Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

Geoffrey Sloan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135773304
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

This volume examines geopolitics by looking at the interaction between geography, strategy and history.

This book addresses three interrelated questions: why does the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy of states change? How do these changes occur? Over what period of time do these changes occur? The theories of Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman are examined in order to provide an analytical narrative for five case studies, four historical and one contemporary. Taken together they offer the prospect of converting descriptions of historical change into analytic explanations, thereby highlighting the importance of a number of commonly overlooked variables. In addition, the case studies will illuminate the challenges that states face when attempting to change the scope of their foreign policy and geo-strategy in response to shifts in the geopolitical reality. This book breaks new ground in seeking to provide a way to understand why and how the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy both expands and contracts.

This book will be of much interest to students of geopolitics, strategic studies, military history, and international relations.

1
Geopolitics

Geography, history and strategy: a trinity of relationships

Introduction

This is a book about relationships and the puzzles they present. These two issues will be explored through a trinitarian structure. Understanding the manner in which geography, history and strategy interact and have produced political outcomes that have affected the security of states is the analytical objective. Initially it would appear that this relationship is self-evident given the fact that the configuration of terrain, changing technology and political preferences are widely recognized as being pivotal to all security arrangements. Deudney has pointed out, that there is a long history in attempting to develop explanatory power with respect to these variables: ‘geopolitical theorizing about the relationship between material contexts and security politics is also among the oldest and most central lines of argument in the 2500-year project of Western political science.’¹

The problem of definition

Despite this impressive intellectual lineage, which stretches back to antiquity, geopolitics in the early twenty-first century has a three-fold problem. First there is the problem of definition. Every theory is generated for someone and for some reason. Geopolitical theory initially emerged – from Aristotle to Montesquieu and Machiavelli – as a result of a naturalist intellectual impulse. In The Prince, Machiavelli suggested that mastery of geography is a key component to political survival:

He [the prince] should learn the nature of sites, and recognise how mountains rise, how valleys open up, how plains lie, and understand the nature of marshes – and in this invest the greatest care … and the prince who lacks this skill lacks the first part of what a Captain must have.²

There are numerous contemporary definitions of geopolitics. Many focus on an appreciation of the development of modern economies, changes in transport and weapons technology, access to trade routes and resources. Aron has maintained that geopolitics ‘combines a geographical schematization of diplomatic-strategic relations with a geographic-economic analysis of resources, with an interpretation of diplomatic attitudes as a result of the way of life and of the environment (sedentary, nomadic, agricultural, seafaring).’³ Gray has tried to disaggregate the concept to reveal its essential components: ‘Geopolitics is regarded here as a house with five rooms: geophysical resources; location; human resources – skills and culture; experience – the past, history, legends, myths; and mental cartography. These categories capture the sources of the political implications of geography.’⁴ Sloan focuses on the way in which these components should function together to generate explanations:

Geopolitical theory is an attempt to draw attention to the importance of certain geographical patterns in political history. It is a theory of spatial relationships and historical causation. From it explanations have been deduced which suggest the contemporary and future political relevance of various geographical conceptualisations.⁵

Grygiel maintains that geopolitical theory has three constituent elements: lines of communication and their changing significance due to changes in transport and weapons technology, the location of sources of natural resources and the location of economic power.⁶ Furthermore, he has made an important claim about the nature of the geopolitical reality and its relationship to policy: ‘the first quality of geopolitics is its objectivity. By this I mean that geopolitics, or the geopolitical situation, exists independently of the motivations and power of states and is not contingent on the perceptions of strategists and politicians’.⁷

Applying a synthetic intellectual approach, all four definitions elucidate a common insight. Geopolitics is one of the ‘grand theories’ of International Relations. It is illustrative of theorising in which inter-relationships among a limited number of variables purport to explain a wide range of phenomena.

The problem of usage and currency

The second problem is that of usage and currency. In terms of the modern literature of International Relations and Strategic Studies, it has become invisible. In one of the most important text books on International Relations, edited by Baylis and Smith, there is no reference at all to geography or geopolitics, and there is only one reference to strategic interaction.⁸ In one of the leading text books on International Relations theory,⁹ one that has gone through three editions,¹⁰ there is no reference to geography or geopolitics. In terms of the field of Strategic Studies the situation is little better: in the recent monograph by Friedman¹¹ there is only a brief treatment of geopolitics; in the monographs by Heuser¹² and Hill¹³ there is no explicit reference to geography or geopolitics and their relationship to strategy.

