In The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World by Dominique Moisi the author claims that he’s chosen to write this work in opposition to the optimism of Francis Fukuyama and the pessimism of Samuel Huntington. While geopolitics has traditionally been defined in relation to geography, Moisi uses a number of examples to highlight the need to include an “emotional geography” of those that populate a region within geopolitical investigations. Moisi believes that the three most powerful emotions to assess in order to create a psycho-analytic profile of a national spirit are Hope, Humiliation and Fear. Using this as a framework, Moisi assesses a number of the controversial issues prevalent in modern politics. Worth noting in this introduction is that when looking for other reviews of this work, there are few written by those in the field of geopolitics and far more written by those in performance studies, literary analysis, gender studies, psychology and sociology.
Defining Hope, Humiliation and Fear
Moisi’s choice to focus on geopolitics from the standpoint of emotions stems from his assessment that collective sentiments towards past events, their relation to the present and what is possible in the future all have a strong connections to confidence.
Hope, Humiliation and Fear are all linked to the notion of confidence – a defining factor in the manner in which national bodies address other national bodies, international bodies and their own people.
Fear is the absence of confidence, hope is an expression of confidence and humiliation is injured confidence. Moisi provides a formula for quickly summarizing them:
- Hope is “I want to do it, I can do it, and I will do it”
- Humiliation is “I can never do it”, which may lead to “I might try as well to destroy you since I cannot join you. ”
- Fear: “Oh my god, the world has becomes such a dangerous place; how can I be protected from it?”
One of the anecdotes that I found compelling in showing how it is that emotional valences get consideration within the diplomatic-cores of nations was the government of China’s decision to change their description of themselves from “rising” to “developing” as the former implicates that there will be conflict between them and established power while the latter does not.
From these definitions, Moisi then proceeds to analyze Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and America according to this rubric. Those that are hopeful are those that have accommodated themselves to this system, those that feel humiliated it are those that have yet to maximize their domestic capacities to do so while those that fear it seem to take an anti-globalization stance which is strongly related to a sense of national or ethnic pride.
Methodological Criticism
While there is certainly value in a number of Moisi’s insights, from a methodological standpoint there is a lot lacking. Even if the claims he makes are intuitively sensible, he provides no real method for determining which indicators are valuable and which are not, no comprehensive process for correctly discerning the emotional valences of a nation and no steps for qualifying intra-national emotional variances (i.e. defining the Opposition/different interpretations of historical/current events).
True, he states in the opening of the text that confidence indicator can be mapped by things such as level of investment, spending patterns and surveys – he neither provides any comprehensive manner for weighing these or other factors nor describes a model other than his own subjective views on issues. This is in sharp contrast to business confidence – an indicator charted by numerous organizations (OECD; the NFIB Business Optimism Index; RMB/BER Business Confidence Index (BCI), etc.) that emerge from scientifically-based survey and analysis.
Globalization, Identity and Emotions
Despite this epistemological weakness, Moisi’s positions ought not to be automatically invalidated. He provides enough case studies wherein emotions are exploited by politicians, diplomats and businessmen are able to mobilize emotions towards the execution of specific activities. One can also look to the words that politicians and geopolitical strategies themselves say – be it Hugo Chavez or Alexander Dugin – and see that frequently it is their emotional appeals that get the support in the forms of votes or a reading audience.
One of the primary anxieties affecting confidence via the emotions is the relationship of national economic structures to the New World Order created following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition to a bi-polar world and the transformation of the United States into the global hegemon. It’s following these changes on the world stages that Moisi focuses upon.
The World in 2025
Published in 2009, the last chapter of the book is spent speculating on describing how he sees the emotional developments that Moisi describes as manifesting in the world. A few pages in, it immediately becomes apparent just how problematic the lack of a clear methodology for emotional vigilance and future-planning are – the views provided are so far from what has happened that at multiple times during the chapter I considered skipping it. Moisi forecast a rapid decline of the European union following sub-national revolts (i.e. Calatonia) and national revolts (U.K.) in the early 2010’s followed by its rapid reawakening and expansion (Serbia, Kosovo, etc.) in 2016. Not only has this not happened – Serbia, Turkey, and other still have not transitioned – but at least at the moment is seems as if the European Union project is in a state of decline stemming from lack of national support and existential anxieties on how to define itself in relation to Russian political manipulations and a massive influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
Moisi also believed that China would invade Taiwan in the early 2010’s and that the United States would be “mature” enough to take a hands off approach. While few projected Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election – it’s worth noting that in a number of U.S. poles one of the reasons that he gained such popular support was that there were wide swathes of the American public that even without all of the evidence ready to martial were aware that China had been gaming the financial and manufacturing rules to cause damage to the American economy via every manner possible, be it industrial espionage, dumping or non-enforcement of labor laws. Thus we see here that though China may have historicized their “century of humiliation” and be classified according to Moisi under the banner of “optimism” – which is justifiable considering how many of the country’s population have seen their standards of living increase, a sense of fear a humiliation still guides their actions. And this here is the problem of his account – lacking a specific means by which to determine specific classes of people as having specific emotional attitudes towards things, an “emotional” accounting of geopolitics for guiding policy-making is highly prone to error.