Geopolitics is the applied study of the relationships of geographical space to
politics. Geopolitics, therefore, concerned with the reciprocal impact of
spatial patterns, features, and structures and political ideas, institutions,
and transactions. The term 'Geopolitics' has originally invented, in 1899, by a
Swedish political scientist, Rudolf Kjellen and its original meaning is to
signify a general concern with geography and politics. However, defining the
concept of 'geopolitics' itself is a considerably difficult task because
definition of geopolitics tends to changes as historical periods of time and
structures of world order change. Therefore, there have been numerous ways of
interpreting the term and arguments on them all through the history. In this
essay, I intend to examine how geopolitics has influenced on international
relations and how it has evolved using well-known geopoliticians' theories in a
chronological order: Imperialist, Cold War, and New World Order. Imperialist
Geopolitics In early 20th century, geopolitics was a form of power or knowledge
concerned with promoting states expansionism and securing empires. It was a time
characterized by colonial expansionism abroad and industrial modernization at
home. This is also the time when natural supremacy of a certain race or the
state has considerably prevailed. The most historically and geographically fated
imperialist rivalry of the period was that of between British Empire and the
rising imperial aspirations of the German state in Europe. In order to
investigate the geopolitical tension between them, the geopolitical writings of
the British geographer Halford Mackinder and of the German geopolitician Karl
Haushofer have to be thoroughly examined. In addition, it is also needed to
examine the view of the far side across the Atlantic, the United States that
emerged as a significant player on world's stage later on. First of all, the
starting point for almost all discussions of geopolitics is Sir Halford
Mackinder, a member of the British Parliament who wrote "The Geographic
Pivot of History" in 1904. He addressed the importance in the history of
geopolitics for three reasons in his work; for its god's eye global view; for
its division of the globe into vast swaths of history, and for its sweeping
story of geography's conditioning influence on the course of history and
politics. First, he argues that "Geopolitics is a new way of seeing
international politics as a unified worldwide scene" and adopts a god's eye
global view which looks down on what he calls "the stage of the whole
world": For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion
of features and events on the stage of the whole world and may seek a formula
which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in
history. In this sentence, 'we' implies the geopolitical experts, educated and
privileged white men who can perceive the real political features. This sentence
shows all the basic elements of imperialist geopolitics, such as the divine eye
gaze on the world, only experts can perceive the real and the desire to reveal
laws to explain all of history. However, this view has been criticized for the
reason that imperialists only see within the structures of meaning provided by
their socialization into certain backgrounds, intellectual contexts and
political culture and beliefs. Second, he suggests the map of "The Natural
Seats of Power". To illustrate his thesis geographically, Mackinder labels
enormous tracts of territory with simple identities like "pivot area."
He eliminates the tremendous geographical diversity and specificity of places on
earth. Difference becomes sameness. Geographical heterogeneity becomes
geopolitical homogeneity. Third, he argues "the geographical causation of
history" in the application of the sweeping theory. At the centre of this
theory shows the relationship between physical geography and transportation
technology. Until the end of nineteenth century, sea power was the supreme, but
by then, railroads were making it possible to move large armies quickly over
vast land areas. Mackinder wanted his government, which had achieved glory as a
sea power, to be prepared for the rise of a land power, obviously Germany at
that time. In his famous "heartland theory", he renamed Euro-Asia,
"the world island" and the "pivot area", "the
heartland". Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the
Heartland commands the world island; Who rules the world island commands the
world. According to his simple strategic argument, what must be prevented is
German expansionism in Eastern Europe and a German alliance with the Soviet
Union for the time. In spite of his effort, his idea had a little impact on
British foreign policy. The reason is said that his way of interpreting human
history is too simplistic and far geographically deterministic, and he failed to
aware of the emergence of revolutionary air power in 20th century led by mostly
the United States. He underestimated the power of the United States while he
overestimated the vast spaces of Russian "heart land." By 1904, the
United States had emerged as a significant player in international relations.
They started expanding their territories with strategic naval forces. Admiral
Alfred Mahan who announced sea power doctrine, which stressed the significance
of overseas naval bases. He argued in an institutionally self-serving way that
the path to national greatness lay in commercial and naval expansionism. All
truly great powers were naval powers. It is not necessary to acquire all
territories and formally occupy them; what the Unite States needed was an
informal empire based on "open door" trade and a string of overseas
naval bases that would give its navy the ability to protect power in a
troublesome region whenever it needed to do so. To back up this view in a
concrete sense, Theodore Roosevelt applied social Darwinian ideology. He
emphasized that all the races are in a struggle for survival and only the
fittest and the strongest can survive. He wrote " there is no place in the
world for nations who have become enervated by soft and easy life, or who have
lost their fibre of vigorous hardiness and manliness." Along with his view,
the most civilized and superior state in the world, the United States had a
right to exercise an international power in the region to keep troublesome and,
namely, uncivilized states. In Germany, a former military officer Karl von
Haushofer, who was anxious to avenge Germany's post-World War I humiliations and
rebuild the German empire, advocated a strong nationalistic imperialist
geopolitics. Like many of veterans of World War II, he had a deep hatred of the
peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, which took away Germany's colonies and
part of its national territories after the war. After the Treaty, he believed
that Germany's need for Lebensraum (living space) was greater than ever.
