Geopolitics

An Introductory Reader

Jason Dittmer, Jo Sharp, Jason Dittmer, Jo Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136201998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It has been increasingly impossible to think about our changing world without coming across the term 'geopolitics'. In the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, United Kingdom, and others, geopolitics has been offered as an explanation for the occupation's failure to reinvent the Iraqi state and as a blueprint for future action. But what is 'geopolitics'?

Drawing both on academic and political material, this book introduces readers to the concept of geopolitics, from the first usage of the term to its more recent reconceptualisations. The concept of geopolitics is introduced through four thematic sections - Imperial Geopolitics, Cold War Geopolitics, Geopolitics after the Cold War and Reconceptualising Geopolitics. Each section includes key writings from a range of diverse and leading authors such as Said, Agnew, Dalby, O Tuathail, Gregory, Barnett and Kaplan, and is accompanied by a critical introduction by the editors to guide the reader through the material. This Reader establishes the foundations of geopolitics while also introducing readers to the continuing significance of the concept in the 21st century.

This Reader provides an essential resource that exposes students to original writing. The Editors provide a pathway through the material with Section Introductions to assist the readers understanding of the context of the material and impacts of the writings. The readings included draw from a range of authors, writing from a range of locations. The Reader concludes with the latest changes in geopolitical thought, incorporating feminist and other perspectives.

PART ONE Imperial Geopolitics

Introduction to Part One

Jason Dittmer

DOI: 10.4324/9780203092170-3

The language of geopolitics emerges in a very particular moment in history. At the end of the 1800s, several different trends were unfolding in the world of international relations. For over a century, international affairs had been understood to be largely a European subject. The uneven and stuttering colonization of the rest of the world had proceeded apace, with the British Empire rising to global preeminence in the wake of Napoleonic France’s defeat (1815), but with other European countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Denmark carving out empires of their own. Of course, Spain and Portugal still maintained their empires in Latin America, but this grip was slipping and many of these colonies became independent in the nineteenth century. However, this Eurocentric understanding of the world was about to be challenged.

Peace in Europe during the nineteenth century had been underpinned by a common sense of genteel diplomacy (the so-called “Concert of Europe”) and the general understanding of the non-European world as the proper space in which violent expansion ought to be undertaken. However, concern began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century that the very basis of this peace in Europe, and European supremacy elsewhere, might be undermined by several developments. The first was rise of new “Great Powers.” Some of these were former colonies, like the United States, that had launched their own colonial wars to eradicate indigenous populations and create states on a continental scale. Russia, too, had risen to greater prominence by incorporating vast swathes of territory in Asia into its European core. States such as these fundamentally called into question the continued dominance of Europe’s maritime empires. Similarly, Japan (which had never been colonized but which had been humiliated by American military might in the mid-nineteenth century) called into question assumptions of European racial dominance by defeating Russia in a war in 1905 and establishing its own imperial territories in mainland Asia. What sort of world was emerging? Would Europe be sidelined?

These anxieties existed alongside another set of concerns: the traditional concern about the balance of power in Europe. The previously mentioned Concert of Europe was a system originating in the defeat of Napoleon, in which the victorious states (Austria-Hungary, Britain, Prussia, and Russia) sought to contain the ambitions of both France (who later joined the Concert) and one another by ensuring that no country became too powerful. Great Britain was arguably the most powerful member of the Concert of Europe, but was primarily concerned with maintaining its vast overseas empire and preventing any single continental power from getting powerful enough to invade across the English Channel. This scenario began to unfold in slow motion throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, with Prussia first defeating Austria-Hungary and then France to become the dominant power in Central Europe, becoming the modern state of Germany in 1871 after incorporating many neighboring ethnically German states into the Prussian territory over the preceding decades. This new, powerful Germany posed a threat to the world order established under the auspices of Great Britain. Not only was it the strongest continental power since Napoleonic France, but it also had a chip on its shoulder: unifying too late to get in on the colonization of the world, Germany grabbed what little was left (some small portions of Africa, a few Pacific islands) but felt dissatisfied with its place in the global pecking order. Unlike the other European powers, Germany had little to lose from upending the global order. Indeed, the catastrophes of World Wars I and II can be understood as violent spasms in which the era of the “balance of power” in Europe and colonial subjugation overseas was overturned and a new order was established (the Cold War). Key to the justification of both the colonial order and its eventual upending was geopolitical thought, and the readings in this Part are intended to trace the intellectual currents that carried these ideas to places such as Washington, London, Berlin, and Tokyo.

