ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, vol. 25, no.

2, 1988

Review Essay

The Uses and Abuses of Geopolitics*

⊘YVIND ⊘STERUD
Institute of Political Science, University of Oslo, and Department of International
Relations, The Australian National University

Three recent books illustrate the variety of contemporary interpretations of

geopolitics G Parker
presents the terminological tradition, originating among Europeans (Kjellén, Ratzel, Mackinder), as
an expression of the late nineteenth century spirit,
continuing in a German inter-war version (Haushofer)
often accused of having inspired Nazi strategies, and with a modern American interpretation (Spykman,
Kissinger) But there is also a more detached, French interpretation: the tradition of Yves Lacoste and
the Hérodote-group, which in a recent collection edited and translated by P Girot and E Kofman is
presented as a modern alternative to the great power view of geopolitics Finally, geopolitics may also
be seen simply as a label for the study of the relationship between geography and politics The recent
survey by P OSullivan presents methods and issues in this kind of political geography This review
essay takes these three views of geopolitics as points of departure for some reflections on the geopolitical
tradition and its present relevance.

1. The Twist of Language as a conceptual and terminological tradition

Some important parameters for foreign
policy and military strategy are clearly com-
posed of geographical conditions. Space,
topography, position, and climate interact
with population, communications, industry,
and technology. Geography in itself, as a
delimitation of neighbouring states, is a
prevalent conflict issue. Innovations in mili-
tary technology and transport will unfailingly
affect the relative strategic importance and
the security conditions of geographical areas.
These general observations are rather trivial.
They are not in dispute. From this point of
view, geopolitics should occupy a promi-
nent place on the centre stage of inter-
national relations.
The relationships between geography and
politics can, however, be characterized in
quite different ways. Geopolitics is not a
term for the general linkage of politics to
geography. It should rather be understood
*
A of Geoffrey Parker, Western Geopolitical
review
Thought in the Twentieth Century, London & Sydney:
Croom Helm 1985. Pascal Girot & Eleonore Kofman,
editors, International Geopolitical Analysis. A Selection
from Herodote, London, Sydney & New York 1987.
Patrick OSullivan, Geopolitics, London & Sydney:
Croom Helm 1986.
in the study of the political and strategic
relevance of geography.
Still geopolitics has been employed in a
variety of ways. The label was introduced by
Rudolf Kjellen in an article before the turn
of the century. He was concerned with the
implications for power politics of the geo-
graphical attributes of states, and of their
relative spatial locations. The idea of geo-
politics was conceived and disseminated as
a science of the development and con-
figuration of states. Fin de sicle geopolitics
was, furthermore, an expression of Social
Darwinism and imperialist rivalry, and it was
highly influenced by the revolution in com-
munications, which had changed the geo-
graphical correlates of power. But the
genetic impetus did not lend the term a
distinct meaning, and Kjellens original
definitions never gained universal accept-
ance. The term he coined came to live its
own life.
Recent usage is still very heterogeneous.
Geopolitics is sometimes just political
inquiry with a spatial dimension, sometimes
the label on a normative-strategic doctrine,
sometimes an analytical way of thought,
sometimes the term for a pretentious scien-
tific theory of the development and power

