Five theses on geoeconomics

Abstract

For over a century, spatialised economic representations of variegated political strands have found a convenient linguistic shell in the term geoeconomics. Since the 1990s, iterations of geoeconomics, usually citing the US-based strategist Edward Luttwak, have become subject to attendant scrutiny by geographers. However, the longer arc of geoeconomic postulates and reasoning, deeply entwined with key 20th century political moments and economic events has long been overlooked. Notably, nearly all of these arguments share a common desire to twist the economic spaces of capitalism towards particular national-political aims that nonetheless are planetary in reach. Invariably this means that geoeconomics’ entanglement with imperialism merits careful consideration. Alongside the range of other interventions assembled in this set, we therefore call for a broad and sustained effort to respond to the present ‘geoeconomics boom’, that is fuelled by a transatlantic, and increasingly trans-Pacific, think-tank industry. In these contexts, we chart vectors for a critical geoeconomics in the form of five condensed theses inviting further debate.

In geo-economics as in war . . . the offensive weapons are more important. Of these, research and development, force-fed with government support and the taxpayers’ money, is perhaps the most important. Just as in war the artillery conquers territory by fire, which the infantry can then occupy, the aim here is to conquer the industries of the future by achieving technological superiority.

(Luttwak, 1998: 131)

As the systemic East-West competition faded in the early 1990s, the analytical frameworks of many Washington hawks and other Cold Warriors elsewhere appeared to be on the brink of irrelevance. This conjuncture soon yielded a multitude of narratives. Some celebrated the triumph of a worldwide liberal revolution soon interwoven with globalisation narratives, others reworked colonial narratives about civilisational clashes, whilst more critical voices discerned the logic of a capitalist world market supplanting nation-states, a prophecy already presented by Marx and Engels in 1848 (Altvater, 1994). The cosmopolitan strategist Luttwak (1990, 1993), however, resurrected the spirits of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and Max Weber, when he asserted that the moment was ripe to focus on geoeconomics. This, he argued, was ‘a very appropriate projection on the world scene of classless meritocratic ambitions, offering desirable roles for military officers and diplomats who were aristocrats, or acted as if they were’ (Luttwak, 1998: 133). Geoeconomics, he had already proposed, could become the new code of strategic political expression, at least for those portions of the world that had left historic hills and plains of military contestation behind for good (Luttwak, 1990).

Like his 1968 Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook Luttwak’s ‘geoeconomics coup’ was eagerly and widely seized upon, now far exceeding his initial outlines. Indeed, redefinitions proliferate. For Blackwill and Harris (2016: 20) geoeconomics signifies the ‘use of economic instruments to promote and defend national interests, and to produce beneficial geopolitical results’. For Wigell and Vihma (2016: 606), geoeconomics more concisely ‘can be defined as “the geostrategic use of economic power”’. In reality, the term has been turned into a useful placeholder that may capture a myriad of relations between economy, space and the often – obscure ‘national interest’. It is seen as a logic driving China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the scramble for its containment from the AUKUS and Quad alliances to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (Imessaoudene, 2022; Envall et al., 2024). ¹ It peppers diagnoses of (yet another ² ) Second Cold War (Schindler et al., 2023) amidst a remilitarisation of Mackinder’s Eurasian rimlands (Wezeman et al., 2024). But whilst the term’s connotation is frequently left up to the reader’s judgement, multiple texts recite the creation myth of Luttwak as geoeconomics’ founder, echoed by media (e.g. Rediker, 2015).

Patron he may be, but as Luttwak (2024) has acknowledged, he is not a parent of geoeconomics. As documented elsewhere (Mallin and Sidaway, 2024a), the Luttwak-as-originator narrative neglects geoeconomics’ tangled historical relationships with geopolitical traditions and a century of explicit references to geoeconomics in English, German and other languages. Far from being a neologism, postulates for establishing geoeconomics as a tool of statecraft or as a spatial science of economic life long predate Luttwak’s re-coinage. In 1919, for instance, former Association of American Geographers’ president Whitbeck (1926) sought to institute a field of research under the rubric of ‘geonomics’ as a ‘body of principles or laws operating under the influence of geographic conditions’ (p. 121). In 1925, the German national-conservative writer and colonial revanchist Dix (1925) first laid out a comprehensive vision for geoeconomics as the natural twin of geopolitics. And, on the eve of the US entry into World War II, the President of the Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Richard Field, proffered geoeconomics as the peaceful Allied antidote to Axis’ ‘geowar’ (Field, 1941). Many others followed. During the Eisenhower administration, geoeconomics appeared in curricula of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, DC. And while geoeconomics never matched the popularity of geopolitics, the notion circulated across the Atlantic and Pacific, until Luttwak’s bold reignition of the term yielded an explosion in its use.

