Stages of Geo-Politics

Stages of Modern Geopolitics

Modern geopolitics has developed through five stages—the race for imperial hegemony;
German geopolitik; American geopolitics; the Cold War–state centered versus universalistic
geographical; and the post–Cold War period.
STAGE 1: THE RACE FOR IMPERIAL
HEGEMONY
Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), the German “father” of political geography and a
natural scientist, was the first to treat space and location systematically, in his
comparative studies of states.10 He provided successor geo politicians with a
scientific basis for state expansionist doctrines that reflected Germany’s
nineteenth-century experiences and its ambitions for the future. During the last
half of the nineteenth century Germany had emerged as the chief economic
and military power on the European continent. Unified under Bismarck’s
leadership and victorious in its wars with Austria and France, it had enlarged its
territory, expanded its heavy industries, and enacted social reform. With the aid
of a new, powerful naval fleet, Germany posed a serious threat to Britain and
France as it acquired an overseas empire in East and West Africa and the West
Pacific, and sought commercial footholds in East Asia.
Halford Mackinder (1861–1947),
who established geography as a university discipline in Britain, foresaw the
ending of the Victorian era. His concern was safeguarding the British
Empire’s political, commercial, and industrial primacy at a time when
command of the seas no longer appeared to guarantee world supremacy.
With the advent of the transcontinental railroad age. Mackinder viewed the
rise of Eurasian continental states as the greatest threat to British world
hegemony. For Mackinder, geographical realities lay in the advantages of
centrality of place and efficient movement of ideas, goods, and people. In
1904, he theorized that the inner area of Eurasia characterized by interior or
polar drainage and impenetrable by sea power, was the “pivot area” of world
politics This area included basically the forests of Siberia in the north and its
steppes of the south, bounded by the deserts of Turkestan. He warned that
rule of the heart of the world’s greatest landmass could become the basis for
world domination owing to the superiority of rail over ships in terms of time
and reach. A Eurasian land power that gained control of the pivot area would
outflank the maritime world. Eleven years later, the English geographer
James Fairgrieve, who introduced the term “heartland,” opined that China
was in an excellent position to dominate Eurasia.
In Democratic Ideals and Realities (1919), Mackinder, now using the term “heartland” and taking into account
advances in land transportation, population increases, and industrialization, enlarged his map to include
Eastern Europe from the Baltic through the Black Sea as Inner Eurasia’s strategic annex This became the basis
for his dictum, “Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands
World Island: Who rules World-Island commands the world.” The warning to Western statesmen was clear the
key to world domination lay in the middle tier of German and Slavic states, or a region as accessible to
Germans as it was to Russia.
Mackinder described the world as a closed system. Nothing could be altered without changing the balance of
all, and rule of the world still rested upon force, notwithstanding the juridical assumptions of equality among
sovereign states. Mackinder called himself a democratic idealist in advocating equality of opportunity for
nations to achieve balanced economic development. He also described himself as a realist who feared that the
League of Nations would degenerate into an unbalanced empire as one or two of the great powers bid for
predominance. As a safeguard, he urged smaller powers to federate to increase the number of significant
players on the world scene and make it more difficult for hegemony to be attained by potential tyrants.
Foreseeing the decline of Britain as the world’s leading power, he called for Western Europe and North America
to become a single community of nations a forerunner of the North Atlantic community.
STAGE 2: GERMAN GEOPOLITIK
German geopolitik emerged in reaction to Germany’s devastating defeat in World War
I. Humbled by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was stripped of its overseas empire
and important parts of its national territory. A. Historic Prussia was divided. In West
Prussia, (Posen) went to Poland, as did the land that constituted the Polish Corridor.
This territory first came under the League of Nations, administered by France, and was
then annexed by Lithuania. Parts of Upper Silesia went to Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The Saar was put under French administration, pending a plebiscite to be held in 1935
to determine its final status, and the Rhineland was occupied by Allied forces.
Germany was now but a shadow of the expanding giant state .In addition, the social
cohesion forged by Bismarck’s policies was shattered. The socialist Weimar Republic
was beleaguered by class warfare and attempts to overthrow it by Communists on the
left and racist militant nationalists and aristocratic conservatives on the right.
Unemployment was rampant and inflation raged. This was the setting within which
Karl Haushofer and his colleagues established the Geopolitik (1924–39) and the
Institute for Geopolitics at the University of Munich. Undoing Versailles by restoring
the lost territories and rebuilding Germany as a world power undergirded the scientific
“laws” and principles of geopolitik that served Nazi Germany
STAGE 3: GEOPOLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES
Spykman considered that the Eurasian coastal lands (including maritime Europe,
the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and China) were the keys to world control
because of their populations, their rich resources, and their use of interior sea-
lanes. In essence, Spykman had the same global view as Mackinder, but he rejected
the land power doctrine to say, “Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules
Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” To Spykman, the rimland was the key
to the struggle for the world. In the past, the fragmentation of the Western
European portion of rimland and the power of the United Kingdom and the United
States (parts of what Spykman considered the offshore continents and islands) had
made unitary control of the rimland impossible.
Now, however, Spykman feared that a single power, such as Germany, might seize
control of the European rimland and then sweep onto the other portions through
various combinations of conquests and alliances, using ship superiority and
command of a network of naval and air bases around Eurasia.
