Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The word geopolitics comes from Greek gê, or “earth,” and politiká, or “affairs of the city.” Beyond these aspects, it is a somewhat loose term, broadly used to describe the relationship between physical and human geographies, politics, and/or international relations (IR). It refers to the study of “world politics,” but might encompass geoeconomics, globalization, political geography, political/environmental relationships, or the geostrategic discourse of IR realism. Furthermore, it is widely researched, spoken about, and thus defined outside of the academy. One popular voice on geopolitics, journalist Tim Marshall, claims that

Geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion. (2015, 2)

Marshall’s concern with “the [overlooked] physical realities that underpin national and international politics” (2) is but one aspect of geopolitics. Another aspect relates to political economy: to ports and trade routes, migration, borders, and the new powers of global finance which go beyond environmental and “balance of powers” analyses. Furthermore, in the subfield of critical geopolitics, scholars like John Agnew, Gerard Toal, and feminist geopolitical theorists like Jo Sharp examine the way ideas and discourses surrounding geopolitics influence actual geopolitical practices. Critical geopolitics does not deny its own “fictions,” but attempts to establish a more “cosmopolitan” and “self-critical” analysis (Toal 2010, 316).

Important works from the history of geopolitical thought (an extensive account of which is provided by Agnew in Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (2003)) include Thucydides’ analysis of land and sea powers in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which posits the inseparability of human (political) actions and physical environments, and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which draws a direct connection between climate, “temper of the mind,” and a society’s governing laws (Montesquieu 2008, 438). Where Montesquieu’s economically minded contemporaries, Physiocrats like François Quesnay, would see economic value as derived from land (nature), these strands of ancient and early modern geopolitics suppose that power is derived from earth’s physical spaces.

Geopolitics as a truly global analysis began in the nineteenth century with the rapid development of industrial capitalism, colonialism and global empires, formal interstate relations, and an understanding of the world as a complete entity. Agnew writes that “World politics was invented only when it became possible to see the world (in the imagination) as a whole and pursue goals in relation to that geographical scale,” (2003, 5) and categorizes the discourse of geopolitics, or “geopolitical imaginaries,” into three historical periods: “civilizational geopolitics, naturalized geopolitics and ideological geopolitics, respectively. World politics in each of the epochs has been organized around the characterizations of space, places and peoples defined by these modes of representation and communication” (Agnew 2003, 85). Agnew’s first geopolitical imaginary, nineteenth century civilizational geopolitics, is based on an international political economy 

characterized by a European Concert in which no one state ‘laid down the law’ for the others within Europe, and by an emerging British economic dominance in much of the rest of the world… Its main elements were a commitment to European uniqueness as a civilization; a belief that the roots of European distinctiveness were found in its past; a sense that though other cultures might have noble pasts with high achievements, they had been eclipsed by Europe; and an increasing identification with a particular nation state as representing the most perfected version of the European difference. (2003, 87)

This understanding of world politics helped to establish the notion of a progressive, developmental trajectory for nation-states, and a hierarchy between “advanced” Europe and  a “backward” colonial periphery. 

Building off of this, thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and the Anglo-world, ascribed geopolitical hierarchy to nature, a “naturalized geopolitics.” This new imaginary “involved elaborating systems of environmental/geographical accounting; classifying states and regions in terms of inventories of resources, racial characteristics, economic and political organization, and climatic types… natural attributes determined national destiny” (Agnew 2003, 101). Naturalized geopolitics envisioned nations as organic bodies which swallowed up weaker nations and needed national economies to counter failing global financial systems. Swedish geographer Rudolph Kjellén first used the phrase “geopolitik” (Kjellén is also credited with coining “biopolitics”), and would greatly influence German geopolitical theorists Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer. Ratzel, for one, saw the territorial state as “the organized expression of the place-specific peoples they ruled—an expression of their Geist (spirit)—and state power was intimately linked to the extent of territory and size of population a state controlled” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 26). Ratzel and Haushofer developed the concept of a “vital space” or lebensraum, which would become an central part of Nazi ideology via the latter’s student, Rudolph Hess (Esposito 2008, 16). This style of organic geopolitics is also rooted in the “environmental determinism” characteristic of Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu, and which underlies darker currents of anti-globalization movements, the alt-Right, and “eco-fascism” today (neo-environmental determinism also enjoyed a popular resurgence with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)—no association with the latter, nefarious politics). Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith argue that “However arcane this idea might seem today—even repulsive in the wake of Nazi geopolitics—the organic state represented a considerable conceptual democratization compared with the absolutist state it succeeded” (26, 2009). In other words, geopolitics had adapted to a developing capitalist, bourgeois state—it sought a more nuanced view and left behind the brute civilization statism of the nineteenth century.

