Geopolitică

1.General remarks

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world in which we live is often characterized by the acceleration of time, the shrinking of space and the plurality of the political. It is a world that shows a rich mosaic of motifs for a political geography of the future. The present world supplies the political thinking with abundant topics to be addressed:

-contrasting trends and growing inequalities - although there is strong evidence that during the last 2 or 3 decades the developed countries seem to slow down their pace of economic growth and the developing countries try to catch up, these are only global trends. If you look at particular cases or at the variation of the relevant socio-economic indicators, such as GDP per capita or human development index, you will find out that in fact the gaps in economic terms between developed countries on one side and the developing countries on the other side have been widening lately. The sharpest disparities have occurred within the group of developing countries: only some of them have been able to take advantage of the benefits of globalization - Brazil, China, Mexico, Indonesia have been attractive to international investment flows; others have experienced economic decline and stagnation, for example, in about 70 countries of the world average incomes are lower today than they were in 1980.

-social conflicts and movements of resistance - have two major origins: cultural one is based on the increasing pressure of the global forces and the local inertia trying to resist against the identity dilution (from the cultural point of view, the globalization process is considered to be a homogenization process -are we going to deal with national identities in 50 years, in 100 years or we are going to deal with the world system as a uniform cultural entity; ethnic one caused by two apparently opposing trends: both re-emergent nationalism and new supra-national identities are developing on the globe. Let's take Europe as an example: nationalistic tensions in Northern Ireland, in Basque Region Spain, in Corsican Island in France, in former Yugoslavian space and the enlargement process of the European Union.

-the environmental change as political subject - is due to the fact that international security is largely dependent on healthy environment; the motto frequently used is "think globally, act locally" which means that the world-system is increasingly interdependent and that there are mutual relationships between nature and society. Up to the 1970s the general opinion was that human society can place any action on the physical environment without having any feedback, after the environmental and energy crises from the beginning of the 1970s, the human society became aware of the complex, dynamic and partially known response of the nature, so the scientists try to analyze the human dimension of the global environmental changes (what is the impact of green house gas emissions, ozone-layer reduction, acid rains, loss of biodiversity on the quality of the human life)

-new forms of governance and democracy - political actors try to set up efficient coalitions and regulating modes of the economic and social life. Democracy takes a variety of forms showing the efforts to meet the civil society needs as well as the civil society struggle to be better represented by the corresponding governments. More over, rethinking the state-society relations across the national territory in different areas of the world is a vital component of the political geography.

-resurgence of ethico-political concerns in relation to human rights - there are internationally accepted human rights and international institutions monitoring the world in this respect. That is why the provision or not of human rights can be a tension source of international relations between different nation-states.

-place of indigenous people vs. new comers - the position of countries in the democratic transition process, the differences between the economic development, ethical and social conflicts stay at the root of international migration flows. Romanian people emigrate to Canada, USA, Germany, Italy and other western European countries, whereas people from China, Pakistan, Arab countries immigrate to Romania. Also the displacement of peoples and the integration-segregation of the world's refugee population are subject to geopolitical inquiry.

-global significance of gender and race - are there anthropological differences related to race (is white man superior to black people, is German pure, educated superior people to Jewish or Slav people) or are women given equal job opportunities as men (do they have equal rights, how can we explain the differences of individual income, are women well represented at the level of political and economic leadership) are important questions whose answers are relevant also for the political thinking.

At the same time, the conceptual frames are used to bring some sense of understanding to these pressing themes which are themselves open to review, restructuring and radical change. The complex world we are trying to cope with, provides a field for a broad range of perspectives that focus on the increasingly significant web of relations connecting space, politics and power. That is one of the reasons the political issues should be addressed in an inter-disciplinary way keeping open different lines of analytical approaches. This is especially crucial since we live in a world where conflicts in society as well as within and across our own ways of interpretation, have a tendency to proliferate and to become more complex