(Due to unforeseen circumstances, Lily was unable to post this month. So I've re-posted something she wrote in July. I've done this because I found this a very moving and resonant piece, and I'm glad to be able to give it another airing. Sue Purkiss)
This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow.
They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either.
I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains.
The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it.
There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway.
Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string.
This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to.
This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries.
That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.
She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently.
You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do?
And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it.
www.lilyhyde.com
This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow.
They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either.
I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains.
The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it.
There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway.
Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string.
This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to.
This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries.
That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.
She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently.
You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do?
And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it.
www.lilyhyde.com
By Klaus Dodds
If a week is a long time in politics then goodness knows what seven years represents in geopolitical terms. The publication of the second edition of the VSI to Geopolitics was a welcome opportunity to update and reflect on what has changed since its initial publication in 2007. Five issues loomed large for me in terms of the second edition.
First, the onset of a global financial crisis and the geopolitics of austerity deserved greater recognition. While much of the conversation focused on the failings of neoliberal globalisation and the banking/financial services sector, the financial crisis was also geographical and geopolitical in nature. Geographically, the impact and scope of crisis and austerity remains resolutely uneven with some communities and localities more exposed to debt, liability, loss and dispossession. The retrenchment of government spending and investment hit those communities highly dependent on public sector employment for example. Geopolitically, the financial crisis brought to the fore the manner in which some countries were represented and understood as financially reckless, political weak and incapable of reforming their economies. The so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) within the European Union context might be one such example of this geopolitical profiling but another might be the manner in which Cyprus was depicted as a source of ‘hot money’ from Russia and China, which was disrupting the capacity of the Cypriot government to make ‘necessary’ fiscal and political reforms to its economy and society.
Second, the ongoing legacies of the War on Terror needed further exposition. The recent rise of Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has generated a plethora of commentary much of which insists that the contemporary crises in Iraq and Syria are related to the deeply controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a US-led coalition and a US-led strategy designed to use the invasion of Iraq as a way of introducing democratic transformation in the Middle East and Central Asia. What we now appear to face is a situation where the US and Iran might find they are able to collaborate with one another in a mutual goal of preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq (and perhaps also Syria). All of this seems far removed from the situation in January 2002 when President George W Bush described Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’ with Iraq and North Korea. As critics noted at the time, this opportunistic labelling did not reflect the complex geopolitical circumstances surrounding those three states. And the refrain ‘states like these’ in the 2002 State of the Union Address by President Bush suggested that there might be even more to add to the list.
Third, the Edward Snowden revelations have highlighted the second edition had to talk more explicitly about an ‘invisible geopolitics’ or one perhaps barely visible to those of us not well connected to the intelligence community. While few would have been surprised by the rise of a surveillance culture post 9-11 in the US and UK (for example), it took these revelations to bring home quite how involved the communications sector was in enabling these mass surveillance cultures. Had popular culture, including films such as Enemy of the State (1998), offered us a pre-warning of the kind of surveillance capabilities that might be brought to bare on domestic citizens? What might the implications be for citizens to express geopolitical dissent in a world where telephone conversations and electronic conversation might be capable of being recorded, analysed and actioned?
Fourth, a new chapter on objects is introduced for the express purpose of focussing attention on the materiality of geopolitics. In other words, stuff. Whether it be either the CCTV camera on the high street or the flag being waved at an official ceremony, geopolitics is made possible by our relationship to objects. In the midst of the 2014 World Cup, it is difficult to avoid the sight of various national flags fluttering from buildings and cars, and being waved vigorously by supporters. In the contexts of mega events such as the Olympics and World Cups, the flag is an essential accomplice to host governments eager to capitalise on such global media exposure while at the same demanding ever more investment in security projects designed to safe-guard participants, spectators and the interests of government sponsors. But the flag can also matter in more mundane ways as well; the flag that might hang from someone’s house barely noticed but a powerful marker of geopolitical possibilities which extend far beyond national identification.
Fifth, and finally, the second edition was a welcome opportunity to remind readers that geopolitics is always embodied. It is not abstract. It is not something merely preoccupied with the global. It is a subject matter that is resolutely everyday. Geopolitics is about the various ways the geographies of politics are made to matter and the manner in which the local, national, regional and global co-constitute one another. Feminist geographers have been at the vanguard of this realisation and demonstrating how bodies, sites, objects and practices are inter-linked to one another and capable of producing very real consequences for people, communities and environments. The border and associated border regimes provide a rich source of material; linking border control/policing ideologies to the mobility and vulnerability of bodies. Sites and environments matter as anyone who has attempted to cross the US-Mexican border or the Mediterranean in a ramshackle boat would testify. For many of those migrants the journey itself will be one they won’t survive.
Professor Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. Since publication of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, he has co-edited three books, Spaces of Security and Insecurity (2009), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (2010), and The Ashgate Handbook on Critical Geopolitics (2012). He has also written The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction. The new edition of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction
publishes this month.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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Image credit: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / CC-BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The post What has changed in geopolitics? appeared first on OUPblog.
By Rana Mitter
This week, the foreign ministers of Japan and China shook hands in public in Beijing, pledging better relations in the years to come. It was a reminder to westerners that we still don’t know nearly enough about the relationship between the world’s second and third biggest economies (Japan and China having recently switched places, so that Beijing now holds the no. 2 spot, riding hard on the heels of the US). Relations between China and Japan have been rocky over the past few decades, with an incident over the arrest of the captain of a Chinese fishing vessel by the Japanese authorities causing ructions just last autumn. And of course for many Chinese, the relationship is shaped by memories of the horrific war with Japan between 1937 and 1945 in which some 15 million Chinese died. But China and Japan are also profoundly linked economically and culturally. Japanese companies invest in China; Chinese goods flow into Japan. And the two countries share aspects of culture, particularly writing systems and religious practice, that come from centuries of shared interaction. In the twentieth century, Japan was the dominant member of the duo. But as the century to come seems to be China’s , what does that mean for its closest neighbour, sometime enemy, and now wary partner?
The key player in this diplomatic minuet is the US, still, of course, the world’s biggest economy and a cultural powerhouse. It may be in relative decline, but it looms large in every region of the world, including the Pacific. And of course, the continuing security arrangements between the US and Japan are one of the factors that exercise minds in Beijing. The Chinese see the Pacific as the site of a new regional hegemony: not territorial, but in terms of influence, both military and economic. Having the United States, with its powerful naval presence, in the Pacific, is a constant reminder that there is a check on their ambitions in the region and that not everyone in that region welcomes every aspect of China’s “peaceful rise.” And Japan is still a key US ally. After World War II, Japan was disarmed precisely so that it could never again invade and occupy Asia. But as a result, Japan’s defence was taken care of by the United States, leaving Japan free to grow its economy (remember, until the 1990s, “Asian economic miracle” meant Japan, not China). Ironically, the China of today might have preferred it if China had been left to develop its own forces without US assistance in the postwar era, since it would be easier for Beijing to face down an independent military in Tokyo than to do so a force backed by Washington. The rivalry is not just about arms: both China and Japan compete for influence in the region and beyond with foreign aid and investment. So the mistrust remains – but also the realization that the relationship will inevitably change as China becomes richer and Japan becomes older (Japan is one of the faster-ageing societies in the world – although so will China be from the 2020s on, because the children of the one-child policy are getting older).
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford and the author of Modern China: A Very Short Introduction and A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World. The Sino-Japanese relationship is just one area that will be explored at a forum
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