Globalisation, advances in communications, the “shrinking of distance” do not mean the End of Geography, any more than the collapse of communism presaged the End of History, as Francis Fukuyama claimed. That was the thesis of a talk on “Geography and Diplomacy” I gave to the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland this week. The state’s Governor, HE Penny Wensley, a distinguished former Australia diplomat, attended.
Geographers are interested in the impact of the natural environment on human activity. The world’s natural resources are often located in remote, difficult environments, where companies are glad of diplomatic support. In recent years, as tourists travel to more and more exotic destinations, they are subject in ever greater numbers to the vicissitudes of hazards and natural disasters – tsunamis, earthquakes, floods. Foreign ministries have had to massively upgrade their consular assistance operations. Climate Change diplomacy, through multilateral negotiations and bilateral advocacy, has become a mainstream activity.
Geographers are also interested in how humans organise themselves spatially. Physical features of the landscape like rivers may be a basis for international borders; a rocky outcrop may influence a country’s maritime territorial claims. Sometimes these are disputed, requiring recourse to bilateral or multilateral diplomacy as an alternative to conflict. Countries may group themselves into blocs based on geographical regions (EU, ASEAN) or shared interest (OPEC, OECD). These groupings change over time, for example as G8 is supplanted by G20, so diplomats have to develop new models of working.
Human geographers study how people identify with place. Patterns of migration create diaspora communities which can have an important impact on particular aspects of foreign policy. In our public diplomacy activities, we try to understand and influence how others feel about our country and its policies.
Of course, I may have a bias in this discussion, having studied geography at university, like several of my fellow British ambassadors. But the audience’s interest in the slides I used to support my argument reminded me again of just how fascinated we all are with maps as a way of interpreting our world.
Lovely