GEOPOLITIK.docx (original) (raw)
(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. (...)
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.
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.
Race Contra Space: the Conflict Between German Geopolitik and National Socialism
Political Geography Quarterly, 1987
Popular views of the role of geopolitics in the Third Reich suggest a fundamental significance on the part of the geopoliticians in the ideological orientation of the Nazi state. The present article is an examination of the relationship of geopolitical doctrine to National Socialism, and ...
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2017
Despite its alternate fortunes during the past century, the term geopolitics has seen a considerable success in the last two decades. In this informative and updated book, structured in eleven chapters, Black explores many aspects of the "spatial dynamics of power," expanding its historical horizon to find geopolitical precursors in ancient China and Rome, especially during the last 500 years, in Chapters 2 to 5. To such chronological and geographical extension corresponds a more general approach to the subject: Given that the ambiguities of the term and its use by politicians, diplomats, advisors, journalists, etc., are well known to political geographers, Black refuses to be constrained by disciplinary borders. Solidly grounded in many decades of historical and interdisciplinary readings, he considers the complex relations between power and space, and their perception, from a plurality of angles, ranging from the history of international relations and cartography to diplomatic and military history, to that of science and technology, etc. He even draws a few examples from the history of cinema, literature, and the arts. The book is thus a precious reference work that certainly enriches the historical and geographical horizon of political geographers, political scientists, historians, and scholars from other disciplines. Historical geographers will appreciate the richness of Black's historical contextualizations in Chapters 6 to 9 and will recognize the usefulness of extending the analysis backward, in order to balance the historical role of the British Empire and the usual criticism centered on U.S. hegemony. They will also appreciate the attention given not just to the geopolitics "of the land" but also to that of the seas and the air, as well as to the spatial implications of many technological innovations in transport and weaponry. Furthermore, in addition to his inevitable emphasis on British and German geopolitics, Black also gives attention to the American, French, and other national traditions, though in a more fragmented way. Indeed, Black would have found useful inspiration in the work of Harold and Margaret Sprout and in Jean Gottmannʼs The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville, 1973). 1 Nonetheless, when confronted with the bulk of historical and political geographies, the book systematically accounts for most of the various ideological positions, debates, and controversies, opening the way to a number of interesting theoretical questions that are sometimes underplayed in the mainstream literature: Why does the common geopolitical unit of analysis have to be limited to the state seen as a monolithic entity? Why limit geopolitics to the global scale and not consider also the subnational scale, if international and domestic events are so often
FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING: GEOPOLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY
Geopolitics is the offshoot of both geography and political science. It is an attempt to find a deterministic principle which controls the development of states. Geopolitics is the planning of a nation's security policy on the basis of geographic factors. Analyzing these factors the geopolitician assesses existing areas of power and tries to relate a nation's policy to them. John Kieffer has defined geopolitics in terms of the application of "the social, political, economic, strategic and geographic elements of a state".1 U.S. War Department states that geopolitics combines pertinent facts of history, geography and politics in an explanation and prediction of "the behavior of nations within their own boundaries and among other nations".2
Understanding “Geopolitics” in an Era of Globalization
Revista Tamoios, 2015
An older European-Enlightenment geopolitical imagination was lost in the late nineteenth century with the rise of naturalized understandings of interstate and imperial relations that saw states and empires in terms of biological competition conditioned by relative location on the earth's surface. The word "geopolitics" emerged in that context and since that time the term has had to contend with this original sin. Arguably, however, Montesquieu and Voltaire in their references to Alexander the Great had a somewhat different conception of geopolitics in mind: one in which reciprocity and exchange between places as well as the redistribution of resources from colonies to homeland are at work. It is this broader sense of the word that has been revived over the
Geopolitics Classical theory and its relevance in Contemporary world politics
The age of classical geopolitics is not over. Classical geopolitics, a bunch of analyses may endure truths such as the international system is a competitive arena in which great powers play a disproportionate role. In international relation the theory of offensive realism is substantive to classical geopolitics. Present world is explained by Mearshemier as a power struggle between major powers and describe the relationship between great powers. In this ground classical geopolitics is highly relevant. Another case is that military force is critical indicator and fundamental of that influence, classical geopolitics emphasis on two major elements: (a) Power (influence and politics) and (b) space (territory and soil) as explained by Rudolph Kjellen. From this perspective we find classical geopolitics can explain " Russian's aggression on Crimea " and its aim to become a great power. Israel-Palestine conflict is a classic example of classical geopolitics. Since the establishment of Israel state, it follows the 'labersnaum' policy (Kjellen and Friedrich Ratzel), the Israeli policy is capture the territory of Palestine as much as possible. The war of 1948, 1967 and 1973 showed that after winning the main aim of Israel was usurpation of the spaces. Alfred T. Mahan's theory of 'Seas power and strong naval force', even it has applicable for both china and USA in present era. The South China Sea disputes on various island shows that countries wanted to increase their sphere of influence among sea routes, by establishing naval base and enlargement of the navy. " The Heartland " theory of Mackinder dominated the cold war politics, the establishment of NATO, a military alliance, marshal plan and economic assistance of USA was mainly controlling the " Heartland " of the world, such eastern Europe, Eurasian regions and other close states. In contemporary world politics, I find classical geopolitics and its practice still has relevancy. Classical geopolitical theories are mainly aggressive, expansionist, support the concept of living space, power struggle, importance on land, control of the maritime boundary, military and arm race to exchange state power and to enhance state power and its superiority. Many liberal thinkers think that the era, this is the age of liberalism and realist politics is no more in existence. But many recent phenomena in contemporary world politics inspired me to reject their claim that " classical geopolitics " is no more used or exercised. The present great power's actions indicate a dreadful future and nuclear arms race pose a fatal threat towards humanity. No country prevents or gives up arm race. Every country of the world tries to secure its security and put more priority on their survival. For this reason world wide the military expenditures and budget allocation is increasing. We have seen a competition between China, USA and Russia in terms of power, economy, military expenditure and cyber security. The world is becoming more critical because of these activities.
Geopolitical Thinking and World Politics (1st Chapter)
The Foreign Policy of Modern Turkey: Power and the Ideology of Eurasianism, 2017
Geopolitics has been an excessively used term since Rudolph Kjellen first coined it in 1899.1 In one sense, the term “geopolitics” came close to losing its credibility because of overuse and also its association with the intellectual apparatus of Nazi expansionism in the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless, it is still a useful term to explain, describe or analyse specific perspectives of world affairs. Especially along with the emergence of Critical Geopolitics after the 1990s, the concept “Geopolitics” has started to get attention. To make the concept more understandable, the following taxonomy of Classical Geopolitics, which is more state-centric, and Critical Geopolitics, which focuses on space, identity, vision and statecraft, is used.