I. Why geopolitics matters?

Living in a changing world

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world in which we live is often characterized
by the acceleration of time, the shrinking of space and the plurality of the political. Major
political changes marked the turn of the last century. The Cold War Era was over after
dominating the world for a half of century. A new category of countries has appeared on the
international stage, in addition to industrialized and developing countries. It comprises
countries at war or emerging from conflict in which the state has been foundering in genocide
and intercommunal massacres. The Soviet Union and its satellites disappeared from the
political map of the world, turning into the so called transition economies. The United
States seemed to be the only one capable to run the world, its position of global policeman
being enhanced by the new role the UN decided to play on the international arena. Old
alliances broke up and new others started to be successful. The Warsaw Pact is now history,
whereas NATO has recently enlarged its membership, reaching the Russian border. European
integration is an on-going process aiming to give the Old World the place it used to have on
the economic and political scene of the world. The world economy becomes more and more
globalized and the hierarchy of key-players is changing permanently. China, still ruled by
communism, has embarked successfully on free-market reforms. Other developing countries
take advantage of the globalization attracting major flows of foreign investments, while others
seem to suffer from the erratic boat syndrome, being unable to set a course.
The multiplication of conflict and the strengthening of differences have both gone
together with momentous shifts in the geopolitical map of the world post-1989. Emerging in
the wake of that specific moment, the post 1989 period bears witness to the development of a
pervasive paradox. On the one hand powerful standardizing and normalizing forces are at
work the engines of finance and technology become increasingly global; new forms of
economic and political co-operation bring nation states closer; images and information
circulate at the speed of light, and discourses of liberal democracy are projected planet-wide.
On the other hand, federations break up, weaker nation states can hardly cope with the
pressure of local and regional divisions and in some cases, religious or ethnic differences are
made manifest with violence.
The present world supplies the political thinking with abundant topics to be addressed:
-contrasting trends and growing inequalities although there is strong evidence that during
the last 2 or 3 decades the developed countries seem to slow down their pace of economic
growth and the developing countries try to catch up, these are only global trends. If you look
at particular cases or at the variation of the relevant socio-economic indicators, such as GDP
per capita or human development index, you will find out that in fact the gaps in economic
terms between developed countries on one side and the developing countries on the other side
have been widening lately. The sharpest disparities have occurred within the group of
developing countries: only some of them have been able to take advantage of the benefits of
globalization Brazil, China, Mexico, Indonesia have been attractive to international

investment flows; others have experienced economic decline and stagnation, for example, in
about 70 countries of the world average incomes are lower today than they were in 1980.
-social conflicts and movements of resistance have two major origins: cultural one is based
on the increasing pressure of the global forces and the local inertia trying to resist against the
identity dilution (from the cultural point of view, the globalization process is considered to be
a homogenization process are we going to deal with national identities in 50 years, in 100
years or we are going to deal with the world system as a uniform cultural entity; ethnic one
caused by two apparently opposing trends: both re-emergent nationalism and new supranational identities are developing on the globe. Lets take Europe as an example: nationalistic
tensions in Northern Ireland, in Basque Region Spain, in Corsican Island in France, in former
Yugoslavian space, on one side and the enlargement process of the European Union, on the
other side.
-the environmental change as political subject is due to the fact that international security is
largely dependent on healthy environment; the motto frequently used is think globally, act
locally which means that the world-system is increasingly interdependent and that there are
mutual relationships between nature and society. Up to the 1970s the general opinion was that
human society can place any action on the physical environment without having any
feedback; after the environmental and energy crises from the beginning of the 1970s, the
human society became aware of the complex, dynamic and, sometimes, unpredictable
response of the nature. The scientists try to analyze the human dimension of the global
environmental changes, assessing the impact of green house gas emissions, ozone-layer
reduction, acid rains, loss of biodiversity on the quality of the human life.
-new forms of governance and democracy political actors try to set up efficient coalitions
and regulating modes of the economic and social life. Democracy takes a variety of forms
showing the efforts to meet the civil society needs as well as the civil society struggle to be
better represented by the corresponding governments. More over, rethinking the state-society
relations across the national territory in different areas of the world is a vital component of the
political geography.
-resurgence of ethical-political concerns in relation to human rights there are internationally
accepted human rights and international institutions monitoring the world in this respect. That
is why the provision or not of human rights can be a tension source of international relations
between different nation-states.
-place of indigenous people vs. new comers the position of countries in the democratic
transition process, the differences between the economic development, ethical and social
conflicts stay at the root of international migration flows. The new composition of national
population can sometimes be problematic. Maghreb immigrants living in the outskirts of Paris
accused violently the French authorities of unequal treatment in summer of 2005. Also the
displacement of peoples and the integration-segregation of the worlds refugee population are
subject to geopolitical inquiry.
-global significance of gender and race are there anthropological differences related to race
(is white man superior to black people, is German pure, educated superior people to Jewish or
Slav people) or are women given equal job opportunities as men (do they have equal rights,

how can we explain the differences of individual income, are women well represented at the
level of political and economic leadership) are important questions whose answers are
relevant also for the political thinking.
Different conceptual frames are used to bring some sense of understanding to these
pressing themes which are constantly open to review, restructuring and radical change. The
complex world we are trying to cope with, provides a field for a broad range of perspectives
that focus on the increasingly significant web of relations connecting space, politics and
power. That is one of the reasons the political issues should be addressed in an interdisciplinary way keeping open different lines of analytical approaches. This is especially
crucial since we live in a world where conflicts in society as well as within and across our
own ways of interpretation, have a tendency to proliferate and to become more complex.
Different approaches to politics
The range of issues or problems facing us seems to grow, rather than to shrink. An
endless list of concerns would be worked out. Directly or indirectly politics influences our
lives (Painter, 1995).
Most of us usually operate with what we might call a common-sense or everyday
understanding of what politics is. In the common sense view, politics is about governments,
political parties, elections and public policy, or about war, peace and foreign affairs. All of
these are immensely important, although these common sense assumptions about politics are
rather limited and they refer to the so called formal politics. According to the same author, the
term formal politics means the operation of the constitutional system of government and its
publicly defined institutions and procedures. Consequently, politics is a separate sphere of live
involving certain types of people (politicians and civil servants) or organizations (state
institutions). The rest of us interact with this sphere in limited and usually legally defined
ways. The political system may give us formal political rights (such as the right to voting, or
to own property) or formal political duties (such as the duty to pay tax). Alternatively, it may
from time to time affect the society in which we live, through changes in public policy, for
example in the spheres of education or environmental protection.
By contrast informal politics might be summed up by the phrase: politics is
everywhere (Painter, 1995, p. 9). There is an informal politics of the household (parents
attempt to influence children, women do more housework than men), of education (some
subjects or points of view are taught while others are not, some children benefit more from
education than others), even of television (some people have more chances to have their say
on TV than others, certain groups are shown in a more favorable light than others). Generally
speaking, there is no aspect of life which is not political and that is why politics really is
everywhere.
Geopolitics, political geography, geography
The starting point of our discussion will be the statement: geopolitics evolved from
political geography, which is a branch of geography (Fifield, Pearcy, 1944).
Geography

Geography is the systematic study of location and place (Braden, Shelley, 2000).
Geographers address questions concerning where and why various phenomena are located and
distributed. After describing and explaining the spatial patterns, they examine and compare
the uniqueness of places while considering the relationships between individual places and the
global economy. The modern geography is similar to other fields of knowledge in content, but
distinct in approach. The vast number of subjects analyzed by geography is equally studied by
a large range of scientific disciplines (climatology, hydrology, soil science, biology, history,
demography, sociology, economics, political sciences, and others). What distinguishes
geography from these disciplines is its unique, holistic and integrative approach to
knowledge. Geography pulls together knowledge of social, economic, political, cultural and
environmental forces that shape human activity worldwide. Geography employs some major
concepts when addresses various processes and phenomena. These usually refer to location,
distance, direction, distribution, diffusion, place and region.
In examining the locations of places, geographers distinguish between absolute and
relative location. The latter one is especially rich for geographical explanation. The location
of a place in comparison with others shows the relative location, critical to the understanding
of international geopolitics (Braden, Shelley, 2000). For example, Germanys position at the
center of continental Europe, between France and England to the west and Russia and Eastern
Europe to the east, has proven critical to the development of German geopolitics throughout
its history.
Distance is also relevant, both in relative and absolute terms. Relative distance is
measured in terms of travel time or cost rather than in miles, kilometers or other spatial units.
Knowledge of relative distance is critical in a contemporary world characterized by increasing
worldwide interdependence, instantaneous telecommunications and reduced travel time
between places. The nuclear weapons exerted a tremendous impact on reducing distances and
getting enemies closer. The arm race between Soviet Union and USA during the Cold War Era
could be explained, at least partially, by looking at the position of both superpowers on the
two sides of the North Pole.
The distribution of a phenomenon reflects its arrangement in space. Geography studies
the geometric properties of distributions as well as the processes responsible for creating and
changing distributions. Geopolitics and international relations are influenced by the
distribution of population, natural resources, industries, military expenditures, cultures, ethnic
groups and many others. Distributions are subject to change over time, and changes in
distribution can have profound effects on international relations.
Diffusion is the process by which new ideas, innovations or technologies are
transmitted from one place to others across space and over time. For example, the Industrial
Revolution diffused from its origin in England in the late 18th century to Europe and North
America in the 19th century and to most other parts of the world in the 20 th century. As a rule,
distributions change as a result of diffusion processes. Hence, knowledge of diffusion helps in
a critical way the understanding of changes in spatial distributions. These changes in turn
often affect international relations and geopolitics.

