CFP 2020, 1: GEOPOLITICS AND GLOCALISM

Already in Land und Meer, Carl Schmitt set out the hypothesis where contemporaneity itself produces a second “spatial revolution” after the one marked by the conquest of the oceans between the 16th and 17thcenturies. The introduction of the air element into the modern contraposition between land and sea would provoke a geopolitical as well as existential shift. Land is, in fact, the only surface on where it is possible to draw and defend a clearly defined border and thus is the only place by definition where territory can transform itself into a meaningful social and political community.

Local, interregional and trans-border socioeconomic mobility, communication technologies, global markets, new technologies and the “cyber” dimension, all impose a continental dimension to some processes of government in such a way that augments the porosity of territorial confines which in turn become increasingly more fluid in the same way as the identities crossing them.

Looking at globalization from an exclusively global perspective can nurture the feeling of “disorientation” in the face of the porosity of borders and the remodulation of the relationship between inclusion and exclusion within modern sovereignty. It is not by chance that the so-called “sovereignist” political forces around the world are claiming the power of decision against supra-state entities and, more generally, are in opposition to every form of power external to national borders (and thus able to plunge the Westphalian triad of political power, population and territory into a state of crisis), while the rhetoric of populist voices from both the left and right crash against those who represent the “global élite”.

The geopolitical outlook further complicates the scene by way of its point of view which focusses on the concept of “strategic interest”. What is the strategic interest of a country or a population and how does it change in the face the interdependence between states in the world order as we know it today? How is the geopolitical outlook and supra-state structuring of the world order organized between them? What relationship is there between the first and the crisis being felt by the second? Can we possibly find a synthesis of the conflict between land, sea and air? A glocal perspective could help in responding to these and other questions.