Geopolitical Traditions

Critical Histories of a Century of Geopolitical Thought

David Atkinson, Klaus Dodds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134692194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Condemned as an intellectul poison by the late American geographer Richard Hartshbornem geopolitics has confounded its critics. Today it remains a popular and important intellectul field despite the persistent allegations that geopolitics helped to legitimate Hitler's policies of spatial expansionism and the domination of place. Using insights from critical geopolitics and cultural history, the contributoirs focus on how geopolitics has been created, negotiated and contested within a variety of intellectual and popular contexts. Geopolitical Traditions argues that geopolitics has to take responsibility for the past whilst at the same time reconceptualising geopolitics in a manner which accounts for the dramatic changes in the late twentieth century. The book is divided into three sections: firstly Rehtinking Geopolitical Histories concentrates on how geopolitical conversations between European scholars and the wider world unfolded; secondly Geopolitics, Nationa and Spirituality considers how geopolitical writings have been strongly influenced by religions, iconography adn doctrine with examples drawn from Catholicicsm, Judaism and Hinduism; and thirdly Reclaiming and Refocusing Geopolitics contemplates how geopolitics has been reformulated in the post-war period with illustrations from France and the United States. Geopolitical Traditions brings together scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locations in order to explore a hundred years of geopolitical thought. Sanjay Chaturedi Punjab University, India. Paul Claval, Eaubonne, France. Michael J. Heffernan Notingham University, UK, Les Hepple University of Bristol.

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INTRODUCTION

Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought

David Atkinson and Klaus Dodds

Originally coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén in 1899 (Holdar 1992), few terms in the modern history of geography have been as controversial and emotive as ‘geopolitics’. From its obscure origins at the twilight of the nineteenth century through to the widespread and sometimes indiscriminate contemporary uses of the term, the label has frequently been the focus of intense and often acrimonious debate. At certain times, ‘geopolitics’ even attracted such enduring notoriety that political geography and even academic geography in general were tainted by what, in 1927, the geographer Carl Sauer felt able to call the ‘wayward child of the geographic family’ (Sauer 1927).

To many geographers since Sauer, geopolitics has remained an enigmatic, shadowy, contested and sometimes shameful category. Yet despite occasional outrage, periodic soul-searching, denial and notoriety, geopolitics has continued to lurk insistently within the discipline. Moreover, geographers and other scholars have returned again and again to this intellectual domain. For many writers—and not just those who might be identified as politically conservative and reactionary—geopolitics seem to offer the seductive promise of a privileged perspective upon current affairs and a unique insight into the political world.

This book therefore brings together reflections upon the enduring problematic of ‘the geopolitical’ throughout the twentieth century. It does so in the light of approaches enabled by critical histories of geography and critical geopolitics. It engages with some of the substantive expressions of geopolitics, but also deals with less well-known, non-anglophone experiences. It recognizes the roles of elite and popular, formal and practical geopolitics, while acknowledging that geopolitics are contingent and context-bound. There is no attempt to define or delimit the topic, but analysis revolves around those movements and individuals who have consciously used or appropriated the term ‘geopolitics’. As such, the book is a modest attempt to understand some of the natures of ‘the geopolitical’ through history, and the continuing use of geopolitical ideas, however fractious and incoherent this tradition may be. However, until relatively recently, a book with this theme might have been deemed unacceptable by some geographers. For much of the Cold War period in the Anglo-American world, geopolitics was shunned by many within academic geography. One result was that histories of geopolitics in the English speaking world were both partial and problematic. Therefore, these first pages discuss these partial histories and their subsequent

Partial histories

Geopolitical thought emerged at the close of the nineteenth century as geographers and other thinkers sought to analyse, explain and understand the transformations and finite spaces of the fin de siècle world (Heffernan 1998, and this volume; Kearns 1983, 1993; Kern 1983; Smith 1999). Geopolitics is thus related to other elements of geography that underpinned western imperialism in the period. However, while the entangled nature of geography’s links with imperialism has recently attracted sustained academic attention, by contrast, geopolitical thought has suffered notoriety for much of the post-war period. In Anglo-American geography for example, until recently, histories of the discipline reproduced an artificial dualism whereby geography’s imperial heritage remained largely unspoken, but geopolitics was routinely shunned as a bastardized form of geography that had been conscripted to political service.

