Geopolitics, Geoeconomics: What's the Difference?
Geopolitical entities versus geoeconomic systems
**First draft - not edited - to be refined and re-released with a new title**
In computer science, there are practices related to programming that involve handling shared resources. An atomic operation means that a operation on a variable completes in one iteration relative to other operations. A non-atomic operation acts on the same variable, iteratively, while other operations work with that variable at the same time. When non-atomic operations are not properly “guided” you get a “data race” with broken reads from, and writes to, the variable. In plain English, distinct activities, and/or sets of activities, interfere with one another when attempting to do their activities in the same location at the same time.
Geopolitics: The first global, unit-level consolidation of peoples
For a very 2-300 years, starting with the evolving peace of Westphalia from 1648 (I know…I know) Europe began to spread its idea of atomic sovereignty around the globe. First, that sovereignty was monarchical, and by its nature not very atomic. There were lots of collisions around the globe as royally chartered corporations and imperial agents for any given empire (large or small) competed with their counterparts. Over time, these territories were essentially consolidated and the boundaries demarcated, and battles were fought at the edges of these boundaries.
Beginning in the 19th century, following the revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the monarchical state slowly made way for the nationalist state. The nationalist state had harder boundaries, which included a defined “people” and their defined “location” and their needs for survival. The nation-state, as it became known, was highly atomic and collisions, conflicts, disagreements about which people should live where, would inevitably lead to a war - some small, some large.
This all came to head in World War I. The non-atomic hinterlands were brought into the atomic war of attrition on the European continent: a true “data race” and a fundamental example of the wastefulness of poor governance structures. But we weren’t done, and few lessons were learned as the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic demonstrated.
The nationalist state reached a peak during the interwar period, with collisions between extremely atomic cults of nationalist personalities (Mussolini, Hitler, the Japanese emperor) and those who preferred a slightly more “open” globe. Following that ultimate collision in Europe, only two atomic entities remained: the US, and the USSR. This was the ultimate atomic model: two operations on a global set of resources, and very little interaction between them. Although, if they did “interact”, one would probably annihilate the other, leaving the system open to the victor/survive (if anything had remained).
This is the story of #geopolitics as we know it: nation-states and their competition against other comparable “units of territorial governance.” Collisions between their interests and operations are often destructive, and it is this history - especially from a European perspective - that informs much of Western international relations theory.
The point is that the central theme of #geopolitics is: the nation-state and all its attendant governance challenges, both domestic and foreign.
Geoeconomics: A system, a network, a flood
Towards the middle of the 20th century, a group of anti-socialists that are often referred to as the Geneva School were pushing for a way to make the world of commerce safe from these nationalist-state tendencies. One can (and should) read Quinn Slobodian’s history of this group (click the link ^) of people and their concerns with national democratic governance. To paraphrase the entire book: they weren’t exactly proponents of the democratic peace theory due to its correlation with nationalist threats to global commerce.
In many ways, the Geneva School was (and is?) just an extension of Norman Angell’s warning in The Great Illusion. Angell pleaded in 1910 that war is destructive to commerce, and that the interlinking of global commercial ties would be destroyed by nation-state/imperial warfare (for what are nation-states but the ultimate Westphalian expression of sovereign writ?).
Fast-forward to the end of the Cold War, the US’ “unipolar moment” and the new wave of globalization driven by:
virtually unrestricted capital flows,
communications networks enabling remote data transfers and production planning and monitoring,
and a philosophical dedication to finally letting the global market system operate without “geopolitical” interference.
While the commercial and financial world has adapted to this networked system, nation-states have largely lagged. In fact, they mostly just got out of the way of the network building for about 20 years (1992 - 2008/12). In the process, the nation-state abandoned the social contract regarding their role as “welfare state” to a greater or lesser degree - depending on the culture of a given a “people and place.” When the world was all nation-states, there was diplomacy, and rules, and national interests and these could all be negotiated with establishment political leaders, advisors, and select industry leaders as well.
No more.
The networks of commerce, finance, logistics, communications were allowed to run free - just like the early (post-1990s) internet was envisioned to run free - for just long enough to get any economic entity in the game that had the capacity to play.
Enter Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party writ large in 2012, following the 2008 financial crisis and the embarrassment of the Atlantic financial cabal…not to mention the North Korean ruling family, the inheritors of the Iranian Revolution, disgruntled South American cults of personality, and really any number of other dissatisfied developing nations (India, Russia, Turkey) with atomic, geopolitical clout.
