Geopolitical Thinking Research Articles

The Rise of the Geopolitical Thinking in Asia: An Analysis of the “One Belt One Road” and the AIIB Policy of China from the Perspective of Taiwan

The rise in power has been a very important issue in geopolitics, and power politics is, moreover, a major mode of operation in geopolitics. The Author conducts a preliminary analysis on how Taiwan confronts China’s setting up of the AIIB and forming of the “One Belt One Road” strategy as well as the geopolitical strategy and strategic thinking it has represented in the region. The article gives an in-depth insight into China’s setting up of the AIIB along with its considerations and discuss its implicit thinking of national interests.

George Jobberns, freemasonry, geopolitics and the post-WWII world

The article suggests Jobberns’ view of geopolitics ultimately rested on the work of British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder overlain by the writing of American political geographers. Jobberns’ geopolitical thinking was, however, also strongly informed by his being a Freemason. WWII, as the overshadowing external event of Jobberns’ early years at Canterbury, amplified his interest in geopolitics both as a way of understanding the world and, at a time when geography was not universally accepted as a university discipline, as a means of promoting to a wider public the utility of a geographical perspective on world affairs.

Characteristic Features of Medieval Geopolitical Considerations: An Analysis of 12th-Century Hungarian-German Diplomatic Relations

The objective of this research project is to present a significant time period in the system of diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th century. My intention has been to focus on the effects of the rule of the Hohenstaufen dynasty on Hungarian foreign policy. I have examined this issue as embedded in a broad international system of relations, including Hungarian-Polish, Hungarian-Czech, German-Polish, German-Czech, and German-Hungarian connections. I have also investigated the Hungarian foreign policy relevance of the conflict between the Hohenstaufen and Welf dynasties. My purpose through this is to call the attention of experts in this field of study to the less often highlighted peculiarities of medieval diplomatic and geopolitical thinking. Beside a chronological presentation of the events in the diplomatic system of contacts, I regularly refer to the differences between Hungarian and German historiography, as regards the interpretations of the sources quoted. Through utilizing the most recent and not so recent findings in Hungarian and German historical research, the reinterpretation of the sources might be used for the proper handling of these anomalies, for finding a consensus between the oftentimes entirely contradictory viewpoints in historical scholarship and, consequently, for providing a more precise description of the events occurring in the diplomacy of the given historical time period.

Professional Geopolitics as an Ideal: Roles of Geopolitics in Russia

Geopolitics is a topic that again has taken the frontline in discussions of how to interpret Russia’s foreign policy or Russia’s relations with the West. Geopolitical thinking in Russia has often been identified with different schools of neo-Eurasianism, extreme versions of which contain expansionist, nationalist ideas. However, these schools do not characterize university teaching of geopolitics in Russia as a whole. Instead, teachers of geopolitics focus mainly on introducing various theoretical models and criticizing representatives of neo-Eurasianism. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate with survey data that there are differences in what we might call the published discipline and the taught discipline of geopolitics in Russia.

The EU’s comprehensive approach as an alternative strategic framework for a security provider: the case of EU NAVFOR Somalia

The aim of this paper is to examine the dynamics of the Comprehensive Approach (CA) doctrine of the EU and to address the implications of the CA for the EU’s ambitions, as a security provider, to become an effective transformative power; this is in comparison with the predominant realist strategic thinking of the great powers, which still dominates geopolitical thinking in world politics. This analysis aims to contribute to this debate by questioning the identity of the EU from a normative power formulation by applying the concept of hegemony from a Gramscian perspective. This paper considers from the case of EU NAVFOR Somalia that the EU’s current transformative capacity and possibilities could be grasped differently from its operational dimension, focusing on its broader policy-tool potentialities and the broader potential of its delivery, which the CA contributes to consolidate in contrast to the narrower strategic framework of the great powers.

Giving Peace to Europe: European Geopolitics, Colonial Political Culture, and the Hanoverian Monarchy in British North America, ca. 1740–63

As William Pepperrell, the famed commander of New England’s expedition against Louisbourg, was laid to rest at Kittery Point in 1759, his eulogist praised the departed general for giving peace to Europe. This sermon spoke to an influential yet scarcely studied strand of British North American public discourse, in which colonists meditated upon the workings of the eighteenth-century European state system and the developing role of the British Empire as a great power. During the tumultuous global conflicts from 1739 to 1763, British American geopolitical thinking exerted a profound influence on colonial political culture, fostering support for the Hanoverian monarchy as the “arbiter” of Europe while inspiring commensurate discourses of royalism and colonial British nationalism. However, British Americans participated in this transatlantic debate over British foreign policy on their own terms, fashioning distinctively colonial conceptions of intervention, allegiance, and nationality. These subtle expressions of Americanization, which would come to have a major impact on the imperial crisis after 1763, present a starting point for reconsidering the historical importance of this rich but little-quarried vein of colonial political culture.

