Geopolitik
Geopolitik was a German school of geopolitics that existed between the late 19th century and World War II.
It developed from the writings of various European and American philosophers, geographers and military personnel, including Oswald Spengler, Alexander Humboldt, Karl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Homer Lea, Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer. The ideology of Adolf Hitler adapted, and eventually incorporated some of its tenets.
The defining characteristic of Geopolitik is the inclusion of organic state theory, informed by social Darwinism. It was characterized by clash of civilizations-style theorizing. It is perhaps the closest of any school of geostrategy to a purely nationalistic conception of geostrategy, which ended up masking other more universal elements.
Germany acted as a revisionist state within the international system during both World Wars by attempting to overthrow British domination, and to counter what it saw as rising US and Russian hegemony. As a latecomer to nationhood proper, lacking colonies or reserved markets for industrial output but also experiencing rapid population growth, Germany desired a more equitable distribution of wealth and territory within the international system. Some modern scholars have begun to treat the two World Wars, participated in by Germany, as a single war in which the revisionist Germany attempted to bid for hegemonic control with which to reorder the international system.
German foreign policy was largely consistent in both wars. The foreign policy of Nazi Germany was unique insofar as it learned from what it saw as past imperial mistakes but essentially followed the very same designs laid out by German Geopolitik in the historical record of the German Empire.
Geopolitik rises
German geopolitik contributed to Nazi foreign policy chiefly in the strategy and justifications for Lebensraum. It contributed five ideas to German foreign policy in the interwar period: the organic state; lebensraum; autarky; pan-regions and the land power/sea power dichotomy.Geostrategy as a political science is both descriptive and analytical like political geography but adds a normative element in its strategic prescriptions for national policy. While it stems from earlier US and British geostrategy, German geopolitik adopts an essentialist outlook toward the national interest, oversimplifying issues and representing itself as a panacea. As a new and essentialist ideology, geopolitik found itself in a position to prey upon the post–World War I insecurity of the populace.
In 1919, General Karl Haushofer would become professor of geography at the University of Munich. That would serve as a platform for the spread of his geopolitical ideas, magazine articles and books. By 1924, as the leader of the German geopolitik school of thought, Haushofer would establish the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik monthly, devoted to geopolitik. His ideas would reach a wider audience with the publication of Volk ohne Raum by Hans Grimm in 1926, popularizing his concept of lebensraum. Haushofer exercised influence both through his academic teachings, urging his students to think in terms of continents and emphasizing motion in international politics, and through his political activities. While Hitler's speeches would attract the masses, Haushofer's works served to bring the remaining intellectuals into the fold.
Geopolitik was in essence a consolidation and codification of older ideas, given a scientific gloss:
- Lebensraum was a revised colonial imperialism;
- Autarky a new expression of tariff protectionism;
- Strategic control of key geographic territories exhibiting the same thought behind earlier designs on the Suez and Panama canals; and
- Pan-regions based upon the British Empire, and America's Monroe Doctrine, Pan-American Union and hemispheric defense.
Ostensibly based upon the geopolitical theory of US naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan, and British geographer Halford J. Mackinder, German geopolitik adds older German ideas. Enunciated most forcefully by Friedrich Ratzel and his Swedish student Rudolf Kjellén, they include an organic or anthropomorphized conception of the state, and the need for self-sufficiency through the top-down organisation of society. The root of uniquely German geopolitik rests in the writings of Karl Ritter who first developed the organic conception of the state that would later be elaborated upon by Ratzel and accepted by Hausfhofer. He justified Lebensraum, even at the cost of other nations' existence, because conquest was a biological necessity for a state's growth.
Friedrich Ratzel
Ratzel's writings coincided with the growth of German industrialism after the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent search for markets that brought it into competition with England. His writings served as welcome justification for imperial expansion. Influenced by Mahan, Ratzel wrote of aspirations for German naval reach, agreeing that sea power was self-sustaining, as the profit from trade would pay for the merchant marine, unlike land power. Haushofer was exposed to Ratzel, who was friends with Haushofer's father, a teacher of economic geography, and would integrate Ratzel's ideas on the division between sea and land powers into his theories by saying that only a country with both could overcome the conflict. Here, Hitler diverged with Haushofer's writings in consigning Germany to sole pursuit of land power.Ratzel's key contribution was the expansion on the biological conception of geography, without a static conception of borders. States are instead organic and growing, with borders representing only a temporary stop in their movement. It is not the state proper that is the organism but the land in its spiritual bond with the people who draw sustenance from it. The expanse of a state's borders is a reflection of the health of the nation. Haushofer adopts the view that borders are largely insignificant in his writings, especially as the nation ought to be in a frequent state of struggle with those around it.
