Geopolitical Review

Political geography is a valuable field of social science, linking geography and political science – it is concerned with the spatial interaction between political and geographical phenomena. There are a number of established approaches to political geography, though few can be justified as holistic approaches. It is currently conventional to recognize historical, morphological, functional and power analysis approaches, though the latter, concerned with the assessment and comparison of the power of states is a branch of, rather than an approach to political geography. The historical approach is generally adopted in studies which describe the evolution of a political or social unit through time. The morphological approach calls for a descriptive and interpretative analysis of the external and internal structure of the state area as a geographic object. The external morphological attributes include size, shape, location and boundaries, and internal morphological subdivisions include core areas, the capital, cultural regions. This was replaced by functional approach, which emphasized the dynamic relationship of the human and morphological contents of the state to each other and to the whole.
The real founder of political geography was the German geographer Ratzel (1844-1904), whose writings closely reflect the location of its author in time and space, being coloured by DARWINISTIC notions about the survival of the ‘fittest’ and by the environmental determinism of the late nineteenth century German school of geography. The state was regarded as an organic entity, its success depending largely upon its ability to obtain space, and itself an expression of the imperishable ties between men and the land.
Ratzel formulated a potentially dangerous view of the world in which the competitive aspects of state behaviour were flattered with the dignity of natural laws. The concept was studied through power analysis approach which described similar world view, following hostile definitions of social classes presented earlier in the century.
Other political geographical works of considerable quality were produced at various intervals during the past century. Two texts in particular merit special mention, Bowman’s The New World and Whittlesey’s Earth and the State, which produced more optimistic, objective and authoritative survey of the new world.
While political geography in the West was pursuing its rather aimless course, in Germany the development of geopolitics proceeded with a more definite if sinister sense of direction. Ratzel’s organic view of the state was followed up, which gave a pseudo scientific justification to the rights of strong states to expand by any means possible, found an avid readership among extreme nationalists in Germany. Hoshofer, a German soldier, traveler and geographer (he was a disciple of Hess rather than of Hitler) and other group of German geographers, and their speculations produced an amalgamation of the organic state notions of Ratzel, macro regionalism, post war paranoia and the supposed German right to Lebensraum. These ideas were mainly articulated in the pages of the periodical Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik which first appeared in 1924 and continued for twenty years. Geopolitik was developed in this journal as the geographical conscience of the state, though certainly moral and scientific consciences must have been abandoned, for data were either presented in subjective and misleading forms or more simply, falsified, in order to suggest directions or to enlist support for expansion policies of war aims. The launching of Geopolitiik in Germany rightly inspired profound reactions of disgust in the outside world. In Germany the subject had in fact harboured nationalistic and deterministic undertones, stated by one as “German geographers have long ago tried to make physical geography one of the moral weapons with which they are prepared to carry out their plans of dominating the world.” – the journal represented the grotesque eruption of a long seated blemish, a rationalization of the basest policies. In 1932 Demangeon wrote, ‘we are able to establish that German geopolitics deliberately renounces all scientific spirit. It is diverted to the arena of controversies and national hatreds. To Bowman, there was no sure science to bring them out of these new depths of international difficulty. Geopolitics is simple and sure, but in German writings and
It is widely suggested that political geography suffered as a result of the general outcry against Geopolitik. Certainly most western geographers were extremely wary of accusations of subjectivity, and at the end of the 19th century Mackinder apparently faced a certain hostility in the establishment of a School of Geography at Oxford, partly on the grounds that it might ‘subvert’ geographical techniques to the study of international politics. Yet all political geographers had been aware of the distinctions between political geography and Geopolitik , as was explained, for example, by Maull:
Geopolitik is concerned with the spatial ‘requirements’ of a state while political geography examines only its spatial conditions.
After the 1945, the post war development was much as before. In the 1950s, a number of important theoretical innovations appeared which seemed to promise further conceptual advances. Since 1967, a number of promising publications have appeared many by non political geographers, but they have not yet been fully absorbed into the theoretical basis of the subject. Political geography is quite rich in regional descriptions, particularly those concerning boundary studies but the resumption of its rightful status as a branch of geography, the equal and essential companion of the economic, historical and social branches, will depend upon the development and refinement of theoretical and analytical techniques.