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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
192
of states. The adjective form geopolitical
perhaps tends to be used in a wider and
softer sense than the noun geopolitics.
Henry Kissinger, for one, fancies the adjec-
tive form, but evades the noun for its fas-
cistoid connotations. In the abstract,
geopolitics traditionally indicates the links
and causal relationships between political
power and geographical space; in concrete
terms it is often seen as a body of thought
carrying specific strategic prescriptions based
on the relative importance of land power and
sea power in world history. Modern writers
on geopolitics relate to the alternatives in the
way they handle this peculiar terminological
tradition. Some of the linguistic and ana-
lytical variety is displayed in three quite new
books on the subject, all with geopolitics
or geopolitical in the title.
Geoffrey Parker offers a chronological
expos6 of geopolitical thinking from its fin
de sicle beginnings to the early 1980s. His
presentation is generally subtle and based on
a revisit to the major original texts, exploring
behind the screen of secondary literature on
the subject. The analysis could have been
more penetrating in detail, but as an intro-
duction it is clear and synoptic. How is geo-
politics and geopolitical thought
understood here? In this book the term
&dquo;geopolitics&dquo;, together with its adjective
&dquo;geopolitical&dquo;, is defined as being the study
of the international scene from a spatial or
geocentric viewpoint, the understanding of
the whole -
what Ritter called Ganzheit
being its ultimate object and justification,
says Parker (p. 2). This quest for geopolitical
totality, through an analysis of specific com-
ponents and mechanisms, is dated from the
moment in history when imperial
domination had completed the global pol-
itical map - the last decades of the nine-
teenth century.
Parker traces the roots of geopolitics in a
peculiar Western intellectual soil, imprinted
by biological analogies derived from Dar-
winism and by national trends connected to
the relative positions in imperialist rivalry.
He follows the quite characteristic tradition
from these roots through its ramifications in
Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world,
and -
with modifications in France. This
-
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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
geopolitical tradition had some consistent
concerns, like thegeographical correlates of
power in world politics, the identification of
international core areas, and the relation-
ships between naval and terrestrial capa-
bilities. It also parted into different strands,
without uniform objectives, levels of
ambition or ideological stance. Again the
German Geopolitik, the British-American
geopolitics, and the French gographie poli-
tique were conceptualized and employed at
cross purposes, even if certain analytical
attributes still kept them together.
A problem of definition whereby geo- -
political thought is identified emerges in -
the last few chapters of Parkers book. Here
the analytical response to a more fragmented
international scene, with a gradual dis-
solution of the bipolar world of the 1950s, is
considered. The section starts with revision-
ist perspectives clearly within the conceptual
tradition of geopolitics, but Parker soon
describes the mainstream international
relations literature of the epoch, and then
makes the canvas even broader with pictures
of radical alternatives and Wallersteinian
world system analysis. The kaleidoscopic
effect here becomes a bit flimsy, even if the
basic idea is clear enough: the strength of
analytical traditions reflects some of the
development in the real world correlation of
forces. Still the works of Haas and Etzioni in
the 1960s had their most notable predecessor
in Mitrany in the 1940s, who is not even
-
mentioned. And world system analysis was
not only a generic reaction to Cold War
geopolitics, but it prolonged an alternative
tradition running through the whole twen-
tieth century, from Lenin to Baran and Gun-
der Frank, and of course from Braudel and
the holistic Annales school, which are
hardly mentioned either. In the later chap-
ters the contours of geopolitical thought
thus become somewhat blurred, and hardly
confirm the fairly distinct delineation of the
earlier decades. Parkers initially abstract
definition of geopolitics allowed for flexi-
bility, but consistency the criteria for
-
selection is bound to suffer. The book
-
starts out with a fairly broad general defi-
nition ; it then narrows the coverage down
to the specific terminological tradition and