The place is a special concern of geography. It has its own history, culture, geography,
whose combination makes it unique. The changing attributes of a place are explanatory
factors of the nature of relations with other places. Given the increasing interdependency of
todays world, geography cannot examine the unique qualities and characteristics of
individual places without reference to relationships between them. For example, we can
hardly understand the position of Europe during the Cold War Era without reference to its
location between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geography focuses also on regions.
A region can be defined as a set of places with common attributes, such as culture, economy,
political system, language, religion and many others. Region has gained more significance for
the geographical analysis of Europe, since the integration process has the motto: The Europe
of Regions.
Geography has two major sub-disciplines: physical and human. The former examines
the location and distribution of various components of the natural environment: landforms,
climate, vegetation, soil cover. Knowledge of the physical geography of particular places is
often critical to the understanding of international conflict. For example, Russias northern
location and lack of access to warm-water ports that can be used for shipping throughout the
year has made access to Mediterranean Sea an important goal of Russian foreign policy for
centuries. The latter focuses on the relationships between human societies and cultures and the
space on which they live. It is traditionally divided into a number of fields: urban geography,
social geography, historical geography and so on. Given the breadth of the subject of human
geography this is unsurprising and in many ways eminently practical.
Political Geography
One of the conventional sub-disciplines of human geography is political geography. It
has all the characteristics of an institutionalized sub-discipline: special journals devoted to it
called usually Political Geography, formally organized representations such as the Political
Geography Study Group of the International Geographical Union, great thinkers of the past,
and of course it has university courses and textbooks (Painter, 1995).
There is no universally accepted definition of the field of enquiry called political
geography. Anyway, it is worth mentioning the definition given by Yves Lacoste, an
outstanding French geographer who wrote that political geography is the analysis of
geographical features of political phenomena, such as the size and the shape of different
nation-states, the location of their capital city, the tracing of the borders, as well as election
issues and territorial planning problems (Lacoste, 1993). By geopolitical problems the same
author understands rivalries of power on territories not only between different states but also
within the same state or nation. And these rivalries do exist from the very beginning of the
humankind history, but they have recently become major subjects of national and international
debates due to the freedom of expression stronger nowadays. Other authors consider that
political geography investigates the relationships between politics and geography at spatial
scales ranging from local to international (Braden, Shelley, 2000). In their opinion, the usual
topics for political geography are boundaries and boundary disputes, election procedures and
outcomes, land use controversy, law and legal systems, and the management of common
resources such as the oceans, Antarctica and outer space. The Dictionary of Geopolitics,

edited by John OLoughlin in 1994, gives the following definition: Political geography is
that part of geographical inquiry which examines the territorial constitution of political power
the sources of power, shifts in power, and the use of political power in relation to territorial
location and characteristics and its corollary, the sculpting of territorial relations via the
application of political power (p. 200). Traditionally the focus has been on nations and states,
but increasingly it refers to class, race and gender, local communities as active powers in
shaping territorial relations.
Not only the subject is debatable, but also the status of political geography is not
certain: is it a scientific discipline, is it a discourse or is it simply a way of thinking? The most
frequent answer is that political geography could be conceived as any one of the three
alternatives.
Additionally, the concern of the political geography is also changing. Painter (1995)
considers that early political geography was concerned mainly with the relationship between
physical territory, state power and global military and political rivalries. These concerns
continue to be important issues for contemporary political geography. But some others have
been added meanwhile. Political geographers now take social and political struggles and
social movements much more seriously than in the past. For example, the social movements
which political geographers study more often than any other are those associated with
regionalism and nationalism. These movements are the most relevant for geopolitical thinking
because they are explicitly linked to territory. By contrast, although other social movements
such as those associated with labor, women, minority ethnic groups and the environment, are
all highly political and all exhibit marked geographical characteristics, have been until
recently neglected by political geography because they do not fit so well with its traditional
themes.
Geopolitics
The term geopolitics was first coined by Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish political
scientist in 1899. Recently, the term has entered the common language and has been used at
all scales, from neighborhood to global. Today, one can hear discussion of the geopolitics of
technological hazards, of Islam or of the dismantling of the Cold War economy, and so forth,
all referring to political geographies at scales below the international one. In this light,
geopolitics seems to be shorthand for political geography.
As in the case of political geography, geopolitics can be defined in different ways.The
developer of the term, Kjellen defined it as: the theory of the state as a geographic organism
or phenomenon in space, i.e. the state as land, territory, domain or most suggestively as
realm (Kjellen, 1917, cited by OLoughlin, 1994). Geopolitics is a long-established area of
geographical enquiry which considers space to be important in understanding the constitution
of international relations (Johnston et al., 1994). Since it was born in the late 19th century,
geopolitics has tried to analyze the global, social, economic, political, military trends and to
provide some key principles of the modern geopolitical imagination. The goal of geopolitics
is to allow people to see the political-economic reality of the world (Blin et al., 2000). The
link between geography and politics is obvious: geopolitics is the study of the geographical

representations and practices that underpin world politics (Agnew, 1991). According to
Braden and Shelley (2000), geopolitics is a subset of political geography that deals directly
with international relations, international conflict and foreign policies. In the abstract,
geopolitics traditionally indicates the links and causal relationships between politicall power
and the geographic space; in concrete termes it is often seen as a body of thought assaying
specific strategic prescriptions based on the relative importance of land power and sea power
in world history. The geopolitical tradition had some consistent concerns, like the geopolitical
correlates of power in world politics, the identification of international core areas, and the
relationships between naval and terrestrial capabilities (Osterud, 1988, p. 191). Concisely,
Chauprade and Thual (2003) consider that geopolitics is the study of geopolitical realities.
More precisely, geopolitics is an interdisciplinary scientific field, placed at the interface of
geography, history, political and social sciences which analyzes the relation between the
political events and the geographical space as well as the distribution of power across the
world(Negu, 2005, p. 7).
Usually there are three ways of looking at geopolitics.
For many, geopolitics is simply the geographic dimension of foreign policy. In this
view, geopolitics has two levels: the former is the background study of places, people,
resource distributions and so on that provides the data for the foreign policy choices,
and the latter is the consequent formation of spatially based policies designed to
achieve specific objectives.
A second common definition of geopolitics is applied political geography. That means
that each state has its own specific national aspirations defined accordingly with its
position, historical background, and power. So, American geopolitics differs
fundamentally from French geopolitics since each starts from a different point due to
different national aspirations.
A third kind of geopolitics is the interpretation of the games of the great powers. It is
called critical geopolitics and it attempts to approach the subject from social theory,
trying to understand the causes, consequences, methods and beliefs of the practice of
geopolitics. A major part of the critical geopolitics literature is a close examination of
language and discourse; by analyzing the speeches, documents, treaties and memoirs,
it is possible to interpret the aims and offer alternatives.
Geopolitics is considered to be a 20th century concept as it did not come into
widespread use until the 1930s when it was enlarged and transformed by the German political
analysts. It is deeply associated with the Nazi Party policy as it was used to justify Germanys
territorial expansion. It took the form of human geography ajusted to modern totalitarian
politics, being derived from old environmental theories. Different formulations of
environmental political theories can be found in ancient and medieval times and are related
with the names of Aristotle, Lucretius, Strabo and far later Bodin. These lie at the basis of the
theory of geographical determinism, developed by the German geopolitical school, aimed at
explaining the nature, functions and political activities of the state from its geographical
foundations such as space, land, or the influence of physical environment on the people. Later
on, during the WWII, the term was rediscovered by the American foreign policy scientists

who considered geopolitics to be essential if the United States was to become and think like a
global power. During the Cold War era, geopolitics has been developed in different ways and
at varying intensities by nation-states and other political actors according to their position,
interests and goals. After 1990, it has been reactivated in a large number of countries as a
form of spatial thinking and an insight into the nature of international relations. To this
impressive revival, different events of late 20th century contributed: after the 50 year-Cold
War period, the humankind entered the cold peace marked by uncertainty; the bi-polar
world has turned for a while into hegemony of the United States; the sheres of influence still
exist and are reinvented despite the fall of the Iron Curtain; many conflicts have emerged and
diversified lately (Negut, 2005).
Old and new factors of geopolitics
During the WWII, seven world powers have ruled the greater part of the world: the
United States of America, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan.
The geopolitical context of the world war inspired several authors (Russel P. Fifield,
Geopolitics in Practice and Principle and Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace,
both published in 1944) to evaluate the relative power of states. From the geopolitical point of
view, the world powers should be examined in terms of the six separate components: location,
size and shape, climate, population and manpower, natural resources and industry, and social
and political organizations. The analysis takes as an example the case of Germany.
Location is the first element in determining a world power. Location is expressed in
relative (neighbors, borders, accessibility) and comparative (political power, economic
strength) terms. The size and shape of a country are also crucial in assessing its power.
Geography is a permanent topographical feature and should be closely tied to the countrys
political actions. Topography can not be changed but can be used to national advantage of the
country. Area, major landforms, permissive borders, physical obstacles, are all important to
national security. Climate influences the agricultural and productivity potential of a country,
being a critical condition in war times or for an expanding population. The access to warm
water ports proved also to be vital to power. Frequent wars in recent history of humankind
required a large population base to supply the army with soldiers and an ever larger pool of
workforce to support the economic activities related to war. Thus, population and manpower
are needed to sustain a world power. Natural resources and industry represent another
component vital as supply sources for a country looking to expand and grow. Social and
political organisations usually enhance the ability of a country to defend itself.
The evolution of the world during the second half of the 20th century has given birth
to new geopolitical concepts. According to Alvin Toffler and his Powershift (1991) now
geopolitics has to take into consideration the power movements made by knowledge,
technology and money. Knowledge is a form of fortune practically inexhaustible and
inexclusive. The ones who hold the access to high military and civil technologies can change
their position in the existing power relations. The poles of the world attract highly qualified
professionals and the brain trade has reached an alarming level in the developing countries
enhancing thier technological gap.Toffler introduces the concept of access to information

