulation is superficially attractive because it at least opens up a consideration of how spaces and places are actually produced. Invocation of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia also has theoretical cachet. But this conceptual move ends up flattening a potentially rich geographical argument into an absolute Kantian space whose wooden banality is no better than the “sedimented banalities of neighborliness” that it interprets. The full implications of heterotopia crucially depend, Deshpande discovers, upon “the context of its mobilisation for some larger than everyday activity or campaign” (that is, it is dependent upon some nonlocal source of power). Nehru had his steel mills, and Hindutva has its symbolic centers and places. Both are equally heterotopic sites. And so what? Is there no better theoretical handle to deal with actual geography and the complexities of spatiality than Foucault’s wooden version of absolute spaces?
In the face of such difficulties some thinkers have understandably chosen to reject cosmopolitanism and to dismantle Kantian universals into local, contingent, and purely place-based communitarian meanings. Michael Walzer, for example, takes this path in formulating a “radically particularist” theory of justice. Senses of justice, a universal principle, can and do vary greatly across space, he argues, even from neighborhood to neighborhood. Such differences often become a manifest source of serious political and juridical conflict. “Local justice” (Jon Elster’s term) is a fact of geographical as well as institutional life and one that deserves close attention. Like Kant’s concession to local laws, this seems to pose an intractable dilemma. We are caught between a relativism that suggests “that for each cultural group there is some theory of justice that captures its ethical intuitions” and “moral universals” that may be just as unpalatable even if they can be defined. But because justice (as Walzer argues) may be “rooted in the distinct understandings of places, honors, jobs, things of all sorts, that constitute a shared way of life,” it does not follow, as Walzer asserts, that “to override those understandings is (always) to act unjustly.”14 The cosmopolitan temptation is, of course, to revert to Zeno’s dream of a “well-ordered and philosophical community” where we should not be “divided from one another by local schemes of justice,” but regard all human beings as “fellow citizens.” Walzer’s communitarian reply is equally utopian, however, since it rests on a belief in “my community right or wrong” without any clear idea of the geographical and anthropological processes that might make something called “community” a possible (let alone coherent) entity of political judgment and of economic action in the first place.
Such abstract communitarian arguments—often produced in direct opposition to neoliberal, liberal, and cosmopolitan universals—invariably end up assuming (tacitly rather than explicitly) a geographical world divided into a mosaic of cultures or communities understood as a series of what Anthony Appiah condemns as “closed territorial boxes.” They fail to note how places and localized ways of life are relationally constructed by a variety of intersecting socio-ecological processes occurring at quite different spatio-temporal scales. No attention is paid in this communitarian political theory to the actual historical-geographical processes of place and community construction. To ignore these processes and build a particularist theory of local justice with respect to places and cultures as embodied things located in a fixed, absolute space is to advocate a fetishistic politics that would try (fortunately, against all odds) to permanently freeze existing geographical structures of places and their social norms of justice. When the communitarian boxes close, exclusions invariably follow. The effect would be as dysfunctional as it would be oppressive. Compared to multiple authoritarian and even neofascist forms of localized social regulation, Kant’s cosmopolitanism as a norm for intervention in an unsatisfactory and violent world of geographical difference appears positively liberatory. The problem for Walzer lies in his failure to examine how “local and particular solidarities” are actually formed and how they work. Take away the presumption of closed boxes, and Walzer’s theory has no clear geographical or anthropological base. Reimpose the closed boxes, and the repressions start.
