Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joseph Borrell, announced “the awakening of geopolitical Europe.” Gone are the days of “Soft Power” Europe, he declared during a debate organized by the European Council on Foreign Relations in March 2022, one month after the invasion. This would not mean an exclusive focus on military power. Rather, areas that were not previously thought of as “geopolitical”—global supply chains, flows of goods, money, people, and data—would henceforth have a geopolitical rationale.
Is geopolitics, understood as territorialized interstate competition, really back at the center of world politics? Did it ever subside, washed away by the tide of globalization and its anonymous, borderless market forces? At a time when old-fashioned power plays aimed at controlling territory appear to be back in fashion, and when notions of “national interests” and geographic “spheres of influence” contrast with familiar liberal tropes of a borderless, hyperconnected world, Hidden Geopolitics makes an important intervention by warning against viewing the world in simple binary terms of geopolitics versus globalization, states versus nonstate actors, or foreign versus domestic. The global system of territorially defined nation-states and the seemingly apolitical networks, flows, and processes associated with globalization are not opposites but are closely entwined. However, the power bound up with global capital flows makes for a geopolitics of authority and influence that remains largely hidden when we think about the world solely in terms of territorial nation-states banging up against each other.
Importantly, what Agnew labels hidden geopolitics does not amount to a continuation of classical geopolitics by other means whereby powerful states “weaponize” interdependence and turn seemingly open networks into potent tools of coercion (e.g., Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire, 2023). We live in a world in which territorial states have been hollowed out and in which multinational companies generate much of their revenues beyond the shores of their titular “host” countries whose tax bases shrivel as a result. In this world, Agnew argues, national governments have lost a great deal of their capacity to manage global flows of capital, goods, or people or to address major shocks like the 2007–8 financial crisis. Yet, this is not to say that competitive great power politics is obsolete—far from it. Much of what comprises hidden geopolitics is rooted in the actions—sometimes deliberate, often not—of powerful states (p. 18). What is more, ditching our fixation with the territorial nation-state in favor of a focus on the myriad agents and processes involved in globalization should not mean losing sight of the spatial properties of world politics, Agnew insists. Geographical extensions of power continue to shape politics in the twenty-first century but often along different lines than those defining the territorial state.
To make this point, Hidden Geopolitics explores three ways—operating at different levels—in which geopolitics underpin globalization. The first, at the global level, is the “geopolitics of globalization” (part 1). This refers chiefly to how the world’s most powerful state, the United States, has facilitated the creation of an open world economy by exporting its corporate form and legal and financial procedures to the rest of the world. The second, at the national and subnational levels, is the “geopolitics of development” (part II). Agnew here focuses on the uneven capacities of different national and subnational governments to pursue effective strategies of economic growth and capture the presumed benefits of globalization. The world is far from flat when it comes to integration into the global economy: the benefits of globalization fall unevenly, although increasingly less on a country-by-country basis than in terms of within-country divides (p. 47).
The third geopolitical underpinning of globalization explored in the book is the “low geopolitics of global regulation”: the increasingly complex economic-regulatory activities carried out by private, quasi-public, and public agencies (global firms, national and international banks, pension funds, NGOs, and credit-rating agencies) relatively autonomously from states (part III). This is geopolitics without the drama of military strategies but nevertheless with dramatic effects for local and national communities.
Each theme is illustrated by a set of case studies. The geopolitics of globalization is illustrated through an exploration of the 2018 US–Mexico border crisis and the question of China’s place in the global order. The geopolitics of development is revealed by the variable geography of the 2007–8 financial crisis and the US government’s mishandling of the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic, whereas the geopolitics of global regulation is illustrated by the outsized role of global credit-rating agencies and the EU’s mediation of the Eurozone crisis. Few will likely deny Agnew’s contention that “thinking about the world entirely in terms of interstate competition between the Great Powers misses much about how the world actually works” (p. ix). Likewise, the fact that there are winners and losers from globalization has dawned on even the most ardent pro-globalization liberals. What makes Hidden Geopolitics an important contribution to current debates, however, is its critical political geography perspective, which highlights how spatiality shapes our political world—not via a deterministic relationship between geographic factors and political “necessities” but via geographic representations and imaginaries that influence the understanding and practice of world politics.
This critical perspective comes into clearest view in chapter 3, which focuses on how historical-geographical analogies perpetuate an image of geopolitics originating from the era of inter-imperial rivalry and impose it on the present world to “make the strange familiar.” Agnew offers the examples of “Balkanization” and “Macedonian Syndrome.” Long associated with irrational hatreds among intermixed ethnic groups, both concepts continue to be applied across a range of geographic locations to signal imminent danger from ethnic conflict, thereby effectively reducing geopolitical complexities (not least the detrimental effects of great-power intervention) to local animosities (pp. 58–61). Similar geopolitical tropes inherited from the Cold War presently fuel ideas of a “new Cold War” in which the United States must strive to contain a rising China. This is another form of “hidden” geopolitics: a vernacular geopolitics that offers a convenient but generally misleading way of classifying global problems and solutions.
Hidden Geopolitics has much more to offer than can be explored in this short review. Besides exploring the role of geopolitical tropes in perpetuating a myth of unending interstate territorial conflict, another strength of the book is its attention to historical path-dependence. Chapter 2 centers on the historic role of the United States in opening up the world economy. The public and private agencies of global regulation that shape current patterns of globalization predominantly originate in the United States from where they have been exported to the rest of the world. The very possibility of cross-border corporate and financial transactions hinges on the spread of legal norms and procedures that arose in the United States in the nineteenth century and continue to be managed by global law firms based mainly in New York and London. Importantly, unlike many that see this as bestowing a unique advantage on the United States in enabling it to control the world economy (e.g., Susan Strange, “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony,” International Organization 41 [4], 1987; Farrell and Newman, Underground Empire, 2023), Agnew paints a more uncertain picture in which the monster has long since escaped control by its creator.
As should be clear, Hidden Geopolitics is not a book organized around competing explanatory frameworks and testable hypotheses. What emerges across 200 pages is less a theory of how globalization and geopolitics fit together than a meditation on the historicity and spatiality of global politics. Concerns about case selection thus seem inapt. Still, there are themes I would have liked to read more about. For example, I would have liked to read more about China’s global role (chapter 5 somewhat skims the surface), Putin’s seeming aspirations to reestablish the Russian empire, and the uneven effects of globalization across Africa.
That said, Hidden Geopolitics is a tour de force that delivers a clear message: neither globalization nor geopolitics captures the reality of contemporary world politics. We live in an “in-between world” where great powers continue to vie for domination, but meanwhile all sorts of hidden geopolitics determine how the world really works. This is rarely a good thing, but to remedy the system’s faults we must first clearly see the fault lines.