This notoriety is often traced to the hysterical reactions to Karl Haushofer and his development of German Geopolitik in early 1940s American journalism. Writing for the mass audiences of Current History and The Reader’s Digest in 1941, for example, Frederick Sondern (1941a, 1941b) wrote of ‘The Thousand Scientists behind Hitler’. He told a sensational tale of:

the work of Major General Professor Dr. Karl Haushofer and his Geopolitical Institute in Munich, with its 1,000 scientists, technicians and spies. These men are almost unknown to the public, even in the Reich. But their ideas, their charts, maps, statistics, information and plans have dictated Hitler’s moves from the very beginning.

(Sondern 1941b:45)

It was such breathless accounts, syndicated across the newspapers and magazines of early 1940s America, that prompted further interest in this secretive Institut für Geopolitik and its supposed domination over Hitler and Nazi Foreign Policy. Geopolitik cast a long shadow in the American popular imagination, andthese sinister themes even found their way into popular books and cinema (de Seversky 1942; Meilinger 1995; Ó Tuathail 1996).

At an official level, Roosevelt’s administration was worried enough to commission academic studies of Geopolitik (Whittlesey, Hartshorne and Colby 1942). And although elements of this analysis qualified Sondern’s hyperbole, self-styled ‘experts’ such as the Jesuit-academic Edmund Walsh (see ÓTuathail, this volume) were still agreed that:

The basic, incontestable truth is that Haushofer, directly in some instances indirectly in others, co-ordinated, integrated, and rationalised the whole field of comparative geography for the uses of the Führer… [geopolitics] became a dynamic driving rod in the mechanics of states craft. A huge personnel was mobilised by Haushofer to comb the earth for significant facts and geographic information.

(Walsh 1944:22)

Indeed, these ideas took such a firm hold in the United States that after the collapse of the Third Reich, proceedings began to indict Haushofer at the Nuremberg war trials. At least one of the prosecuting team thought that in the absence of Hitler, they had nevertheless found the true mastermind behind German expansionism (Jacobsen 1979).

It is thought that Haushofer would not have been tried at Nuremberg, although his 1946 suicide pre-empted any indictment (Jacobsen 1979). However, his alleged associations with Nazism ensured that after the war, geopolitics was largely ostracized by geographers in general, and by political geographers in particular. In a 1948 textbook for example, under the sub-heading of ‘Perversion’, G.Etzel Pearcy, Richard Fifield and Associates (1948:23) revealed tortuous attempts to distinguish ‘Political geography [which] is a sane, cautious and—above all else—honest science’ from the geopoliticians, ‘in no normal state of mind’ who:

had fallen victim to the psychosis of ‘all or nothing’. To achieve their ends they were willing to convert political geography into total geographical nonsense if need be…it enabled the German geographers themselves to escape the moral censorship of their science and to side-step their own scientific consciences.

(Etzel Pearcy, Fifield and Associates, 1948:23)

Other histories of geography chose to virtually ignore geopolitics altogether. In his Background to Political Geography (1967), Crone mentioned German geopolitics in only one paragraph of 239 pages; and this only because he felt himself ‘required’ to do so (Crone 1967:106). Likewise, in Johnston’s Geography and Geographers (1987),Haushofer and geopolitics merit only two lines (Johnston 1987). A reluctance to engage with this troubled past was thus evidenced in attempts to isolate the topic, and exclude it from geographical histories. At the same time, academics who tried to reassess ‘geopolitics’ in the post-war period often risked fierce criticism. When Ladis Kristof (1960) tried to rehabilitate the term at the height of the Cold War, he suffered immediate censure (Alexander 1961).

