Guest Contributor
Igor Okunev, Professorial Research Fellow at MGIMO University’s Institute for International Studies
It is customary to distinguish between two major territoriality-defined foundations of statehood. These are common territorial identity and mental maps marking the community through awareness of external security threats. In other words, we are talking about an awareness of the “we”-community and the revision of the “they”-community. Nation building connects geographically separate cultural communities with emerging political institutions, which allows the population to act as a source of legitimacy for the future state.
Common territorial identity is the internal basis for statehood, while external security threats, or rather, the relevant security discourse, constitutes the external basis. External threats create the image of “them”, and it is by opposing “them” that the nation is built. In addition to political borders, a new political entity needs identity boundaries, which among others arise also through the awareness of a danger from the outside. In addition, security threats mobilize the population, thereby significantly accelerating internal legitimation. Thomas Eriksen contrasted the two mechanisms as “we-hood,” the common identity and the common mission, and “us-hood,” opposition to an external foe, real or imaginary.
In both mechanisms, particularism, or foregrounding the self among others, which constitutes the greatest challenge to statehood, is clearly geography-based. It is the feeling of belonging to a certain common territory that is one of the main features of national identity. It turns out to be even more significant than an ethno-confessional or socio-economic unity for a state building process. Although people are better aware of this basis of unity, it is less homogeneous at the outset than at the later stages of nation building, when they begin to prevail over territorial identity. In other words, “We” and “They” can be mapped even if it is impossible to determine exactly who “We” and “They” are. This explains why territories that have lost their ethnic identity still stick to the myth about their particularism (Cornwall in England, Istria in Croatia, Ingria in Russia, etc.).
And yet, the described mechanisms fail to adequately explain nation building. These principles can produce only homogeneous nations relying on an understanding of their commonality (primarily territorial) and otherness in relation to external forces. However, almost any state turns out to be heterogeneous and unevenly developed. In Italy and the United States, the industrial North will be opposed to the agricultural South (Mezzogiorno); the east–west divide is visible in Germany and Ukraine; and in France and England the areas closer to the capital are developed and those further away lag behind, etc. Such demarcation lines can be traced not only in the economy, but also in culture, politics, and other realms. Following the two-mechanism logic, the periphery usually seeks isolation (up to secession) through promoting its local identity and contrasting itself with the centre. Such was the case with Catholicized Flemings seceding from the Netherlands, industrial Czechia (Czech Republic) leaving agricultural Slovakia, etc. If these two mechanisms operate infinitely, the world’s political map will keep dividing, and the segmentation of nations will continue, which is not seen on such a scale.
Persistent antagonism in centre–periphery relations in every country points to a possible third mechanism of state building – internal othering. Interregional differentiation is usually studied as a negative phenomenon, something the state should eliminate. This approach steals the spotlight from studies of the emergence of national myths as an important process for maintaining the unity of the country.
Interregional differentiation establishes and maintains internal mental borders between the centre and the periphery. According to the critical theory of the internal “other,” this makes it possible to identify territories in need of assistance and get them to comply with national standards and, accordingly, uphold statehood. This mechanism contains both geochronopolitical and constructivist dimensions.
The geochronopolitical dimension sees centre-periphery relations as a geographical representation of chronopolitical (time-related) differences. Society defines space through the dichotomy of the modern and the backward. If history is interpreted from the perspective of modernity as a linear development from backwardness to modernity, then some regions are assigned the status of modern or developed, while others appear backwards or undeveloped. However, development and backwardness are only meaningful in terms of how they contrast with each other. Such geochronopolitical differentiation operates at the international level (“the developed West/North” vs. “the Third World”) and at the intraregional level. Establishing and maintaining internal mental borders between the centre and the periphery gives the centre the feeling of superior development and allows the periphery to acknowledge its backwardness, that is, the need to follow the centre’s suit.
Critical geopolitics offers the constructivist dimension. There is a special link in the formation of spatial identity, the interpretation of space expressed in spatial myths, images, imagination, and ideas. It is central, as it allows different identities, including those that oppose each other, to form within the same space. This, in turn, proves that geographical variables play a defining – but not decisive – role in political processes. In other words, it suggests routes and possible scenarios of such processes. A periphery as such may be interpreted as an underdeveloped area compared to the centre, which enhances loyalty to the centre and boosts national identity, or as an opportunity to create local histories of one’s own that add up to national identity.
American geographers Corey Johnson and Amanda Coleman believe that “The persistent recognition on the part of the nation-state of an apparently economically and culturally weaker region serves to unify the rest of the nation-state by providing a fable of sorts, one that demonstrates the grandeur of national ideals and the dangers of deviating from them.” The authors find parallels between the myth of the inner “Other” and ideas about the East described in Said’s Orientalism. Edward Said, father of postcolonialism, describes the mystical, exotic, uncontrollable, and undeveloped nature of the East as an image invented a priori by Europeans. They suggested a mode of discourse with the binary opposition of the East and the West. The internal “Other” “is first subordinated through internal colonialism and then assigned negative traits, such as cultural or moral backwardness, which stem from the colonial-like condition.” Thus, the idea of the backwardness of the periphery can be considered a myth of internal Orientalism.
Thus, space forms the basic coordinate system for nation-building, intensifying the crucial mechanisms of a nation’s imagination of its identity. This once again emphasizes the status of political geography as one of the key disciplines for nation studies.
About the author
Igor Okunev is a Professorial Research Fellow at MGIMO University’s Institute for International Studies and Director of its Center for Spatial Analysis in International Relations. He is a Co-Chair of Research Committee on Geopolitics at the International Political Science Association. In 2021, he published an English textbook on Political Geography and Coursera launched his online course on the same subject.