MAKING THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: GEOGRAPHICAL ANALOGY IN GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS*

ABSTRACT. In several publications in the 1950s, Donald Meinig raised two themes that are central to contemporary “critical geopolitics”: criticizing the idea of a determining global physical geography that directs global geopolitics, and suggesting that geographical labels and geopolitical concepts have political consequences. I take off from Meinig's insight about geopolitics as an active process of naming and acting by discussing the broad power of analogy in world politics and by examining recent use of two geographical analogies—the Macedonian syndrome and balkanization—as symptomatic of a wider process of making the strange familiar by recycling geographical analogies.