Geopolitics: what it is, fields of study, and main references

Politics is contingent on many factors, and one of the often overlooked is geography.

Geopolitics is responsible for studying this peculiar relationship. We will see what is its definition, its characteristics and what has been its importance throughout history, studying some concrete examples of different governments.

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What is geopolitics?

Geopolitics is about the study of the relationship between the geographical conditions of a specific place and its weight in the political decisions that are made and that affect these territories. By geography is understood both the physical conditions of the land and the human distribution on it, that is, the configuration of the different states and other administrations. In other words, geopolitics tries to explain why certain political events happen in specific territories.

The geographical aspects that are fundamentally taken into account when talking about the geopolitical are the lands that belong to each country and also the waters of each nation, or the international. It is essential to know the history of each country as well as the diplomatic relations it has had with the rest of territories in order to understand the repercussion of a certain political decision from a perspective geopolitics.

In addition to history, other disciplines that should feed this study are economics, practically inseparable from politics and its decisions, sociology, to take into account the behaviors of a certain society, political science, which underlies the decisions made by the rulers and the aforementioned geography, to know the exact area of ​​our planet on which we want to study the behavior political.

Currently, the concept of geopolitics is used to encompass everything the set of political relations between different countries, although the origins of the term were much more complex. Then we can take a brief tour of history, from the coining of the word itself, to the present day.

history of geopolitics

Although the origin of geopolitics is somewhat disputed, the truth is that most opinions agree that it arose at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th. In the first case, it is stated that it was a geographer from Sweden who referred to that term. for the first time, while other researchers attribute this merit to a group of political scientists germans. This divergence is not particularly relevant to the history of geopolitics, so it is not a major problem.

The truth is the term began to gain importance with the arrival of the 30s of the last century, and it did so at the hands of Nazism, so geopolitics was not without controversy at first. It was Karl Haushofer, a German soldier, geographer and politician, who was in charge of developing this discipline and thus using it in order to draw up the strategies to be followed by Hitler and the Nazi army during the development of the Second War World.

This association between geopolitics and National Socialism resulted in the abandonment of the term after the end of the war. The 70s had to arrive for it to be recovered. He did it, first, through a current known as critical geopolitics. One of the promoters of this movement was Yves Lacoste, a French geopolitician, who realized the great importance of geography in the development of war conflicts, giving the Vietnam War and the Cold War as examples.

The other great exponent of critical geopolitics was Peter Taylor, a British botanist who, likewise, has addressed the issue over the years and values ​​the figure of the political geographer as the expert who should be in charge of geopolitical studies. Since this new birth of the concept of geopolitics, its importance has only grown, especially as a way of analysis for the great conflicts that constantly arise between different countries of everyone.

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Main authors in this field of study

Geopolitics has developed in very different ways in the various countries where it has been studied and promoted, so today we have various authors on which to lean when we try to better understand the complexity of this freak. Let's get to know some of the main ones.

1. Alfred Thayer Mahan

The first author would be Alfred Thayer Mahan, American. mahan noted the importance of the sea in political relations between countries, and how strategic places should be used to dominate this type of medium. In this sense, it established six conditions that a country should meet to control the maritime environment. The first would be to have a geographical position that was already advantageous from the start. The second would speak of having accessible coasts, with climates that facilitate navigation and useful resources.

The third point would be to have a sufficient extension of land. The next one would refer to having a population level such that it would allow the defense of said terrain. The fifth point would establish as a condition that the society had favorable aptitudes to function in the sea, and finally It would require that the government of the nation in question have an interest in the maritime domain and direct its policies towards this line.

2. Homer Read

Another US author is Homer Lea. At the beginning of the 20th century, Lea warned of the danger faced by the Anglo-Saxon nations due to the expansion that neighboring states of Slavic (Russia), Teutonic (Germany) or Japanese.

Somehow anticipated the movements that were to come throughout World War I, since he knew how to read political intentions taking geographical factors into account. That is to say, he carried out one of the first geopolitical studies of which there is evidence.

3. Kissinger and Brzezinski

Kissinger and Brzezinski, US security advisers at the time of the Cold War, developed the grand chessboard theory, whereby the entire world would resemble this scenario, in which there would be some main actors who would constantly fight to control more and more squares, and therefore should be assumed international policies aimed at guaranteeing a balance between the most powerful nuclei, in order to avoid possible future conflicts between they.

They mainly put that weight on Russia, Germany and the US, stating that the US should establish alliances in Europe that would prevent a hypothetical convergence between Germany and Russia, which would generate a nucleus of power, named Eurasia, which would be uncontrollable for the rest of the world. world.

4. mackinder

Sir Halford Mackinder, a late-19th-century British geographer and politician, was another pioneer of geopolitics. His great contribution to this study was the Heartland theory, in an article called "The Geographical Pivot of History". According to his analysis, in the central zone of the Eurasian continent the conditions were being given for the formation of a gigantic empire.

Said conglomeration of nations, thanks to being an enormous extension of land, would have an advantage over the rest of the nations that had to make use of maritime transport, much slower and more dangerous, to supply resources and troops to defend each space. The central zone of that supposed empire was what Mackinder called Heartland, and would correspond to the Ukraine and the westernmost part of Russia..

Indeed, these territories involved major disputes between the great powers that faced each other during the two great wars of the last century, knowing that whoever controlled the area would have a great advantage to continue advancing through the rest of the continent and therefore definitively unbalance the balance.

5. Friedrich Ratzel

This German ethnographer and geographer from the second half of the 19th century contributed the concept of biology as a factor of geographical expansion, beyond rigid borders. According to Ratzel, nations resemble living organisms, and therefore must continue to grow. If, on the contrary, the borders remain static or even decrease, it will mean that the nation is in decline and is in danger of dying.

This theory was criticized for being considered too simplistic, ignoring important factors that explain the power of nations, such as the organization of their own society, by putting a example. In addition, these postulates were some of those that the National Socialist movement would later use to design its strategies, as we saw in the previous points, which meant the fall from grace of the concept of geopolitics during several decades.

6. jacques ancel

Jacques Ancel was the first French geopolitician. He was quite a reference in the matter, and he came to publish important studies on the matter before the Second World War devastated Europe.

7. Vadim Tsymbursky

As a representative of the Russian school, Vadim Tsymbursky would be the greatest exponent. This researcher made different contributions to geopolitics, coining terms such as the Island-Russia or the Great Limit.

Bibliographic references:

• Agnew, J.A. (2005). Geopolitics: a re-view of world politics. Editorial Plot.
• Flint, C. (2016). Introduction to geopolitics. Routledge.
• Hyndmann, J. (2001). Towards a feminist geopolitics. Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien.