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Geopolitics: Geography
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Geopolitics is defined as a branch of geography that promises to explain the relationships between geographical realities and international affairs. The idea that such relationships exist was noted as early as the ancient Greeks (18,309-328). Although noted at this early time it was only with the discovery of the conceptual and methodological tools of modern geography that scholars became convinced they could examine the connections in something approaching scientific precision.
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Specific events and historical periods define Europe’s geopolitics as much as terrain and climate. Identifying the essential qualities of European geopolitics in terms of what are assumed to be its outcomes presents a misleading view. An effective historical approach cannot read contemporary perspectives into the past in a search for origins. History presents key developments in a context that balances change with continuity, along with cultural and technological factors that shaped perceptions of geography and its political impact. Technology or cultural affinities can make distance, for example, a more or less important factor. The specific effect varies at different times.
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The roots of modern geopolitics spring from the work of a German geographer, Professor Friedrich Ratzel in 1897 (13). It was Professor Ratzel who coined the phrase anthrogeographical, meaning a combination of anthropology, geography and politics. He believed that states have many of the characteristics of living organisms. He thought a state had to grow. It must expand or die. He ... introduced the idea of "living frontiers", that borders were dynamic and subject to change.
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Between Kjellén’s time and that of Haushofer, of course, geopolitics had been much developed as a scholarly discipline, and not just in Germany. From London, Halford Mackinder made a living out of the idea with his famously evolving theory of the Heartland. [4] At base, the Heartland theory, in all its variations, was a simple idea: that relations among states could be reduced for most practical purposes to considerations of relative power—economic capacity, political cohesion, and military might—but that the actual use of that power depended on relative position. (This too was an old idea, or else Hannibal’s crossing the Alps with a bunch of elephants would never have been understood as such a legendary feat.) But now a scientific observation underlay this notion: just as the intensity of sunlight or sound waves or energy in a magnetic field varies according to the distance from their source (according to the Inverse Square Law, expressed as S/4πr2=I), so the power of a state can be brought to bear most effectively on other states that are closer rather than far away. It all boils down to a measure on the Y-axis—power—as it intersects with a measure on the X-axis—distance. What gave this idea the girth it soon acquired was the obvious fact that the earth’s geography is gloriously convoluted, and the almost equally obvious fact that technological innovation and its uneven diffusion affected how “close” or “far” other states were for practical purposes.
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Since then, the word geopolitics has been applied to other theories, most notably the notion of the Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington. In a peaceable world, neither sea lanes nor surface transport are threatened; hence all countries are effectively close enough to one another physically. It is in the realm of the political ideas, workings, and cultures that there are differences, and the term has shifted more towards this arena, especially in its popular usage. Traditionally, it strictly applies to geography's effect on politics.
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- Nazi geopoliticians rejected Haushofer’s geopolitics because it failed to incorporate the ‘race principle’ adequately. Like Ratzel, at base Haushofer was a geographical determinist and argued that people cannot escape their geography. The Nazi racists, on the other hand, argued that the major determinants of history and almost everything was genes and genetic heritage— ‘race’; genes could even nullify geography.
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