In reflecting on a set of essays on cosmopolitics, the anthropologist James Clifford, a long-time critic of studying cultures as if they are a series of closed boxes, returned somewhat to his own anthropological roots and came up with the term “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” as the most satisfactory description of his own ambiguous stance toward the word. While he accepts that we live in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, he could not forget that “people have, for many centuries, constructed their sense of belonging, their notions of home, of spiritual and bodily power and freedom, along a continuum of sociospatial attachments. These extend from local valleys and neighborhoods to denser urban sites of encounter and relative anonymity, from national communities tied to a territory to affiliations across borders and oceans. In these diverse contact zones, people sustain critical, non-absolutist strategies for survival and action in a world where space is always already invaded. These competences can be redeemed under a sign of hope as ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms.’ But it is a chastened hope associated more with survival and the ability to articulate locally meaningful, relational futures than with transformation at a systemic level.”15
But the search for “locally meaningful, relational futures” brings us back to Mehta and Edmund Burke. Burke did not deny the possibility of conversations between “mature individuals” (shades of Kant) who could agree upon common policies based upon experiences that were local and particular in character. Burke even envisaged the possibility of systemic transformations arising out of such conversations. “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,” he wrote, “is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”16 Far from being hostile to cosmopolitanism, Anthony Appiah concludes, Burke “posits the culminating value of universalism, that overarching love of humanity; that’s how love of the little platoon is justified, as a first step along the path.” Envisaged here is the possibility of some kind of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” and this is what Appiah celebrates so emphatically.17 It roughly seems to accord with the sentiments expressed in Clifford’s formulation of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” and parallels in some ways the more subversive argument for a “globalization from below,” based either in place-based revolutionary politics of the sort that the anthropologist Arturo Escobar supports or the “subaltern cosmopolitanism” put forward by de Sousa Santos.
All these “adjectival cosmopolitanisms,” as we might call them, have in common the idea of somehow combining respect for local differences with compelling universal principles. From such a standpoint, local patriotism rooted in the geographies of actual places and cosmopolitanism are not necessarily at odds. Rather, they have the potential, as Richard Falk also, somewhat surprisingly, maintains, to “share a common commitment to refashioning conditions for the humane state, the humane region, and, depending on the success of transnational social forces, a decent inclusive globalism.”18 Unlike the postcolonial critics of John Stuart Mill, however, Appiah can take Mill’s theory as one pillar of his cosmopolitanism because it can be merged, he says, with the specifics of existing local cultural traditions (in his case, that of the Asante). The “rooted cosmopolitanism” and the “cosmopolitan patriotism” he seeks to defend are openly and unashamedly rooted in local loyalties (that is, in some version of the anthropological and geographical facts) and form the basis for a global cosmopolitanism of negotiated difference. This cosmopolitanism “is not the name for a dialogue among static closed cultures, each of which is internally homogeneous and different from all the others: not a celebration of the beauty of a collection of closed boxes.” Appiah thus seeks to evade the charge of any narrowly based communitarian politics. He searches for what Clifford called “the ability to articulate locally meaningful, relational futures.” “Localism is,” he argues, “an instrument to achieve universal ideals, universal goals,” and on this basis it is possible to construct “a form of universalism that is sensitive to the ways in which historical context may shape the significance of a practice.”19 This double grounding (in both universals and particulars), he argues, makes possible a truly “liberal cosmopolitanism.” There was, therefore, nothing wrong with both Locke and Smith grounding their liberalism in their own local worlds because that is what all liberals do everywhere. What counts is precisely the fact that they can do so everywhere across the globe while negotiating local differences.
But then there is the problem of how local histories and cultural traditions are to be understood. His father’s pride in Asante tradition, Appiah suggests, was just as important as his father’s British education and admiration for John Stuart Mill in grounding his universal conception of respect for and dignity of the individual as a basic human right against the arbitrariness of colonial and postcolonial state power. But Appiah also suggests that private property rights are necessary to escape from conditions of poverty, and in so doing he happily sets aside “traditional” Asante practices and beliefs concerning common property rights. Appiah’s claim to the mantle of Asante cultural history is highly selective, as well as seductive, evidence as to his own cultural authenticity, and conveniently so. It is not even clear from Appiah’s own account whether his father’s embrace of liberal human rights doctrine was derived more from Asante cultural tradition or from his experience of struggle within the postcolonial Ghanaian state. When we look more closely at where Appiah ends up, we see the construction of an apologia for the extension of liberal (not Asante) doctrines. At the core lies respect for individual human rights and the free development of individuality (as Mill depicted it), supplemented by tolerance toward diverse social, religious, and cultural practices, values, and beliefs.