adjacent perspectives; until the presentation
isopened up again in the last chapters.
Yves Lacoste and the Hrodote group
employ a prescriptive definition of geo-
politics, arguing on the one hand for a sober
and rigorous analysis of geography and poli-
tics, detached from the ideological pro-
pensities of the conventional geopolitical
tradition, and on the other hand against the
mainstream of French geographers, who
allegedly thought that scientific analysis
implied an outright rejection of the political
terrain. Geopolitical reasoning, according to
Hrodote, can be used for different aims:
as such, it is neither left nor right, neither
imperialist nor liberationist, even if the tra-
dition needs purification from outdated slo-
ganeering. The new programme calls for
analyses of spatial configurations on dif-
ferent scales, from the global through the
regional to the local. The changing relation-
ships between geography and politics should
most fruitfully be sought in the problem of
borderlines between states and between eth-
nic groups, in frontier disputes, and in the
mobile zones of influence of the major
powers. Here, in the Hrodote view, is a
better terrain than the traditional Leit-
motiven of conventional geopolitics. This
agenda is specified in the examples of geo-
political hot spots analysis given in the col-
lection-
from Central America, the Middle
East, India, the Falklands War, the variety
of Islam. Geopolitical analysis here varies
from the topographical details of guerrilla
warfare in Northern Nicaragua to the global
strategies of the superpowers. French g6opo-
litique remains somewhat of an antithesis to
the mainstream of the tradition.
OSullivans Geopolitics is essentially a
collection of essays on the spatial dimensions
of international relations. The key term is
here defined quite broadly: Geopolitics is
the study of the geography of relations
between wielders of power, be they rulers of
nations or of transnational bodies (p. 2).
Here are sections covering some of the same
ground in intellectual history as Parkers
book, with perceptive notes on the Western
uses of Mackinder as well as on the relation-
ship between Nazi policy and Haushofers
Geopolitik. Still, the bulk of the collection
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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
193
outlines methodological issues relevant to
the analysis of geograph~ and politics -
distance and power, flows and links, the
measurement of interaction and diffusion,
etc. OSullivan takes his geopolitics far out-
side the conventional normative bias of the
terminological tradition, although an equally
suitable title to his essays might have been
methods and issues in political geography.
So the three books taken together dem-
onstrate the variety of present usage: one is
an exercise in the history of ideas, basically
exposing a specific terminological tradition;
another is an argument for a modern alterna-
tive in geopolitical analysis; a third is geo-
politics more generally understood as
prevalent topics in political geography.
2. The Legacy of the Pioneers
The turn of century genesis of geopolitics
lends itself easily to a sociology of knowledge
type of interpretation. The globe was more
completely arranged in terms of political con-
trol. Imperialist rivalry and European
dominance overseas corresponded to the
continental expansion of the Russian and the
North American states. The recent revo-
lution in communications, particularly due
to railway construction, had also revolu-
tionized the modes of nation-building and
warfare. The perspective of the early geo-
politicians reflected these new conditions
fairly closely, and they presented their con-
cerns very explicitly in these terms. Accord-
ingly, but less explicitly, the early geopolitics
was deeply embedded in the intellectual cli-
mate of the epoch. Ratzel, in his Politische
Geographie (1897), saw the development of
states in an evolutionary perspective derived
from biology. The state as an organism in
space, contingent upon adaptation to
environmental conditions, was a product of
organic evolution. Political geography was
hence a part of the natural sciences. State
power was largely derived from its Raum and
Lage, and Ratzel further compared different
continental areas with respect to political
power: wide geographical space -
Lebensraum was a necessary condition of
-
state viability in the twentieth century. The
development of strong states through ter-
194

ritorial expansion, to the cost of states in the tradition of geopolitics. Here the interior
decay, hinged on laws of evolution. Rat- centre of the vast Eurasian landmass, domi-
also
zels political geography carried some crucial nated by Russia, is the pivot of world
elements of Darwinism, although the mech- politics. While world history revolves on
anism of natural selection was not really the endemic conflict between seawards and
applied, as Parker perceptively points out. landwards empires, the heart of Eurasia in
Fin de sicle Social Darwinism stressed the the post-Columbian epoch had become the
elements of growth and evolution, struggle strategic centre for political control of the
and decay, although some leeway for delib- long maritime fringes, stretching in an enor-
erate human action was retained by the more mous fertile crescent to the south and the
moderate spokesmen, in accordance with west, and with an insular crescent from
Darwins own views on human civilization. Australasia to the Americas further out. In
On these terms Kjell6n subscribed to the Mackinders perspective the uneasy and
basic views introduced to political geography unstable balance between the pivot area and
by Ratzel. The state-centric biologism of pol- the Asian and European fringes was the key
itical development was an integral part of the to international unrest, and his strategic
new science of Geopolitik. The geographical message was the need for the maritime
anatomy of power comprised territorial powers to prevent an alliance or a unified
space, internal control, seawards or land- control of continental Europe - particularly
wards location, the impact from geographi- Germany - and the Russian empire. This
cal factors in previous foreign policy message was further specified in Mackinders
decision-making. Here the biological anal- political pamphlet from 1919, Democratic
ogies are retained, but still with room for Ideals and Reality, where the pivot area
political decision-making. Kjellens pri- was geographically somewhat extended,
orities were anti-Russian, pro-German, and incorporating Eastern Europe, and re-
a rather conservative advocacy for Swedish baptized the Heartland with a telling bio-
self-assertion within a broader pan-Ger- logical metaphor. Europe, Asia and
manic order. Africa were now called the World-Island,
Early geopolitics also acquired an influ- and the basic thesis was worded by his airy
ential strand from a somewhat different cherub in a whisper to the statesmen of the
angle. In 1890 the American naval strategist world: Who rules East Europe commands
Alfred Mahan voiced the view that sea power the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland
was the key to global control, in contrast to commands the World-Island; Who rules the
Ratzels confidence in land territory as the World-Island commands the World. The
ultimate source of strength. Now the geo- strategic thesis was a warning and a message
political Leitmotiv for half a century to come to the Western maritime powers: the urgent
was set: the debate between the Blue Water need to prevent a single World Empire
school of strategists and the advocates of emerging from German Heartland pol-
vast continental areas on the strategic key icies - a German-Russian alliance or a uni-
to world power. Mahan employed historical fied control of Central to Eastern Europe
evidence to support his view on the priority and the Eurasian landmass.
of naval hegemony, and his prime objective Now the cards and the maps of the geo-
was to call the USA to follow Britains political tradition were laid out and the