which is, in the 21st century, the main weapon of every state in a power-based relationships.
The problem that arises is who takes control over the new informational and knowledge-based
systems and monopoly could be a real danger. The world experiences an information war and
the power will shift to those that have the best information about the limits of information. All
big companies develop special departments to fight against the informational crime. Toffler
introduces intor the formula of global power another determinant: the time. The acceleration
effect generates new mechanisms in economy, as well as new economy-money relations.
Money means power and has deep implications on businesses, economies and global relations
between the states. In a world system where the way of making money changed from the
system of production to that of over symbolic values, marketed globally, the financial
relations influence geopolitics. Huge banks influence the rate of exchange for other national
currencies driving their economic systems on the verge of financial collapse. Big investment
funds, huge withdrawal of capital, lack of liquidities could generate bankruptcies,
unemployment increase and political instability.
Is geopolitics over? What comes next?
The dismantling of the bipolar world and the end of the Cold War era in early 1990s
has brought about a radically new geopolitical context. For some the world is passing through
a transition between the old order and the new one. For others it is a transition between the
industrial society and the informational capitalism along with the emergence of new values,
norms, behaviors, relations. Some consider that the world has reached the end of history due
to the victory of the neo-liberal world order. Others, on the contrary, say that this is impossible
in a de-centered, polyglot world of emergent anarchy and pervasive indifference. The
complex and rapidly changing geopolitical environment made room for different
interpretations of the significance of geopolitics.
Some authors argue that chronopolitics is now more important than geopolitics in
contemporary international affairs. The loss of material space, of the significance of territory
left governments only one strategic value: the time. Information, innovation, technology, are
all related to the time race and the conclusion is that space is no longer in geography it is in
electronics There is a movement from the geo- to chronopolitics: the distribution of
territory becomes the distribution of time (Virilio, 1998).
Others (Luttwak, 1998), warned that the waning of the Cold War has reduced the
significance of military power in international affairs. Considering a supposed consensus
within the western foreign policy community in the early 1990s, he announces a transition
from geopolitics to geo-economics. Methods of commerce are displacing military ones,
disposable capital becomes more important than firepower, civilian innovation than military
technical advancement, market penetration than military bases. A new change is developing:
the new world will be dominated by borderless capitalism which marks the end of the nation
state. Thus the coming geo/economic age will not be one of harmonious global
interdependence, but rather an age of continued state rivalry where the logic of conflict will
be expressed in the grammar of commerce.

On the other way, environmental and ecological crises threaten to alter radically the
nature of international politics. For many environmentalists the real transition to be made is
from geopolitics to eco-politics. As Gore (2000) pointed out the explosion of the world
population, the loss of forest land, topsoil, stratospheric ozone, and biodiversity pose
unprecedented challenges to our civilization. To deal with the deterioration of the global
environment, humanity does not need a Strategic Defense Initiative but a Strategic
Environmental Initiative.
Combining elements of all, some analysts (Falk, 1995) argue that the world is moving
rapidly away from geopolitics towards a more integrated economic, cultural and political
reality, a set of circumstances identified by him as geo-governance. The capacity of the
sovereign territorial state as an actor to manage the history of humanity has diminished
significantly; in many instances, the state is fragmenting scoring a decline in governmental
capacity at the level of the nation-state. The dilemma of global politics is no longer
geopolitics but geo-governance, the ongoing and often inefficient try to establish workable
governance structures at the global scale.
According to these arguments, geopolitics belongs to the past, to an earlier
technological and territorial era dominated by the Cold War and state sovereignty. In reality,
all these arguments are over-simplistic and limited in understanding and explaining the world
politics. They miss to catch the whole meaning of geopolitics, the study of the dispersed
cluster of changing elements synthesized into different historical orders of geographical
knowledge and power. Obviously, the problematic of geopolitics the
geography/power/knowledge of the production of global space demands our attention more
than ever.
KEY POINTS
Geography is the systematic study of location and place. Professional geographers
address questions concerning where and why various phenomena are located and
distributed. In addition, they examine and compare the unique characteristics of places
while considering the relationships between individual places and the global economy

Political geography is the analysis of geographical features of political phenomena,

such as the size and the shape of different nation-states, the location of their capital
city, the tracing of the borders, as well as election issues and territorial planning
problems

Geopolitics is a subset of political geography that deals directly with international

relations, international conflict and foreign policies

The evolution of the world during the second half of the 20th century has given birth
to new geopolitical concepts. The power of states used to be assessed in terms of
location, size, population and labor, natural resources and industry, social and political
organizations. Now, it means knowledge, technology and money

The dismantling of the bipolar world and the end of the Cold War era in early 1990s
has brought about a radically new geopolitical context.

II. Main schools of geopolitical thought (concepts, theories and representatives)

The historical context
Throughout history, authors from all over the world have identified and described the
relationships between power, territory, conflict and location. Concepts relevant to geopolitical
thought can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Confucius, Machiavelli and many other
ancient and medieval authors. But the formal study of geopolitics began in the late 19 th
century with the end of the Age of Exploration.
By 1900, the task of mapping and exploring the earth and its resources had largely
been completed. All of the inhabitable or commercially valuable parts of the world had been
divided into formal colonies controlled directly by the European powers as in Africa, or into
less formal spheres of influence, which were nevertheless subject to European economic and
political control as in East Asia (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Because the Age of Exploration had
now passed into history, no longer could the European powers expand their resource bases
through the incorporation of additional colonies outside Europe. Increasingly, the arena of
conflict moved from outside Europe to Europe itself. It is no coincidence that the late 19 th
century, a time in which the earths resources had been surveyed and the incorporation of the
entire world into the European-dominated world economy had been completed, was the
period in which formal geopolitical thinking emerged in Europe (idem).
The modern world economy is characterized by capitalism, global economic
interdependence and political fragmentation. The world economy as we understand it today
began to emerge in Western Europe at the time of the Renaissance. As the world economy
developed, the concept of a nation-state began to emerge. Nation-states were delimited
territorially, and they linked cultures and ethnic groups to specific political units. By the end
of the Middle Ages, many of todays major European nation-states, including England,
France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, had already come
into existence.
At the same time that modern nation-states began to emerge, their economies became
increasingly interdependent. Since that time, the modern world economy has expanded to
encompass the entire world civilization.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distinct schools of thought emerged in
many countries. In large measure, the geopolitical views were closely connected with the
foreign policy goals of each country. Common to these approaches, however, was a concern
with large-scale, systematic generalization along with particular emphasis on the role of each
country within the volatile world political order.
British geopolitics

Britain became the dominant power within the world economy during the 18 th century
and it maintained this domination during the 19 th century. Its power depended basically on the
control of the seas. The location of Great Britain on an island off the mainland of Europe had
been a stimulus for maritime activities, and the British Navy was far stronger than its
continental counterparts. British maritime power was seen to balance the larger populations
and continental resources of Central Europe, especially Germany and Russia (Braden,
Shelley, 2000). British concern with continental domination of the world order was
summarized by the well known theory of Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), the leading
geopolitical thinker in Britain during the early 20th century. He promoted imperialist ideas,
analyzing mainly the ways to maintain the integrity of the British Empire and the threats to its
hegemon position in the world (OLoughlin, 1994). In his 1904 presentation to the Royal
Geographical Society, Mackinder describes a new geographical/geopolitical perspective that
is made possible by the end of the geography era of exploration and discovery. In the new
post-Columbian era of closed space, a global view was enabled. It was possible for the first
time to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between macro-scale
geographical and historical generalizations. For the first time one could perceive something of
a real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and might seek a
formula to express a certain geographical causation in universal history. That formula helped
setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics. In his
first lecture Mackinders view upon the spinning globe of 1904 revealed what he termed the
Natural Seats of Power, displayed as a lantern slide on an oval shaped Mercator map and
comprising the pivot area, inner or marginal crescent and lands of outer or insular
crescent. What Mackinder produced in his lantern slide show was an understanding of
international politics as a spatial spectacle, as a theatrical drama (the stage of the whole
world) to be explained by the unraveling of the geographical regions and laws beneath the
surface of the world affairs.
Mackinder summarized his view of geopolitics, in his work on The Geographical
Pivot of History, as follows:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

Who rules the Heartland commands the World islands;

Who rules the world island commands the world.

By the Heartland, Mackinder meant the core of the Eurasian continent, including the area
of former Soviet Union. Around the Heartland lie the Rimlands peninsular Europe, North
Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China all of which link the
Heartland to the World Ocean. Beyond the World Island lay Japan and Mackinders native
Britain as well as three islands of continental size Australia, and North and South America.
Surrounded by seas and dependent on them, the island states have potential as sea powers.
Control of the Heartland, in Mackinders view, implied control of the World Island, i.e. the
great landmass of Europe, Asia and Africa. The Heartland was considered to be the pivot of
history because of its central location, size, morphology and resource abundance. A vast
resource-rich plain whose rivers empty the inaccessible Arctic or the plains inland seas, the
Heartland is like a fortress for whatever land power controls it. Well equipped with industry

