This thesis traces the relationship between militarism and geographical thought in
the United States during the early Cold War. It does so by traveling across certain
spaces, or environments, which preoccupied American geopolitics and American science
during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, geopolitics and science, understood during the
Second World War as markedly distinct terms, came together uniquely to wage the Cold
War from the position of strategy. The most intriguing and influential conjunctions were
made possible by militarism, not in the deterministic sense of conditioning technologies
or funding lines, but as a result of antagonistic, violent practices pervading American life.
These practices reaffirmed America's status as distinctly, powerfully modern, while
shoring up the burden of global responsibility that appeared to accompany this
preeminence. Through militarist reasoning, the American world was turned into an
object that needed securing - resulting in a profoundly insecure proliferation of danger
that demanded an equal measure of global action and retreat behind new lines of defence.
And in these American spaces, whether expanded or compressed, the identity of America
itself was defined.
From the global horizons of air power and the regional divisions of area studies
to the laboratories of continental and civil defence research, the spaces of the American
Cold War were material, in the sense that militarism's reach was clearly felt on
innumerable human and natural landscapes, not least within the United States. Equally,
however, these environments were the product of imaginative geographies, perceptual
and representational techniques that inscribed borders, defined hierarchies, and framed
populations governmentally. Such conceptions of space were similarly militarist, not least because they drew from the innovations of Second World War social science to
reframe the outlines of a Cold War world. Militarism's methods redefined geographical
thought and its spaces, prioritizing certain locations and conventions while marginalizing
others.
Strategic studies formed a key component of the social sciences emboldened by
the successes and excesses of wartime science. As social scientists grappled with the
contradictions of mid-century modernity, most retreated behind the formidable theories
of their more accomplished academic relatives, and many moved into the laboratories
previously associated with these same intellectual stalwarts. The result was that at every
scale, geography was increasingly simulated, a habit that paralleled the abstractions
concurrently promoted in the name of political decisiveness. But simulation also meant
that Cold War spaces were more than the product of intangible musings; they were
constructed, and in the process acquired solidity but also simplicity. It was in the
fashioning of artificial environments that the fragility of strategy was revealed most fully,
but also where militarism's power could be most clearly expressed. The term associated
with this paradoxical condition was 'frontier', a zone of fragile, transformational activity.
Enthusiastic Cold Warriors were fond of transferring this word from a geopolitical past to
a scientific future. But in their present, frontiers possessed the characteristics of both.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/15138 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Farish, Matthew James |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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