The geoeconomic networks lay wide open for them to use. Due to the loss of leadership, the economic malaise of the last 15 years, a pandemic, a hard and inward-looking shift in American political culture, climate change, technological jealousy, ad infinitum, and we’re seeing nation-states attack the market system to secure themselves.
The point is this: the central theme of geoeconomics is the process-oriented nature of economic interactions, and the tools that enable them.
Geopolitics versus Geoeconomics
So if there is a “difference” between geopolitics and geoeconomics, it is a different of the unit of action.
In geopolitics, the unit of action is almost always the nation-state and any attendent governance structures that maintain them as “atomic” sovereign units.
In geoeconomics, we’re dealing with a non-atomic, resource-constrained group of iterative interactions, let’s call it "the market system”, in which atomic nation states compete with corporations, the ultra-wealthy, international organized crime, celebrities, large subnational populations - basically any and all atomic groups other than the nation-state.
This “actor” versus “system” approach leads to many people concluding that geoeconomics is just geopolitics, within the scope of global economic competition. But it’s clearly more than that.
What we’ve described above is almost a kind of 4th Generation “warfare”, where different natural and legal persons compete with each other in a jungle of market-oriented constraints. Nation-states aren’t just competing with each other when they attempt to weaponize “geoeconomic” infrastructure - sometimes they are competing with their own populations…let that sink in. Geoeconomics is almost biological, since one of the most basic human activities is exchange. Exchange of gifts, favors, letters, property, goods, ideas, DNA, etc.
Geoeconomics is a system problem, not an actor problem, even though actors’ disagreements constitute the measurable points of friction in the system. Geoeconomics is an issue of governance, which is why perceived US and Western hegemony in technology, finance, information systems, and wealth is often criticized. It’s not just Britain and Germany, Russia and Japan, Ethiopia and Kenya, the United States/Germany-France/China-Russia engaging in diplomacy to solve issues anymore. It’s the entire species that has become sovereign - right down to the least educated troll with an internet connection and state-defended privacy protection.
It is an analytical fallacy to extend geopolitics to the individual, to “democratize humanity”, and have “geopolitics” still make sense in a world of nation-states, territorial sovereign governance, and the potentiality for nuclear war. It breaks the world and makes any cultural grouping a sovereign actor if they gain effective control of territory and infrastructure. There really is no governance structure for what we are witnessing right now, because the nation-state is too limited a concept to be the representative actor. So no, geoeconomics is not just “geopolitics” with an economic layer.
We need to embrace “geoeconomics” as separate from geopolitics. It’s a poor expression, ripe for substitution, that demonstrates that our species is truly, globally connected now. The atomic unit is now the individual, not the nation-state. Geoeconomics is just a “vocabulary” that incorporates the terminology of networks to help us describe the governance challenge of hyper-networked peoples. But how to approach the challenges?
Where to?
#artificialintelligence, algorithmic decision-making, and digital surveillance scares people, for good reason. It trades liberty for order, and we’re not great at writing algorithms that balance liberty and order for an arbitrary set of tastes that also allows diverse preferences to interact without conflict…
The conflict is between nation-state power dynamics and the political struggle for survival, economic health and commercial linkages keep us fed and moving forward, and the inability to allow either to run rampant.
Territorial governance is still a requirement. There is a need for order that extends beyond the political disfunctions of a 19-20th century organizing principle in the networked reality of the 21st century and beyond. Otherwise, we get a war of all against all.
Acknowledging that the nation-state organizing principle has reached its limits, that the individual homo sapiens is the true sovereign, and that we need “network protocols” to avoid gross resource waste is liberty, in effect.
It is also where the network logic of “geoeconomics” leads. That’s a very different world, and an interminable future of atomic nation-state bureaucracies can’t get us there.
Whether “AI”, or something in that conceptual space, is the answer is the conversation we’re having right now. That’s the argument nation-states, cultures, and supraregional governance structures are having right now. That’s the competition that is super intense right now. And nation-states aren’t really leading it - startups and researchers, or private actors with strong ties to a nation-state power structure, are. And the work is conducted sub-nationally, by select human beings, in a more atomic way than nation-states are equipped to handle either way.
That’s “geoeconomics” and it’s bigger than “geopolitics.”