Abstract
Over the past decades, a ‘neoclassical geopolitics’ has emerged in and beyond the field of International Relations. This diverse practice reproduces many of the problems that characterised classical geopolitics, notably an excessive tendency to explain politics on the basis of ostensibly permanent geographical factors. As a contribution to the interdisciplinary dialogue between International Relations and (Political) Geography, this article outlines the history of classical geopolitical reasoning and some problems that relate to this tradition. The contemporary perspective of ‘critical geopolitics’ is introduced as a radically different alternative. But the core problem of classical as well as neoclassical geopolitics is a superficial understanding of geographical space, which all too easily results in geographical determinism. For this reason, particular emphasis is placed on different conceptions of space. It is argued that rather than looking to classical geopolitics with its scientific and ultimately also politically problematic notions of geography, analyses of international and global politics is better served by adopting a relational approach to geography, which stresses the geographical as dialectically related to the social and the historical.
Highlights
Geografiens hævn Geografiens hævn, “the revenge of geography”
I stedet må vi atter vende os til den politiske realisme, og “of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography” (Kaplan 2009, 98)
Ifølge Kaplan skal vi søge til tidligere tænkere som Alfred Mahan (1840-1914), Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943) og især Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), der alle forsøgte at forklare storpolitik som grundlæggende bestemt af geografiske faktorer: If you want to understand the insights of geography, you need to seek out those thinkers who make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy – those authors who thought the map determined nearly everything, leaving little room for human agency (Kaplan 2009, 98)
Summary
That it is through geopolitics that geography – so often ... the neglected orphan of social theory – comes back into a social scientific understanding of the world (Harvey 2010, 210). Særligt vil jeg inddrage nyere forståelser af geografi, der på afgørende vis udfordrer tankegangen i den klassiske forståelse Jeg tager her udgangspunkt i erkendelsen af en ny-klassisk geopolitik, der også omfatter politologer knyttet til International Politik. Det er snarere måden at inddrage geografi i storpolitiske analyser, som karakteriserer den ny-klassiske geopolitik. Det gjaldt også i Danmark, hvor Gudmund Hatt (1884-1960) på grund af „tyskvenlige“ geopolitiske analyser under besættelsen blev afskediget fra sit professoratet i kulturgeografi ved Københavns Universitet.[2] For journalisten Nicolai Blædel, der som udtalt antinazist skrev med stor styrke, havde Hatt gennem geopolitikken vovet sig „ud i denne med Videnskabens Navn smykkede tyske Agitation“ og gjort „Videnskaben til en Skøge“ (Blædel 1946, 569-70). Men i Praksis har de britiske Statsmænd været Verdens mest indsigtsfulde Geopolitikere, allerede længe før Ratzel og Kjellén begyndte at skrive Bøger (Hatt 1940, 174)
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