A country is like a figure skater. Stick with me for a second.
When a pair of figure skaters go into the death spiral, one skater pivots around a central
point and holds onto the second skater’s arm as they rotate while basically being parallel
to the ice.
The skater in the center is like centripetal force, which you may have heard of in physics,
because they pull the other skater towards the center. And we can use the same term in
geography to talk about forces that bring people together.
At the same time -- probably while their life is flashing before their eyes because mine
certainly would be if someone was swinging me around while figure skating -- the skater
parallel to the ice is like a centrifugal force trying to pull the skaters apart. Technically
centrifugal force doesn’t exist in real life physics, but in geography we can still
use the terms to visualize the way there can be forces pulling a state apart from the inside
and threatening the stability of the state’s power.
Tension like we see on display in the death spiral exists everywhere -- in physics, in
figure skating, and between the many centripetal and centrifugal forces in geography.
And no one event or force is enough to pull a state apart or together. A state has to
master the waves of external forces and internal needs of their neighbors and their citizens.
Which makes creating stability and peace a delicate balancing act.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
Really, a country is mostly just another name for a state, or a unit of government that
controls borders. But states are held together by power systems. So today we’re diving
into geopolitics, which is the term we use for studying international relationships across space.
We’ll be looking across borders but also within borders, because how a state builds
a relationship with other states is often colored by how it builds internal relationships.
Trying to maintain power is a big part of how any state interacts with the nations,
or groups of people with a shared ethnic or cultural background, within its borders, and
the states outside of its borders.
Like we learned before, power is never in balance. So we can talk about the cohesiveness
of a state, or how stable it is, and realize that states are trying to balance a host of
factors to create stability. But, that isn’t as easy as it sounds, because there's no strict
formula that creates a stable state. If there were, there'd be a lot more world peace.
We wouldn’t even have to leave a formal region like Latin America, which is a region
that contains similar characteristics, to find examples of the shifting dynamics of
state cohesiveness.
Take Costa Rica. In the 200 years since becoming independent from Spain, it’s had several
different types of governments. Which sounds volatile, but Costa Rica is considered a stable
state in the Fragile State Index, an annual report that assesses how vulnerable states
are to conflict or collapse.
One way Costa Rica has achieved stability is with the type of government those in power
create. Costa Rica’s current constitution became law in 1949 and forms a democratic
republic, which means that at least some general citizens have a say in who is in power.
This is a form of democracy, which has a relationship between the people and elected officials through
voting and civic involvement.
Popular support for leadership is one of the centripetal forces, and a state maintains
power by finding ways to keep most of the people satisfied. In the early 2020s Costa
Rica has been able to address most group grievances fairly adequately, or at least adequately
enough to keep the majority of the people satisfied. Though this can mean that minority
groups don’t share in the feeling of political unity.
But stable states often have other centripetal forces working together, like a common set
of cultural traits like language and religion, although diversity doesn’t have to create
tension. For instance, Costa Rica is considered stable and it’s a fairly diverse state that’s
a popular location for immigrants to look for work, which in other states can highlight
differences and bring discord.
Costa Rica is also known for having a strong infrastructure -- like clean energy, education,
and healthcare -- which in turn enables a fairly stable economy. And both strong infrastructure
and a stable economy are unifying forces.
As a people, they’re also committed to conserving their rainforests, and ecotourism is another
major component of the economy. So by investing in their people and their
environment, Costa Rica has created a place where people feel connected and cared for.
That doesn’t mean all people feel that way -- for instance there have been issues with
indigenous populations being pushed off rainforest land. But enough Costa Ricans do feel supported
that Costa Rica is seen as a stable state.
But if any of those unifying forces starts to weaken -- especially when there’s less
economic opportunity and people’s needs are no longer met, or leadership doesn’t
feel legitimate, and communication across the state starts to break down -- then the
centrifugal forces of disunity get the upper hand.
It’s hard work to keep a state unified! And throughout the rest of Latin America there
are more fragile than stable states as each country's colonial history has created difficult
economic situations.
Venezuela is one of the less stable states. Since the mid-1920s, Venezuela’s economy
has been based on oil exports -- which we think of as bringing in a lot of wealth. But
when the entire economy is dependent on oil prices, it becomes extremely vulnerable to
oil price drops, which first happened in the 1980s.
This drop led the way for political reforms that didn't actually change Venezuela's economic
reliance on oil, and when oil prices crashed again in 2014, it caused a commodity crisis
and reinforced how vulnerable petrostate economies are.
And after a political movement to reinvest in agriculture failed to build a strong, diversified
economy, and with their oil refining capabilities further diminished, by 2019 Venezuela experienced
a deepening economic crisis that continues into the 2020s. And with more than two thirds
of the population experiencing multidimensional poverty, the government is susceptible to instability.
Disasters -- whether they’re natural or human-caused ones like war or the collapse
of an economic sector -- can also upend internal stability. Especially if the country doesn’t
have the infrastructure and capacity to help people in the aftermath of a disaster.
In response, people have been emigrating, or moving out of Venezuela in huge numbers.
So as it stands now in 2021, Venezuela is being pulled apart from the inside. But centrifugal
forces can also come from outside a state.
There are a host of economic sanctions, or ways to limit trade and economic opportunities,
that outside groups have imposed against Venezuela for lots of reasons, like Venezuela’s involvement
in drug trade.