and modern means of communication, a land power controlling the Heartland could exploit
the regions interior lines to acquire control of portions of the Rimlands, gain access to the
sea, and build a navy sufficient to overcome the insular sea powers. In his view, power
originated in the Heartland and was expressed in recurrent expansionist tendencies of the
rulers of the Heartland. Relative location allowed expansion in all directions, while the
Heartland itself was protected from attacks by sea. In addition, as Napoleons failed efforts in
1812 had illustrated, even by land it was extremely difficult to destroy the Heartland powers.
How could the British balance the potential threat of continental dominance in the world
island? Mackinder regarded world history in terms of recurring conflict between land-based
and sea-based powers. By achieving access to the sea, land powers have usually initiated that
struggle: peninsular Greece versus insular Crete, peninsular Rome versus insular Britain,
Peninsular Europe (as under Napoleon and Germany) versus insular Britain. During the Age
of Exploration, technological advances in shipping and naval activities along with European
emphasis on colonialism and overseas expansion had turned the balance of power in favor of
the sea-based powers. But, by the end of the 19 th century the Age of Exploration was almost
over. The development of the railroad, the internal combustion engine, and other technologies
facilitating land-based transportation and communication were seen by Mackinder as factors
shifting the balance of power toward the land-based powers. The heartland, secure from
maritime attack and with access to heavily populated and resource-rich areas of China, India
and the Middle East as well as the Western Europe, was the natural center of land power.
From the geographical and historical point of view, the Russian Empire had been best
situated to control the Heartland. Despite this valuable asset, the Tsarist (Czarist) state of
Russia was weaker than Germany at the end of the 19 th century. On these grounds, Mackinder
argued that it was necessary for Britain to dominate the worlds oceans as a check on possible
German expansion. Hence, Mackinder argued that Britain should control the Rimland, or
those areas of the world on and near the worlds oceans. Allied victory in WWI in which the
sea-based powers of Britain and the United States defeated the land-based power of Germany
and her allies, seemed to prove that Mackinder projections were right. In a visionary way,
Mackinder argued that Germany despite its defeat in WWI, could again rise into a world
power through control of the continental resources of the Heartland. As a consequence,
Mackinder stressed the importance of preventing a political or military alliance between
Germany and Russia. All along the 19th century and the first half of the 20 th century, Britain
had made efforts to prevent an alliance between Russia and Germany. Analysing the WWI,
Mackinder considered that Germany was wrong in focusing its efforts westward rather than
first conquer Eastern Europe and gain dominion over the Heartland. Had it done so,
Mackinder observed shortly after the wars end: The British and American insular peoples
would not have realized the strategic danger until too late (cited by Sempa, 1998). When the
peace settlement failed to secure Eastern Europe, Mackinder warned that the insular powers
would soon face a renewed attempt to dominate the Heartland. That came in 1939 when
Germany attacked part of Eastern Europe and two years later invaded the Soviet Union. Just
before the end of the WWII, Mackinder suggested an alliance (recognizing the decline of

British power) between Great Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union with the
purpose of frustrating any future German attempt to control the Heartland.
The Allied victory in WWII gave the Soviet Union control of the Heartland and East
Europe, a position of strength soon enhanced by an alliance with China. Anticipating another
global struggle, Mackinder introduced a new geopolitical concept: the Midland Ocean,
defined as the North Atlantic Basin and its four neighboring seas Mediterranean, Baltic,
Arctic and Caribbean. Only if the nations surrounding that basin Canada, the United States,
France, Britain united could they resist the challenge coming from the Soviet Heartland.
Placing a bridgehead in France and an aerodrome in Britain and using the trained manpower,
agriculture and industries in eastern United States and Canada, the resistance against both
land and sea wars could have been accomplished. One of the reasons NATO has been created
was to ensure this unity. Looking to the post-Cold War future, analysts warned that Russia still
controls much of the Heartland. So, the recent expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe is,
presumably, an answer to this.
Nevertheless, the heartland term continues to play a central role in many strategic
analyses, although Mackinders theory has been criticized on the basis of its geographical
determinism and has been judged outdated because of the deployment of long-range nuclear
weapons, which have rendered the inner reaches of the Heartland as vulnerable as other parts
of the globe (OLoughlin, 1994).
Geopolitics in France
The tradition of geopolitical thought in France is quite different from that of Britain.
To understand the French geopolitics one should make reference to the French position within
Mackinders scheme of recurring conflict between sea-based and land-based powers.
Germany and Russia represented the major land-based powers of the world, whereas Britain
and the United States were the worlds predominant maritime powers. Thus, France was
situated between the centers of land-based and sea-based power. So, France is the only
European power that can be considered part of both the Heartland and the Rimland (Braden,
Shelley, 2000).
Despite the victory of the Allies in WWI, France was concerned about the possible
expansion of Germany within Europe. Being on the part of the winners, France supported the
provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that forced the Germans to cede the colonies and the
European territory to the Allies. Resting uneasily behind the Maginot Line (fortification
system along the German frontier from Switzerland to Luxembourg built 1929-1936 under the
direction of the war minister Andr Maginot), the German forces succeeded to outflank it in
1940, passing over the Belgian border.
The opposition between the two countries was reflected by the French school of
geopolitics. This was mainly interested to establish the contrasts between West and East.
According to it, the western tradition represented by France, Britain and the United States was
based on cooperation and flexibility. The east symbolized by Germany was marked by
dictatorship and rigidity. In the extent of the colonial empire, France surpassed Germany, but
regarded German views of territorial expansion with suspicion and alarm. As a result, France

strongly endorsed the League of Nations and advocated expanded international cooperation to
settle disputes.
The first French geopolitical study is considered to be La France de lEst published
in 1917 by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918). He examined the question of the annexation
of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany in 1871, pleading strongly for the return of the provinces to
France. Rejecting the German arguments of nationality based on race and language, he
invoked the idea of la gographie active based on the importance of historical development
in the formation of both national and regional character. He accepted only partially the
Ratzels determinism and the organic view of a state, developing instead the idea of the state
as a spatial unit in which the core and the political and psychological importance of the
frontiers play the most considerable role. During the interwar period, the French geopolitical
thinkers (Jacques Ancel and Albert Dmangeon are two of the most outstanding
representatives) were critical of the German doctrine, considering the science of geopolitics to
be la science propagandiste allemande aiming to rationalize une expansion infinie. They
countered lespace vital (the French for Ratzels lebensraum) with the concepts of entente
(friendly agreement of two or more countries on issues of common interest, such as la petite
entente established by Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania after WWI directed mainly
against Hungary, which having lost two thirds of its prewar territory at the Treaty of Trianon
in 1920 was aggressively revisionist in regard to all three) and communaut europenne. This
last term was initiated by Albert Dmangeon (1872-1940) in early 1920s, in his work Le
Dclin de LEurope in which he argued that the European states should put an end to
confrontation and work together in the common interest. The causes of the European decline
were the rise of the United States to a hegemonic position and that of Japan to regional
dominance in the Far East. He employed additional terms, such as: lunion europenne and
les tats-unis de lEurope which were soon adopted and made famous across Europe.
During the 1930s, the French geopolitics placed its attention on the pressing problems
of Europe and less concern being given to the military and strategic questions as Germany
did. The study of geopolitics in France came to a sharp end with the defeat by Germany in
1940. For many years after the end of WWII, the subject was avoided, particularly because of
its associations with Nazi policies. It was only during the 1970s that the subject has been
revisited by Yves Lacoste who advocated the leading role of geographers in developing a
better understanding of the geopolitical reality of the world. The French periodical Hrodote
(established in 1976) whose editor is Yves Lacoste, considers that the main objective in the
filed of geopolitics is the critical examination of global issues from a geographical
perspective, with a view to reaching an understanding which can lead to action. Another
contribution of the French geopolitics lies in the replacement of the term geopolitics with la
gographie politique du pouvoir, the study of the nature and distribution of power in the
wider sense and its relationship to political power specifically (Claude Raffestin, 1980).
Geopolitics in Germany
Both British and French geopolitics evolved in accordance with their respective
countries positions within the European world order of the late 19 th and late 20th centuries.

Similarly, geopolitics in Germany can best be understood with references to German history
and geography (Braden, Shelley, 2000).
In comparison with other Western European countries, Germany was disadvantaged
by several aspects. First of all, Germany lagged behind in terms of political construction.
France and Britain along with other nations of Western Europe, had achieved political unity,
having emerged as nation-states by the Renaissance. In contrast, German-speaking areas of
central Europe were characterized by deep political fragmentation until mid 19 th century. It
was only under the dominance of Bismarcks Prussia in the mid-19 th century that Germany
managed to achieve political unification.
This triggered a sustained economic and social growth: by 1900, Germany was the
third leading industrial country in the world, behind Britain and the United States.
Another weakness regards the relative geographical position of Germany. Located at
the center of the great European Plain, northern Germany had always been at crossroads,
vulnerable to attack. Germany lacked the natural insularity of the British Isles, and was faced
with traditionally hostile neighbors on both sides France on the west, and the Eastern
European powers along with Russia on the east. During the late 19 th century, German foreign
policy emphasized rapid territorial expansion in order to counter the possibility of attacks on
both fronts. A strong, united Germany or Mitteleuropa including all of the German speaking
people of Central Europe would be the most effective means of preserving the integrity of
German culture. The idea was that Central Europe was united by a common German heritage
as a result of centuries of German expansion to the east, significant German minorities in the
states bordering Germany, an affinity for German culture and traditions in the Low Countries,
the Alps and Scandinavia and German economic dominance of the region.
The German defeat in WWI confirmed these views. The Treaty of Versailles obliged
Germany to recognize an independent Poland on its eastern frontier and to cede a substantial
portion of East Prussia to the new Polish state. Poland, Czechoslovakia and other newly
independent nations of Eastern Europe were established as a buffer between Germany and
Russia. On its western border, Germany ceded Alsace-Lorraine back to France. The territorial
and military losses suffered by the Germans in the WWI, rendered the German state even
weaker than it had been prior to unification. In response to this increased vulnerability,
German geopolitical thinkers stressed the need of territorial expansion along with the
unification of German speaking people from Central Europe. The territorial expansion was the
solution for the German state to secure itself from external attack on both the western and the
eastern fronts. From the beginning of the 1920s, the German expression Drang nach Osten
(Drive to the East) became the priority for the German political actions. Hitler himself
supported the orientation to the East in the view to conquest new lebensraum in Eastern
Europe. The drive to the east began with the German attack on Poland in September 1939.
German geopolitics was influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). At
his turn, Ratzel, who is often regarded as the founder of the modern, systematic political
geography, was influenced by Darwins theory of evolution. Ratzel was the first one who
understood the meaning of the relationships between the environment and the human groups.
The environment should supply the human beings with what they need for their existence and

