Ph.D. Degree in International Relations and Diplomacy
Director : Prof Mahmoud M MUSA
Jury : Prof Fouad NOHRA
Prof Michael STRAUSS
Prof Paul BOURGINE (prof à Polytechnique Paris)
Submitted 17 December 2013 CEDS under the auspices of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Internationales de Paris
Abstract
Noopolitics is the geopolitics of knowledge, the interaction between knowledge ans political power that is.Noopolitik is in turn the national policy of fostering an intense knowledge flow and thus, in the words of EdgarPoe, to ensure that « deep thoughts are a duty ». Since knowledge is the universal game changer, Noopolitics is a game of game changers. Besides, it is universal that conflicts require both a mixture of knowledge and ignorance to exist. Conflicts indeed require both the knowledge to deal harm and the ignorance to transcend them. Thus, as the UNESCO anticipated, increasing the global knowledge flow is actually the surest known way to achieve global peace.
We study four cases of the so-called New Great Game, the struggle between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and NATO in Central Asia within the ongoing « Cold War 2.0 », and the Artic Game which is opposing the same players over the control of the Nord Pole. in particular, we review China’s game-changing Noopolitik from 2001 to 2011 to observe that the People’s Republic is clearly transforming its « growth panacea » doctrine into a potentially considerable « knowledge panacea » doctrine, which could in turn bring it an immense share of global leadership.
The reviewing of our case studies allows us to define the geopolitical concepts of State Stoicism, Peace-Industrial Complex and National Ego. State Stoicism posits that the ultimate form of power for a state is self-power. The Peace-Industrial Complex doctrine posits that the Military-Industrial Complex can naturally evolve from the making of weapons of mass destruction to that of mass construction, which will be the new means of power of the 21st century. This evolution still, has a very high activation cost (kinetically speaking) while it is (thermodynamically speaking) very stable. The concept of a National Ego posits that states, like individuals, have a « commanding self » that forces them to take self-destructive decisions, and that therefore what states crave throughout their history is almost never what they need. This concept has fascinating geopolitical implications, especially for China, which geopolitical containment, which it surely did not wish, is turning out a great strength, and for Israel, which contemporary geopolitics is particularly conditioned by the collective and self-destructive « commanding self ».