STAGE 4: THE COLD WAR–STATE-CENTERED
VERSUS UNIVERSALISTIC APPROACHES
State-Centered Geopolitics
American Cold Warriors embraced geopolitics as a basis for a national policy aimed at confronting
the Soviet Union and international Communism. Building on early, geographically derived
geopolitical theories and holding static interpretations of global and regional spatial patterns, they
introduced such political-strategic concepts as containment, domino theory, balance-of-power
linkages, and linchpin states into the lexicon of Cold War geopolitics. In this context, Halford
Mackinder’s heartland theory played an instrumental role. In 1943, William C. Bullitt, the first US
ambassador to the Soviet Union, cited Mackinder in his efforts to persuade Roosevelt that Stalin
was not to be trusted owning to Soviet long-range plans for the global conquest by Communism.
Roosevelt rejected Bullitt’s recommendations that the United States should take measures to block
the expansion of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe that Bullitt anticipated. George Kennan’s 1946
warning of the historical imperative of Soviet expansionism from its Russian Asiatic center was
embraced by American anti-Communists as the intellectual basis for containment of the USSR
around every point of the heartland. This was formalized in the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Winston
Churchill, in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, also issued a call for containing the expansionist
tendencies of the Soviet Union, coining the expression “Iron Curtain.”
Western foreign policy therefore could not confine itself to containment of the Eurasian continental power
along its heartland borders. Instead, it adopted a strategy of checking the spread of Communism
throughout the Third World. The idealistic vision that had prompted the United States to support the
freedom and democratization of colonial peoples quickly gave way to expedient realpolitik propping up
right-wing dictatorships in order to stop the threat of Communism wherever that threat was perceived to
exist. Another popular geopolitical doctrine, “domino theory,” was first proposed by Wiliam Bullitt in 1947.
He feared that Soviet Communist power would spread via China into Southeast Asia. The concept was
adopted by both the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, which rationalized American intervention in
Vietnam as a measure to “save” the rest of Southeast Asia. The domino theory was an important argument
for extending Western containment policy well beyond the Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern shatter
belts into the Horn of Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and Cuba, South America, and South
Asia. These areas became battlegrounds for the two superpowers, as each supported local surrogates
militarily, politically, and economically. The goal was to protect or gain sources of raw materials and
markets while denying military bases to the enemy overseas. The threat of the spread of Kosovar Albanian
irredentism to Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece was one of the factors, along with humanitarian
considerations, which precipitated NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia in 1998. Without using the term, the
George W. Bush administration applied this theory as one of its rationales for toppling Saddam Hussein. It
argued that a free, democratic Iraq would foster democracy and peace throughout the Middle East as well
as help to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Toward the end of his administration, President Bush shifted
course, arguing that American troops had to remain in Iraq to prevent Islamic terrorism from spreading.
This argument is also the basis for the efforts of President Obama to retain American military trainers in
Afghanistan after withdrawal of nearly all of the US and NATO troops in 2014.
STAGE 5: POST–COLD WAR ERA:
COMPETITION OR ACCOMMODATION?
The end of the Cold War era has generated a number of new approaches to geopolitics. For Francis Fukuyama,
the passing of Marxism-Leninism and the triumph of Western liberal democracy and “free market”. Fukuyama
has more recently theorized that for the next couple of decades, authoritarianism will become stronger in
much of the world, especially Russia and China, and that the United States cannot do much. For others, the
end of the Cold War has heralded a “new world order” and the geopolitics of US global hegemony. President
George H. W. Bush, addressing Congress in 1990, defined the policy behind the war against Iraq as a new
world order led by the United States and “freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and
more secure in the quest for peace, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom
and justice.” From the perspective of a world divided into the rich North and the poor South, Kaplan concludes
that the South, especially Africa, is doomed to anarchy and chaos. His map of the future, dubbed the “last
map,” is an “ever mutating representation of chaos.” He argues that only the United States has the power to
stabilize the world system, pushing back the spreading autocratic tide and standing up to Islamic anti
modernism. None of these three scenarios has come to pass. In most cases, the overthrow of Communist
regimes has not led to stable, free-market economies. The restraints upon the unilateral application of US
military, economic, and political power are evident from the failures to gain US objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Somalia, and Haiti, while a geopolitics of chaos gives inadequate attention to the systemic regional and global
forces that keep turbulence in check and absorb its positive aspects into the system. The main thrust of post–
Cold War geopolitics, however, continues to follow the two streams of the previous era the nation-
centered/political and the geographical. Political geo politicians advocate projection of Western power into
Central and Eastern Europe to weaken Russia’s heartland position at its western edge.
Conclusion
The reality-based geographical geopolitics that is based on multi polarity and regionalism. It builds
upon the continuous proliferation of the various parts and levels of the world and their geopolitical
development. The current number of 200 national states could increase to 250 within the next
quarter of a century. As the pace of devolution quickens, some of these new geo territorial entities
will be highly autonomous “quasi states.” In addition, the network of global cities centers of capital
flows and financial services linked ever more closely by cyberspace, tourism, and immigrant
communities will emerge as a major new geopolitical level, promoting policies sometimes
contradictory to national interests. International social movements, such as environmentalism, will
also become more influential in shaping national and regional policies, including military ones.
Within this framework, radical geopolitical restructuring is a continuing process. Thus, China has
emerged as a separate geostrategic realm, while Southeast Asia is no longer a shatter belt. The
Middle East has become even more fractured as a shatter belt.