This is the first book to examine Britain’s geopolitical identity and how it is expressed in foreign policy discourse. It demonstrates how British imperial thought, related to its island status, has remained important for British Members of Parliament in their debates of contemporary issues. It presents an exciting and provocative new reading of modern British foreign policy that decentres traditional notions of rationalism and pragmatism by foregrounding the much-neglected aspects of identity and geopolitical space. As British foreign policy-makers wrestle with how to define Britishness outside of the EU, this analysis provides a fresh perspective. It presents a much-needed historical contextualisation of long-standing concepts such as insularity from Europe and a universal aspect on world affairs. This book will be highly relevant for students, researchers and professionals that are seeking to understand British foreign policy. It will be of interest to those researching and working within geopolitics, identity, sociology, foreign policy analysis and international relations.

This book brings together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics. It provides an archaeology of the field, maps the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and charts a course forward for the discipline. It explores the real-world implications of popular culture, with a particular focus on the evolving interdisciplinary nature of popular geopolitics alongside interrelated disciplines including media, cultural, and gender studies.

This book examines the relationship between national identity construction and current foreign policy discourses on Russia in selected European Union member states in 2014–2018. It shows that divergent national discourses on Russia derive from the different ways in which the country was constructed in national identity. The book develops an interpretive theoretical framework and argues that policy makers’ agency can profoundly influence the contestation between different identity narratives. It includes case studies in policy areas that are of primary importance for EU–Russia relations, such as energy security (the Nord Stream 2 controversy), the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s military intervention in Syria. Focusing on EU member states that have traditionally taken different stances vis-à-vis Russia (Germany, Poland and Finland), it shows that at the peak of the Ukraine crisis national discourses converged towards a pragmatic, but critical narrative. As the Ukraine crisis subsided and new events took centre stage in foreign policy discussions (i.e. the Syrian civil war, international terrorism), long-standing and identity-based divergences partly re-emerged in the discourses of policy makers. This became particularly evident during the Nord Stream 2 controversy. Deep-rooted and different perceptions of the Russian Other in EU member states are still influential and lead to divergent national agendas for foreign policy towards Russia. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in European and EU politics, Russian and Soviet politics, and International Relations.

This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation’s historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions. The empirical part of the book focuses on the critical analysis of first-hand sources containing representations of the imagined spaces and places of Bulgaria and Bulgarians from a long-term perspective. The research results are structured in accordance with the author’s model of an imagined national space. It contains three general domains: possessed national space, the ethnogeopolitical neighbourhood, and ancient and legendary spaces. The book also explores how Bulgarians’ historical and ethnic spaces are linked with specific geopolitics, such as passive internal geopolitics, soft revisionism, non-intervening geopolitical claims, blocking international integration as a disguised form of old territorial claims, and emerging historical geopolitics. It examines how the imagined national space is approached by statesmen, politicians, academics, and other creators of ‘high’ geopolitics. The book also pays attention to the role of spatial imaginations in growing ‘low’ (popular) geopolitics, which includes media, popular culture, and national mythology. Written in an interdisciplinary manner, this timely book will attract the interest of scholars and students in geopolitics, human geography, international relations, nationalism studies, and ethnic history.

"This is the first book to examine Britain's geopolitical identity and how it is expressed in foreign policy discourse. It demonstrates how British imperial thought, related to its island status, has remained important for British Members of Parliament in their debates of contemporary issues. It presents an exciting and provocative new reading of modern British foreign policy that decentres traditional notions of rationalism and pragmatism by foregrounding the much-neglected aspects of identity and geopolitical space. As British foreign policy-makers wrestle with how to define Britishness outside of the EU, this analysis provides a fresh perspective. It presents a much-needed historical contextualisation of long-standing concepts such as insularity from Europe and a universal aspect on world affairs. This book will be highly relevant for students, researchers and professionals that are seeking to understand British foreign policy. It will be of interest to those researching and working within geopolitics, identity, sociology, foreign policy analysis and international relations"--

