Geopolitics and Integration: A South American Perspective

Abstract

Regarded as populist, conflict-driven or nationalists, geopoliticians have generally been confronted with suspicion by the academic community. After World War II, geopolitics was associated with Nazi-oriented anti-liberal ideas and, later on, with realist right-wing military circles. Yet, in recent years, the concept of geopolitics has become more widespread as an analytical dimension. A reason for this can be found in the shifts of the international system, where the end of the Cold War and the increasing limits of power of the remaining superpower (the US) are leading to new definitions. The global power architecture is increasingly regarded as ‘multipolar’, and these poles are identified with certain core nation-states. Even if there is continuity here with the established view of nation-states as central nodes of the international system, the new viewpoint regards these as too weak to become nodes of the system by themselves. Hence, some pundits prefer to speak of them as ‘nuclear states’ of broader ‘civilizations’ (Huntington, 2002), as parts of ‘a world of regions’ (Katzenstein, 2005) or of broader ‘regional states’ (Ohmae, 1995).