However, this detonation has yielded hasty and predominantly unreflexive adoptions. Geoeconomics has come to pervade policy documents, political statements, media reports and academic texts at multiple levels and in different languages. Despite its incoherent usage, we argue that in at least one way, today’s invocations resemble earlier ‘geoeconomic moments’. It is the scramble for a clear-cut national-political resort amidst upheavals in the tectonic order of the world economy and polity. In contrast to the unipolar perception of the 1990s, today’s juncture is less defined by the overwhelming forces of what Luttwak (1998) called turbocapitalism. Rather it is akin to the ideological and economic spectres of the 1920s and 30s – the revisionist interregnum – in which responses to intensified uneven development, crisis and territorial-economic fragmentation eventually found a valve in the grand and violent remaking of global geography. In light of this, we posit that a broad and incisive critical engagement with geoeconomics, past and present on the part of geography and cognate fields is warranted. Building on aspects outlined elsewhere (Mallin and Sidaway, 2024b: 1), in what follows, we delineate arguments for a critical geoeconomics via five condensed theses:

1. Geoeconomics contains neither intrinsic analytical power nor essence

A principal task of any spatially-attuned critique of political economy is to explain how social relations are mediated through the spatialisation of capitalism and their manifestation in abstract representation, politics or concrete life (Lefebvre, 1991). Amongst a plethora of frameworks, geoeconomics has repeatedly figured for over a century in the slipstream of elite-driven efforts to wield the market-subjugating clout of state bureaucracies over an unruly inter-state system. While some have advanced geoeconomics as a strategic lens that complements the hegemonic impulse of powerful states alongside geopolitics, others have considered it as a distinctive mode of spatialising power. In light of its chequered history, serving diverging interpretations (Mallin and Sidaway, 2024a), we see few grounds for claims that the concept can ultimately hold intrinsic ‘analytical power’ (Vihma, 2018: 49). There is no such thing as singular meta-geoeconomics and it does not appear on the horizon. Hence, if we wish to venture beyond descriptive generalisations of what geoeconomics might signify, we need to look for modes of critical inquiry that contextualise different conceptions, their circulation, and their political effects within specific sociological and historical-geographical contexts. At the same time, we ought to accommodate the mutual propulsion of geoeconomic ideas and praxis that might in the future yield unanticipated and ominous outcomes; just like Geopolitik did when it came into conversation with different kinds of supremacy quests, from Nazism to American Realism (Specter, 2022).

• 2. Historical and geographical contexts form the basis for dialectical critique

Despite the relative obscurity of geoeconomics’ historical emergence, a nuanced analysis of its past is crucial. International Relations (IR) scholarship often suffers from a tendency to bury the evolution of its conceptual apparatus under rigid categorisations. This is evident in the treatment of geopolitics versus geoeconomics within IR, fostering the illusion that both concepts are universal and transhistorical. This has fed into debates focused on neat definitions rather than messy contradictions and contingencies with which lived histories and geographies are dotted. Moreover, unfettered abstraction in scholarly discourse obscures problematic assumptions. Every iteration of geoeconomics, whether as a loose idea, strategic discourse or political programme, emerged within a specific ideological context. In this vein, we concur with Glassman (2024) that critical engagement with geoeconomics needs not solidify assumptions ‘about specific geohistorical realities from broad theoretical frameworks’. Rather, a sharp contextual awareness becomes key to construct ‘finely calibrated analytical tools’ that can differentiate intellectual and political continuities from situated, isolated or accidental particularities. History might repeat itself, but never in identical terms. A nuanced historiography that retrieves the intellectual ferment, on which modes of reasoning thrive, in particular, ought to transcend schematic left/right critique, witness the broad range of figures, from Anglo-American bankers and politicians to revanchist German imperial advocates associated with geoeconomics in the 1920s (Mallin and Sidaway, 2024b).

• 3. Critical geoeconomics is not reducible to critical geopolitics

Since the early 1990s, geographers have launched a multifaceted critique of geopolitical reasoning. Early interventions focused on textual analysis (Dodds and Sidaway, 1994; Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992), subsequently enriched by feminist perspectives (Massaro and Williams, 2013) and grounded readings of geopolitical practice (Megoran, 2006). Critical geopolitics has excelled at dismantling dominant world narratives and their popular echoes in media and cultural industries from James Bond to Call of Duty. In its zeal, it has been said, critical geopolitics has overlooked the social relations of production (Smith, 2000) and the inherent class dynamics of the ‘geopolitics of capitalism’ (Harvey, 1985). This neglect inadvertently replicates the limitations of its target – intellectuals and logics of statecraft that delineate spatial boundaries of good and evil – reinforcing the artificial yet arguably instrumental rifts between geopolitics and political economy in geostrategic rationalities. In the spirit of Smith’s (2000) provocation ‘Is critical geopolitics possible?’, we propose that ‘critical geoeconomics’ should not merely imitate (see also Sparke, 2000). Instead, we suggest that it can help to rebalance analytical vantage points by taking seriously the class struggles inherent in the production of territory. In related terms, to foster a dialectical perspective is not to juxtapose or separate inter-state rivalry and economic and financial and social antagonisms, or to render one a sub-order effect of the other. Such epistemological care, as a productive pathway to integrate critical (international) political economy and political geography scholarship, signals how critical geoeconomics is not simply reducible to critical geopolitics (see also Slobodian, 2023).