to accomplish their activities; they compete for the limited resources and will survive only
those best adapted. Ratzel argued that states act like organisms: obey laws of evolution, and
fight to survive. Strong states prosper and expand, while weak states decline and die. Within
this competitive framework, the expansion of a state, through war, is a natural progressive
tendency. A major source of inspiration was the work of Rudolf Kjellen who invented the
term of geopolitik and described it as the science which conceives the state as a geographical
organism or as a phenomenon in space. In 1896 Ratzel published an article entitled: The
Laws of the Territorial Growth of States, comprising seven fundamental rules that any state
should obey if wishing to expand:
1. The space of states grows with Kultur as the population expands with the same
cultural pattern, new territories occupied by these people enlarge the state;
2. The growth of states follows other manifestations of the growth of peoples, which
must necessarily precede the growth of the state the idea of the flag following
commercial expansion and missionary activity is considered valid;
3. The growth of states proceeds, to the degree of amalgamation, by the addition of
smaller units the people and the soil must be welded together if the state is to be
amalgamated;
4. The frontier is the peripheral organ of the state the frontier reflects not only the
security of the state but also the growth of the state;
5. In their growth states strive for the absorption of politically valuable sections these
valuable sections may be plains, rivers, coastal regions, or areas rich in mineral ores,
oil, or food production;
6. The first impetus for territorial growth comes to primitive states from without the
great states with Kultur bring their ideas to primitive peoples who through increasing
population acquire the need of expansion;
7. The general tendency toward territorial annexation and amalgamation transmits the
trend from state to state and increases its intensity the history of expansion indicate
that appetite grows through eating.
The organic analogy underlies several of the key concepts of German geopolitics.
Central is the idea of Lebensraum (living space). Expansion of territory could help to ensure
the long-run survival and competitive position of a state, and expansion was seen as a critical
key to a states growth and development. Ratzel developed a theory of expansionism in which
the need for constant physical growth of the state was explained by his environmental
determinist concept of Lebensraum. By that means, Ratzel supplied a scientific justification
for imperialism and, ideologically, he was involved in the development of National Socialism.
A recent use of the term occurred during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, when many American
commentators referred to Kuwait as Saddam Husseins lebensraum.
The basic principles of German geopolitics were developed further on by scholars of
the Institut fur Geopolitik in Munich, headed by Karl Haushofer (1869-1946). Haushofer
argued that a dynamic state required lebensraum to achieve autarcky, or economic and
political self-sufficiency. Autarky is possible only if the state has a large territory in order to
ensure a rich raw material base and expanding markets. The large area is a prerequisite for a

state to prosper and develop. The territorial losses suffered after the WWI, pushed Germany to
expand the territory and to conquer the eastern and southeastern Europe. This view of large
scale German expansion contributed to a third fundamental concept of German geopolitics:
that of pan-regions. For Haushofer, a logical consequence of competitive expansion would be
the development of a small number of pan-regions, each consisting of a large area of the
world under the domination of one country. During the 1930s a number of potential panregions were identified: one of these conceptions divided the world into three major spheres
of influence: Europe and Africa (Eurafrica) under the influence of Germany, Asia and
Australasia (Pan-Asia) under the domination of Japan, and the Americas (Pan-America) under
the domination of the United States. During and after the WWII Haushofer was condemned as
providing intellectual inspiration to Hitler and the rulers of Germany during the war.
However, this inspiration is not certain, as Germany had always had the will to expand its
territories. After the WWII the notion of pan-regions remained alive. Three possible scenarios
envisaged at the end of the war reminded the division of the world into great spheres of
influence. More recently, the discussion of competing blocs has turned around the competition
between the European Community, Japan and the United States and there seems to be
increasing evidence that a world of trade blocs will resemble the pan-regional world map of
the German geopolitics (the expansion of the European Community, the growth of the
NAFTA into South America, the so-called yen block indicate that the world of autarkic
spheres of influence is still possible).
Russian geopolitics
Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has remained the largest country
in land area in the world. Russias European territory, in fact, is nearly equal in size to the land
area of the rest of that continent. The huge area of European Russia has strenghtened its
influence in international geopolitics for centuries, as Mackinder had recognized the role of
Russia in defining the heartland. Yet, Russias impressive geopolitical potential started to be
turned into account by the end of the 19th century.
In comparison with the rest of Europe, the Czarist Empire was huge, peripheral, backwarded and isolated. Even so, the large and rich territory had long been an interesting target
for invadors. For example, during the Middle Ages, Russia had been invaded by the German
speaking Teutonic Knights from the west and by the Mongols and other asiatic nomads from
the east. Meanwhile, Russias economic development lagged far behind that of Western
Europe; industrialisation came late to Russia, which remained a feudal society long after
Britain, France, Germany and other European powers had become characterized by industrial
capitalism.
Russian geopolitics is in large measure derived of Russia perception of itself as
vulnerable, isolated and peripheral. This was recognized by Peter the Great, who travelled
throughout western Europe before ascending the Russian throne in 1689. After he became
Czar, tried to transform Russia into a major European power by encouraging Western
influence. He opened Russia to Western trade and established the city of St. Petersburg on the
Baltic as the new capital of the Russian state. Peter the Great and his successors established

the traditional cornerstones of Russian international policy: secure borders, access to warmwater ports, elimination of economic dependency and expansion to the east.
The borders of the Russian Empire display different geographical contexts: two safe
borders, to the north - the Arctic Ocean, and to the south - the great mountain ranges of Asia;
and one problematic - the western border represented by the Russian Plain, always dangerous
because of its accessibility. That is why, the western border has been secured constantly,
especially against the expansion of Germany. Another geographic factor which has influenced
the Russian geopolitics referred to the climatic constraints. The major rivers and ports of
Russia are blockaded by ice for several months each winter, diminishing the Russian trade
flows mainly to western Europe. Only Murmansk in far northern Russia is an ice-free port,
but its remote location on the Arctic Ocean renders it of little value for trade with western
Europe. Thus, a major objective of Russian policy has been expansion to warm-water ports
and trading opportunities. In particular, Russia desired control of the Black Sea and the
Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and
consequently to the Atlantic. Russian control of this territory stayed at the root of the Crimean
War of 1853-1856 (Braden, Shelley, 2000). During the 18th and 19th centuries, Russia
expanded steadily to the southwest and to the east, through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. The
establishment of Vladivostok and other Pacific ports and the completion of the Trans-Siberian
railway helped to link Siberia with European Russia. Less-populated Siberia stands in
opposition with the densely populated countries of eastern Asia to the south.
The overthrow of the Czars and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union
brought about some fundamental changes in Russias approach to geopolitics (Braden,
Shelley, 2000). After the Russian Revolution had established a communist government in the
Soviet Union, Soviet leaders argued the merits of using Russia as a base from which to
encourage worldwide socialist revolution as opposed to concentrating on the economic
development of the Soviet Union itself. This debate was critical to the struggle for power
between Stalin and Trotsky, the former sustained the policy of socialism within one country,
whereas the latter intended to facilitate an international socialist revolution. Stalin viewed the
Soviet state as a socialist island surrounded by hostile, capitalist enemies, so during the 1930s
he sponsored large-scale industrial development programs, aiming to build a strong military
system. During the existence of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, geopolitics was
considered to be the preserve of the bourgeois democracies. The Russian geopolitika
became a term of abuse, as it was equated with militaristic capitalism (OLoughlin, 1994). Its
promoters were seen as lackeys of imperialism. In the mid-1950s the Soviet view of world
affairs changed dramatically. The Soviet navy has changed its range from Soviet coastal
waters to worldwide operations. At the same time, the demand for independence in the
European colonies began to escalate, and the region became viewed as a zone of competition
between the West, led by the US and the USSR. The USSR saw its role as assisting national
liberation movements, later codified as part of the Brezhnev doctrine. According to this,
USSR was supposed to intervene in Africa, Asia and Latin America to disrupt the capitalist
order in the 1970s. The declaration of active support of revolution without frontiers was
accompanied by practice in different places of the world. The Soviet Union provided military

and economic aid to self-proclaimed revolutionary governments in Angola, Mozambique,

Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Laos and lesser amounts of aid to
other Third World left-wing governments and movements. The other element of Brezhnevs
Doctrine was the proclamation that Soviet control of Eastern Europe was irreversible,
especially after 1968 when the Red Army had put down the Czech ambitions for
independence. This was considered unquestionable until the so-called Sinatra Doctrine came
into play in autumn 1989. The name came from Gennady Gerasimov, the Gorbachev
spokesperson, who stated that Eastern European countries could do it their way,
paraphrasing the popular Frank Sinatra song I did it my way. In effect, Soviet leader
Gorbachev stated that the Eastern European states could follow their own destinies, as civil
unrest was growing in all of the Eastern European countries. The result was the rapid success
of popular movements in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Romania, the
unification of Germany and the replacement of Communist regimes by popularly elected
governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria (OSullivan in OLoughlin,
1994).
Geopolitics in the United States
Although Europe was in the center of the geopolitical thinking in the 19th century and
the first half of the 20th century, the US had already emerged as one of the most powerful
countries in the world in the aftermath of the WWI. In less than a century and a half, the US
grew from a European colonial outpost on the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean to a
leading military and economic power.
In its rise to international prominence, the US enjoyed several strenghts: abundant
natural resources, large land area and secure borders (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Thanks to its
great distance from Europe, the United States could remain neutral in most European conflicts
and, thus, allocated much less money for military purposes than the European countries. This
money was in turn used to finance the industrialisation and economic development.
Throughout American history, US foreign policy has shifted between introverted cycles in
which American interest has been dominated by domestic concerns, and extroverted cycles
when the US took a more active interest in international relations. Thus introvert phases
represent periods dominated by a philosophy of American isolasionism, while extrovert
periods are characterized by an attitude of intervention in foreign affairs. Between the
granting of American independence following the Treaty of Paris in 1793 and the end of the
WWII, three extrovert periods and three introvert periods are recognized. The extrovert
phases include the early years of American independence prior to 1825, the period between
1845 and 1867 when America completed its teritorial expansion across North America, and
the period from the late 1890s until the end of the WWI, when the United States emerged as a
global power. The period during and after the WWII represents the fourth extrovert period.
After the Revolutionary War, Americas main foreign policy concerns included
ensuring sovereignty over its territory and removing European influence from the New World.
Achievement of these objectives brought the newly independent state into conflict with
Britain and France, including the War of 1812. The result was the Monroe Doctrine adopted

