Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements

The admonition to “think globally,” having long outgrown its ecological, vaguely leftist new-age origins, feels now like an advertising slogan that can mean anything to anybody but that won’t go away. Global discourse today is certainly global—it is a buzzword in high and popular culture, the academy, journalism, and a host of other scenes in the United States and elsewhere. Less frequently invoked, though, is the materiality and spatiality of the globe, the globe as the planet. The dimension of global thinking expressed in the earth photograph, published first in Life magazine in 1969, then gaining wider currency on the earth flag, the Whole Earth Catalog, and other expressions of popular ecology movements, now makes only brief appearances around events such as the 1997 Kyoto Conference on Climactic Change, whose failure to build a political consensus to match an impressive degree of scientific unity may be a sign of the waning purchase of the ecological on the global. Globalism is registered as a moment. The end or the beginning of history, the omnipresent figure of simultaneity—the Lexus and the olive tree—and the related threat of belatedness—are we global enough?—are among its temporal registers.¹

Globalism’s emergence as a problematic²—a philosophical or political problem on which one must take a position that newly orients knowledge, cultural, theoretical, and narrative production—can also be read as a sign of the supersession of the global as space. Indeed, an Aufhebung of the material/spatial has become a cliché of boosterist globalism’s ad copy. Disintermediation is the corporate goal: the erasure of distance through communicational, media, or distribution-system breakthroughs. We are said to be witnessing, to mix the temporal and the spatial in the logic of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis, the end of space.³ This has created some political and analytical difficulties. Concepts such as region, place, and the local emerge as counterglobalities, material fixities in the global-temporal swirl. But from what position, from what place, would a global thought articulate itself? From where would the global represent itself? As English and comparative literature undergraduate curricula turn to the global, university colleagues who are looking for the global novel—a novel whose relation to global space is analogous to the national-space narratives that have largely framed the modern novel to date—often search in vain. Salman Rushdie, Bessie Head, Tayeb Salih, Chang-rae Lee, Max Frisch, Amin Maalouf—many come close, but no one really fills the desiderata. The global is as yet inadequately available as an object of representation; a fact tied, I believe, to its problematic character as space.

What I want to argue here, though, is that something of the globe remains in the global, that the spatial categories through which the globe has been thought continue to shape the still inchoate imaginary of the global. And if we want to do some of the work of “cognitive mapping,” as Fredric Jameson has described the construction of alternative futures for the species, then it would certainly be of some use to take a categorical inventory of the global as constituted thus far. Global thinking often conceals its particular, national origins—the United States as Universal Nation is probably the best example of that⁴—just as national liberationist discourses—one version of the “local”—commonly have an implicit supranational character.⁵

The thinking of the global until fairly recent times, from Eratosthenes, who coined the term geography, “the writing of the earth,” and preimperial Chinese geographer Zou Yan, has been material, topographical, spatial, and elemental: its concerns have been mountains, rivers, oceans, islands, and continents, and the way these forms shape social life and history. Martin Lewis and K”ren Wigen’s work on continents documents how the category of the continent has done and...