Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
makeup of the human populations in the vicinity. While we regard borders as static, as the
very representation of permanence, legality, and stability, Ratzel saw only gradual expan-
sion, contraction, and impermanence in the affairs of nations. For him the map
breathed
as though a living being, and from this came the idea of the organic-biological state whose
expansion was written into natural law.
One of Ratzel's students, a Swede, Rudolf Kjellén, would as a political scientist at
the universities in Uppsala and Göteborg coin the word
“Geopolitik.”
Kjellén, an intense
Swedish nationalist, feared Russian expansionism in quest of the relatively warm waters of
the Baltic Sea. He wanted an expansionist Sweden and Finland to counter Russia's designs.
While Kjellén found support for his views with members of the aristocracy and upper
middle classes, nostalgic for Sweden's past grandeur under kings such as Gustavus Adolfus
and Charles XII, there was ultimately too little public support for his views. The appetite
for great power preoccupations in Scandinavia, even by the late-nineteenth and early-twen-
tieth centuries, was long past. Kjellén transferred all his hopes to a Greater Germany—to
stand forth against Russia and England, both of which he especially detested. Kjellén's
German empire-of-the-future, as he cataloged it, included all of Central and Eastern Europe
as well as the Channel ports along the French coast, and the Baltic provinces of Russia,
Ukraine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia (to be connected to Berlin by a great railway). Em-
ploying Ratzel's ideas, Kjellén categorized human societies in racial, biological terms, con-
ceiving of the state in terms of the
Volk
, which, if sufficiently virile and dynamic, would
require an especially large amount of living space. It is the very glibness and windiness in-
habiting the thought of Ratzel and Kjellén that a later generation of murderers would make
use of to justify their acts. Ideas matter, for good and for bad, and hazy ideas can be es-
pecially dangerous. Whereas legitimate geography shows us what we are up against in the
challenges we face around the world, Ratzel's and Kjellén's is an illegitimate geography
that annihilates the individual and replaces him with the vast racial multitude.
This is all but prologue to the life of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism and
steadfast admirer of Mackinder. The tragic perversion of Mackinder's work by Haushofer,
as well as the danger posed by Nazi
Geopolitik
, is elegantly told in a largely forgotten
but classic work of political science,
Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power
by
Robert Strausz-Hupé, published in 1942. Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian immigrant to the Un-
ited States, was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and a U.S. ambassador
to four countries (including Turkey) during the Cold War years. In 1955 in Philadelphia,
he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with which I have been loosely affiliated
for two decades. Strausz-Hupé's topic, written before the tide turned in the Allies' favor in
World War II, was a clear-cut attempt not only to explain the danger of Nazi
Geopolitik
to
the fellow citizens of his adopted country, but to explain what geopolitics is and why it is
important, so that the forces of good can make use of it in a much different way than the
Nazis were doing. Strausz-Hupé thus rescues the reputation of Mackinder and the discip-
