Geopolitical Irony
Over the past several days I have posted three times on my other blog concerning biopolitics and bio-power, explicitly contrasting this Foucaultian idea with the more familiar idea of geopolitics (cf. Geopolitics and Biopolitics, Addendum on Geopolitics and Biopolitics, and A Further Note on Geopolitics and Biopolitics).
In these posts I suggested that the emergence and rise of geopolitical thought constitutes the ideological superstructure of the geographically defined nation-state (though I didn’t phrase it there in these Marxist terms). Biopolitical thought is too recent to be unambiguously associated with any particular political form of organization.
It is an irony of history that the institution of the geographically defined nation-state, for which is claimed a privileged status in representing the interests of a particular national group, i.e., serving as the representative of an ethnic identity, now enjoys its unquestioned status as the organizing principle of international political order at the moment when socio-political thought has a mind to deny that there is any such thing as ethnicity, when ethnicity is understood biologically.
Darwin would have, without embarrassment or hesitation, called these ethnicities instances of “geographical races,” and would have understood these geographical races as incipient species (i.e., subspecies), but it has since become too controversial even to acknowledge the existence of an ethnic population associated with a geographical region. However, the only political conception that is today accepted as legitimate is that of — yes, you guessed it — a particular ethnic population associated with a geographical region.