Theorizing Geography as the Influence of Environment on History

Picking a starting point for any discourse, especially one as complicated as “geopolitics,” is a fraught business. While Swedish scholar Rudolf Kjellén was the first to use the term (in 1899), we begin further back – with the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower on History, 1660–1783, published in 1890 (Reading 1). We do so because Mahan not only sees geography as central to the patterns of history, but also because his book is key to the evolution of geopolitical thinking over time.

Mahan’s central argument was that sea power was the determining factor in the fate of nations. This may have had something to do with the fact that Mahan was the president of the US Naval War College when he published The Influence of Seapower on History: by arguing for the crucial nature of naval power in world history, he was arguing for greater funding for the US Navy. Mahan’s survey of 120 years of European history identified several characteristics of a state that helped determine whether it was a sea power. Some of these were explicitly geographical, including the location of the country (Is it an island? How many coastlines does it have?), its environment (What kind of climate does it have? How good are the soils?), and its territory (Does it have good harbors? What is the ratio of coastline to people?). Mahan laid these physical characteristics alongside more social ones, such as the type of government, the industriousness of the people, and the nature of their economy. Taken together, these environmental and social elements could add up to a powerful navy that would in peacetime be able to develop the commercial success of the country in question by protecting international trade, and in wartime would be able to choke off the trade and troop movements of an opposing navy. Having the freedom of the seas, according to Mahan, enabled both the ability to protect overseas interests (such as colonies) and to land troops in the colonies of imperial powers with weaker navies. His insights would not only shape the rise of the US Navy in the twentieth century but would also prove popular in Germany and Japan.

By connecting military and economic success to a strong navy, and linking a strong navy to a particular set of environmental characteristics (shorelines, harbors, etc.), Mahan initiates a tradition that would come to define geopolitical thinking for decades to come. In this line of thought, the unchanging nature of the Earth’s geography (by which Mahan meant the physical landscape) meant that these insights would be equally unchanging: “From time to time the superstructure of tactics has to be altered or wholly torn down; but the old foundations of strategy so far remain, as though laid upon a rock.” Indeed, Mahan literally attributed his theory to the rocks of which states’ territories are composed.

Our second reading, from Sir Halford Mackinder’s “The Geographical Pivot of History,” clearly draws on Mahan’s ideas. Mackinder is a figure who looms large in British geography. He argued that geography ought to abandon its traditional activities of exploration and adventuring in favor of a more academic synthesis of knowledge about the world. Ensconced in an academic position at Oxford University, Mackinder began to outline a new identity for the discipline, in which geographic patterns are analyzed and put in the service of the British Empire. The Empire was simultaneously at its greatest geographic extent and also anxious about the trends identified at the beginning of this essay. Mackinder sought, like Mahan, to shape government policy and empower his country at the expense of others.

“The Geographical Pivot of History” accepts Mahan’s claims about sea power, but argues that they were relevant only to the time period Mahan studied. He argues that, prior to particular technological developments that made long distance sea travel reliable, it was, in fact, land power that dominated, with repeated invasions of Europe by fast-moving nomads on horseback (the Huns, the Mongols) turned back only by a combination of European geography (mountains and forests which are unsuited to warfare on horseback) and European political and technological innovation. Crucially, Mackinder takes Mahan’s focus on specific geographic features and scales up his analysis to the global scale. The world can be divided into areas that are “naturally” sea powers and land powers, and the people of these areas are equally naturally pitted against one another. The invention of reliable seafaring technologies allowed Europe to “outflank” the land power of Asia and to colonize the rest of the world in the way outlined by Mahan. But “now” (when Mackinder was writing) the spread of railroads throughout Russia threatened to give the land power of Asia the same amount of mobility that Europe (and particularly Britain) had enjoyed for several centuries, thus threatening to upend the global order. Further, while land power could always attack “outward” towards the coast, there was a core part of Asia (referred to as the “Pivot” or later the “Heartland”) that was immune from naval invasion. Thus, Britain must prevent an alliance between the upstart Germany and Russia (the current occupant of the Pivot) at all costs.

