Geopolitics

Origins of the “Science” of Geopolitics

In the earliest phases of its scholarly history, geopolitics was taken up with great interest in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. As a portmanteau adjective, geopolitics attracted interest because it hinted at novelty. It was intended to convey an interest in the often unremarked geographical dimensions of states and to posit “laws” in international politics based on a series of geographical facts such as the relationship between land- and sea-based powers. Informed by social Darwinism, the struggle of states and their human creators was emphasized, as was the need to secure the “fittest” states and peoples. According to Ratzel, the state should be conceptualized as a super-organism that existed in a world characterized by struggle and uncertainty. To prosper, let alone survive in these testing circumstances, states needed to acquire territory and resources.

Strikingly, in Germany after World War I, an influential figure, General Karl Haushofer, was pivotal in the creation of a journal of geopolitics in 1924. As a former aide-de-camp to Rudolf Hess and an established expert on Japan, Haushofer became professor of geography at the University of Munich. Like earlier writers such as Ratzel, he believed that German survival, let alone consolidation, in the aftermath of the 1919 Peace Conference would depend on the country understanding the geographical realities of world politics. As a defeated nation, Germany's national boundaries had changed, and empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman were dismantled. Europe [Page 1250]was in a state of flux, and the alleged scientific status of geopolitics was important in establishing intellectual legitimacy and policy relevance in Germany and elsewhere.

For Germany to prosper, Haushofer opined that interwar Germany needed to appreciate five issues: (1) physical location, (2) resources, (3) territory, (4) morphology, and (5) population. If Germany was, what he termed, a “space-hopping” country rather than “space bound,” then it might be able to capitalize on all available resources and territorial opportunities. He also contended that if the world were organized into a series of pan-regions, then it might be possible for Germany and other states such as the United States and Japan to exercise global leadership. Under his global model, Germany would dominate the Euro-Asian landmass and Africa. He was a keen supporter of the proposed Berlin-Baghdad railway and of German colonies in Africa. As a consequence of his close relationship to Hess, these ideas have been credited with informing Hitler's plans of spatial expansionism in the East and were even seen as contributing to the final solution involving Jews, communists, and others, including the disabled. While Haushofer was fascinated by spatial relationships and Germany's reemergence after World War I, there is neither any evidence that he shared Hitler's hatred of European Jewry nor evidence that he viewed the world as being controlled by an international cabal of Jews and communists. By the late 1930s, Haushofer's influence was on the wane, and he thought the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a geostrategic error. He later committed suicide in 1946, after being sidelined in academic and policy-making terms.

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