• 4. Geostrategy is a business: money talks geography

The early 20th century witnessed a confluence of factors that fuelled the rise of ‘geo-reasoning’. This included a perceived moment of global ‘spatial closure’ (Kearns, 1984), where the world seemed fully grasped by imperial cartographers, alongside an academic fascination with continentalism, exemplified by the concept of Großraumdenken (big-space thinking), whose merits in solving other geographical puzzles, such as Wegner’s continental drift hypothesis, were eagerly seized. The aftermath of the Great War and Bolshevik revolution further amplified this trend. Especially in Weimar Germany, the cataclysmic effects of the British naval blockade and the Versailles treaty fostered a potent mix of ultra-nationalism, revanchism and corporatist ideologies, all of which fuelled a long latent desire to instrumentalise spatial knowledge towards grand political projects. Beyond just Germany, however, a broader sociological shift on both sides of the Atlantic during this period saw foreign policy and military strategy increasingly influenced by financial and industrial elites, whose aim was not least the recovery of war debts from crippled European economies. Their subsequent largesse allowed private foundations and influential ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ to flourish: The Berliner Nationalclub (1920), the British Institute of International Affairs (1920), now Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) and the Deutscher Herrenclub (1923) are just a few examples from this era. Offering a comfortable setting to hold off-record conversations, these shielded lobbies became crucial platforms for advancing geostrategic projections, including varieties of geopolitics and geoeconomics. At face value, they served to corral public opinion behind the ‘national interest’, but they quickly became part of a larger project of reconfiguring business class solidarity; a potent counterweight to the socialist internationalism, and one that could conveniently circumvent legislative scrutiny. Times and spaces have changed and today their ‘more-than-gentlemen’ successors are joined by multiple gainful ventures. Whilst for over 30 years, Luttwak ‘has run his own strategic consultancy – a sort of one-man security firm – that provides bespoke “solutions” to some very intractable problems’ (Meaney, 2015), elsewhere in America, intellectuals of statecraft monetised their trade with virtuosity, from the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy, to Friedman’s Stratfor, or Kissinger Associates. Though clearly a sizeable business sector in its own right, the ‘money-making’ aspect of geostrategic advice has often remained notably low-profile (see Luttwak, 2023); good geopolitical and geoeconomic counsel, it seems, is not merely a rare commodity – it’s priceless. And all the while things have often gone awry (or terribly wrong as Robert McNamara once put it) the industry stubbornly dodges any kind of ‘moral reckoning’ (Anderson, 2016).

• 5. Geoeconomics is a multicentred venture of provincial origin

Geoeconomics began to circulate widely early on. References to, and translations of Dix’s (1925) Geoökonomie, cropped up in Mussolini’s Italy, in Franco’s Spain, in Soviet Russia, as well as imperial Japan. ³ Meanwhile, post-1990 Luttwakian readings of geoeconomics have seeped into policy agendas and documents well beyond the anglophone domain. Notably, its recognition through professional bodies and outlets is manifest in France more than anywhere else outside of North America (see also Mamadouh, 2024). Simultaneously, the worldliness of geoeconomics remains deeply entangled – both in its earlier and its contemporary renditions – with a set of transatlantic, and specifically German-American intellectual exchanges that occurred between the early 19th and early-mid 20th centuries. This includes adaptations of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List’s interventions in favour of economic protectionism, self-sufficiency and industrial diversification; the diffusion of world spatialisations, such as Weltwirtschaft (world economy), Weltpolitik (world politics) or Lebensraum (living space) through figures from Alfred Mahan and Archibald Coolidge to Friedrich Ratzel and Max Weber (Klinke, 2023; Specter, 2022); as much as their globalist antagonists that set the stage for neoliberal projects (Slobodian, 2018). Hence critical geoeconomics joins wider moves to disentangle key moments in the ‘German-American Synthesis’ (Specter, 2022) whilst being mindful of multiple imperial backdrops. It is the task of further geo-historical scrutiny to reconstruct the fusions of these ideas with vernacular political-economic spatialisations from the Indo-Pacific to Afro-Asia and beyond, as well as their relations to colonial and anti-colonial economic projections (see Bhambra, 2021). Such efforts might help highlight the limitations and provinciality of claims to universality inherent to conceptions of geopolitics or geoeconomics, which often remain overlooked.