The specifics of Mackinder’s theory are important, but perhaps more important is the way in which he argues for it. He claims to view the world in an abstract way, as if he hovers above the world and can see everything. He creates the illusion that he has identified a fundamental pattern of geography in history that is objectively true. Of course, the story he tells – of a Europe that is fundamentally an innocent victim of Asian aggression, of conflict as inherent between land and sea power, of the importance of the global scale to understanding local events, of the role of physical landscapes in shaping human behavior – is linked to who Mackinder is (a white, male supporter of Empire) and is only one of many that might be told. Nevertheless it is this mode of narrating the way the world works that would become identifiable as “geopolitics” even if Mackinder never uses the word.

These first two readings might give the impression that geopolitics was primarily an Anglo-American project, but this is not true. In fact, a slightly different approach to geopolitics originated in Germany around the same time. Friedrich Ratzel had fought in the Franco-Prussian War (the final war of German unification) and developed his ideas of political geography (his 1897 book of the same name originated the term) in this context: a new Germany surrounded by the other Great Powers of Europe and with few options for colonization around the world. Ratzel was greatly influenced (as were many scholars of his time) by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Ratzel and others like him were trying to transfer the principles of Darwinism from the biological to the social arena. Social Darwinism considered people (or peoples) as locked in a struggle for survival, in which only the strong would thrive. Ratzel saw the state as like a species, nourished by the ecological niche that it occupied (manifested as territory). This view of the state necessarily treated the people of various states as fundamentally different (as species are in biology) and therefore utilized biological notions of race and ethnicity that have subsequently been rejected (Mackinder was also a believer in racial hierarchy). Ratzel’s “organic state theory” asserted that dynamic, thriving states ought to take territory from less dynamic states, or else they will lose that dynamism and slide into an economic, political, and demographic malaise. In other words, if your state was not taking land from its neighbors, they would soon be taking land from you. This extra territory to accommodate a growing population was termed Lebensraum, or “living space,” a word that made its way from Ratzel’s academic works into the speeches of Adolf Hitler. But more on that later.

Ratzel’s ideas were hugely influential, as in his classroom were students such as Rudolf Kjellén (inventor of Geopolitik) and the American, Ellen Churchill Semple. Indeed, it is important to see the Anglo-American and German variants of geopolitics as intertwined in a range of ways. Ratzel incorporated Mahan’s idea of sea power into his ideas, and Semple’s affection for Ratzel’s ideas (and a desire to modify them) led her to write Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (1911), from which our third reading is drawn. Semple explicitly rejected organic state theory, and tried to introduce more nuance to the role of the environment in shaping human outcomes. Indeed, her belief in the importance of the environment also led her away from the more racist aspects of Ratzel’s Social Darwinism; she believed that differences in culture among social groups were not biologically inherited but the result of environmental influences (Keighren, 2006). The reading offered here (Reading 3) illustrates how Semple wanted to maintain Ratzel’s idea of borders as always liable to change, yet wanted to replace his belief in racial hierarchy with an appreciation for the role of geography in shaping the hierarchy of ethnic groups: “human activities are fully intelligible only in relation to the various geographic conditions which have stimulated them in different parts of the world” (Semple, 1911: 51).

As a woman, Ellen Churchill Semple, though at the forefront of geographical thought, was relatively unique at the time. Academia at the turn of the twentieth century was dominated by men and for her work to be the nexus between American, British, and German geography was quite an achievement. As mentioned above, Mackinder was himself key in the retooling of British geography to be less about exploration and adventure and more interested in synthesis and the production of wider knowledge. Nevertheless, as Reading 4 indicates, Mackinder was not uninfluenced by the culture of masculinity and Empire that suffused the discipline of geography at the time. In fact, arguably because he was trying to push geography into becoming a more intellectual (rather than physical) endeavor, Mackinder had to prove his manly credentials to his peers. In this excerpt from his 2009 book, Geopolitics and Empire, Gerry Kearns compares the African adventures of Halford Mackinder with those of geographer Mary Kingsley, showing how these two contemporary expeditions were each shaped by gender expectations of the time, and how gender was intertwined with race, class, and Empire differently for each. Armed with the insights from Kearns’s historical study, it is worthwhile returning to the ideas offered by Mahan, Mackinder, and Semple. In what ways were their purportedly “objective” understandings of the world and what we now call geopolitics shaped by who they were and how they fitted into prevailing categories of race, class, gender, and nationality? Is an objective view of the world even possible? Can any explanation of the world and how it got to be “how it is” ever satisfy everyone?