in 1823 which established as a cornerstone of American foreign policy the opposition to any
further European colonial expansion in North and South America. Geopolitical domination of
the Americas has remained a central tenet of American geopolitics ever since. The first half of
the 19th century was devoted to land purchase of Louisiana in 1803, Florida in 1819, New
Mexico and southern Arizona in 1853 and Alaska in 1867. The second half was devoted to the
expansion of settlement across these new territories and the development of American
industry. In the same time the role of the US was increased in Central and Southern Americas
(the previously independent kingdom of Hawaii was annexed, and troops were sent to Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Honduras, Panama and the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to justify these
incursions. The Monroe Doctrine embodied three principles. First, it restated the principle of
noncolonization for the European powers in the Americas. Second, it asserted the
nonintervention principle by announcing that the United States would stay apart in the case of
European wars since the political systems were so different. Third, it formalized the principle
of nontransfer, that the United States would not submit to any transfer of territory in the New
World from any one European state to another. The Monroe Doctrine was invoked in the
1980s by President Ronald Reagan when referring to the Soviet Union and Cuban support of
the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The end of the 19th century witnessed the released of two important contributions to
the theoretical foundations of the American geopolitics. These were the works of Alfred
Mahan (1840-1914): The Influence of Seapower upon History (1890) and The Interest of
America in Seapower (1897). He was the first to distinguish seapowers and landpowers and
to analyze their roles in world history. He considered that the worlds great powers, England
and the United Provinces at that time, were seapowers favoured by their insular location, their
far away position as against other powers, their defensible coastlines and easy control over
land bases. Mahan proposed an American-British alliance that could rule the seas and oceans
of the world and supported US takeovers in the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama as a means to
supply the United States with vital bases.His work was influential nor only for the American
administrations but also for scholars and politicians in Europe.
Integrating Mahans and Mackinders ideas, Nickolas Spykman (1893-1943) argued
that it was no longer in the interest of US to maintain an isolationist foreign policy after the
WWII. He identified two basic geographical entities in global politics: the Old World
comprising the Eurasian continent, Africa, Australia and the New World dominated by the
United States. The best strategy for the United States was to keep the Old World divided
through an active foreign policy. He took an in-depth look of the Old world, defining its main
geographical features. In line with Mackinders view, Spykman identified similar
components, but unlike Mackinder suggested that the most strategic one was the Rimland, i.e.
the margins of the Eurasian continent. According to him, the Rimland provided the key to the
balance of power in the Old world, thus the United States would have to project its power in
this area.
The US entered the WWI as neutral but Woodrow Wilson, the president at that time,
was concerned to maintain a balance of power in Europe, so in 1917 the US declared war
against Germany. In fact, Americas entry into the war secured an Allied victory. President

Wilson provided a set or principles that help war to be avoided. He defined fourteen points
in calling for a new approach to international diplomacy. One of the most important outcome
of the Wilsons Fourteen Points was the creation in 1919 of the League of Nations, as an
international organization based on the principal of collective security, the first formalised
attempt to create an international body designed to mediate disputes with permanent
structures and a codified Charter. Despite its failure to take action against Japanese, Italian
and German aggression in the 1930s, the League provided a model for the United Nations
Organization in 1945.
After the WWI, the US moved again into an introvert phase in its foreign relations.
Only during the 1930s when the tensions mounted again in Europe, the US gave up of its
international policy of isolation. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbour
in Hawaii caused the American declaration of war against the axis Powers (Japan, Germany
and Italy). The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs demonstrated the
immense power of nuclear weapons. The end of the war in 1945 left America the worlds
strongest military and economic power. However, America did not retreat into isolationism as
it had done following WWI. During the late 1940s the US expanded economic and military
aid to Western Europe through the establishment of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. In early 1950s a bipolar view of international relations, contrasting
Soviet communism with American democracy, was characteristic of American foreign policy.
The nuclear era and the increasing arms race between the US and the Soviet Union generated
the beginning of a new era in world geopolitics.
In addition to the tension between isolationism and internationalism and the Monroe
Doctrine, two other considerations have influenced 20th century American geopolitics the
role of aviation and the role of the Arctic regions. Throughout the 20th century, American
foreign policy emphasized American dominance of the sky and outer space. The Arctic
Region is important because it is located along the shortest air routes between Eurasia and
North America. In this respect, Arctic has been regarded as an American Mediterranean,
which explains why during the Cold War era the Arctic was considered very important to
American defense. Numerous military bases and missile tracking stations were operated in
Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and Iceland.
Key Points
The tradition of geopolitcal thought refects largely the geographical and historical
setting.
Many geopolitical concepts born in early 20th century are still relevant for the
understanding of world politics one century after.
Geopolitical theories and representatives were influential in determining the
international relations of their countries.
Key Concepts
Territory a portion of the earths surface appropriated by a political community, a state.
State sovereignty a states characteristics being politically independent of all other states.

Suzerain state a state which dominates and subordinates neighboring states, without taking
them over.
Empire a state which possesses both a home territory and foreign territories; an imperial
state.
Hegemony power and control exercised by a leading state over other states.
Balance of power a doctrine and an arrangement whereby the power of one state (or group
of states) is checked by the countervailing power of other states.
International order a shared value and condition of stability and predictability in the
relations of states.
Third World term born in the context of the Cold War to define the countries that did not line
up on one side (the western bloc The First World) or the other (the Soviet bloc the Second
World), such as Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Cyprus, Indonesia, Ethiopia. In the long run,
the term gained economic and social connotations.
Brezhnev doctrine declaration by Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 that
members of the Warsaw Pact would enjoy only limited sovereignty in their political
development.
Sinatra doctrine statement by the Soviet foreign ministry in October 1989 that countries of
Eastern Europe were doing it their way and which marked the end of the Brezhnev doctrine
and Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.
Glasnost policy of greater openness pursued by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from
1985, involving greater toleration of internal dissent and criticism.
Perestroika policy of restructuring, pursued by Gorbachev in tandem with Glasnost, and
intended to modernize the Soviet political and economic system.

III. Geopolitical World Orders

Contemporary geopolitical analysis
The creation of a New World Order is the key issue in contemporary international
politics. After the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, it has
become generally accepted that the Cold War the Old World Order is finished and
international politics has to be reconstructed in another form. To understand the current search
for a new world order, it is necessary to explore this popular notion both within a theoretical
and historical context. For doing so, world orders should be interpreted as relatively stable
distributions of political power across the world. To explain the content of these world orders
we need to relate them to other global patterns of social change, and the particular activities of
governments that create the events that are the essence of international politics (Taylor, 2000).
Two geopolitical world orders are identified in the 20 th century, chronologically, they are:
firstly, the geopolitical world order of British Succession and secondly, the Cold War
geopolitical world order.
Periods and cycles

The starting point of the analysis is to locate geopolitical world orders within the
periods and cycles that form the 20th century. The geopolitical world orders although seem to
be randomly generated changes, in fact they can be related to other temporal sequences that
are more patterned. One of the most frequent correlation links world orders with economic
periods. The world economy is cyclical in nature, according to Immanuel Wallersteins
famous theory Long waves as capitalist process released in 1984, and politicians have to
accommodate to these systematically varying circumstances. Changing materials contexts
profoundly alter the circumstances in which politicians act by providing new agendas for
action. Cyclical changes on the global scale, is made up of basically two types of cycles:
Kondratieff cycles of approximately half a century and hegemonic cycles of about a century in
length and their corresponding geopolitical world orders. Kondratieff cycles (named after the
Russian economist who first identified them) are usually described in strictly economic terms,
but undoubtedly they have profound political impacts (Knox, Agnew, 1998). The fifty year
cycle is divided into two approximately equal periods, an A-phase of growth and a B-phase of
stagnation. In accordance with the timing of these cycles the 20th century covers the third and
fourth Kondratieff cycles, with the 1980s bringing to the forefront the fifth Kondratieff cycle
(Taylor, 2000). The most successful interpretation of these economic waves in relation to
political processes has come through their linkage to hegemonic cycles. Hegemonic cycles
focus upon one state, - the hegemon - that for a short period is pre-eminently powerful
economically, politically and culturally. The cycle consists of the rise and fall from this
position. These can be explained as follows: the hegemon gradually gains a clear economic
advantage in the field of production and extends its leadership to the commercial and financial
spheres. At the same time it becomes politically dominant after leading a coalition of states
against its main political rival. Henceforth it is able to order the world to its advantage using
the balance of power. This is possible in part because of its cultural leadership in universal
ideas, the hegemon being usually considered the champion of world liberalism. The period of
high hegemony is relatively short and these leadership attributes from production to culture
are progressively lost (Wallerstein, 1984). Geopolitical world orders are not as neatly related
to the economic waves as they are to each other, i.e. the British succession and the Cold War.
Although they show other pattern of temporal variation, they generally begin and end at
roughly the same time as Kondratieff phases. More than that, both cycle phases and the world
orders between them constitute the nature of the modern global times. For example, the
processes making up the K4, US hegemonic practices and the Cold War are impossible to be
taken separately when understanding the recent past of contemporary times.
Table 1. Kondratieff/hegemonic cycles and their corresponding world orders
Time
Kondratieff cycle
Hegemonic cycle
Geopolitical
world orders
th
st
nd
19 c.
1 and 2 K cycles British Hegemonic World Order of
(industrial
cycle
(ascending Hegemony
revolution long hegemony of Britain (Britains
industrial

declining ascending
depression)
hegemony (age of hegemony

imperialism,
mercantilism)

new

20thc.