The geopolitics of the Cold War, Agnew’s third era of “ideological geopolitics,” was characterized by competition between global superpowers as the representatives of their respective political economic systems. For the US, this meant

indirect stimulation of economic growth by means of fiscal and monetary policies; commitment to a growing global marketplace based on a global division of labour; accepting the dollar as the principal world currency; hostility to Soviet-style economic planning; assuming the burden of policing political changes that could be construed as damaging to the stability of the world economy. (Agnew 2003, 103)

According to Agnew, when it comes to geopolitics “the intellectual and the political are not separable. Geopolitics has served statecraft, usually that of particular states” (127, 2003), and there is no better example of this unity than in the work, inside and outside of academia, of geopolitical theorists and Cold War American statesmen Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński (the latter of whom famously referred to geopolitics as a “grand chessboard” (1997)). Rather than just a conflict between states (as civilizations, organic entities, or political economic systems), ideological geopolitics attempts to establish a static, ahistorical world politics—a status quo to be maintained. With the end of the Cold War, this vision of ideological geopolitics has become threatened, as Hardt and Negri conclude in Empire (2000), from fundamentalisms “understood both from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences of primordial identities and values… conceived as a kind of historical backflow, a de-modernization” (2000, 146). Therefore, any resistance to global order is also seen through a global lens: “Conflicts with apparent local roots were thus read as local manifestations of the superordinate global one. Links to outside powers in the form of supplies of arms or the furnishing of advisers were read as the only causes of local conflicts” (Agnew 2003, 109).

Today, geopolitics is more directly connected to global economic systems, to geoeconomics; it is situated in a confusing web of fluctuating economies and new state roles in the market. For IR strategist Edward Luttwak, geoeconomics has, in fact, taken over geopolitics among core powers. It is a spatial neoliberalism where the geopolitical social is replaced by geoeconomics as the predominant mode of state strategizing; geopolitics remains the strategy of developing peripheral states. Others, such as Cowen, Smith, and Matthew Sparke, have complicated this shift to geoeconomics. Cowen and Smith write that “the assemblage of territory, economy and social forms that was both a foundation and effect of modern geopolitics… is currently recast by an emerging geography of economy and security that might best be captured as geoeconomics with its own attendant social forms” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 23). They see a tension, however, between the two spheres rather than a complete shift: security issues are “increasingly defined by conflicts between geopolitical territorial logics and geoeconomic market logics” (32). Conflicts arise at places like ports, where “more than 90% of global trade occurs… [and] where many key struggles over ‘security’ and ‘economy’ are being waged” (2007, 33). They argue that attempts to protect American economic investments, like the American Container Security Initiative (CSI), have effectively extended US borders, and thus geopolitical power and accompanying conflict across the globe (34). Geoeconomics has not totally replaced geopolitics, but has become crucial for understanding the latter.

Sparke, on the other hand, argues that “geopolitics and geoeconomics are better understood as geostrategic discourses” rather than periods, and through the “cultural politics of geopolitical representation … it is possible to explore how geopolitics and geoeconomics operate as alternately fearful and hopeful discourses shaping the worldviews of U.S. security strategists and their audiences” (Sparke 2007, 340). The “geopolitics of fear” is used to justify foreign wars, expansionist policies, and domestic repression, while “visionaries” of “geoeconomics of hope” tend to “fantasize about connectivity and pace” (also at the service of war, expansion, and repression (340)). Furthermore, Sparke, inspired by David Harvey (1985), writes that the confusing array of geopolitical terms can be clarified by understanding  “the ‘external’ dialectic of geopolitics and geoeconomics… as an overdetermined expression of the ‘internal’ uneven development dialectic in capitalism between spatial fixity and spatial expansion. Geopolitical economy can in turn be treated as the analysis of the relays between these internal and external dialectics” (Sparke 2017, 484). In other words, the relationship between geopolitics and geoeconomics reflects capitalists’ desire to both consolidate investments and protect space, and expand for new accumulation and markets, and is similarly “shot through with contradictions” (487).

Finally, despite the aforementioned state absolutism, naturalization of geopolitical hierarchies, and geopolitics’ association with chessboard-views of the world, one should not draw the impression that geopolitics is necessarily militaristic or expansionist. The intellectual and political aspects of geopolitics continue to be closely related; the discipline is a site of politics, and any claims to total positivism are ahistorical and unfounded. According to Toal, new imaginations might fall under the umbrella of “critical geopolitics,” the “general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that characterize modernity” which includes a skepticism toward the objectivity of texts, a challenge to “state-centric readings of world politics,” and critical histories of geopolitics in order to recover it from militarism and nationalism (2010, 316). A new vision of geopolitics can break from the game-like, colonial tradition which defined the previous eras, while providing both analyses of and practical responses to issues surrounding globalization, demographic changes, security, and resource scarcity.

(see Biopolitics, Capitalist State, De/Reterritorialization, Empire, Nature, War)

Bibliography

Agnew, John A. Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997. 

Cowen, Deborah, and Neil Smith. “After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics.” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. 

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 

Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography. New York, NY: Scribner, 2015.

Montesquieu. “The Spirit of the Laws.” Essay. In The Great Political Theories, edited by Michael Curtis, 425–40. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. “Opening Remarks” from “New Directions in Critical Geopolitics: an Introduction.” Edited by Laura Jones and Daniel Sage. GeoJournal75 (2010): 315–25. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9255-4. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers97, no. 2 (2007): 338–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00540.x. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Globalizing Capitalism and the Dialectics of Geopolitics and Geoeconomics.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space50, no. 2 (2017): 484–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518×17735926.

Sparke, Matthew. “Geoeconomics, Globalisation and the Limits of Economic Strategy in Statecraft: A Response to Vihma.” Geopolitics23, no. 1 (2017): 30–37.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1326482.