Reform and Capacity Building in the Turkish Foreign Ministry: Bridging the Gap between Ideas and Institutions

Turkey has expanded the horizons of its foreign policy in geographical terms, as well as in terms of Ankara's involvement in global issues and in international organizations. Turkey's new foreign policy and line of geopolitical thought marks a considerable degree of discontinuity with the previous era. Turkey's ambition is to take on a central role in world politics under the guidance of the foreign policy vision of former Foreign Minister and current Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. This paper analyses the extent to which Turkey's Foreign Ministry has been able to transform itself in accordance with the new geopolitical thinking under Davutoğlu. It focuses on the capacity building and reform of the Foreign Ministry to understand how policymakers bridge the gap between ideas and institutions to ensure that the geopolitical perspective is an enduring and long-term project.

A SMALL STATE IN THE ASYMMETRICAL BILATERAL RELATIONS: LITHUANIA IN LITHUANIAN-RUSSIAN RELATIONS SINCE 2004

In this article, Lithuania's relations with Russia from 2004 to 2014 are examined. This analysis is not much of a challenge in itself: there have been no significant changes in the overall quality of the two countries' relations, no new issues of disagreement, and the countries' approaches to each other have also remained unchanged. This analysis is significant in a different way—relations with Russia motivate and induce Lithuania's entire foreign policy arena, from its strategies to the country's everyday debates. Understanding Lithuania's relations with Russia leads to insights regarding Lithuania's geopolitical thinking and how Lithuania represents itself. Therefore, in this article, the goal is to demonstrate that an analysis of Lithuanian-Russian relations since 2004 not only explains Lithuanian foreign policy, but also reveals an enduring and negative stability in bilateral relations notwithstanding constant turbulence and quarrels.

European Geopolitics Resurgent?

The Return of Geopolitics in Europe: Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy Identity Crises. Edited by Guzzini Stefano. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 322 pp., £68.00 hardback (ISBN 978-1-107-02734-3). The academic field of geopolitics has experienced something of a resurgence in recent years, driven by a changing international environment and advances in the field of critical geopolitics. Moreover, with the growth of—perhaps temporary—questions relating to the future of European integration after the 2008–2009 financial crisis, there has been particular interest in the field of European geopolitics. From a more classical perspective, analysts like Simon and Rogers (2010, 2011), Kaplan (2012), and Grygiel (2012) have sought to chart the changing geopolitical dynamics on the European continent, tracing the role played by the European great powers as they jostle for wealth and power—even during European integration. At the same time, critical geopolitical analysts have sought to analyze the discourses sustaining the geopolitical perspective and worldview, which, despite their hopes to the contrary, refuse to die away. The Return of Geopolitics in Europe —edited by Stefano Guzzini—is informed decidedly by the second camp, but does something quite unique in that it focuses on the return of geopolitical thinking within Europe before—and not after—the 2008–2009 financial crisis, and its related economic and political fallout. As Guzzini puts it: “a movement to a more Hobbesian culture happened not despite the end of the cold war but because of it” (p. 5). This book therefore shows that—contrary to received wisdom—many European countries witnessed a resurgence of geopolitical thinking after the Cold War, …

Spiritual Geopolitics

This article is an attempt at reconceptualizing “Anglo-French relations” in seventeenth-century northeastern America by testing the concept of “spiritual geopolitics” (and its limits) in the case of the Anglo-French “interface” in northeastern America. Spiritual geopolitics is defined as the impact of confessional identities on geopolitical thinking and actions. Building on a binary religio-diplomatic context of the 16th and early 17th-century, the article first makes the case for Puritan spiritual geopolitics, consisting in a revision of familiar events through a new geopolitical lens. It then moves on to French anti-Protestant geopolitical thinking applied to North America, in particular in the second half of the century. While the first two sections argue that documentary evidence confirm “spiritual geopolitics” as a legitimate lens, the third section puts forward instances of religious border-crossing that plead in favor of a more nuanced, multilayered, concept of spiritual geopolitics in the period before the beginning of “Imperial Wars”.

GEOGRAPHY AND MARITIME POTENTIAL OF CHINA AND IRAN

Geographical factors – in particular location, length and terrain of the coastline, and SLOCs – enable us to assess the maritime potential of two key emerging powers: China and Iran. Referring to said geographical factors, we also derive specific features of the Chinese and Iranian naval strategies, and conclude with an outlook on their geographically shaped “strategic cultures”. Pursuing this approach to international relations/security studies, we seek to revitalize classical geopolitical thinking.

