ABSTRACT
Drawing on Ó Tuathail further, I want to build on his claim that ‘geopolitics cannot be abstracted from the textuality of its use’ (Ó Tuathail 1996:65). Indeed, I want to explore the construction of the concept at a pivotal moment within popular discourse, by looking at the intersection of international politics and geography. In this chapter I address these themes by focusing upon popular British fiction in the early part of the twentieth century, a period that is compelling for two reasons. First, this was a time of intense nationalism and state formation, that both reflected the material rivalries in the West and also fuelled further tensions. As Mann reminds us, this was the period when a formal state apparatus began to evolve, but it was as common for governments to spend large sums on war-making as it was to spend funds on state-making (Mann 1988). Relations between states, especially in Europe, were driven by a number of factors; economic rivalries were endemic in a time of industrial growth and imperial aspiration, but were also coloured by longer-standing tensions that had been evolving for decades or more (Overy 1996:289). Competition and conflict between nations drew on archetypes of race and ethnicity and permanent historical markers such as the Prussian occupation of Paris in 1870 or the French Revolution and its after math. The frictions of the past lurked behind the conflicts of the present, and the strategic interpretations of trade routes, boundaries and other geographic realities were slow to change (Paasi 1996). This was a template of time and space that continued to define many conflicts, even until 1939, and it was, as we shall see, a template that was maintained via public discourse.