Critiquing Imperial Geopolitics

It would be a mistake to think that the language of geopolitics was unchallenged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries when it emerged. Of course, it entered an already crowded field of ideas about how international relations unfolded, some of which it dovetailed with nicely and others which it flatly contradicted. For instance, geopolitics (at least as it has been discussed so far) shares some elements of what has been called “realism” in the discipline of International Relations (though the term would not emerge until after World War II). Realism is the belief that the only relevant actors in international affairs are states, and that those states seek to maximize their own power at all costs. This inherent antagonism is built into the system, and even allies will only remain such until it becomes power-maximizing for one of them to do otherwise. You can see some of the overlaps with, for instance, Ratzel’s emphasis on states as mutually exclusive “species” in competition for space, or the antagonistic divide between land power and sea power that Mahan and Mackinder offered. Further, both geopolitics and realism share a belief in the world and its politics as something that exists objectively “out there” and can be known. Realism and geopolitics differ, however, in the emphasis given to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• PART ONE IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS
• Introduction to Part One
• 1 Discussion of the Elements of Sea Power
• 2 The Geographical Pivot of History
• 3 Society and State in Relation to the Land
• 4 Manly Endeavours
• 5 What Geography Ought to Be
• 6 Some Rules of Satyagraha
• 7 Why Geopolitik?
• 8 Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy?
• 9 Geography versus Geopolitics
• 10 Japanese Geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s
• 11 Orientalism
• 12 “America is Safe While its Boys and Girls Believe in its Creeds!”: Captain America and American Identity Prior to World War 2
• PART TWO COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS
• Introduction to Part Two
• 13 The Sources of Soviet Conduct
• 14 The Domino Theory Principle
• 15 Antidomino
• 16 Diplomacy
• 17 The Brezhnev Doctrine
• 18 Non-alignment in the 1970s
• 19 An Illustration of Geographical Warfare: Bombing the Dikes on the Red River, North Vietnam
• 20 Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy
• 21 Common Sense and the Common Danger: Policy Statement
• 22 Publishing American Identity: Popular Geopolitics, Myth and the Reader’s Digest
• 23 American Families in the Cold War
• 24 Between Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World War to Cold War
• 25 A Common European Home
• PART THREE GEOPOLITICS AFTER THE COLD WAR
• Introduction to Part Three
• 26 The Clash of Civilizations?
• 27 The Clash of Ignorance
• 28 The Coming Anarchy
• 29 Reading Robert Kaplan’s “Coming Anarchy”
• 30 The Pentagon’s New Map
• 31 Neoliberal Geopolitics
• 32 Gravity’s Rainbows
• 33 Geopolitics by Another Name: Immigration and the Politics of Assimilation
• 34 Emerging China and Critical Geopolitics: Between World Politics and Chinese Particularity
• 35 The Uncertain State(s) of Europe?
• 36 Icy Geopolitics
• 37 The Geopolitical Economy of ‘Resource Wars’
• 38 The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security
• PART FOUR RECONCEPTUALIZING GEOPOLITICS
• Introduction to Part Four
• 39 In Defence of the Heartland: Sir Halford Mackinder and his Critics a Hundred Years On
• 40 The Revenge of Geography
• 41 A Feminist Geopolitics?
• 42 Globalized Fear? Towards an Emotional Geopolitics
• 43 Geopolitics and Family in Palestine
• 44 Affectivity and Geopolitical Images
• 45 After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics
• 46 Religion and Geopolitics
• 47 Militarism, Realism, Just War, or Nonviolence? Critical Geopolitics and the Problem of Normativity
• 48 The Question of ‘the Political’ in Critical Geopolitics: Querying the ‘Child Soldier’ in the ‘War on Terror’
• 49 Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalisation, Empire, Environment and Critique
• Sources
• Index