Haushofer's crusade to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles led him to found the
journal Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik in 1924. This journal helped Haushofer create
a new school of geography. Mixing the social Darwinist ideas and the ideas of
Mackinder, he attempted to reduce the complexity of International relations. In
order to survive, according to Haushofer, the German state must achieve
Lebensraum. The best way of achieving is for Germany to develop alliance with
the heartland power, the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he argued that Germany
should align with Japan and create "maritime-continental" block,
stretching from Germany throughout Russia to Japan. In "why geopolitik",
he claims that the reason Germany lost World War I was because its leader did
not study geopolitics. He said that geopolitics is the study of the "earth-boundedness"
of political processes and institutions. Like Mackinder, he attributes special
power to the god-like geopolitician, treating geopolitics as a faith that offers
divine revelations. His persistent emphasis on the need for geopolitical
education is nothing more than a legitimation for the right-wing militarist
foreign policy. Haushofer's acknowledgement led to a militarist and
nationalistic version of Nazi regime that produced a murderous and brutal war in
the 20th century. Furthermore, his ideas justified the practice of many
chauvinist, racist, imperialist ideologies. However, geopolitics did not
disappear after World War II and the fall of Nazi Germany. All these views of
imperialist geopolitics gave way to a newly emergent Cold War geopolitics. Cold
War Geopolitics Questions of geography were always deeply indicated in the Cold
War that developed between the United States and the Soviet Union after World
War II. After the war, bipolar system has been clearly formed. The Cold War is a
political structure based upon two contrary relations between the
superpowers-opposition and dependence. Theories of opposition are concerned the
Cold War as either the result of the Soviet threat or an outcome of US
imperialism. In either case, the conflict implies the one between communism and
capitalism. The Cold War created the term 'Third World' and the division of
space into a First World of capitalist states, a Second World of communist
states, and a Third World of developing states. This also reflects the
North-South issues of massive global material inequality. The Truman Doctrine is
the first significant statement of American Cold War geopolitics. Like the
imperialists geopoliticians, Truman adopts a god's eye globe view and uses
simple and abstract categories of "the free world" and "the
enslaved world", which is black and white reasoning. This geographical map
became the geographical monochrome of good vs. evil, capitalism vs. communism,
the West vs. the East, and the US vs. the Soviet Union. These simplistic
reasoning has drawn the domino theory. Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson,
explained before Congress that like: Apples in a barrel infected by one rotten
one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would
also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe
through Italy, France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist
parties in Western Europe (Acheson, 1969). Presenting "apples in a
barrel" is a mark of excessive pride in the American intellectuals of
statecraft with the Truman administration. Thus when Truman declares in his
speech that it is "necessary only to glance at a map," the map he has
in his mind is one where states are equivalent to dominoes about to fall. Only
physical proximity is seen as geography and nothing else. The geopolitical order
made by the American after World War II was geographically more extensive than
the Soviet order. Domestic politics with the US was characterized by containment
militarism, which was set by exaggerated view of the Soviet threat. This mainly
facilitated the creation and expansion of a national security state and a
confinement of US political culture. Through exaggeration of the Soviet threat,
American intellectuals of statecraft attempted to transform the US stance from a
reluctant isolationist power to a crusading interventionist power, which
promoted an open world economy and safeguarding the free enterprise system. In
addition, the US ought to establish for itself the freedom, in the space called
the "Third World" to intervene and attack peoples and states that have
been considered a threat to a view of American values and economic interests.
After World War II, this tendency led the US security state to intervene in the
domestic politics of many states, for example, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1956
and Chile in 1973. The US also got massively involved militarily in a number of
regions and fought bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam among other places against
what it perceived as a threat of worldwide communist. The geopolitical order
established by the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II was largely confined
to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Just like the US built a huge military
complex to support its national security, so did the Soviet Union that its state
structure became even more militarised than that of the US. The Soviet
geopolitical order was set by the maintenance of a system extended deterrence in
Eastern Europe by ruling communist elites and military structure of the Warsaw
Pact organization. Because it did not have the resources and wealth of the
capitalist West, the Soviet Union intervened erratically in the Third world such
as a few radical states like North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, to compete its
counterpart, the capitalist West. Europe was the principal place where both
contending geopolitical orders confronted each other and the site of its
greatest militarization. However, ironically both superpowers came to share a
mutual interest in the Cold War as a system because they convinced their mutual
positions on the European continent. COX (1990) notes: The Cold War served the
interests of both the USSR and the US. For this reason neither sought to alter
the nature of the relationship once it had been established. Their goal,
therefore, was not so much victory over the other as the maintenance of balance.