imperial role: from the Caribbean towards Leitmotiven established: the endemic antag-
and across the Pacific the US could fulfil her onism between British-American sea power
Manifest Destiny far beyond the shores of and Russian land power; the inherent
North America. dangers of the German Drang nach Osten;
In 1904 Halford Mackinder synthesized the strategic importance of different geo-
and developed the strands of ideas presented graphical areas; the reshuffle of geo-strategic
by Ratzel, Kjellen, and Mahan. The Geo- relationships by technological innovations in
graphical Pivot of History, published in warfare and transport. One branch of this
Geographical Journal, is the seminal work in tradition sprouted in Germany; another in

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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

the Anglo-Saxon world; a third one, anti-
thetically, in France.
3. The Geopolitics of Patriotism
Was German Geopolitik after the First and
through the Second World War an aspect
of Nazi ideology, and was it strategically
instrumental to Hitlerian expansionism? The
answer in the critical allied literature of
the War years - like Strausz-Hupes (1942)
book on geopolitics and Whittleseys chap-
ter on Haushofer in the 1944 edition of
Makers of Modern Strategy was a resound-
-
ing yes to both questions. Geopolitik was
seen as a source and a spur of Third Reich
ambitions, and Haushofer was portrayed as
somewhat of an evil genius behind Hitlers
expansionist strategy. Is this legacy of inter-
pretation tenable?
The Haushofer school expressed in the
-
Zeitschriftfiir Geopolitik and the Institute in
Munich from the early 1920s definitely
-
carried a vindictive and expansionist
German ideology after Versailles. In geo-
strategic terms it explained why the dis-
astrous decline had occurred; and it offered
a prescription and a conceptual framework
for restoration of German power. The ter-
minological tradition from Ratzel supplied
national socialism with a litany of spatial
and earthbound phrases; the cartographic
production of the Munich institute showed
German humiliation and legitimate claims;
the Geopolitik gave an academic varnish to
the Drang nach Osten, and the geopolitical
idea of the dynamic border hecame an ideo-
logical argument for inherent German right
to expansion, in accordance with the pseudo-
scientific principle of politics as either growth
and movement or stagnation and decline.
Germanys Schicksalsraum eastwards was
blocked by a barrier of small, artificial states
erected in Versailles. In more global terms,
Haushofer accepted and expanded upon the
geopolitical Leitmotiv of the world conflict
between land and sea power, and he adapted
Mackinders perspective to German interests
by advocating the very alliance against which
Mackinders work was a warning - the con-
solidation of German and Russian land-
masses against the seaward Western powers.
A German-Russian alliance was envisaged
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195
as the of a Eurasian union, with Eastern
core
Europe the decisive lever to German
as
ambitions, and with Japan as an eastern
anchorage of a broad trans-continental bloc.
The ultimate global dominance emanating
from German geopolitical strategies was
passing through the intermediate pan-
regions in Haushofers visionary world view:
the East Asian area under Japanese
hegemony; the pan-American region under
North American control; and the Eurasian
Heartland, including the Mediterranean and
northern Africa, with German dominance.
The racial ideology of NSDAP was originally
alien to German Geopolitik, as was the nos-
talgic streak in Nazism, although the space
for academic distance to Power diminished
notably after 1933. Both Parker and OSul-
livan are on fairly firm ground when their
answer to the question of Geopolitik as an
aspect of Nazi ideology is a qualified yes.
But did it give the recipe for Hitlers strategy
of expansion?
It remains undecided to what extent
Haushofer and the philosophy of Geopolitik
influenced German strategy and decision-
making. Both Parker and OSullivan are wise
to point out the uncertainty here, in contrast
to many earlier allegations. There were
channels from the Munich institute to the
general staff, and the Haushofer school gen-
erally kept a high profile during the inter-
war years, with a wide dissemination of their
maps and their peculiar vocabulary. There
were also direct links to Hitler, like Rudolf
Hess who had been affiliated to Haushofer,
and who assisted Hitler in the writing of Mein
Kampf. But did Geopolitik supply the grand
design of German war strategy, as Wittlesey
and others asserted? In hindsight, the gen-
eral similarities seem striking, and the
German-Soviet pact of 1939 was very much
to Haushofers taste. But the attempted con-