Of course there were exceptions to this rule. As Hepple points out (1986), the notion that the post-war taboo of geopolitics in the Anglophone world was absolute is wide of the mark. Several writers (mainly non-geographers) still used the term (Chubb 1954; Roucek 1955, 1956, 1962), others continued to investigate geopolitical themes (Cohen 1964), while some attempted to develop a ‘geopacifics’ of peace (Taylor 1957). Additionally, English-language experiences are not the whole story: in some parts of the world, geopolitics thrived. In Latin America, geopolitics became closely linked to the violent, militaristic and expansionist regimes of countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile (Dodds this volume; Hepple 1992). With dictators such as Augusto Pinochet having taught geopolitics in military academies, these ideas found application in foreign and domestic policy initiatives. Geopolitics under the generals appeared at best partial in so far as national security doctrines only identified ‘threats’ to the state; at worst, they were bloody and awful (Child 1985; Hepple 1992). Certainly, the experience did little to improve the intellectual reputation of geopolitics.

Regardless of this, within Anglophone geography, geopolitics seems to have been largely proscribed and demonized as a malign aberration for much of the post-war period. By 1969, when Brian Berry castigated political geography as a ‘moribund backwater’, geopolitics was surely the most stagnant reach of this lifeless subdiscipline (Berry 1969).

New perspectives

In the last fifteen years or so, understandings of the histories and development of geopolitics have improved markedly. For example, studies of German Geopolitik have allowed far more subtle understandings of the emergence, contexts and significance of Geopolitik in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Fahlbusch, Rössler and Siegrist 1989; Heske 1986, 1987; Heske and Wesche 1988; Jan van Pelt and Dwork 1996; Korinman 1990; Kost 1989; Murphy 1994; Sandner 1988; Sandner and Rössler 1994); the ways that Geopolitik was appropriated for intellectual legitimation by Nazism; and also the eventual marginalization of the movement by the suspicions of the Third Reich’s hard-line racial theorists (Bassin 1987b; Heske 1987).

There also exist more nuanced understandings of the distribution of geopolitical ideas throughout the inter-war world, and their re-negotiation in a series of different countries. For example, geopolitics met varying degrees of success inFinland (Paasi 1990), Sweden (Holdar 1992) and Japan (Fukushima 1997; Takeuchi 1980, 1994). There are studies of French contestations of German Geopolitik, and efforts to forge a Géopolitique (Desfarges 1996; Heffernan 1998; Parker 1985, 1987). Recent studies relate how both French and German geopolitics were read in Fascist Italy, where geographers developed an ‘Italian geopolitics’ in the light of, but distinct from, these extant geopolitics (Antonsich 1997, Atkinson 1995, 1996; Raffestin, Lopreno and Pasteur 1995). Similarly, geopolitics were re-worked in Franco’s Spain (Bosque-Maurel et al. 1992; Sidaway, this volume), and chapters in this volume (by Chaturvedi, Dodds, and Sidaway) demonstrate the emergence of geopolitics in Indian, Argentine and Portuguese contexts. Reactions to geopolitics in the United States (Smith 1984, 1999; Ó Tuathail 1996) and the Soviet Union (Hauner 1992) have been addressed, while there are also studies of early geopolitical thinkers such as Ratzel (Bassin 1987a), Kjellén (Holdar 1992) and Mackinder (Ó Tuathail 1992, 1996).There is coverage of the geopolitical assumptions, theories, and practices of post-1945 American ‘security intellectuals’ (Dalby 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1991; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992), and the popular elements of Cold war America’s ‘geopolitical cultures’ (Sharp 1993, 1999). Finally, the ‘anti-geopolitics’ that resisted the connections between geopolitical expressions and statescraft are also addressed (Ó Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge 1998; Wittfogel 1985).

In the light of this body of work, the history of geopolitics is far less partial than the outline reproduced earlier. Certainly German Geopolitik played a significant role in the development and diffusion of geopolitics throughout the modern world. However, the German experience is not the entire story. Rather, it is now clearer that the geopolitical tradition entails a varied and complicated set of experiences, and a series of different ‘geopolitics’ negotiated and filtered through many different contexts.