In this sense, the Cold War was more of a carefully controlled game with
commonly agreed rules than a contest where there could be clear winners and
losers. The new breed of communist politician who came to power was Mikhail
Gorbachev. He launched a policy of glasnost (openness) in Soviet society in 1986
and envisioned perestroika (restructuring and renewal) of the USSR based on
modernized and humane communist principles. His new political thinking helped
bring about the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev's policy for arms reductions and
his refusal to intervene to save communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe
resulted in the fall of Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War
in Europe at last. Furthermore, the geographical consequence of his new policies
provoked a counter-reaction by hard-liners within the Soviet military-industrial
complex in 1991, an attempted coup whose failure spiralled into the consequent
dissolution of the USSR and the fitful emergence of the "new world
order" of the 1990s. New World Order Geopolitics The end of the Cold War
allowed the emergence of a new geopolitical order dominated by geo-economic
questions and issues, a world where the globalization of economic activity and
global flows of trade, investment and images are re-making states, sovereignty
and the geographical structure of the world. The existence of one of the
superpowers, the Soviet Union completely disappeared from the world scene. The
end of Cold War effectively left the US as the sole remaining superpower.
President George Bush declared a 'new world order' during the Gulf War and it
was a way of achieving the national exceptionism of the US. He believed that
American's interests were universal interests for everyone. In practical term,
the new world order for Bush was a world where the United States, in alliance
with those who were willing to follow, did not ordering. Any change in the
status quo geopolitical order unfavourable to the US and the interests of
"the West", such as Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was considered unlawful
aggression that "would not stand." On the contrary, any change in
geopolitics initiated by the US, for example, the US invasion of Panama was
acceptable and can be justified. Many of geopoliticians argue that geopolitic in
the post Cold War era can be explained as geo-economics. Focusing greatly on the
economic ability of the state, Japan has emerged as most likely hegemonic
contender at the time. What makes Japan look so good as successor in this sort
of environments is that its economic prowess is not prevented by any military
commitments. However, it is possible to interpret Japan as the antithesis of the
USSR, another mammoth mismatch between economic and political power but the
other way around. Although by no means likely to suffer the same fate as the
Soviet Union, Japan's weaknesses have been exposed by the post-cold war
situation as for instance their failure to contribute physically to the Gulf War
in 1991. There is much less talk now of Japan as a future world leader. For some
of the environmentally minded intellectual and policy maker, the new geopolitics
is not geo-economics but ecological politics or 'ecopolitics.' Because the
relationship of politics to the earth became more important than ever as state
and people struggle to deal with environmental degradation, resource depletion,
transnational pollution and global warming. In many cases, the owners of the
land are not the same people as those who traditionally used it before
development and imposed a very different understanding of the environment and
the appropriate ways of using it. It also tends to be occupied by the state with
power for their interests. Like this, the variable and processes in geopolitics
differ from international environments and times they get involved. Besides, not
only economic and environmental issues, but also the perspectives of race,
culture and ethno-minorities came up with a considerable attention in
geopolitics. Therefore, as the power of the world and the interests of them
changes, new roles and new actors in international context emerge incessantly.
Conclusion The early geopoliticians had emphasis on the sheer friction of
distance and the buffering function of space, the value of which were evaluated
in terms of military technology at that time. However, the technological
revolutions over the period of time have produced the variables and tools of
power. For example, economic and environmental variables and technological
developments have already started altering the ways of assessing distance,
space, influence and power. However, it is important to note how dependent on
historical context the evolution and application of the modern geopolitical
assumption have been. Whatever the outcome of the period, the awareness of
historical dependence remains strong. That is why the question of the current
geopolitical understandings for the future has to be solved with examining the
geopolitics of the past. It also seems certain that there are perceptible
differences to interpret the concept of 'Geopolitics' in historical and
contemporary perspectives because it has been changing along with changing
historical conditions. However, it is also possible to find some common
denominators of geopolitical assumption of geopolitics, such as universality of
national interests, the centralization of the state like Mackinder's "pivot
theory", the reasoning of intervention and so on, all through the history.
The ways to achieve tend to vary in accordance with prevailing issues and the
interests of the power state at the time. To conclude, it can be said that the
main purpose of each state's geopolitics has been achieving power and
maintaining the stance with power in international context. Although the history
produced many contending perspectives on geopolitics that seemed to be merely an
adaptation to newly emerged issues to keep pace with a rapid radical change.
Thus it seems hazardous to assess 'Geopolitics' in a facing contemporary context
without considering how it has been evolved. Geopolitics is not only a way of
interpreting current geopolitical realities but also an evolutionary process,
which constantly reflects the whole picture in a wider historical context.

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