Beka Katsitadze
Ilia State University.
Invited lecturer, MA.
Tbilisi, Georgia
Beka Katsitadze
Ilia State University.
Invited lecturer, MA.
Tbilisi, Georgia
The Values And Choice of the Georgian Population in the Context
of Critical Popular Geopolitical Theory
The term ‘’Geopolitics“ (‘’Geo“ – land, ‘’Politics“ – state affairs) was coined by Rudolf Kjellén in 1899. Hence, a space became connected to the state, which referred to the fact that geographical factors had a kind of influence on political processes. Geopolitics as an inter-discipline field emerged on the edge of the XIX-XX centuries and the classical geopolitical theories started to rise: Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Alfred Mahan, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman got on a scientific stage. Besides German organicism and Anglo-American geostrategic schools, French and Russian schools surfaced in geopolitics. During more than a century, multiple geopolitical epochs transformed and different theories developed within the main schools, nevertheless American critical geopolitics stemmed from the beginning of the 1990s, which blamed traditional geopolitics for superficiality, an absolute dominance of natural-geographical variables and a lack of social content of space. Today, contemporary critical geopolitics is divided into four main branches: formal, practical, popular and structural geopolitics. Popular critical geopolitics is significant between them because it explores mass culture, i.e. so-called pop-culture’s (media, literature, arts, music, cinematography, etc.) production, which is closely linked to the formation of public opinion both at the international and national levels. The trends of pop-culture have been mainly prevailing by the efforts of Western countries for the last decades, which seriously traces the consciousness of the Georgian population too. A duplication of American entertaining TV programs (Late-night Show, In the city-center, Voice, Talented, etc.), a tangible rise of American musical genres (pop, rock and specifically, hip-hop), permanent translation of American films at local cinemas, the Western-style fashion tendencies, a slang partially derived from USA-based social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.) serve as the best examples of this situation. Consequently, the Western pop-culture boosts pro-Western political orientation between the Georgian citizens, whose indication is their aspiration towards the membership of the EU and NATO. It seems that classical (traditional) geopolitical theories have more explanative power in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but exactly critical popular geopolitics is such momentum that determines pro-Western choices and values of Georgian, Ukrainian and Moldavian nations.
Keywords: Georgia, Values, Choice, Traditional Geopolitics, Critical Geopolitics.