Geopolitics

GEOPOLITICS IS POLITICS taking place in regard to geographical circumstances, territorial relations and aspirations of political entities. It derives from the spatial settings of place as well as from territoriality as a universal dimension of human (and animal) behavior. While the spectrum of geopolitical action is very wide, it is never just derived from “geographic imperatives.” There are always underlying motivations, constructions and lines of thinking behind geopolitics, whether we speak of geopolitical theories or geopolitical action.

In order to understand the relational and proportional settings of contemporary geopolitics, it helps to construct some kind of picture of the asymmetric “geopolitical ideologies” that influence the motives and ideas behind the geopolitical activities of various states and other political actors.

At the same time, geopolitics should not be confused with the field of POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY. Both disciplines have in common the search and identification of an area of study that concerns the connection and mutual interaction between geography and politics. Political geography deals with the study of the existing relations between spatial facts and the political processes, and therefore constitutes the spatial analysis of political phenomena. It concerns the spatial attributes of the political process or can be seen as the study of existing relations between spatial facts and political processes. Geopolitics, on the other hand, is an approach to international politics that insists on the significance of geographic territory and its resources. It represents the study of the geographic distribution of power among the states of the international system, paying particular attention to the rivalries of the major powers. From a slightly different point of view, geopolitics could be seen as an expression of the foreign policies of states, where those policies are determined by the state’s location, natural resources, and physical determinants.

Thus, geopolitics and geopolitical analysis constitute the study of international politics seen from a spatial or geocentric perspective. Where political geography deals with the interaction of geographical factors and politics, the interactions of political power and space, geopolitics tries to provide a geographic interpretation of these events by studying the geographical aspects of political phenomena.

BACKGROUND

A Swedish political scientist, Rudolf Kjellen, originally coined the term geopolitics in 1899. Kjellen viewed the state as a living organism and, in developing his ideas, saw geopolitics as the study of the state as a geographic organism whose spatial phenomena could be a land, a territory, a space, or a country. Kjellen believed that in order for a state to be strong, its government had to put in practice five complementary types of policies in order to be successful in its natural expansion. For Kjellen, the aim of the discipline was to demonstrate the role of the geographic characteristics in the conception of the state and the practice of statecraft to the statesman and decision maker.

According to Friedrich Ratzel, the state is a territorial entity with two essential coordinates: the space (raum), which he viewed as the total surface or aerial extent of territory, and the position (lage), which he referred to as the situation of the territory in relation to other states. Ratzel was also interested in two other ideas: the concept of space itself, namely the sense and meaning of space, and what he called vital space. 

There is one definition of geopolitics that seems to be particularly well expressed. In the words of Osmo Tuomi, the geopolitics that emerged in the last decades of the 20th century is by no means comparable to the old framework and theoretical points of view, namely the eternal confrontation between sea power and land power developed during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. For Tuomi, theoretical geopolitics studies the relation between physical space and international politics, develops models for the spatial division of the world into cooperating and competing parts for historical, economic and political reasons, and analyzes how the participants interpret the political, economic, and military consequences of this division. The geopolitics of a state or other territorially defined society relates to its pursuit of geographically dimensioned aims that are connected with its economic and political position, security and culture.

With the end of World War II, new perspectives emerged for the study of geopolitics and political geography. The international system in the postwar period changed dramatically the notion of the balance of power and introduced strategic bipolarity and nuclear deterrence, concepts responsible for the ideological, political, cultural, and geographic confrontation between the two superpowers and the respective spheres of influence and blocks of allies. It was during this period that geopolitical theory cut drastically with the international situation that had prevailed up to that time, and the realities of the world situation were constantly assisting the development of new weapons, strategies, and techniques for conducting war.

The resurgence of both political geography and geopolitics began in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they ceased to be mere instruments in service of the military establishment/sphere and started to be objects of analysis by academics and researchers who wanted to construct critical reasoning and discourses with respect to the disciplines in question. The renaissance has been particularly manifest after the end of the 1980s, compared with the exclusion and distancing that it suffered after 1945 and for approximately three decades thereafter.

