Is geography a destiny?

The second part of the 5th Arab-Turkish Social Sciences Congress, whose first part took place in Morocco, is being held in Ankara at the Institute of Strategic Thinking, with participation from Arab countries as well. This initiative, which was launched before the mass mobilisations in the Arab world began, aimed to bring Turkish academics and researchers together with the intellectual accumulation of the Arab world and to form an effective intellectual-social network. It can be said that this aim has been achieved to a significant extent in the time that has passed. We can say that since this Congress, the first of which took place in 2010, there has been a much more intense traffic and acquaintance between Arab and Turkish academics, and a greater familiarity with one another's work has formed.

The theme of the congress, which meets each year with a different theme, was this year "Security and Geopolitics." In a region where the Arab Revolutions have been dragged into a chaotic environment by a wave of counter-revolution, it seems necessary to dwell more carefully and more comprehensively on these two concepts, and especially on the concept of geopolitics.

The concept of geopolitics is one that takes shape according to how you determine its content. Immanuel Wallerstein is among the foremost thinkers who emphasise the concept. Wallerstein, who, put simply, regards the capitalist world system as the articulation of state structures to one another in the form of long commodity chains, presents this structure as a world system by nourishing it with the concepts of geopolitics and geoculture as well. In other words, of the three basic emphases that give Wallerstein's analysis the form of a world system, two are geopolitics and geoculture.

Wallerstein uses these concepts in a dual sense, to express both the cultural and economic hegemony of US hegemony and the resistance of underdeveloped countries to this hegemony. In this framework, Wallerstein's approach to globalisation also gains meaning. According to the thinker, the concept called globalisation is nothing other than the economic and cultural expansion of the US.

Again in this scope, geopolitics expresses the world of the hegemonic countries that make the world system work. Again with a very simple definition, geoculture is the historical construction of the cultural pressure toward modernisation and development on all countries within the world system. This framework of Wallerstein's is like a mechanism designed to analyse the global capitalist system.

The average use of the concept of geopolitics, on the other hand, is aimed at emphasising that the geographies in which states are located somehow also shape their foreign policy outputs. Centuries ago Ibn Khaldun produced works claiming that the geographies in which societies live are decisive in the formation of their behaviour. What Hegel called Gheist is the deep reason of states, manifested especially under the influence of their own geography as well. This was also the idea that inspired the idea of the "deep state," which would later turn into its most vulgar forms.

Ali Shariati, who expressed the effect of geography on societies and their behaviour with a more philosophical theme, also regarded geography as one of man's "four prisons." It seems that geography, which shapes societies and forms their behaviour, has been constantly said to be effective in states' domestic and foreign policies as well. Indeed, it can be said that even the conceptualisation of "oriental despotism" in Marxist jargon, resting on the conditions of prebendal feudalism, in one way or another emphasises geography; points to an inevitable fate created by geography. But is this really so? That is, is geography really a fate?

Evaluating this matter in the context of Russia's foreign policy can be productive both for making sense of current events and for giving the matter dimension. The thesis that Russia historically determines its foreign policy by a geographical imposition has been dwelt upon. For example, the "policy of reaching the warm seas" is taught, starting from primary school, within Ottoman history lessons. It has been understood and interpreted as the demand to open to the seas where the pulse of trade beats, in order to meet the needs of its very vast and climatically unfavourable geography and to integrate into the global system, and as the policies it developed in this direction.

The warm seas policy appears today to have manifested itself in the form of bringing energy resources and shipment areas under control. Russia aggressively exports energy resources to Europe from its own geography and hinterland, but is geographically far from the Middle East, where the pulse of petro-politics beats. Moreover, the natural gas and oil drilling work in the Eastern Mediterranean basin has come to threaten Russia's future.

Viewed from this angle, it is possible to say that Russia's present policies are a fate drawn by its geography.

Yet there are also the costs that knowing this geography as a fate and doing what it requires bring to the country. Playing to this fate, or rather regarding this policy as fate, may sometimes lead nowhere other than to playing for defeat. The historical defeats Russia is experiencing at present, and has experienced many times, may perhaps have been a result of seeing itself condemned to its geography.

Just like the attitude Iran has displayed. With the policy it put forward in 1979 it had seized the great and golden opportunity of overcoming the prison of its own geography. Yet with the policy it has displayed recently, it is re-establishing its condemnation to its own geography.

Shariati points to love as the way of overcoming the prison of geography, just like the prisons of history, biology and the self. Undoubtedly, for nations, the way of overcoming the prison of geography perhaps passes through this love and an appropriate politics. One who sees himself as a prisoner of fate has most probably raised the walls of the prison he takes for fate himself and shut himself inside it.