3rd K cycle (first 2

decades
of
economic boom
the
great
depression of 19131920)
4th K cycle (the post
war boom after
1940 the long
recession
late
1960s-early 1970s)

American Hegemonic
cycle (increasing role
of USA as world
power declining
hegemony because of
the Japanese and
European rivalry)

Late
1980s

5th K cycle

New
cycle?

Hegemonic

Germany
dominating
Europe, Britain
still
greatest
world power)
World Order of
the
British
Succession
(Germany and
USA overtake
Britain
as
world powers)

disintegration
(Cold
War
World
Order
transition

USA hegemony
challenged by
the ideological
alternative
offered by the
USSR)
Disintegration
again
New
World
Order
transition
1989-1991 and
then?

Source: Taylor, 2000, p. 35, synthesized.

Geopolitics is centered on states. Governments conceptualize the distribution of
political power beyond their boundaries as a precondition for conducting foreign policy in
their special national interest. This is the way state elites make sense of the world in order to
respond to or to create events to their states advantage (Taylor, 2000). Undoubtedly, all these
political events and actions are the results of a very specific way each state assesses its power
and communicate its objectives. This is expressed in a particular language in the same way
human beings in their daily life develop social codes. Lets take for example the code of
manners: it is made up of certain rules of behavior in different occasions, at different times, of
addressing to different persons distinguished by their civic status, social position, sex or age.
Accordingly, there is also a very strict geopolitical code.
Geopolitical codes
The term geopolitical code is to describe the output of practical geopolitical reasoning
by which a government deals with the outside world (Gaddis, 1982). A national interest is
defined and other states are evaluated in terms of whether they are real or potential aids or

obstacles to that interest. A change of government in a state may change details in a code,
although the foreign policy in the 20th century has come to be located within the consensus
realm of most state politics. According to political changes in a state, we can identify general
codes that transcend several governments and specific codes incorporating different emphases
for each of those governments. For instance, there is one code for the USA after the WWII but
with distinctive features for successive Democrat and Republican administrations.
The geopolitical code is easily understood through analyzing the foreign policies of
governments: alliances, agreements, overseas bases, and levels of diplomatic status, indicate
the content of the code. The geographical scale is a major component in geopolitical codes. In
general the content of the geopolitical code of one state to another will vary in a greater or
lesser extend, with distance (OSullivan, 1986). For all states their neighbors are crucial
components of their code either as friends or enemies. Trade interactions, for example,
generally occur between neighboring states, but also most wars are border wars. Every state,
therefore, has its own local code. For the small states this constitutes the effective whole of
their practical operations. For medium and large states the perspective is wider, including the
regional level. Regional powers throughout the world define their national interests beyond
the narrow confines of their borders. Brazil in South America, India in South Asia and Nigeria
in West Africa are the clearest examples of states which include domination of their region as
integral to their national interests. Finally there are world powers whose codes are global in
extent. Their governments consider events across the world as being of potential relevance to
their national interest as a great power. The USA and USSR as superpowers in the second half
of the 20th century are classic examples of states claiming such worldwide interests. States
can move between these categories. The most recent and dramatic example is that of the
USSR, which gradually disengaged around the world in the late 1980s, leaving its major
successor state, Russia, as a regional power.
The geopolitical codes are strongly interrelated. Put it in the simplest way, the local
codes of small states have to fit into the regional codes of medium states which in turn should
fit into global codes of world powers. This leads to a series of bilateral and multilateral
patterns of associated codes across the world. But the geographical organization of power
across the world is more than an aggregation of these hierarchies of codes. Beyond any
individual code, however powerful the state, there is a geographical order that defines the
basic parameters of the international politics of the time. Such orders represent relatively
stable patterns of geographical power distributions over distinctive periods of time. During
that period, the geopolitical codes of most, though not necessarily all, states will accept the
defining parameters of the order.
World Orders in the 20th century
Geopolitically, there are two well marked world orders during the 20th century: one is
from the beginning of the century to the end of the WWII, and that is the world order of the
British Succession and the other is between 1945 to the late 1980s, the Cold War.
The World Order of British Succession

At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was still the most powerful empire in the
world, but there were signs of relative decline as well. Several major events contributed to the
change of the balance of power: the increasing role of Germany set up as an Empire in 1870
and the new agreements between France, Britain and Russia which placed Germany in the
middle of a potential conflict. The Allies get the sympathy of the USA neutral at the time. In
January 1896 Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed that Germany should pursue a policy of
weltpolitik. By giving notice of a global geopolitical code, Germany was directly challenging
Britains extra European supremacy (Taylor, 2000). The Franco-Russian alliance from 1898
had both an anti-British and an anti-German character, the emergence of Japan as an Asian
regional power after its defeat of China in 1894, and the extension of the USAs geopolitical
code to Americas and eastern Pacific were essential contributions to the disintegration of the
old world order. Under these circumstances, Britain showed the first signs of giving up the
hegemon position: in 1901 Britain conceded USA predominance in Central America, in 1904
she signed the Entente Cordiale with France accepting the French domination in Morocco,
and later she agreed with Russia on the partition of Persia between them.
The beginning of the century has been characterized by a strong diplomatic fluidity:
Germany and France came to a bilateral agreement over Morocco in 1909; Britain and Russia
failed to prevent rivalry over Persia in 1911; in the same year Britain hardly accepted the
renewal of the Japanese-British naval alliance. Britain and Germany were destined to conflict
as the former has turned into a leading revisionist state in the inter-state system.
The First World War was essentially a war between Britain and Germany fighting for
the mastery of Europe and the global balance of power (Taylor, 2000). From 1915 Britain was
financing its war effort through loans from the USA. By staying in a military war with
Germany, it was effectively loosing a financial war with USA. As a consequence, the WWI
marked the transfer of the centre of world finance from London to New York. The final
tangible element of Britains financial hegemony was gone, whatever the outcome of the war.
The USA was the real winner of the war even before she joined the Allies in 1917. Also as a
result of WWI and the Versailles settlement, France became the leading power on continental
Europe. But the position was quite artificial and therefore short-term, it was only a matter of
time before the larger and more industrially developed German state would be in the position
to reassert her leadership of Europe. Outside Europe, Britains chief rivals during this phase
were the USA and Japan. During the 1930s, the world has been again deeply divided. The
Americas were under the USA leadership, Japan consolidated its position of regional power,
occupying Manchuria in 1931 and bringing China into war in 1937. At the other end of the
world, URRS embarked on an autarky program, termed as socialism in one country. But the
key actors remained Britain and Germany. While the former has continuously lost ground as
the world hegemon, the latter has enforced its expansionist foreign policy.
The WWII has brought another fundamental change of geopolitical codes: the alliance
of Germany with Japan, coupled with the joining of the USA with the Allies meant that this
was the first truly global conflict with major confrontations outside Europe. Germany
developed a new world plan whose end-result would be the dissolution of the British Empire,
with Germany gaining African colonies, the USA inheriting Canada and the Caribbean,

Russia conquering India and Japan likewise Australia and the Pacific Islands. But there were
three major problems arising from the overlapping of the geopolitical codes of the Great
Powers: USA had economic interest in eastern Asia competing with Japan on the same area,
Russia and Germany could not limit their interest to Asia and Africa respectively, but disputed
Eastern Europe. By the end of 1941 the division of the world into a power struggle between
the two alliances was in place: the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy versus the Grand
Alliance of Britain, the USA and the USSR. At the end of this war, Britain was again on the
winning side, but this time its contribution was clearly secondary in both the European and
the Pacific theatres of war. Germany may have been stopped a second time, but now the
British succession could no longer be postponed. A very different geopolitical world order
was ready to be put in place.
The Cold war order
The term was popularized by US political commentator Walter Lippmann in 1947
(Steel, 1980). It was born of disappointment in the new post-war era: the hot war with
Germany and Japan was over, only to be replaced by new international tensions as the Grand
Alliance broke up. For the USA the USSR soon replaced Germany as a great ideological
enemy threatening the building of a liberal world order anchored in the United Nations. As the
USSR slipped into Germany's role, the only change seemed to be the lack of military conflict,
hence cold war (Taylor, 2000). The freezing of the inter-state system into two antagonistic
blocs had an ideological basis, setting apart the civilized, democratic world and the
totalitarianism, communist world. The new world order was proclaimed in civilization terms.
For the USSR this meant that the Cold War was just a step on the road to world revolution to
create a new civilization. Western politicians were thinking in similar terms. In his famous
speech to Congress in 1947 US President Harry Truman talked of the world having to choose
between two ways of life: freedom or totalitarianism. Nazi Germany had been the
totalitarian symbol, so by branding the USSR with the same label the recent mobilization of
resources and peoples for freedom could be continued: it justified the conversion of ally into
enemy. The Cold War covers the period of US hegemony in the world-system. At the first
sight, the world order seems very straightforward, with and East-West geographical pattern of
power conflict dominating the inter-state system. In fact, an alternative North-South
geographical pattern is added, and US political hegemony came to be challenged by a new
Third World as well as the USSR (Krasner, 1985). The antagonism between US and SU
actually began at the end of WWI with the establishment of the USSR from the ruins of the
old Tsarist state. The intervention of the West Britain, France, Japan and the USA in the
Russian civil war in 1920-21 was the first war with communism at the inter-state level and
may be interpreted as a prologue to the Cold War world order. The world order was totally
transformed: the USA replaced Britain as leader, and the USSR replaced Germany as
challenger. The nature of international politics was turned upside-down. The British
succession was settled, and a different politics would have to be built in place of it, but it was
by no means obvious that the new world order would take the form of the Cold War.

