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(together with Mirko Petersen): Geopolitics is the struggle over hegemony in places and spaces. As a theoretical concept, located between geography and political sciences, it is contested because of its connections to colonial and imperial thinking and particularly due to its use in Nazi Germany. What is generally referred to as “classical” Geopolitics deals with the role of geography in international political relations and mostly focuses on strategic aims of states. This is also the way in which the term is generally used in mass media discourses as well as in strategy and policy papers. Today, scholars, often linked to the academic field of Critical Geopolitics, also include political and cultural production as well as the perception of geographical assumptions in their studies and take a wider range of actors outside the inner circle of political elites into consideration. (...)
A Hegemonic Narrative of German Politics over Geography; Geopolitik in Comparison to Colonial and Imperial Geopolitics, 2021
In this essay I will be trying to answer the following research question; “O’Tuathail (1996) argues that geopolitical visions aim to produce “a total world picture”, erasing geographical diversity and complexity. Discuss, with reference to German Geopolitik” This question in particular I found interesting in its statement of geopolitical generalization, thereby I wondered whether there would be any alternatives to such an erasure of diversity and complexity. The aspect of German Geopolitik I found interesting on the grounds of its trite generalization as a facilitation for conquest and violence. Discussing the question is set to guarantee a certain liberty of exploration that I would like to use for an adequate assessment of the statements presented. I will approach the question in three consequential steps whilst providing arguments from various other academic sources of literature to substantially justify my findings in regard to the question. I will start first with the concept of geopolitical “discourse” and its relation to “narratives” and their possibility of becoming of “hegemonic” proportions. Secondly, I will continue to explore the two dimensions of both “practical” and “formal” nature so as to be able to understand the research question. At last, having to come understand the diverging dimensions of geopolitics, I will try and analyze the world of German Geopolitik to compare it to the broader concept of contemporary world politics before coming to a final discussion and conclusion with an answer to the research question. In this essay on German Geopolitik in comparison to colonialism and imperialism I will be trying to sufficiently answer this research question; “To what degree can we understand German Geopolitik as part of a longer (academic and strategic) tradition of Colonial and Imperial Geopolitics?” This I hope to achieve by taking a systematic approach by discussing three perspectives on the subject matter before coming to a definitive conclusion. In the first part of this essay, I will be taking on the “formal” academic discourse of German Geopolitik and its relation to empire, colonialism, and geopolitics. As for the Second part of this essay, I will write a paragraph on the “practical” political threat that Germany perceived from Geopolitik and its own ideological solution to this conundrum from a racialized perspective. The third part will try to create a direct comparison between acts of American US imperialism in the spirit of the “Westward expansion” and the German “General Plan Ost” respectively. At last, I will come to a conclusion in which I will repeat the most important findings of my essay before having a definitive answer to the posed research question.
Lessons in American Geopolitik: Kaplan and the Return of Spatial Absolutism
Human Geography, 2009
In the aftermath of World War I, Karl Haushofer emerged as one of the most important and influential visionaries of German regeneration and renewed geopolitical ambition. Retiring from the German Army and taking up an honorary professorship in Geography at the University of Munich, Haushofer’s prolific scripting of German geopolitik championed a grand strategy for a global-orientated German foreign policy whose endgame was the securitization of lebensraum for a land-based empire in the Eurasian heartland. That heartland was theorised and envisioned via geographical determinism and the anticipated geopolitical world seen as spatially absolute. Some 90 years later, the sinews of spatial absolutism and geographical determinism so central to Haushofer’s geopolitik have been resurrected and rehabilitated for the purposes of another global-orientated foreign policy: American geopolitik. Academically, its foremost proponents comprise a broad array of cited experts and influential commentators in Strategic Studies, and over the last thirty years in particular their collective writings on US foreign policy have consistently called for an American ‘leasehold’ land-based empire to secure key ‘pan-regions’ in the world’s most pivotal spaces. One of Strategic Studies’ most influential writers today is Robert Kaplan, and his recent ‘The Revenge of Geography’ thesis is in many ways simply echoing more popularly the geopolitical envisioning of an extensive and well-connected assemblage of Pentagon-linked defense universities, war colleges and think-tanks specialising in US foreign policy.
Foreign Policy, 2009
In seeking to understand the complex world we live in, geographical analyses that are historically, politically and culturally informed are vital. Robert Kaplan’s hijacking of the discipline of Geography for his geopolitical ends belongs more in the nineteenth century than today. His writings espouse an astonishingly unproblematic discourse of unilateral geopolitics that too neatly links scriptings of insecurity and threat to the necessity, and indeed inevitability, of U.S. military interventionism for geopolitical and geoeconomic hegemony. Geographers have a responsibility to call out such dangerously ill-informed and potentially influential work. We must insist that it is real people, with real histories and real geographies, who fall under the geopolitical gaze of grand strategists everywhere.
Is there a politics to geopolitics?
Progress in Human Geography, 2004
The term geopolitics is understood and used in a variety of ways. Political geographers typically invoke the term with reference to the geographical assumptions and understandings that influence world politics. Outside of the academy, geopolitics often connotes a conservative or right-wing political-territorial calculus associated with the strategic designs of Henry Kissinger, Aleksandr Dugin, and followers of the new Geopolitik in Germany. This forum considers the nature and significance of the gap in the ways that the term geopolitics is understood and deployed. Four eminent contributors to the literature in political geography offer their thoughts on the meanings associated with the term and potential confusions that arise from its different uses. Downloaded from 620 Forum: Is there a politics to geopolitics? often identified with 'conservative' perspectives on the right wing of the political spectrum.