The significance of the frontier in Antarctic history: how the US West has shaped the geopolitics of the far south

This paper argues that the experience of westward expansion and the myth of the frontier in the USA have shaped geopolitical thinking in Antarctica over the course of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, individual US adventures were inspired by western expansionism and drew upon the idea of the frontier to win funding and support for their Antarctic expeditions. The 1924 Hughes Doctrine and the US reservation of its rights to the entire continent have clear echoes of the nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine and the idea of manifest destiny. By the mid-twentieth century, the idea of Antarctica as a scientific frontier began to have significant geopolitical implications. More recently, the contested experiences of resource exploitation and natural park creation in the US West have influenced international thinking about conservation and preservation in Antarctica. By highlighting a number of connections between the history of the US West and the geopolitics of Antarctica, this paper does not seek to romanticize Antarctic history. Rather, it suggests that these connections encourage us to apply the insights of the so-called New Western History – which has been highly critical of the idea of the frontier in the US West – into the study of Antarctic history. By examining the significance of the frontier in Antarctic history, this paper seeks to encourage a similar demythologization of Antarctic history that New Western historians have brought to their studies of the US West.

The new actors of Brazilian foreign policy

The New Actors of Brazilian Foreign Policy(PINHEIRO, Leticia and MILANI, Carlos R. S. (eds.). Politica Externa Brasileira: As Praticas da Politica e a Politica das Praticas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2012)Brazilian foreign policy has reached a very interesting inflection point. The bu- reaucratic walls of the Itamaraty Palace so stoutly erected by the Baron of Rio Branco in 1902 are cracking. Where foreign policy used to be neatly circumscribed by the world of 'high politics' and external interaction by Brazilians limited to a small group of clearly defined actors, the situation today is very different. Itamaraty retains pride of place for the grand geopolitical thinking that often preoccupies the study of foreign policy, but the aspects of international affairs touching the lives of citizens everywhere are increas- ingly becoming the concern of line ministries, subnational governments, state agencies and private actors.This is a bold claim with respect to Brazilian foreign policy, but one which accu- rately reflects the extent to which the technocratic minutia of specialist policy areas have not only internationalized, but increasingly interact with other areas of 'low' and 'high' politics. The immediate value of the individual chapters in this book is that they highlight the absurdity of any attempt to claim that Brazil's international affairs should remain the sole preserve of Itamaraty. Each of the five diverse sections of the book - human rights, culture, education, health, and paradiplomacy - immediately suggest that it is unreason- able to expect any relatively small organization, no matter how brilliant its staff, to retain mastery across such a wide range of sometimes highly technical specialties. Indeed, this is the very challenge with which Itamaraty is currently grappling. A more subtle approach is needed, one which involves complex bureaucratic positioning and intra-departmental co- ordination by Itamaraty to retain influence while also allowing Brazilian interests in these diverse areas to be advanced by the experts. Each of the chapters in this volume does an excellent job of describing what has happened.Leticia Pinheiro and Carlos R. S. Milani introduce the book by focusing on the im- portance of technocratic expertise in many areas of contemporary international affairs. Their question then is whether or not it is reasonable to expect Itamaraty to have mastery over the diverse range of technical issues that are consequently found in foreign affairs, and if not, how are decisions made and policies pursued? In other words, the sharp dis- tinction that Rio Branco drew between foreign and domestic policy is pointed out as being an increasingly artificial and unhelpful line. This in turn creates some issues for how we approach foreign policy analysis today, casting into doubt such accepted tricks as sharp divisions between levels of analysis and a tendency to oversimplify the nature and ambi- tions of actors.The first section on human rights immediately takes up the theme of seeking a more complicated picture of how decisions are made and which actors are involved. Milani starts with a chapter looking at actors and agendas in Brazil's human rights foreign policy. He paints a picture of shifting understandings of what Brazil's position should be. While Itamaraty may ultimately remained the external voice expressing the national position, it certainly was not driving internal discussions or limiting how domestic politics drove policy change. The following chapter by Thiago Melamed de Menzes, a career diplomat with human rights experience in the UN system, pairs well with Milani's chapter, setting out how Itamaraty sought to adapt its practices to a contemporary scenario where a more participatory democratic process to issues like human rights policy is the norm. A careful tracing through the subtext paints a picture of bureaucratic attempts to control, direct, and defuse, but all done in a manner within the new bounds of having to allow outsiders into formerly exclusive policy consideration processes. …