Analyzing changes in the role and place of NATO, European integration, and Franco-American relations in foreign policy discourse under Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, this book provides an original perspective on French foreign policy and its identity construction. The book employs a novel research design for the analysis of foreign policies, which can be used beyond the case of France, by combining the discourse theory of the Essex School with Interpretive Policy Analysis to examine political ideas and how they are organized into a foreign policy identity. On these grounds, the volume undertakes a comparative analysis of parliamentary and executive discourse of President Chirac’s failed attempt at NATO reintegration in the 1990s, Sarkozy’s successful attempt in the 2000s, and the Libyan War. Ostermann depicts French foreign policy and identity as turning away from the European Union, atlanticizing, and losing its American nemesis. As a result, France uses a much more pragmatic, de-unionized, and pro-American strategy to implement foreign policy objectives than before. Offering a new and innovative explanation for a major change in French foreign policy and grand strategy, this book will be of great interest to scholars of NATO, European defense cooperation, and foreign policy.

This book explores competing definitions of Hellenism in the making of the Greek state by drawing on critical historical and geopolitical perspectives and their intersection with difference and exclusion. It examines Greece’s central role in shaping the state system, regional security, and nationalisms of the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean regions. Understanding the Greek State's social constitution helps learn about the past and present intentions and strategies as well as local, national, and European notions of security and identity. The book looks at the relation of subaltern communities to state power and the state’s ability and willingness to negotiate difference. It also explores how the State’s identity politics shaped regional geopolitics in the past two centuries. Chapters present case studies that shed light on the Hellenization of Jewish Thessaloniki, the Treaty of Lausanne’s making of Western Thrace’s Muslim minority, the role and modes of settlement, urbanization, and ‘bordering-as-statecraft’ in Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace, and the politics of erecting the Athens Mosque, the first officially-licensed mosque outside Western Thrace since Greek Independence. With examples from fieldwork in Greek cities and borderlands, this book offers a wealth of primary research from geographers and historians on the modern history of Greek statehood. It will be of key interest to scholars of political geography, international relations, and European history.

This extraordinary and truly international range of essays illustrates the different manifestations of the geographical imagination by locating myths of national identity and analysing their value in terms of pride, fear and aggression.

Exceptionalist ideas have long influenced British foreign policy. As Britain begins to confront the challenges of a post-Brexit era in an increasingly unstable world, a re-examination of the nature and causes of this exceptionalist bent is in order. Arguing that Britain's search for greatness in world affairs was, and still is, a matter of habit, Srdjan Vucetic takes a closer look at the period between Clement Attlee's "New Jerusalem" and Tony Blair's New Labour. Britain's tenacious pursuit of global power was never just a function of consensus among policymakers or even political elites more broadly. Rather, it developed from popular, everyday, and gradually evolving ideas about identity circulating within British – and, more specifically, English – society as a whole. To uncover these ideas, Vucetic works with a unique archive of political speeches, newspapers, history textbooks, novels, and movies across colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods. Greatness and Decline sheds new light on Britain's interactions with the rest of the world while demonstrating new possibilities for constructivist foreign policy analysis.

The rise of India as a major power has generated new interest in understanding the drivers of its foreign policy. This book argues that analysing India’s foreign and security policies as representational practices which produce India’s identity as a postcolonial nation-state helps to illuminate the conditions of possibility in which foreign policy is made. Spanning the period between 1947 and 2004, the book focuses on key moments of crisis, such as the India-China war in 1962 and the nuclear tests of 1972 and 1998, and the approach to international affairs of significant leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. The analysis sheds new light on these key events and figures and develops a strong analytical narrative around India’s foreign policy behaviour, based on an understanding of its postcolonial identity. It is argued that a prominent facet of India’s identity is a perception that it is a civilizational-state which brings to international affairs a tradition of morality and ethical conduct derived from its civilizational heritage and the experience of its anti-colonial struggle. This notion of ‘civilizational exceptionalism’, as well as other narratives of India’s civilizational past, such as its vulnerability to invasion and conquest, have shaped the foreign policies of governments of various political hues and continue to influence a rising India.