As one legitimate area of study, geopolitics and political geography deal with complicated if not problematic issues like GLOBALIZATION, deterritorialization through constant flows of information and finance, and transnational phenomena that transcend the boundaries of states and seem somehow to erode the concept of sovereignty itself.

In some respects, we live in a world that is becoming boundless, without physical and territorial borders, that bases itself on an increasing, more frequent, and perceptible interdependence among players. In this sense, some authors speak about the end of geopolitics because of profound impacts created by economic globalization. Information technologies and communication are progressively forming and reforming domestic politics and the foreign relations of states, raising doubts about the existence of borders, boundaries, territorial demarcations, and sovereignty itself.

Another major change in the study of geopolitics and geopolitical analysis started in the late 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s: Critical geopolitics. This line of study demonstrates that geopolitical issues and themes can be found in popular culture, movies, or mass media, that is, the press, TV and radio. These same issues are therefore seen as important forms of popular geopolitics. In comparison to formal geopolitics, the insight of critical geopolitics tries to determine in what manner and to what extent geographic labels do not imply some strong causal relation between physical geography and the behavior of the state and its political structures.

For some theorists, critical geopolitics takes issue with the traditional theories of political geography and opposing positions of geopolitical theories by analyzing their discourses and their role in spatial formation and development. In order to achieve an alternative form of geopolitics, one that intends to serve as the equilibrium in the hegemonic balance, the critical approach offers an examination of the suppositions that sustain particular geopolitical constructions, that is, production and use of geographic knowledge in various orders of power and space. In doing so, critical geopolitics tries to uncover the hidden geographical assumptions in foreign policy decisions and actions.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the old Soviet system in 1991, a new phase in the international system of states began to take form, thus paving the way for the end of communism as a socioeconomic doctrine and a new orientation in foreign policy. The revival of geopolitics and political geography after years of relative neglect has highlighted primary concerns such as the role of geographical scale in establishing political identities. New threats to world security emerged, like regional conflicts, violent nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and sharp inequality between the rich north and the underdeveloped south.

Some authors believe we live now in a more unpredictable and unsafe world. The disintegration of the Soviet empire has created a vacuum on the huge landmass that was Mackinder’s HEARTLAND. And that heartland was also the region that in the past was the heart of the country with which the United States was struggling for global primacy. Geopolitics has once again gained special attention from Russian scholars and policy makers.

And once again, the concept of the heartland is retaining its credibility among Russian authors. Here is demonstrated the high interest in geopolitics, where the Eurasian theory provides a simple definition of the belief that RUSSIA is a unique power and does not need to Westernize in order to “obtain” and reach modernity. At the same time, the orthodox version of geopolitics means the Eurasian heartland is, in geographical terms, the milestone for the formation of an anti-Western movement, whose aim once again is to ultimately expel the “Atlantic” influence from Eurasia.

Today, geopolitics is a concept built on a plurality of issues within the theoretical framework of international relations and its study. In a widely interdependent and rapidly transforming world characterized by extremes in complexity, geopolitical perspectives can be very useful in defining the international system. This is particularly so with regard to the extent to which geopolitics is able to provide useful explanations of, as well as point out barriers and obstacles to, stable geospatial relations.

In this sense, geopolitics should be taken seriously, for it constitutes in itself a social element and a technological reasoning that helps in the construction of our images of the world. According to John Agnew, this imagination has provided meaning and rationalization to the practice of geopolitics to the extent that it has defined the ideological space from which the geographic categories upon which the world is organized and work are derived.

Geopolitics and political geography then simultaneously justify and legitimate a confrontation like in the days of the Cold War or give a picture of the inequalities that characterize the present (and past) world economy with regard to the representations of a world without limits, borders and boundaries. In the present state of the world, frontiers and borders seem to vanish because of the changes around the notion and function of territoriality. This points as well to the processes of globalization, a term highly used (and abused), but also a sometimes ill-defined one that can confuse all forms of economic, political, and cultural theories. The functions of the border and the sovereignty of the state are rendered less important and are therefore reduced to a more irrelevant perspective.