The great lesson of anthropology, according to Appiah, is that “when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, then you can make sense of each other in the end.”20 This capacity for making sense of each other, for setting up conversations between mature individuals who are willing to lay aside stereotypical representations of each other, plays the central role in Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism.” But unfortunately, this fails to touch the core of contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalism, even as it offers a shining path out of religious bigotry (of the sort that Osama bin Laden and Christian fundamentalists compose) and the petty hatreds that identity politics both highlights and strives to combat. Appiah’s proposals could possibly smooth out the conflicts that derive from cultural and religious differences. But they would do so at the price of ignoring the political-economic inequalities that capitalism typically foments (exacerbated under neoliberalization). In effect, Appiah ends up supporting the liberal and neoliberal imperialist practices that reproduce class inequalities, while soothing our nerves with respect to multicultural differences. His proposals occupy center stage in a longstanding conversation in the United States about identities, diversity, differences, and all manner of discriminations, a conversation that addresses everything under the sun, as Walter Benn Michaels points out in The Trouble with Diversity, except the central difference that really matters: class power and its associated social inequalities.21 Treating others with respect costs nothing, Michaels notes, but the redistribution of real income and of political power does. Nothing that Appiah proposes has anything to say about the immense concentrations of wealth that have in recent years been amassed on Wall Street, except to imply that we should be prepared to tolerate that difference, too.
But within Appiah’s superficially rooted cosmopolitanism lurks a far deeper and more complicated history of place-based and territorialized identifications, with nationalism in the forefront politically and the phenomenology of place taking a central position philosophically. With respect to the latter, the imposing figure of Heidegger (who, as Mehta claims, is “very Burkean”) looms large. Heidegger’s attachment to “dwelling” and “place,” coupled with his thorough rejection of all forms of cosmopolitanism (capitalist, socialist, modernist), seem to place him in polar opposition to Kantian ethics, while giving a substantial philosophical and phenomenological foundation for place-based theories of morality. And Heidegger attracts at least as much attention as Kant among the scholarly elite. The battle between those two philosophical titans and their intellectual legacies will doubtless rage for the next millennium in much the same way that the founders of Greek philosophy (both Kant and Heidegger drew heavily for inspiration on different strains of pre-Socratic thought) defined major intellectual schisms in the past. But can Heidegger give a metaphysical foundation, a philosophical voice, to the stubborn particularities of Kant’s Geography?
Heidegger’s work is, however, distinctly odd in one respect. The phenomenological experience of objects, places, spaces, time, and cultures (languages and myths) makes “place” the “first of all things” and “the locale of the truth of being.”22 Heidegger is the preeminent theorist of that fundamental geographical concept we refer to by the word place. Yet Heidegger never writes about actual places. Though his affiliations with the Germanic cultural and linguistic tradition are evident, and his postwar texts in particular (such as Building, Dwelling, Thinking) were oriented to the practical problem of how to establish a more solid sense of place in a world of massive destruction, he fails to connect his abstracted metaphysical conceptions to the material circumstances of any particular lived geography let alone any specific urban design. The most famous exception is his invocation of the traditional Black Forest farmstead as a site of “dwelling” and “being” in the world. But his presentation is romanticized. Furthermore, the conditions he describes are not material qualities of the contemporary world, and this particular heimat (as Germans call their dwelling-place) is not something to which he or we can return. There is no real geographical or anthropological content to his writing. This has left his followers struggling with the question of how to define the “authentic” qualities of “real places” and what the “rootedness” of morality or of a work of art might mean—in short, how to give more tangible meaning to Heidegger’s abstractions through actual place-building. We also have to struggle to comprehend Heidegger’s earlier support for National Socialist ideology (and its active political practices) and his failure ever to offer any clear renunciation of that connection. What do such cultural and political attachments have to do with his philosophical arguments about “dwelling” in “place”?
