Geopolitics

Geopolitics denotes, generically, strategic power struggles among states over the political control of territories and resources. More specifically, it suggests that politics is primarily defined by geographical location, territorial expansion, and interstate competition over finite spaces. The late-19th-century interimperial rivalries provided the historical context for the rise of geopolitical thought across the core countries of the imperial zone, rearticulating the relation between economic expansion and territorial control. The final division of the last extra-European vacant spaces generated an acute awareness of the closure of absolute space in a new “planetary” age. Interimperial relations came to be regarded as intensified zero-sum conflicts over the redivision of an occupied planet. This closed spatial horizon prompted a reconceptualization of the state as a territorial phenomenon in space, locked into a permanent struggle for survival. The revalorization and politicization of geography and its absorption into a reconceptualized science of politics forged the new field of political geography—geopolitics' direct precursor. Today, particularly with increasing globalization, geopolitics is more and more challenged and questioned: Territory has lost its classical relevance, as transnational relationships imply a new vision of the global world, which is less compatible with geopolitics. Critical geography points out the ideological and political background of geopolitics.

The concept of geopolitics was invented by the Swedish political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) and developed in The State as an Organism (1917)—a critique of the prevailing legal positivism in constitutional and international law. The radicalization of political geography into Geopolitik as a specifically German theory of international politics was prosecuted—most notably by Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) and his school and, from a different angle, by Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)—during the revisionist conflicts over the Versailles Settlement in Weimar Germany. Geo politics had a lasting, though not exclusive, impact on Nazi foreign policy. Intellectually, it positioned itself as a counternarrative against Marxist theories of imperialism (Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin) and against the Wil sonian liberal internationalism, represented by Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950). Basic elements of geopolitical thought infused, if in a semantically altered and politically sanitized form, the American Cold War discourse of neorealism in a new binary world-political geography. The proliferating but often indiscriminate contemporary invocations of the term geopolitics reflected the shifting post–Cold War strategic geography—globalization, [Page 970]multipolarity, hegemony, unipolarity, empire—and a renewed urgency of resource politics in times of natural resource depletion and environmental degradation. Simultaneously, the new approaches of critical and Marxist geopolitics sought to recover, respectively, the cartographic discourses that shape the construction of geopolitics and the efficacy of geopolitical conflicts that mediate European and worldwide socioeconomic and political developments.

Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), a professor of political geography and the cofounder of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), was cross-nationally the most influential figure in the development of the geopolitical tradition. Applying ideas from biology, evolutionism, and human geography, he contended that state behavior—the expansion and contraction of states in space—is primarily determined by geographical properties and geostrategic location. Space, as a political category, is no longer conceived as a geometric, neutral, and empty expanse (the absolute space of nonhuman geography) but as a concretely ordered and constructed territory (the historical-relational space of political geography). Fusing an organic-biological conception of the state with principles of Darwinian natural selection in interstate relations, Ratzel claimed that states come to life, grow, and die in the struggle for space. Borders are temporary phenomena in a pulsating geopolitical environment. Preoccupied by the quest for a “scientific” legitimation of Wilhelmine Germany's expansionist policies, his Politische Geographie (1897) suggested that states enjoy a natural right to an adequate Lebensraum (living space) grounded in variations between soil fertility and population growth. Population “density pressures,” established by a calculus between state territory and demography, are formalized in the “laws of the spatial growth of states.” Differences arise in the prewar era between ethnocentric and geopolitical conceptions of states and the goals and limits of their foreign policies. While the ethnocentric notion defines nations as cultural-linguistic units (Volksnation), leading to a self-limiting territorial correspondence between a nation's area of settlement and the scale of state territory, the latter conception (Staatsnation) prioritizes territorial aggrandizement over ethnic-racial homogeneity, although it may also involve an active policy of ethnic settlement (Germanicization). Volksnation and Staatsnation are not synonymous and constitute rival points of reference. This tension between “race” and “space” resurfaced later in differences between the original program of German geopolitics and Adolf Hitler's racial ideology.

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