The Tyranny of the Geopolitical

Last week, at the Adelaide Festival, we went to this thing called ‘Breakfast with Papers’. It is an open-air amphitheatre-like space where you go relatively early in the morning, have a croissant and coffee and listen to journos discussing political issues. 

I enjoy listening to political journalists. The proximity they have to politicians translates into a unique form of cynicism that marks journalistic culture. At the same time, I dislike the way some journalists, like many academics in this regard, discuss politicians with a hardly repressed belief that they are better at politics than the politicians they are discussing.  A totally unwarranted belief if you ask me. One that always minimises the nature of the acrobatic act that politicians must engage in as they struggle to make decisions while juggling with an inordinate number of issues and negotiating an equally excessive number of interests. More productive time can be spent reflecting on the presuppositions and trends that mark journalism at a specific time in history and the reasons behind it.

These were the thoughts that came to me when hearing the ‘Breakfast with Papers’ the morning we showed up. That day, the host, Tom Wright had Katrina Sedgwick, Colin James and David Marr who all had many perceptive things to say about the many issues affecting us these days, Scott Morrison and the forthcoming federal elections. What made me want to hop on the stage and show my critical incisors was when Tom Wright interrupted the discussion happening between them to read out a select number of news items which included the Russian army closing in on Kyiv and the Saudi government executing a record number of people (around ninety) in one go.

When Tom Wright read out the Saudi news, one of the journalists on the stage asked: ‘why were they executed for?’. Tom Wright replied something like: ‘I don’t know some religious transgression or another’. Then he explained that there is a choice of being executed by beheading or by hanging but all those executed were hung.

To me what happened at that moment was a quintessential demonstration of one of the most serious problems that plagues the print and the televisual news media today: its reliance on freak show happenings, and on making a freak show out of what is happening.

Firstly, Tom Wright was wrong. The people who were executed in Saudi Arabia were not mainly executed for religious transgression. Some were convicted of serious crime such as rape and murder but most of the executed were in fact classified as political extremists by Saudi regime in connection with their politics regarding Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By failing to deal with this and highlighting instead an orientalised freak-show dimension of the execution where the macabre and the religious meet, it was a missed opportunity to discuss something of great importance for us in Australia, something that also connected these executions to the news regarding the invasion of the Ukraine. This has to do with the way local national political aspirations become entangled with international geo-political imperatives. This is important to talk about because the current government has an unprecedented desire to entangle us with geo-political manoeuvres. While, as is well-known, many Australian governments have involved us in Western wars in the past, this government has a propensity to insert political spats with international political actors right in the midst of national politics like no other government before it. This has been very clear whether in the way it has recently reacted to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, or the way it has almost enthusiastically fostered a climate of international duelling with China. 

Let me make it clear that I am not interested here in questioning who we should be allied to in international politics. It is more the way we do so that interests me.

I was born and raised in a country which has seen the national political aspirations and desires of its citizens crashing many times over on the rocks of geopolitical interests and manoeuvrings. This is what I have termed the tyranny of the geopolitical. This is not the tyranny of one international political actor or another but the tyranny of the geopolitical order as a whole: its capacity to make geopolitical imperatives over-ride the local imperatives of a national population. In Lebanon the way geopolitical imperatives articulate themselves to local antagonisms plays an important role in producing both the social and economic crisis the country finds itself regularly in and the sclerotic governmentality that is unable to deal with it.

A similar tyranny of the geopolitical contributed to the impasse Syria finds itself in today. The democratic desire of the population clashed with the imperatives of the dominant forces of the international order who acted to protect a dictator and a dictatorship because it was in their interest to do so and at the expense of the democratically inclined forces of the country.

Likewise in Egypt where the local revolution deposed an old dictator and managed to bring to power a democratically elected government. The new government was allowed to make changes to the internal structure of Egyptian society but not to touch its position and politics within the geopolitical order. In particular, in relation to Palestine and the siege of Gaza. The new government remained under the watch of the Egyptian army whose interests remained aligned with existing geo-political order. No sooner had the elected government start dabbling with international politics that it found itself deposed. The geo-political order of things imposed its primacy in the figure of Sisi.

Saudi Arabia today, like Israel before it, has become indirectly, in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, and directly in Yemen one of the main shapers and protectors of the existing geo-political order. This is why it was important to highlight the geo-political dimension of its mass assassination /execution ‘program’ rather than its ‘freak-show value’ by the journalists meeting that morning. Especially as we are witnessing one of the most violent expressions of the tyranny of the geo-political in Ukraine today. The aspirations of a whole nation for democracy and for the freedom to align itself with whomever it wishes frustrated by Russia as it feels entitled to prioritise its geo-political interests over the Ukrainian national interest.

How does playing geo-political games ends up affecting local politics is a conversation that is important to have here in Australia. Some would say that the tyranny of the geo-political over the national democratic process has already manifested itself here with the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the subsequent continued subservience of national governments to American geopolitical interests and our participation in its warring ventures. But it remains a fact that, as noted above, no Australian government has made itself an active participant in the antagonistic geo-political games that oppose the United States to China and Russia the way this current government has. As an elected government, it has every right to do so, but we have every right to discuss the ramifications of making the tyranny of the geo-political hover explicitly over our political culture and how it ends up affecting us.