ABSTRACT
In the 1990s such issues as the expansion of NATO membership to include former Communist states in Eastern Europe, the reintegration of Hong Kong into China after more than a century of British colonial rule, the proposed expansion of powers of the European Union at the expense of member governments and the threatened break-up of states such as Canada, Spain, Russia and the United Kingdom at the hands of regional separatist movements all combine questions of the organization of power with those of geographical definition. Understanding each of these issues involves paying detailed attention to the contexts in which they have arisen, knitting together accounts based on various local, regional and international causes. Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, however, political geography has addressed these kinds of questions largely by using an approach that reflected its origins in the Europe and North America of that time; by deploying the modern geopolitical imagination. This frames world politics in terms of a global context in which states vie for power outside their boundaries, gain control (formally and informally) over less modern regions and overtake other states in a worldwide pursuit of global primacy.
