THE GEOPOLITICS OF REPRESENTATIONS: DEFINING IS RULING
THE GEOPOLITICS OF REPRESENTATIONS: DEFINING IS RULING

STUDY CASE: SOME OF A NATION’S MAIN LINES OF REPRESENTATION ABROAD – ANTON GOLOPENȚIA

Summary/Abstract: What if considering culture, the fifth theater of strategic operations? - the fourth being the cyberspace, alongside with air, ground and sea traditional theatres of operations. The fifth theatre of operations is, more precisely, about controlling/defending/targeting the cultural space of a society, the DEFSPACE. This is the realm of the Geopolitics of Representations, the distribution of culturally vectorized power over a certain geography. Some of the invoked theories are Lacoste/Gourdin’ Geopolitics of Representations, Goffman’s stigma, Buzan’s societal security, Putnam’s social capital. In the end Anton Golopenția’s revolutionary theory of state cohesion will be briefly resurfaced. The short schema of ”defining is ruling” is the following: any state is glued around to a certain idea – the “idea of state” where its culturally defined DNA of legitimacy is stored. This glue effect is manifesting itself through the processes of bonding and bridging, the stronger they are, a stronger social capital a country has. The stronger the social cohesion (social capital) the better it is the national security status. One of the main inhibitors of bridging and bonding is stigmatizing, the process of debasing the collective self-esteem by manipulating certain definitions at the macro-cultural level, in particular. Anton Golopenția’s approach towards building the idea of state at the spiritual level is of particular interest, since he writes down in very close detail the main axis of representing the idea of state.

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