quest of the Heartland from 1941 was
equally clearly a mistake, with the lesson of
history propagated by Haushofer being that
dominance of Russia should be achieved by
diplomacy and alliance building. Parker
records the divergence between geopolitical
blueprints and actual strategy in some detail,
and he concludes in a bold counter-factual
assertion that had the advice of the Geopo-
196
litiker been followed on such matters as the
United States, the Mediterranean, Euro-
pean unity and the eastern lands, then Ger-
many might even have won the war (p. 82).
Even if there clearly are structural simi-
larities between the world view of Geopolitik
and the power projections of the Third
Reich, and even if the conceptual legacy of
geopolitical analysis is clearly visible in the
official justifications of German strategy, the
really causal strands are harder to identify.
The explicit acknowledgement of these dif-
ficulties, in the books reviewed here, is a
move forward in the interpretation of the
geopolitical tradition.
Do these reservations as to the instru-
mentality of geopolitics also apply to the
Anglo-Saxon ramifications? The migration
of geopolitics to the US during the Second
World War was explicitly due to its perceived
significance in Germany. Several inter-
pretive books and articles on Haushofer and
Geopolitik were published during the War
years, and Mackinders works and legacy
were researched for a civilized alternative
by a new generation of strategists
Weigert, Lattimore, Whittlesey, Spykman.
Nicholas Spykmans (1942, 1944) point of
departure was the tension between Mahan
and Mackinder, between seawards and land-
based powers. He reworked Mackinders
global model, modifying it with a heartland
and a rimland (Mackinders crescents),
and he concluded as an heir of Mahan: the
rimland was the key to control. Accordingly,
an alliance between Anglo-American sea
power and Soviet land power was required
for impeding German conquest of the stra-
tegically vital Eurasian rim. Spykman
retained Mackinders global view, but he
rejected the land power thesis in a counter
epigram: Who controls the Rimlands rules
Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the
destinies of the world.
Even the old Mackinder himself revised
his theses during the Second World War.
Control of the heartland did not by necessity
imply transcontinental dominance, since
technological change, particularly modern
air force, had reduced the strategic import-
ance and increased the vulnerability of inter-
ior continental lands. Spykman justified
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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
American participation in two world wars by
the need to prevent unified control of the
Eurasian landmasses and the seaward
rimland: power-sharing on the Eurasian
World Island was crucial to the security of
the western insular powers. The future US
strategic objective should thus be to preserve
the balance of power between the Eurasian
rim-zone and the continental core territories;
that is, as the cards were distributed towards
the final phase of the War, to exclude Soviet
dominance of the rimland by a crescent of
US-controlled alliances. Spykmans strategic
model was thus an early blueprint for a
strong version of containment, kept within
the linguistic framework of the geopolitical
tradition. The post-war ramifications of
these considerations particularly the
-
relationship between American geopolitical
thought during the War and the later stra-
tegies of containment are not sys- -
tematically traced in Parkers book. He gives
some space to the debates between inter-
nationalists and advocates of Realpolitik,
between co-operators and confronters,
-
within American political geography in the
1940s, but his chapters on the new per-
spectives in the late 1940s and the 1950s
would have profited from a more thorough
exposition. Here are only a few perceptive
lines on Bevin and on Kennan (pp. 136 ff.).
The relationship of the geopoliticians,
strictly speaking, to the general US strategic
developments in the late 1940s and 1950s is
given scant attention also elsewhere in the
standard literature. John L. Gaddis (1982),
for instance, only devotes a passing note to
the topic.
The liberal civility of French political
geography between the Wars is somewhat of
an antidote to the mainstream of the geo-
political tradition. Parkers chapter on pre-
war French geopolitical thought is aptly
titled LEsprit Vidalienne versus Geopoli-
tik. Here is partly an outright critique of the
ideas from Ratzel and from the Haushofer
school: the pseudo-scientific status of geo-
graphical determinism; the anthropo-
morphic conception of the state; the ideo-
logical cult of expansion and power; the dis-
quieting ideal of grand scale nationalistic
autarky. The spirit of the tradition of

