The Revenge of Geography Read Free Page A

subversion, and the configuration of its energy pipeline routes all designed to gain back its near-abroad, and thus reconstitute in effect the former Soviet Union, are the wages of a deep insecurity. But Germans, at least through the middle of the twentieth century, were more conscious of geography still. The shape of German-speaking territories on the map of Europe changed constantly from the Dark Ages through modern times, with the unification of a German state occurring only in the 1860s under Otto von Bismarck. Germany stood atthe very heart of Europe, a land and sea power both, and thus fully conscious of its ties to maritime Western Europe and to the Heartland of Russia–Eastern Europe. Germany’s victories against Denmark, Habsburg Austria, and France were ultimately the result of Bismarck’s strategic brilliance, anchored in his acute sense of geography, which was actually the recognition of limits: namely, those Slavic regions to the east and southeast where Germany dare not go. Germany’s abjuration of Bismarck’s caution led to its loss in World War I, which gave Germans a keener sense of their geographic vulnerability—and possibilities. Historically changeable on the map, lying between sea to the north and Alps to the south, with the plains to the west and east open to invasion and expansion both, Germans have literally lived geography. It was they who developed and elaborated upon geopolitics, or
Geopolitik
in German, which is the concept of politically and militarily dominated space. And it was such geographical theories, which in the first half of the twentieth century owed much to Mackinder, that was to lead to the Germans’ undoing—discrediting geography and geopolitics for generations of Germans since World War II.
    The rise and fall of
Geopolitik
, in which one theoretician after another both built on and misused the work of his predecessor, began in earnest with Friedrich Ratzel, a late-nineteenth-century German geographer and ethnographer, who coined the idea of
Lebensraum
, or “living space.” The concept actually owes its origin to a German immigrant in early-nineteenth-century America, Friedrich List, a journalist, political science professor, business speculator, and friend of Henry Clay, who drew inspiration from the Monroe Doctrine, with its notion of a vast and virtually sovereign geographical area. As for Ratzel, he was also much influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, and thus developed an organic, somewhat biological sense of geography in which borders were constantly evolving depending upon the size and 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 expansion,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-twentieth 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