From Aeon Magazine:
The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence
Today everyone talks geopolitics. The idea is infectious. It appears to come from nowhere. Twenty years ago, the term was exotic, and the meaning behind it quaint. The world was different then. In 2002, America Unrivaled – a book edited by my Princeton colleague, G John Ikenberry, the foremost exponent of the idea of liberal internationalism – asked why there was so little resistance from other countries to American power projection. That was when the momentum in the United States for an attack on Iraq was building up. The contributors argued that there was no balancing against the unipolar moment that had been created with the disintegration of the Soviet Union: in short, no geopolitics. That changed in the course of the 2000s, and the word ‘geopolitics’ began its road to a dominance of political discourse.
There are simple numerical indicators (see Figure 1 below). A compilation of all newspaper uses of ‘geopolitics’ in English-language publications shows a remarkable increase, in two surges, one after the 2007-08 global financial crisis, and the second after 2014-15, in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the European refugee crisis that followed the Syrian war.
Figure 1
We often associate the beginning of the modern turn to geopolitics with two men, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Putin defined his historic mission in terms of geopolitics. The collapse of the Soviet Union, he declared, had been the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. The explosion of geopolitical thinking already took place in 1990s Russia (see Figure 2 below). Putin’s speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007 was a turning point, which he began with a denunciation of the concept of unipolarity:
One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?
Putin’s language is a characteristic expression of the geopolitical mindset, and reflects the sense that geopolitics involves making good losses, and compensating for inferiority and the memory of humiliation. That language is also present with China’s wish to break the legacy of ‘a century of humiliation’ that followed the Opium Wars, when Britain and other imperialist powers used the trade in drugs to destroy the morale and the capability of the Chinese population.
The Chinese turn to reflection on global geopolitics also started with the global financial crisis, when it looked as if China was rescuing global capitalism. Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, had already urged in 2009 that China should assert four strengths, ‘more influential power in politics, more competitiveness in the economic field, more affinity in its image’ and ‘more appealing force in morality’. He concluded: ‘The prospect of global multipolarisation has become clearer.’
Crimea and the Syrian refugees brought geopolitics home to everyone else. The Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 is another turning point, where attention was focused on Russia’s ability to exert pressure by choking off gas supplies. Today’s US is obsessed with geopolitical challenges, and consequently with reframing the world. The US treasury secretary Janet Yellen talked about a reordering of globalisation in which countries should reorder trade relations so that they would manage supply chains by ‘friend-shoring’, building relations only with countries that were reliable allies, and reducing dependence on strategic competitors. That vision is a sign of a new US nervousness.
The soft-power European Union too has taken up the fad, as the European Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen promised a turn to a geopolitical Commission. In a globalised world, many Europeans thought that Europe needed a voice. The argument that large member countries – France, Germany or Italy – could not on their own be really influential in global politics appeared attractive. Josep Borrell, the EU’s de facto foreign minister, gave programmatic statements about the problems of multilateralism and openness, and how ‘we must relearn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a top-tier geostrategic actor.’
Do the politicians and pundits who speak of geopolitics really know what they are talking about? Geopolitics is a classically ambiguous or nebulous term, with an innocent and a dangerous use. For some, it is a vague sense of continents and big geographical spaces, or just that geography matters in the sense that the United Kingdom is more likely to trade with France and Ireland than with New Zealand; for others, it is about a claim that reality consists of endless conflict and struggle, in which space matters more than ideas, maps more than chaps. This is a bleak, conflictual, zero-sum world.
Space and place clearly matter. At some times, the attention of the world focuses on particular geographic hotspots: some dominate the geopolitical imagination, the eastern Mediterranean, the Dardanelles. The passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean assumes a global significance, a thin needle that connects the grain-producing areas of autocratically controlled central Eurasia to starving consumers.....
....MUCH MORE
Mackinder, who is mentioned deeper into the essay, is having a bit of a revival:
What Is Mackinder's Heartland Theory?
Sir Halford John Mackinder was a British geographer who wrote a paper in 1904 called "The Geographical Pivot of History." Mackinder's paper suggested that the control of Eastern Europe was vital to control of the world. Mackinder postulated the following, which became known as the Heartland Theory:
Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island
Who rules the World Island commands the worldThe "heartland" he also referred to as the "pivot area" and as the core of Eurasia, and he considered all of Europe and Asia as the World Island....