It was Hannah Arendt, whose abiding attachment to Heidegger also proved a puzzle, who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” as she watched the Eichmann trial in Israel.23 The connections here may seem far-fetched or even bizarre (though no more so than the intimacy of the Arendt-Heidegger relationship). For what if Arendt’s characterization of evil has some subterranean connection to the banalities of “dwelling,” of “place,” and of “heimat” as social constructs essential to the human condition? What if Deshpande’s “sedimented banalities of neighborliness” are so fundamental to the human condition (as even Foucault ended up acknowledging of space) that they form the preconditions—the Kantian propaedeutic—for all knowledge of and action in the world (including the actions of an Eichmann)? Such a possibility gets evaded in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism. Appiah avoids any mention of Heidegger, as well as any reference to those who have developed theories of place and rootedness based on Heideggerian phenomenology. Heidegger rates only one entry in Cheah and Robbins’s Cosmopolitics, even though the frequent appeals to some sort of “rooted” cosmopolitanism are loud and recurrent throughout the book. But the one entry for Heidegger, in the chapter by Jonathan Ree, is telling: “nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system.” That thought leads Ree to comment on “a fateful slippage in Kant’s transition over the years from the idea of cosmopolitanism to that of perpetual peace. In the process the shining ideal of world citizenship was reduced to a grudging concession that we ought always to allow foreigners to travel among us unmolested, provided they do not stay around too long—an obligation Kant derived from a ‘right all men have . . . founded upon common possession of the surface of the earth, whose spherical form obliges them to suffer others to subsist contiguous to them.’ Apart from this depressing reflection on human sociability, Perpetual Peace allows cosmopolitan rights to be swallowed up again by the old patriotisms they were originally meant to supplant.”24
The evident rootedness of peoples in places draws us rather awkwardly back to Kant’s actual geographical world characterized by folly and aggression, childish vanity and destructiveness—the world of prejudice that cosmopolitanism must counteract or actively suppress in the name of human progress. It takes but a small step then to see geographies and spatialities (and local loyalties) not only as disrupting order and rational universal discourse, but as potentially undermining universal morality and goodness, much as they undermine the basic foundational propositions of economic theory. They become, as with Kant’s Geography, the fount of all prejudice, aggression, and evil (culminating in that of the Eichmann sort). Is this why Bush got away so easily with banal simplifications about an “axis of evil” in the same way that Reagan could so easily slip into a language of “evil empires,” while both repeatedly emphasized universal values of liberty and freedom? Heidegger’s uncompromising honesty takes us precisely to the metaphysical root of what these particular “evils” (both intellectually and politically) might be about. Iraq, East Timor, Rwanda-Burundi, Darfur, and, of course, the Holocaust tell us what they might mean on the ground.
But this cannot be the whole story. Heidegger certainly did not believe himself to be peddling the metaphysics of inherent evil. His acolytes would find unacceptable the equation of the banality of evil with his metaphysics. From this perspective, the evil (if such it is) arises out of the dreadful cosmopolitan habit of demonizing spaces, places, and whole populations as somehow “outside the project” (of market freedoms, of the rule of law, of modernity, of a certain vision of democracy, of civilized values, of international socialism). What if Heidegger is right in insisting that cosmopolitanism is always rooted and situated? This is what Burke presumed, and it is the position that Appiah now fiercely defends. Isaiah Berlin, for his part, was prepared to see Kant as “an unfamiliar source of nationalism,” going on to remark how the Kantian ideal of autonomy of the will, when blended with the doctrines of Herder and Rousseau, “led to terrible explosions” and “pathological” forms of nationalism.25 The peculiar version of U.S. cosmopolitanism then makes sense. It is based, says T. Brennan, on “an Americanism distinct from patriotism yet also jealously supportive of an American imperial myth about the portable ethos of the United States as an idea and (with some modifications) an honorable longing.”26 Was this not the logic that President Bush articulated in his speech on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11? But the myth cannot be sustained without emphatic denunciations and demonizations of “evil empires” and resistant spaces—“axes of evil”—or even problematic spaces (such as Pakistan) where forces of good and evil seem to be locked in never-ending battle.