Vidal de la Blache, for short, inter- was
nationalist, humanist, anti-Wagnerian. This
is the ideal type presented by Parker, and
basically there is no need for quarrel.
Here are, however, somewhat alternative
lineages. The Hrodote group largely
bypasses Vidal in its search for sources and
ancestry. The vidalienne spirit is perceived
as too narrowly geographic compared to the
near-forgotten legacy of a turn-of-century
giant in historically oriented social
geography: Elisee Reclus. The rediscovery
and celebration of Reclus is established on
his broad conception of geography, his glo-
bal perspective, and his idea of hierarchies
of tyranny in territorial control. Still the Her-
odote volume sometimes goes to extremes to
gloss over the dubious strains, by present-
day standards, in Recluss work. In political
terms he was an outspoken anarchist, and
that is probably part of his appeal. But it
seems to be some understatement to call
his acceptation of colonialism and colonialist
practices ambiguous, when in fact he was
very much a child of his age. Further, his
notion of pays, as the union of man with
nature, came fairly close to the biologism
of political geography elsewhere in Europe.
The principal reason for the return to Reclus,
however, is to re-establish the legitimacy of
the political terrain in French geographical
analysis. Politics as such, Lacoste argues,
should not be expelled from geography to
make the subject safe from politicized
exploitation. Geopolitics meaning a-
spatial analysis of political phenomena -
should rather reappear as a scientific concept
without the conventional expansionist bias.
The recent upsurge of French geopolitical
thought is thus not only stimulated, anti-
thetically, by a generally renewed interest
in the tradition of geopolitics; it is also a
polemical position within the evolution of
French academic geography.
A more generalized view emerges from
the sketches of geopolitical traditions out-
lined here. Their basic concerns were the
projections of state power in interstate
rivalry, or the defensive containment of such
projections, or even the cooperative and
internationalist alternative to power politics.
These concerns have been formulated in dif-
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197
ferent linguistic codes: geopolitics is a ter-
minological tradition employing a certain set
of spatial concepts in international studies.
Political objectives and normative bias, how-
ever, separate geopolitics into different
strands. A look into this range of objectives
will clarify the elements here.
4. The Variety of Uses
Winston Smith lives in London, the major
city in Airfield One, which is the third most
populous province in Oceania. The world is
parted into three great superstates: Oceania
comprising the Americas, the Atlantic
islands including the British, the Pacific and
southern Africa; Eurasia comprising the
European and big parts of the Asian conti-
nent ; and East Asia comprising China, South
East Asia and Japan, and with a more vul-
nerable and changing border towards the
west and north. Oceania is formed by North
American expansion; Eurasia by Russian.
The three superstates are in a state of per-
manent warfare, but the war is a struggle
for limited objectives between adversaries
incapable of destroying each other, without
a substantial material reason for fighting, and
without any important ideological split. The
powers are too equal in strength, and their
geographical space and the interspaced
oceans provide a natural defence. The three
powers are also economically self-reliant,
with internal coordination of production and
consumption; the struggle for the world mar-
kets is settled; the autarky of the superstate
is realized. There is only moderate economic
competition between the states, concerning
labour and raw materials from a shifting zone
without stable great power anchorage, in
northern Africa and South West Asia. The
Arctis is also a contested area, contributing
to a floating and unreliable alliance pattern
among three superpowers in endemic
rivalry. The major purpose of war, however,
is internal order and the purchase and use of
manufactured goods.
This is the future world outlook in Orwells
1984. He hardly took it from his literary
imagination only. The image is, with minor
modifications, similar to the visions in
German Geopolitik in the inter-war years:
the expansion of the great powers towards
198
three dominant pan regions in the Ameri-
cas, Eurasia, and the Far East; the endemic
struggle between these future superstates;
the principle of autarky, self-reliance, as the
aim and condition of existence of the strong
state. The similarity between the global pro-
jections of 1984 and Geopolitik is too striking
to be accidental. Here is an unnoticed
dimension of 1984. Orwells revisions were
reasonable when the book was written and
published in 1948: Germany was deprived of
the honour of being the expanding core area