Renewed responsibilities

In the light of this more sophisticated understanding of geopolitical histories, we argue that geographers have an ever-greater responsibility to reflect upon the consequences of geopolitical knowledges past and present. Recent scholarship on the connections between geography, the state and the military only emphasize this point. These connections provided a powerful incentive for the establishment of academic geography in the late nineteenth century. State patronage was welcomed by geographers who, in turn, often sought to reinforce their embryonic discipline by demonstrating the practical utility of their ‘science’ to the nation. The collection, collation and circulation of geographical knowledge in the form of maps, charts, surveys and reports had much practical significance for the execution of state power (Bell, Butlin and Heffernan 1995; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Harley1988, 1989; Livingstone 1992; Jacob 1999). Thus, in addition to the intellectual armoury that geography provided for imperialism, geographers also offered practical assistance to political elites.

It was amidst this context that Rudolf Kjellén’s original invocation of geopolitics explicitly recognized the territorial basis of the modern state and the geographical elements of governance. Geopolitical thought therefore has its roots planted firmly in this context. It may frequently have been a murky business grounded in the practicalities of governance, but any serious intellectual engagement with the history of geopolitics has to recognize that geopolitics is simply one of the more problematic consequences of geography’s entangled historical connections to state power.

This collection therefore advocates an intellectual responsibility that acknowledges the situated, contingent and troubled past of geopolitics, while contributing an appreciation of how geopolitical knowledges have unfolded in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. The book adopts a critical perspective that situates and contextualizes these knowledges. It also admits a greater degree of pluralism, diversity and uncertainty into extant debates about geopolitics. While it is recognized that western scholars have yet to appreciate the rich geopolitical literatures that exist in China, Japan, Eastern Europe and parts of Africa, this book argues that even the increasingly well known histories of European and North American geopolitics can be re-interpreted with considerable intellectual profit. To such ends, this collection draws upon recent developments in human geography that enable the development of more nuanced, rigorous and critical understandings of geopolitical thought. These include developments in the writing of critical histories of geography, and the themes of critical geopolitics. Both approaches are outlined in the following pages. In the light of these, the idea of a ‘geopolitical tradition’ is developed. Finally, the structure of the collection is discussed.

Geopolitical traditions and critical histories of geography

Our title Geopolitical Traditions consciously refers to David Livingstone’s seminal text The Geographical Tradition (1992). A key statement in the emergence of ‘critical histories of geography’, Livingstone’s fluent narrative was the first significant history of geography to deliberately avoid whiggish historiography and disciplinary exceptionalism in favour of situating the production of geographical knowledges in the social, cultural, economic and political contexts whence they came (Haraway 1991; Livingstone 1992; Smith 1987; Smith and Godlewska 1994). In contrast to previous histories that often cast geography as a neutral, disembodied ‘science’ (Rose 1993), Livingstone recognized geographical knowledge as ‘a social and cultural construction, and a political resource’ (1992:3).

The debate prompted by Livingstone’s book highlighted some of the different aspects of geography elided in Livingstone’s tradition (Driver 1994; Driver et al. 1995; Withers et al. 1996). Some critics perceived the exclusion of non-western geographies (Sidaway, 1997), of the embodied practices of geography (Matless, 1995), or of gender issues (Rose, 1995). Others observed that political and economic contexts (Withers et al. 1996), or technical and physical geographies (Werrity and Reid 1995) might have been emphasized more. Some simply questioned the relevance of histories (Barnett 1995). But in the light of these debates, and following Livingstone’s (1992:358) assertion that geography has ‘connoted rather different things to different people at different times and in different places’, it gradually became clearer that rather than privilege one, singular geographical tradition, it is more constructive to think of plural geographical traditions (Livingstone 1995a). Similarly, rather than search for an immanent, essential core of ‘geography’, it is more productive to recognize the different, negotiated geographical knowledges that are produced in each distinct context.

The importance of contexts demands that th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Rethinking Geopolitical Histories
• Part 2 Geopolitics, Nation and Spirituality
• Part 3 Reclaiming and Refocusing Geopolitics
• Epilogue Futures and possibilities