Analysis of Political Cartoons

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Critical Geopolitics

Analysis of Political Cartoons

Critical Geopolitics seeks to “reveal the hidden politics of geographical knowledge” (Tuithail et al, 1998: 3).  Geopolitics is a discourse, a culturally and politically varied way of describing, representing and writing about geography and international politics.  This paper will attempt to analyse how political cartoons and stamps are geopolitical representations that impart geopolitical knowledge.  The images are embedded with, culture, and political meanings, which as Dodds and Sidaway (1994) suggest makes them part of politics itself and not a neutral, detached description of reality.  As “the production of political knowledge is an essentially contested political activity” (Tuithail et al, 1998: 3) this papers writings will be a subjective interpretation of the geopolitical knowledge being portrayed.      

Figure 1.1

Title   

Sept. 11, three years after
Artist 
Patrick Chappatte
Attribution 
Patrick Chappatte, The International Herald Tribune

 

Figure 1.1 portrays the changing attitude towards America from the world’s population.  Chappatte has placed a number of people in a variety of cultural dress, on top of a globe to symbolize the world’s population.  These figures are holding a banner, which has had a plaque added to change the sentence from, “We Are All Americans” to “We Are All Anti Americans”.  Chappatte is illustrating how the global consensus towards what Falk (2004: 241) sees as USA’s “emergent global empire”, has rapidly changed in the years after the September 11th attacks.  Chappatte is of Swiss nationality, so the cartoon is portraying a European vision of public opinion on America and one that is politically neutral.  Thus this vision is from a relative ally, making the concept portrayed even more intriguing.

Agnew (2003) suggests that the events of September 11th signalled an “increasingly brazen imperial strategy” (Agnew, 2003: 883) and a change to a “new ideological commitment to empire rather than to other means of securing hegemony” (Agnew, 2003: 883) from America.  This analysis will conceptualise this change, and place it in the context of this cartoon and find why public opinion of America and its ideals has changed.

Since the 19th century America has believed in its god given will or “manifest destiny” (Smith, 2000: 38) to “spread liberal democracy throughout the world” (Smith, 2000: 38).  Smith (2000) proposes this is an intellectual activity to justify US imperialism.  The concept of manifest destiny is important, as it was the ideological basis behind America’s rise to world superpower and hegemony.  “America came to be seen as the model for other countries to emulate” (Slater, 1999: 15) with the American dream and ideals becoming what the world should follow.  Figure 1.1 illustrates this by implying that pre September 11th the banner would have read, “we are all Americans” highlighting a world conforming to American ideals and following an American path laid out by the concept of manifest destiny.     

Throughout the cold war and post cold war up to September 11th the USA exercised coercive power “the capacity to intervene in specific circumstances to effect key political change in another state” (Slater, 1999: 24).  This exercise however was “always legitimated within the broader context of moral, cultural, economic and political leadership” (Slater, 1999: 24), in other words its manifest destiny.  Post 9/11 America has increased its imperial agenda but encountered “a loss of credibility and legitimacy” (Golub, 2004: 780).  The key example is the Iraq war and the war on terror.  Golub (2004) suggests that America lost both the unifying support of the nation behind national security objectives, and legitimacy on a worldwide scale.  This loss of legitimacy explains the change of world opinion towards America shown in the cartoon (Figure 1.1).

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The loss of legitimacy and subsequent change in world opinion of America was due to a change from a multilateral to unilateral agenda when America declared its war on terror. America abandoned “successful forms of hegemonic governance, based on the institutionalization of collective economic and security regimes, in favor of militarism” (Golub, 2004: 763), following a new ideological commitment to empire and global domination through force.  The September 11th attacks have regenerated the intensification of a unipolar moment or as Dodds asserts “an aggressive rearticulation of Americas role in the world” (Dodds, 2005: 224).  America has been flexing its power ...

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