This tension points to an intellectual impasse in our dominant representations. An awful symmetry defines the two positions. And the symmetry is secured because we cannot deal with “the banality of evil” (as manifest in the particular barbarisms encountered in East Timor, Rwanda-Burundi, or Yugoslavia, and intercommunal violence in the Middle East, in South and Southeast Asia, or even in our own cities, such as Los Angeles and Paris) because, in turn, we cannot understand and deal with geographical and anthropological difference itself. When we do confront it, the banality of the formulations boggles the mind. Nussbaum, for example, inveighs against the collapse of values and the indifference to cosmopolitan goals in the United States: “The state of things in very many parts of the world gives reason for pessimism; when, two hundred years after the publication of Kant’s hopeful treatise, we see so many regions falling prey to ethnic and religious and racial conflict; when we find that the very values of equality, personhood and human rights that Kant defended, and indeed the Enlightenment itself, are derided in some quarters as mere ethnocentric vestiges of Western imperialism; when, in a general way, we see so much more hatred and aggression around us than respect and love.”27
How easy it is to justify (as does Ulrich Beck) from this perspective those NATO bombs on Serbia as a grand effort to eradicate a particular geographical evil in the name of Kantian ethics. It is even possible to support State Department threats against Serb authorities for crimes against humanity, while supporting the U.S. refusal to sign the international convention against such crimes in order to protect Henry Kissinger and his innumerable colleagues from indictment. And are we not all obliged and grateful to President Bush for leading the noble struggle to rid us of evil in Iraq, for leading the great struggle to bring liberty, freedom, and democracy to the world? This is the point where we need to follow Kant into the nether regions of his Geography and Anthropology and there, perhaps, expose the wrong-headed metaphysical foundation given to that geographical perspective by Heidegger. The only way out of the impasse, the only way to break the awful symmetry around which politics has rotated so fearfully for two centuries or more, is to press for that “revival of the science of geography” that will not only “create that unity of knowledge without which all learning remains only piece-work” but also better equip us to deal with the palpable but seemingly intractable problem of the banality of geographical evils on the ground.
So how, then, are geographical, anthropological, and ecological knowledges constituted, and what relation should they have to the noble universal theories that we typically espouse and all too often act upon with the usual complement of disastrous failures? Unfortunately, there is no adequate framework of historical geographical and anthropological knowledge begging and striving to be incorporated into all other forms of knowing. These fields of study are, for a variety of reasons, a terrible mess when it comes to providing a coherent and substantial answer to the grand question that Nussbaum posed but did not resolve. The reasons for this mess are multiple. While there are, as we shall see, critical elements within the particular disciplinary frames of geography and anthropology that could contribute to such an intellectual project, geography in particular has far too often functioned and continues to function as a mere handmaid to state power, imperialist politics, and corporate interests. Anthropology, while it has stronger roots in the Enlightenment tradition of critical engagement, is not immune to such charges either (as shown by its involvement in counter-insurgency practices in Latin America and Southeast Asia in the 1960s, and by the recent revelations of the involvement of some anthropologists in military activities in Iraq). Although some individual geographers (beginning with Alexander von Humboldt) and anthropologists (beginning with Kant and Herder) have worked assiduously on matters of great import, the main body of materials that has been accumulated and assembled within each of these disciplinary frames is incoherent and anecdotal rather than systematic.28 The seeming ordinariness if not banality of geographical descriptions, for example, fails to inspire deep philosophical reflection, even as it conceals, as I hope to show, basic problems of understanding. Had Heidegger spent time describing actual banal geographies as examples of how we might better dwell, then we might not read him with the same attention and respect. And then there is the problem of how we are to understand the geographical racisms and ethnic prejudices of Kant’s actual geographical writings and the repeated failures of theorists of all stripes to confront the banal problematics of materialist geographies, ecologies, and anthropologies, as opposed to delighting in the conveniently disruptive metaphors of spatiality. The conventional response is to maintain respect for Kant by shearing off his geographical writings as aberrant, unfortunate, and irrelevant to his philosophical contributions, much as we accept that Heidegger can be the preeminent theorist of place without ever actually writing about one.
Finally, we also have to recognize that if geographical and anthropological understandings do indeed occupy a “propaedeutic” position in relation to all other forms of knowing, then those other forms of knowing internalize secret ways in which they incorporate geographical and anthropological understandings into their own statements. The implication is that geography and anthropology cannot be isolated disciplines in their own right that contribute to how other disciplines construe the world, because they are forms of knowledge that flow everywhere even as we pretend to ignore their explicit forms. From this it also follows that geography is too important to be left to geographers, and anthropology is too important to be left to anthropologists. The contrary is also true, for no forms of knowledge can work without explicit, tacit, or secret suppositions about the geographical and anthropological world in which they operate, any more than the major institutions of our social order—whether the state and the military, the security apparatus and public health, corporations, the IMF and the World Bank, the NGOs and the trade unions, the Vatican and the United Nations, militant and revolutionary movements—can operate as if they are outside of geographical and anthropological conditionalities. If geography and anthropology describe the conditions of possibility of all forms of thinking (including, as Foucault recognized, the whole of Kant’s philosophy) and of action, of being and becoming in the world, then we surely need to get beyond the banalities and learn more about how such conditions of possibility are actually constituted.