There are two notable exceptions to this intellectual black hole into which geography has fallen in the field of mainstream international relations theory. First is the work of Colin Gray, who has almost single-handedly addressed these relationships over nearly four decades of scholarship. In one of his most important works, he devotes a whole chapter to discussing ‘Terrestrial Action’.¹⁴ The second is the work of Evans, who argued in 2001 that the international security system had become ‘bifurcated’: that is, a split had emerged between the dominant state paradigm and sub-state and trans-state strata. The implication of this, it was claimed, has been a reduction in the relative importance of geography in the traditional strategic sense: it was no longer possible for a state to retreat behind physical borders. However, he did qualify what he meant by the ‘relative decline’ of geography:

In no sense does such a phrase imply ‘the end of geography’ in the same sense that Francis Fukuyma famously spoke of ‘the end of history.’ In terms of logistics, campaign planning and topographical analysis, geography remains fundamental to the art of war, while geopolitics remains an important component of statecraft.¹⁵

This lacuna flies in the face of the epistemological parameters of Strategic Studies. Wylie has argued that while strategy cannot lay claim to have the same degree of rigour as the physical sciences, it is an academic subject in which geographical considerations play a crucial role:

It can and should be an intellectual discipline of the highest order, and the strategist should prepare himself to manage ideas with precision and clarity and imagination in order that his manipulation of physical realities, the tools of war may rise above the plane of mediocrity.¹⁶

This raises the question why has the usage of the geopolitical concept all but disappeared in the international relations literature? One reason has to do with the close association in the Anglo-American mind with the Nazi geopolitik. Hepple provides an assessment by illuminating the near terminal effect that the association of geopolitics with the German School of Geopolitics¹⁷ had: ‘There does not seem to be any book title in English using the term geopolitics between the 1940s and Gray’s Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era in 1977 (with the exception of Sen’s Basic Principles of Geopolitics and History, published in India in 1975).’¹⁸ The claim is also made that Henry Kissinger, in the late 1970s, was responsible for a revival of the term and gave important impetus to new directions in terms of writing on geopolitics.¹⁹ A second reason derives from the tendency in political science to rely on political variables when explaining political outcomes: Deudney has argued that: ‘In the human sciences, the dominant tendency was to look for the source of change in the development of human institutions and culture rather than in the physical environment.’²⁰ Grygiel has summarized these two reasons as follows:

The vast majority of current international relations literature is characterized by the absence of geography. Although the perverted versions of geopolitics, notably Nazi geopolitik, are partly to blame for the current distain for geography, the main cause for the academic irrelevance of geography seems to be the tendency to explain political realities only through political variables.²¹

This decline in the usage of the concept has not been replicated in the currency of the term. In fact there exists an acute paradox in this respect. Geopolitics has never been more popular on the internet. A recent Google search for geopolitics yielded 5,570,000 results. A search for a more qualified geopolitical theory produced 3,610,000 results.²² However, this widespread use has resulted in an etymological transformation:

the term ‘geopolitics’ has enjoyed a ghostly afterlife, becoming a ubiquitously used while being largely drained of substantive theoretical content, and is used in so many ways as to be meaningless without further specification. Most contemporary usages of the term geopolitics are casual synonyms for realist views of international strategic rivalry and interaction.²³

This ‘ghostly afterlife’ of a once vibrant intellectual concept has been further reinforced by the capture of the term by post-modern geographers. They added the adjective ‘critical’. The resultant phrase, ‘critical geopolitics’, suggests, according to Deudney,²⁴ a strongly anti-materialistic vision, one that emphasizes the point that all geopolitical constructs serve an ideology while paying scant attention to how the strategic significance of geographic configurations change. Thus ‘critical geopolitics’ seeks to unmask how a geopolitical discourse reinforces power relationships, whether found in a specific text or in a general theory.²⁵ It seeks ‘to define theoretically ideological clusters or ‘discursive formations’ which systematically organize knowledge and experience and repress alternatives through dominance.’²⁶ It also claims a unique advantage and insight:

how social and political life is constructed through discourses. What is said or written by political elites – the whole community of government officials, political leaders, foreign policy experts and advisors – is a result of the unconscious adoption of rules of living, thinking, and speaking that are implicit in the texts, speeches, and documents. This group, on the other hand, is also considered to be the elite that guides the masses concerning how they should live.²⁷

The unmasking of the hidden assumptions behind every geopolitical speech or text is a precondition for unravelling existing power structures and understanding geographic configurations.²⁸

Classical geopolitics is interpreted as the antithesis of this approach:

geopolitics (classical) refers to a fixed and objective geography constraining and directing the activities of states … such as the disposition of states in relation to the distribution of the continents and oceans, or fixed processes o...