But sanctions have also been imposed because countries disapprove of the increasingly restrictive
socialist government structure, which in this case means the economy is structured so that
the state owns and controls large parts of it.
And other external forces like agreements with groups like the International Monetary
Fund or the World Bank can also be prominent centrifugal forces that have created a lot
of tension all over the world.
So yeah, keeping a country stable is no easy task, but it is really fascinating to examine
the interconnected forces that lead to people working together, or pulling apart.
Political geographers throughout the 1900s even developed models to try to predict potential
conflict by mapping out disagreements between states, especially over resources, like agricultural
land, and the spread of different political economic systems, like communism or capitalism.
One idea that emerged from that work is that there’s often a central area of power, and
then a zone around that area that’s less stable because it’s caught between those
two larger powers. This is known as a shatter belt.
We can see this happening in the way the United States and Russia interacted through Cuba
beginning in the 1950s.
In 1959, the USSR and the United States were in the midst of a Cold War, which is a geopolitical
conflict that’s fought indirectly with economics and military competition. And in the midst
of this, Cuba experienced a communist revolution that aligned it with the USSR.
Communism is an economic and political model that strives to replace private property and
a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of, well, everything.
And this includes ultimately getting away from a society that has class divisions...
or government!
Technically communism is a form of socialism, though not all socialists are communists.
The closest thing we have right now to a socialist economy is Norway…kind of.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is a free-market economic system that’s commonly associated
with democracies. Unlike communism that’s trying to get away from focusing on profit,
under capitalism, individuals are motivated by profit, and whatever they're profiting
from is owned by individuals, not governments or collectives.
The Soviet Union favored communism, and the US is pro-capitalism. And with Cuba just over
500 kilometers from Miami -- which is just a hop, skip, and a jump compared to how far
away the USSR was -- this put a communist government within the democracy buffer zone
that the US and its allies tried to create to keep communism from spreading to other countries.
This is called Containment Theory. And even over 60 years after Cuba’s communist revolution,
much of how the US interacts with governments throughout Latin America is influenced by
Containment Theory.
Trying to contain different government and economic policies means constantly negotiating
and renegotiating alliances, and is part of redrawing the map on who has power and who
does not over time.
Beyond the Cold War, in the wake of the disunity caused by forces like economic failure in
either communist or capitalist states, another force of disunity can emerge: populism.
Populism is an ideology that claims to express the will of the people which some enemy -- like
the current leader or system -- is supposedly oppressing. When people lose trust in the
government they can push for people in power who act, look, or share similar beliefs in
hopes of creating a government that’s more sympathetic to their economic or political situation.
Like in Brazil, where they’ve had two different populist movements just since the beginning
of the 21st century. The first was a type of economic populism in the early 2000s, where
leaders came to power promising to create a better economic situation for the average person.
By 2017, leaders also began to leverage cultural tensions, and those who came to power ran
on a platform promising an end to corruption among the government and to reduce migration.
Now we’ve labelled many of the forces we’ve talked about like infrastructure or economics
as either unifying or divisive, but a state is a lot more complicated than that.
Like take nationalism, which is an ideology focused on uniting the people of the state.
We can think about nationalism as a slider bar, measuring how united a state is with
full cohesion on one side and divisive chaos on the other.
On one side, nationalism is something patriotic, a sense of belonging and having a voice in
the nation. It‘s the most quintessential picture of the whole community celebrating
their favorite holiday together, complete with parades and picnics.
But, especially in multinational states, if that celebration or event is just for part
of the population, and the point is meant to reaffirm the other part of the population
doesn’t belong, then nationalism displays it’s more sinister, divisive side. We also
see nationalism’s dark side on a global scale when it deepens the us-versus-them dynamic
between people from different states.
There’s nothing saying ideologies or forces can’t collaborate, either. Populism often
combines with nationalism as a response to economic or representational frustration.
This can mean those in power push against trade agreements or being part of alliances,
like what we saw with Brexit.
Or it can mean there’s more pressure on the cultural landscape to solidify into one
identity and violently marginalize others, especially those seen as threats to the populist
group’s economic well being.
Since the 2008 Global Financial Collapse, the world has experienced a rise of populism
and nationalism that have worked together to create tensions and violence between different
nations around the world.
And this has affected our forms of government too. In the early 2000s the nationalism-populism
combo has led to more and more authoritarianism creeping in. Like Brazil in the early 2020s
had a strong central leader with weak supporting institutions, and the check and balance systems
are being eroded.
So the delicate balance we see in figure skaters who can do a perfect death spiral is similar
to all the efforts that go into managing the forces within a state.
What happens politically and economically within a state is incredibly important, because
it impacts how that state functions, how stable it is, and how it relates to other states.
As economic conditions change, or war or disaster breaks out, there are fresh waves of issues
for a state to handle to maintain their own power.
As political geographers, we can still ask “why is this happening here and not there?”
-- only now we’re focused on where and why power shapes the cohesiveness of the state,
and where conflicts might arise.
And as we’ll see more next time, there are patterns to how states behave and what they
fight over -- and they’re always shifting.
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often been decided without
the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants. Many geographical
place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages. So we at
Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship with
that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home through resources
like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous and Aboriginal nations through
the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want
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