Geopolitics: An Ideology for Legitimising the National Socialist Policy of Conquest or a Scientific and Political Field that Is Unappreciated Today?

Abstract

It is being noted by some observers that newspapers in Germany are finding it easier these days to make geopolitical assessments of the international situation. In Russia, it has become common practice since 1992 to discuss in detail geopolitical imperatives and to write about and evaluate the state of international relations. In Anglo-Saxon countries, geopolitical statements have been made for decades. In Germany, geopolitics as a science or an ideology of legitimisation had been spurned since 1945 as being a National Socialist policy of conquest and destruction. No broad public debate has been held over the reintroduction of geopolitics, although there have certainly been several discussions on the topic in certain academic circles.

Geopolitics was understood by its proponents as being not politics, but an applied science, which focuses on the fundamental principles and consequences of politics in terms of natural and cultural geography, and in particular in relation to the foreign and global policies of the great powers. In Germany, it was largely determined by the assumption that states were involved in a battle for their existence and subject to a law of growth in which smaller and weaker states would of necessity decline. In contrast to geopolitics, political geography was regarded as being a pure or fundamental science.

The subject of the two academic disciplines are the interrelations between people’s spatial environment and their political forms of life and institutions. Politics always inevitably has a spatial reference. The differentiation between domestic and foreign policy, European politics and global politics, regional politics and environmental politics expresses this spatial reference without it being necessary to revert to the term “geopolitics”, which is associated with imperial, colonial, racist and aggressive-bellicose politics. The young proponents of critical geopolitics may criticise the concept of power of traditional geopolitics in constructivist analyses, but make little contribution to the understanding of the changes in the state system that are characterised by continued nation state formation with simultaneous international processes of integration.

The fashion, which is growing in popularity, of discussing international politics from geopolitical perspectives, makes it necessary to call to mind the thought patterns relating to political geography, in particular those of Friedrich Ratzel, and to geopolitics, above all those of Karl Haushofer. The new trend can be interpreted as a being a result of the significant shift in international power ratios and alliance formations, as well as radical socio-political changes and the lack of security that these entail.

Lecture given on 16.12.2013.