The new actors of Brazilian foreign policy

The New Actors of Brazilian Foreign Policy(PINHEIRO, Leticia and MILANI, Carlos R. S. (eds.). Politica Externa Brasileira: As Praticas da Politica e a Politica das Praticas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2012)Brazilian foreign policy has reached a very interesting inflection point. The bu- reaucratic walls of the Itamaraty Palace so stoutly erected by the Baron of Rio Branco in 1902 are cracking. Where foreign policy used to be neatly circumscribed by the world of 'high politics' and external interaction by Brazilians limited to a small group of clearly defined actors, the situation today is very different. Itamaraty retains pride of place for the grand geopolitical thinking that often preoccupies the study of foreign policy, but the aspects of international affairs touching the lives of citizens everywhere are increas- ingly becoming the concern of line ministries, subnational governments, state agencies and private actors.This is a bold claim with respect to Brazilian foreign policy, but one which accu- rately reflects the extent to which the technocratic minutia of specialist policy areas have not only internationalized, but increasingly interact with other areas of 'low' and 'high' politics. The immediate value of the individual chapters in this book is that they highlight the absurdity of any attempt to claim that Brazil's international affairs should remain the sole preserve of Itamaraty. Each of the five diverse sections of the book - human rights, culture, education, health, and paradiplomacy - immediately suggest that it is unreason- able to expect any relatively small organization, no matter how brilliant its staff, to retain mastery across such a wide range of sometimes highly technical specialties. Indeed, this is the very challenge with which Itamaraty is currently grappling. A more subtle approach is needed, one which involves complex bureaucratic positioning and intra-departmental co- ordination by Itamaraty to retain influence while also allowing Brazilian interests in these diverse areas to be advanced by the experts. Each of the chapters in this volume does an excellent job of describing what has happened.Leticia Pinheiro and Carlos R. S. Milani introduce the book by focusing on the im- portance of technocratic expertise in many areas of contemporary international affairs. Their question then is whether or not it is reasonable to expect Itamaraty to have mastery over the diverse range of technical issues that are consequently found in foreign affairs, and if not, how are decisions made and policies pursued? In other words, the sharp dis- tinction that Rio Branco drew between foreign and domestic policy is pointed out as being an increasingly artificial and unhelpful line. This in turn creates some issues for how we approach foreign policy analysis today, casting into doubt such accepted tricks as sharp divisions between levels of analysis and a tendency to oversimplify the nature and ambi- tions of actors.The first section on human rights immediately takes up the theme of seeking a more complicated picture of how decisions are made and which actors are involved. Milani starts with a chapter looking at actors and agendas in Brazil's human rights foreign policy. He paints a picture of shifting understandings of what Brazil's position should be. While Itamaraty may ultimately remained the external voice expressing the national position, it certainly was not driving internal discussions or limiting how domestic politics drove policy change. The following chapter by Thiago Melamed de Menzes, a career diplomat with human rights experience in the UN system, pairs well with Milani's chapter, setting out how Itamaraty sought to adapt its practices to a contemporary scenario where a more participatory democratic process to issues like human rights policy is the norm. A careful tracing through the subtext paints a picture of bureaucratic attempts to control, direct, and defuse, but all done in a manner within the new bounds of having to allow outsiders into formerly exclusive policy consideration processes. …

Geographical Metanarratives in Russia and the European East: Contemporary Pan-Slavism

A specialist on Russian geopolitical metanarratives investigates the re-emergence of Pan-Slavism in the ideological landscape of contemporary Russia. Arguing that it is a heterogeneous assemblage of both mutually antagonistic and complementary narratives about the unity of Slavic peoples, the author posits that Pan-Slavism's durability lies not in its conceptual coherence but rather its emotional appeal to disparate Slavic peoples in the former Soviet Union as well as Eastern and Southeastern Europe. After briefly tracing the history of Pan-Slavism from its 17th-century roots through World War I into the Soviet period, he explores the metanarrative's capacity to take modern Russia's geopolitical thinking in new directions, including the potential to replace Russians' center-periphery worldview with a that of a cosmopolitan network of kindred nations affording Russia greater access to the European community.

