ABSTRACT

In spite of a passing reference in the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci-who had an eye for such things, despite, or perhaps because of, his long incarceration in a Fascist prison between 1927 and 1935-to the rise of geopolitical discourse (Gramsci 1949:221), and an interest in fashioning a ‘Marxist or proletarian geopolitics’ amongst a small number of German and Hungarian writers in the 1920s (see Bassin 1996), Anders Stephanson (1989:137) could reliably claim that ‘geopolitics has never found a congenial place within the Marxist tradition, let alone been properly theorized’.1 That it belongs to the domain of ideology and to a broad realm of discourse, signs and cultures has however made it a fertile subject for recent post-structuralist analysis.2 As the development of critical geopolitics has explained, once geopolitics is recognized as operating as a discourse, as a scripting of the world and at once a pouvoir (power) and a savoir (a practical knowledge), it is laid open to contextualization, deconstruction and reconstruction. It is in these senses that this chapter wishes to reconsider Iberian, that is Portuguese and Spanish (or, more exactly Castilian and Catalan), geopolitical traditions. The analysis here is preliminary, and a much longer, deeper and more thorough study would be required to do these traditions proper justice. This chapter therefore describes a selective cross-section of Portuguese and Spanish geopolitical discourses. Part of the selectivity arises from the way that they overlap with and form part of the wider rhetorics of the right-wing authoritarian regimes that dominated both countries for much of the twentieth century. However, although they merge into much broader colonial and nationalist politics, self-consciously geopolitical discourses, citing German, British, French and American traditions, are identifiable in both countries. Without claiming to be a wholly representative description of these, this chapter traces some key strands in each and identifies some of their key patterns.