Ratzel's idea of Raum would grow out of his organic state conception. The early Lebensraum was not political or economic but spiritual and racial nationalist expansion. The Raum-motiv is a historically driving force, pushing peoples with great Kultur to naturally expand. Space for Ratzel was a vague concept, theoretically unbounded just as was Hitler's. Raum was defined by where German people live, where other inferior states could serve to support German people economically and German culture could fertilise other cultures. Haushofer would adopt that conception of Raum as the central program for German geopolitik, and Hitler's policy would reflect the spiritual and cultural drive to expansion.
Rudolph Kjellén
Rudolph Kjellén was Ratzel's Swedish student who would further elaborate on organic state theory and first coined the term "geopolitics". Kjellén's State as a Form of Life would outline five key concepts that would shape German geopolitik.- Reich was a territorial concept that comprised Raum, Lebensraum, and strategic military shape.
- Volk was a racial conception of the state.
- Haushalt was a call for autarky based on land, formulated in reaction to the vicissitudes of international markets.
- Gesellschaft was the social aspect of a nation's organization and cultural appeal, Kjellén going further than Ratzel in his anthropomorphic view of states relative to each other. And finally,
- Regierung was the form of government whose bureaucracy and army would contribute to the people's pacification and coordination.
Autarky, for Kjellén, was a solution to a political problem, not an economic policy proper. Dependence on imports would mean that a country would never be independent. Territory would provide for internal production. For Germany, Central and Southeastern Europe were key, along with the Near East and Africa. Haushofer was not interested in economic policy, but advocated autarky as well; a nation constantly in struggle would demand self-sufficiency.
Haushofer's contribution
Haushofer's geopolitik expands upon that of Ratzel and Kjellén. While the latter two conceive of geopolitik as the state as an organism in space put to the service of a leader, Haushofer's Munich school specifically studies geography as it relates to war and designs for empire. The behavioral rules of previous geopoliticians were thus turned into dynamic normative doctrines for action on lebensraum and world power.Haushofer defined geopolitik in 1935 as "the duty to safeguard the right to the soil, to the land in the widest sense, not only the land within the frontiers of the Reich but also the right to the more extensive Volk and cultural lands". Culture itself was seen as the most conducive element to dynamic special expansion. It provided a guide as to the best areas for expansion and could make expansion safe, but projected military or commercial power could not. Haushofer even held that urbanisation was a symptom of a nation's decline by giving evidence of a decreasing soil mastery, birth rate and effectiveness of centralized rule.
To Haushofer, the existence of a state depended on living space, the pursuit of which must serve as the basis for all policies. Germany had a high population density, but old colonial powers had a much lower density, a virtual mandate for German expansion into resource-rich areas. Space was seen as military protection against initial assaults from hostile neighbors with long-range weaponry. A buffer zone of territories or insignificant states on one's borders would serve to protect Germany. Closely linked to that need was Haushofer's assertion that the existence of small states was evidence of political regression and disorder in the international system. The small states surrounding Germany ought to be brought into the vital German order. These states were seen as being too small to maintain practical autonomy even if they maintained large colonial possessions and would be better served by protection and organization within Germany. In Europe, he saw Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Switzerland, Greece and the "mutilated alliance" of Austria-Hungary as supporting his assertion.
Haushofer's version of autarky was based on the quasi-Malthusian idea that the earth would become saturated with people and no longer able to provide food for all. There would essentially be no increases in productivity.
Haushofer and the Munich school of geopolitik would eventually expand their conception of lebensraum and autarky well past the borders of 1914 and "a place in the sun" to a New European Order and then to a New Afro-European Order and eventually to a Eurasian Order. That concept became known as a pan-region, taken from the Monroe Doctrine, and the idea of national and continental self-sufficiency. It was a forward-looking refashioning of the drive for colonies, something that geopoliticians did not see as an economic necessity but more as a matter of prestige and putting pressure on older colonial powers. The fundamental motivating force would be not economic but cultural and spiritual.
Beyond being an economic concept, pan-regions were a strategic concept as well. Haushofer acknowledges the strategic concept of the Heartland, put forward by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder. If Germany could control Eastern Europe and subsequently Russian territory, it could control a strategic area to which hostile seapower could be denied. Allying with Italy and Japan would further augment German strategic control of Eurasia, with those states becoming the naval arms protecting Germany's insular position.