Geopolitics (For Encyclopedia of Globalization, Edited by George Ritzer (Routledge, 2012) George Steinmetz
Geopolitics (for Encyclopedia of Globalization, edited by George Ritzer (Routledge, 2012) George Steinmetz 1.What is Geopolitics? Historical shifts in meaning and contemporary definitions The word geopolitics points to the interface between two distinct ontological realms and scientific disciplines, geography and politics. The first of these root words, “geography,” is not necessarily restricted in this context to traditional geographic concerns like climate or the earth’s physical surface, but entails a much broader spatial perspective concerned with scale and location, the size, shape, and boundaries of territories, and the processes by which territories are socially defined. The other root word, “politics,” points toward subfields of political science like international relations which are also focused on states and empires, borders and frontiers, international alliances and polarizations, the balance and imbalance of global power, and war, imperialism, and diplomacy (Burchill and Linklater 1996). If geopolitics is delimited by the overlap between geography and politics, this definition does not yet specify the nature of the relationship between the two realms. The founding decades of geopolitical discussion saw an emphasis on geographical modes of explanation. Geopolitical thinkers at the turn of the previous century emphasized the effects of physical geography and spatial location on a state’s growth and decline and its military and foreign policies. The word geopolitics was coined by the Swedish social scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1917: 46), who defined it as “the doctrine of the state as a geographic organism or a spatial phenomenon: i.e., the state as land, territory, region, or, most precisely, as a Reich [realm, empire].” Kjellén’s thinking was based largely on the work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who founded the subfields of political geography and anthropo-geography as the study of the geographical basis of the state’s action (Ratzel 1882, 1897).
[Show full text]