Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 144

need to view space in relative rather than absolute terms. At this historical
juncture, the scale of capital accumulation exceeded the boundaries of the
nation-state, creating a problem whose “solution lay in expansion of national
sovereignty over imperial possessions” (Smith 2003:15). For the first time, the

expansion of one state was only possible through its incursion into the terri-
tories held by another. The imperial ambitions of the U.S., for example, could
no longer be con

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ned to North America but found expression in the 1898
Spanish-American war. As a result of this state of a

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airs, no longer was it
possible to conceptualize political problems and predicaments in isolation of
one another at that time, a period that coincides precisely with the rise of
modern geopolitics.
Famed British geopolitical theorist Sir Halford Mackinder aptly captured
this transformation in his analysis of the geopolitics of imperial rivalry, in
which the seafaring hegemony of Britain would be challenged by the growing
land-based power of Russia and its conquest of space through the railroad. In
putting forth this view, he became perhaps the

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first theorist of the world as an
integrated entity. Mackinder (1904:421) predicted that “Every explosion of
social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown
space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the
globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the
world will be shattered in consequence.” According to Ó Tuathail (1996), this
juncture also lent support to a thoroughly Cartesian view of space in which
the detached, value-free observer could make the world intelligible via the
rational application of political theory, theory that was inescapably Western
and patriarchal in nature; he suggests (1996:34-5)

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Mackinder's struggle to establish a fixed point of view was not only a

struggle against other imperialist states but against an intensifying mod-
ernity and

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in de siecle time-space compression that was the eroding the
possibility of establishing a

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fixed point of view.... The geopolitical gaze,
born in conditions of time-space compression and

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in de siecle turmoil,
had a future among those elites who required the spinning world to be
disciplined by a

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fi fixed imperial perspective.

Likewise, around the same time Vladimir Lenin, arguing contra Trotsky for
socialism in one country, was well aware of the relative spaces generated
and annihilated by imperialism. Lenin argued that with the success of coloni-
alism in conquering the world, capitalism had mutated into a new stage,
imperialism, which required a uni

ed global proletariat to combat it.
Among the European states, Germany, prodded to unity and expansionism
by Bismarck, embraced the new technological order of late modernity with
enthusiasm, developing competence in steel, chemicals, and electronics. The
Prussian bureaucracy became a model of e

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ciency, and the German educa-
tion system one of the world's most rigorous. Friedrich Ratzel married Social
Darwinism and geopolitics, establishing a new rationale for German expan-