in the new Eurasia, and Great Britain was
not the inner crescent of Eurasia, but Air-
field One towards the east in a seaward
empire dominated by North America. The
major structure is still manifestly similar.
Orwell uses one of the prominent geo-
political visions of his time as part of a dysto-
pia, a negative warning against allegedly
inherent political trends. In 1984 he simply
put the world view of Geopolitik on its head,
since the pan regions and the evolution
towards the autarkic superstate were
favoured trends in the German conception.
Orwells dystopia is thus nourished by the
complementary use of the geopolitical vision
as a legitimization of power projections.
Geopolitik from the early 1920s, and par-
ticularly from 1933, was essentially a world-
view in service of the expanding state.
There is, however, a less instrumental side
to the uses of geopolitics. Firstly, the geo-
political tradition has developed in accord-
ance with a broader intellectual climate. The
fin de sicle elements of Darwinism and
imperialist expansion found a rather inten-
sified expression in early geopolitical
thought. In the age of Versailles and the
Wilsonian Fourteen Points, internationalist
idealism also crept into geopolitical debate
as an alternative strand, as Parker points
out. It is also suggested by various analysts
that the bellicose versions of geopolitics ride
a high tide in periods of intense great power
rivalries. Both Parker in his book, and
OSullivan in the short sections he devotes
to the topic, suggest an interpretation of
geopolitics as somewhat of a hegemonic
reflex of the Zeitgeist, although the speci-
fication of the links and mechanisms here
leaves a lot to be desired.
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Secondly, geopolitics as a prescription and
also as a mode of analysis seems closely
connected to the foreign policy situation of
the country of origin. Quite naturally so,
since Geopolitik was instrumental to the vin-
dictive strategies of inter-war Germany, and
Anglo-Saxon post-war geopolitics carried a
distinctive formulation of the containment
idea. At a somewhat deeper level perhaps,
but equally telling, is the defensive, inter-
nationalist and humanist version of geo-
political thought in France. This inter-
pretation is even within the geopolitical tra-
dition itself. To the Haushoferian mind, pol-
itical geography in France was the symptom
of a polity and a state in decay: an intellectual
equivalent to the illusions of the Maginot
line on the one hand and the League of
Nations on the other. That said, lesprit vida-
lienne should also be treated at face value,
and Parker manages the balance here, even
if he ignores the lineage from Reclus, so
warmly celebrated by the Hrodote group.
Thirdly, geopolitical ideas reflect inter-
national realities and global constellations
of forces in a quite simple sense. Geopoli-
tics, as a recipe for strategic efficiency, will
have to change operative priorities when new
communications alter the relative import-
ance of sea power and land power; it is
in itself a reflection upon such alterations.
Similarly, a world order of a basically
bipolar nature implies geopolitical pri-
orities different from the multipolarity of
another period, as Saul Cohen (1964) and
others have emphasized. It is at this point,
by the way, that Parkers exposition tends
to transgress the border to other traditions
within the study of international relations.
5. The Pedagogy of the Atlas
Geopolitical analysis is a manifold phenom-
enon, ranging on scales from reductionist
and determinist theory to awareness of the
geographical factor in strategy, and from
highly politicized partisanship to a fairly non-
committed mode of analysis. Some versions
have promoted a very explicit ideological
message, with a rather heavy load of pseudo-
scientific dross. The geopolitical tradition
generally has carried dim ideas, with a dif-
fuse conception of the causal strings between
 199

geography, technology and politics. Those
varieties of geopolitics lending themselves to
the easiest defence have been limited to a
more heuristic and illustrative ambition.
Recent American types of geopolitical
thought have advocated a superpower per-
spective incorporating local and regional
was published in 1944. Less far-fetched
modes of geopolitical analysis should still
deserve a place.
Taken together, Parker, OSullivan and
the Hrodote collection provide a useful
introduction to geopolitical thought, old and
new. But even they, as we have seen, leave

developments in the global rivalry, while the some crucial aspects unexplored.
French alternative voiced by Hrodote dem-
onstrates geopolitical analysis completely
detached from US strategies of containment.
The conclusions drawn from geopolitical REFERENCES
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1988 International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.