Dam Nation: Imaging and Imagining the 'Middle East' in Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa

Few utopian visions surpass that of Herman Srgel's Atlantropa, in terms of infrastructural, architectural and geopolitical ambition. Conceived in the interwar years and developed until Sörgel’s death in 1952, Atlantropa was an ambitious infrastructural proposal for a tightly linked Europe-Africa that was to be formed by damming the Strait of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles, and the creation of several transcontinental arteries supporting the flow of people and natural resources between the two 'civilizations'. Sörgel’s who emerged from a German school of geopolitical thinking that placed primacy on Lebensraum and the well-being of European races in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was one of the first architects to wholeheartedly bridge the gap between design and this form of discursive geopolitics. While touching on architectural elements of the proposal, this article focuses on the major regional planning and macro-architectural gestures articulated. Atlantropa not only shifted conceptions of Europe's geopolitical relations with its immediate neighbours, but also countered contemporaneous predispositions to eastward as opposed to southward expansion prevalent in German geopolitical thinking in the pre-World War II years.

Strategic Depth or Hegemonic Depth? A Critical Realist Analysis of Turkey’s Position in the World System

This paper is an attempt to provide a critical realist analysis of the concept of ‘strategic depth’ recently being used in analysing Turkish foreign policy. The article provides a criticism of the realist geopolitical thinking on which the concept of strategic depth is based using the insights of the critical realist philosophy of science. It takes the concept of ontological depth from critical realism and extends it to Gramsci’s analysis and develops the concept of hegemonic depth. Underlying the concept of hegemonic depth is the idea that geopolitical relations should be thought of in connection with the social structures that give rise to them. The article is intended as a contribution to a historical materialist analysis of Turkish foreign policy where a state-centric positivism dominates, as well as an attempt to develop a social theory of foreign policy based on critical realism.

The Renaissance of Geopolitics in Post-1989 Italy

The revival of geopolitics in post-1989 Italy is at once a rather straightforward and perplexing matter. On the one hand, the renewed appeal that geopolitical thinking has enjoyed in International Relations (IR) circles has been well documented and could hardly be downplayed. On the other hand, however, the recourse to geopolitics has often boiled down to an undifferentiated and often convoluted use of its terms, approaches and theories. In this article we argue that the rationale of such a revival has been less to import geopolitical knowledge into IR and more to confer legitimacy and respectability to the analyses put forward by scholars and practitioners. It is no chance, in fact, that the geopolitics-inspired academic discourse has been progressively recognised as a way, if not the way, to discuss international affairs in post-1989 Italy. The central puzzle to be investigated behind the revival of geopolitics in Italy is thus how such a discourse has managed to gain and retain a powerful status in Italian IR academia and, most importantly, why.

Reclassifying Chinese Nationalism: the geopolitik turn

This article assesses the rise of China by exploring a number of recent popular Chinese political texts to go beyond explanations that take the international system as the level of analysis. It proposes that a merging of nationalism and geopolitical thinking is taking place, resulting in the emergence of a new form of nationalism that can be categorised as ‘geopolitik nationalism’ because it deploys many of the themes evident in the political thought of Germany and Japan before the two world wars. By considering the impact of such ideas, it is possible to gain new insights into recent assertive actions in Chinese foreign policy.

Réhabilitation et rénovation en matière de pensée géopolitique

La prise en compte de la question des representations en geopolitique n’est pas aussi recente qu’on le croit en France. Aux Etats-Unis, la « revolution behavioriste » a, des le lendemain de la Seconde guerre mondiale, genere une nouvelle ecole, celle de la Cognitive Geopolitics, qui integre les enseignements des sciences du comportement. Il s’agit, desormais, de considerer avec Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1971) que : « les gens dont les decisions determinent les politiques et les actions des nations ne repondent pas aux faits « objectifs » de la situation...mais a leur « image » de la situation. C’est la facon dont ils pensent le monde, non pas ce qu’il est en realite, qui determine leur attitude ». Mais les initiateurs de la demarche sont Harold et Margaret Sprout, et il convient de rappeler ici l’importance de leur apport. Selon eux, la realite du monde est un complexe forme par un reel materiel et par une multitude de representations qui relativisent le premier. C’est pourquoi ils distinguent pour chaque acteur, entre un environnement operationnel et un environnement psychologique. Pour les auteurs constructivistes qui participent au courant de la Critical Geopolitics, tout se joue au niveau du second type d’environnement, mais avec une double particularite. La premiere, negative, est qu’ils percoivent dans l’environnement psychologique des elements culturels et politiques susceptibles d’amener les acteurs a de rechercher une transcendance dans l’espace materiel. Ce qui serait le defaut majeur de la geopolitique a la Mackinder. La seconde, positive, est que cet environnement est egalement intersubjectif, et que par consequent les acteurs, qui construisent la realite, sont en mesure de l’amender et de la normativiser. Au final, en combinant les suggestions des deux courants precedents aux apports des autres ecoles de pensee, il nous semble possible d’envisager une geopolitique comprehensive.