When the term superpower was coined in 1944, it was applied as much to the British
Empire as to the USA and USSR. At the end of the war, the peace was in the hands of the Big
Three, with Britain accorded equal status in negotiations. Despite its rapidly diminishing
power, Britain was surprisingly influential in creating the new geopolitical world order. In
1945 five potential patterns of power were possible (Taylor, 2000):
One world, where the Grand Alliance survives to lead an undivided and peaceful
world;
Three monroes, where the three superpowers split apart and each concentrates on their
division of the world;
An anti-imperial front producing two worlds where the USA and USSR combine to
oppose Britain and other European Empires;
An anti-hegemonic front producing two worlds where Britain and the USSR combine
perhaps as socialist states after Labors 1945 election victory in Britain, to confront
the overwhelming economic power of the USA;
An anti-communist front producing two worlds with Britain and the USA confronting
the USSR.
How did this last option become the next world order? The answer came from Britain. It
was afraid of the option termed as the three monroes where both the USA and the USSR
possessed relatively compact and contiguous spheres of influence, leaving Britain with
leftover western colonies that would be impossible to defend in any future conflict. Britain
feared that SU would promote an autarky policy and the USA would return to its isolationism
that had dominated American foreign policy long time ago. In the same time, Britain had little
faith in the United Nations as a defense umbrella to shelter British interests, so the best
solution to cope with Britains vulnerability was to promote a two-world division. The Prime
Minister Winston Churchill used his influence to speed up the process of world division with
his famous iron curtain speech opposing the dark forces of communism and AngloAmerican liberties. Another major event that helped the Cold War to be put in place was the
confrontation between USA and USSR over Iran because the latter delayed the withdrawing
its troops. So, very shortly, Britain succeeded to speed the USA commitment to defend all
countries against the spread of communism. More over, Britain declared her inability to afford
continuing the defense of Greece and Turkey, and the USA stepped in as new guarantor.
Ironically, in 1947 after Indian independence and other British crises that the Big Three
became definitively reduced to two and the world entered the bi-polar system of the Cold War.
This period began with the division of Europe in two blocs, strengthened by the
Marshall Plan in 1947 through which the US capital was made available to reconstruct
Europe. The U.S. Secretary of State, George Marshall, proposed a European Recovery
Program designed to counter the effects of the war and to create stable political conditions in
which democracy would survive. Over the next four years, the United States provided about
$13 billion in assistance to Europe (almost $100 billion in todays money). Since the USSR
refused to allow states it controlled to accept such funds, the operation of the plan in 1948

applied solely to 16 European countries, included defeated West Germany and Turkey and
effectively divided Europe into two economic regions. Till the early 1950s the geopolitical
codes of the two superpowers have become clear. For the USSR, Eastern Europe was
strategic, since it had been invaded twice through this region, the Soviet state insisted on
political control of a ring of buffer states from the Black Sea to the Baltic. On the other side,
the USA was interested to maintain Britain, Germany and Japan under its influence. Hence,
the rapid conversion of former enemies West Germany and Japan to friends, plus the Marshall
aid for Britain and the rest of Europe.
In this way, Europe was no longer at the center of the global political economy and no
longer in the position to initiate geopolitical change. It rather was a battleground, both
militarily and economically, between the competing interests of the USA and the SU. By the
1950s, Western Europe had become incorporated into the American dominated North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO-1949) and thousands of American troops were stationed in
Western Europe with the intention of protecting it from potential Russian attacks. Similarly,
the Warsaw Pact (1955) symbolized the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet
sphere of influence. Sir Winston Churchills famous phrase: an iron curtain has descended
across the continent came to symbolize Europes position in post-WWII geopolitics (Braden,
Shelley, 2000).
The confruntation between the SU and the US over Europe got momentum in early
1960s. In 1961 the Soviet Premier Khrushchev demanded that western troops be withdrawn
from West Berlin. So, the East German government constructed a wall across Berlin to
prevent East German citizens to escape to the west. For a while, American and Soviet tanks
faced each other across the wall and this remained in place until November 1989 as a symbol
of the Cold War.
At the same time, America has become more and more concerned that the Soviets
would continue to extend their influence beyond Eastern Europe. The Domino theory which
suggested that countries were successively vulnerable to communist influence like a row of
falling dominoes, was often proposed as a metaphor for possible communist takeover of
additional countries. The Domino Theory expresses the belief that Communism diffuses from
state to state by a contagious process. The interpretation belongs to a former US ambassador
in Moscow, William Bullitt, who described the monolithic Communism spreading outward
from SU, sweeping through China and Southeast Asia to eventually engulf the world, unless
the USA intervened to stop it. In response, President Harry Truman established the Truman
Doctrine in 1947 in which the US offered military and economic assistance to European
countries threatened by communist takeover. The Truman Doctrine served to legitimize
American interests in European politics which were reinforced by the Marshall plan
beginning with 1948. The American aid was also provided to fight communist insurgency in
Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine marks the beginning of a new, post-war American
globalism wherein the US government saw it as its duty to support free people who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
The competition between USA and SU went beyond the borders of Europe, to Asia
and the best examples are China (the American-supported Nationalist Government of China

fell to Mao Zedong and the Communists in 1949 and especially Korea, the northern part was
helped by the SU whereas the southern part was backed by the USA. The result was the
Korean War between 1950 and 1953 in which more than 50 thousand American soldiers died
(Braden, Shelley, 2000). The Truman Doctrine justified the intervention of the United States
into Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s under the umbrella of sound
words such as vital interest, national security, free world, and peace is at stake that
suggest the US power to decide matters all over the world. The most dramatic example refers
to the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict during the 1960s. Vietnam was split
between the communist dominated North Vietnam and a western oriented South Vietnam. In
1964 the US Senate decided the involvement into the conflict and by 1966 400,000 troops
were sent in Vietnam. In the late 1960s the President Johnsons decision to supply large
numbers of troops and military aid to Vietnam came to be questioned increasingly by the
American public opinion. The Americans began to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and
the opposition against the American involvement was increasing. As the 1970s began, it
became clear that American military victory in Vietnam could not be achieved, and the
Americans turned over conduct of military operations to the South Vietnamese army. The
Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. By that time, American activities in
Vietnam had resulted in nearly 60,000 American military casualties. Acknowledging this
failure, the United States entered an introvert cycle, which remained until the end of the Cold
War. Later on, the geopolitical code of the USA gave way to a more pluralistic balance of
power model. A pentagonal distribution of power was envisaged, with the two superpowers
being joined by China, Europe (in fact European Community) and Japan. This was a way to
recognize the economic achievements of the latter two and the long-standing potential of
China. More formally, this was the time when the leaders of the seven largest capitalist
economies USA, West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Britain and Canada began their
regular series of G7 meetings.
Other parts of the Third World have been subject to American-Soviet confruntation,
too. Many former European colonies were granted political independence during the 1950s
and the 1960s. They also became battlegrounds of the Cold War, with East and West backing
rival factions in internal power struggles. The USA and the Soviet Union donated large
amounts of military and economic assistance to newly independent nations. Support for Israel
in the Middle East made it difficult for the USA to keep allies in this region. All radical Arab
regimes Egypt, Syria, Iraq, later Lybia distanced themselves from the USA to become
friendly with the USSR.
Irrespective of the more tensed or released periods they were passing through, the two
superpowers struggled to maintain order within their spheres of influence: in 1970 the
USSR interfered in the workers revolt in Poland, in 1973 the USA participated in a coup to
remove the socialist government in Chile. Furthermore, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war found the
USA and the USSR in their familiar positions on either side of the conflict. But some other
events suggested that the USSR was going to enhanced its position in the detriment of the
USA: more colonies turned into new states of Marxist orientation (Angola, Mozambique,
Ethiopia), Iran became explicitly anti-American after the popular overthrow of the Shah, and

the radical Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua brought fears of a communist regime on the
American mainland.
During the Cold War, hundreds of wars took place across the less developed world.
Nevertheless, hostilities were concentrated especially in a few critical regions known as
shatterbelts (Braden, Shelley, 2000).
Four major shatterbelts of the Cold War have been identified:
1. the Middle East and Southwest Asia;
2. Southeast Asia;
3. Southern Africa;
4. Southeastern Europe.
These areas have been identified as shatterbelts for two reasons: major strategic
importance to the two superpowers and long-standing rivalry between indigenous ethnic
groups with distinctive and often incompatible goals.
The Middle East stands as a major crossroads, has vast petroleum deposits that have
proven critical to the economies of the industrialized nations throughout the world. Longstanding ethnic tension was exacerbated by the movement of European Jews to Palestine and
the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Successive wars between Israel and Arabs,
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, United Nations and Iraq over Kuwait in 1991 are some examples
of violent confrontations in the area.
Southeast Asia includes a large variety of ethnic groups with different religious views
and divergent national objectives. Its strategic importance to the both sides of the Cold War
derives from the located along the major trade route between East Asia, South Asia, Middle
East and Europe.
South Africa is strategic for its large mineral deposits of gold, silver, iron, diamonds,
and also for being located along the main sea trade route between Europe and Asia. Another
reason for the local tensions was the conflict between the white minority and the black
majority, generating the apartheid policy.
South Eastern Europe is characterized by ethnic tensions as well, former Yugoslavian
people being on the top. The region was an important battleground of the Cold War: it was in
Greece and Turkey that the Truman Doctrine was first formulated. Later the United States
donated substantial amounts of aid to ethnically divided Yugoslavia in order to encourage
Yugoslavias independent, anti-Soviet foreign policies. During the post-Cold War era, the
region was again the theatre of violent ethnically grounded confrontations which reignite from
time to time.
The worlds geopolitics was also altered radically by new military technologies, which
reduced the distance between competing nations. The atomic detonation of the atomic bomb
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 for the first time showed the destructive power of the
atomic weapons. By the early 1950s the Russians had also developed and tested nuclear
weapons, and the destruction of the entire civilization through atomic war became possible for
the first time. The traditional concept of balance of power translated into a balance of terror in
the 1950s and the 1960s (Braden, Shelley, 2000).

By the middle of the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had become
locked in an increasing arms race. In 1957 the Soviet Union announced the launching of its
first satellite Sputnik. That increased the fears that the Soviets surpassed the USA in
technological development and also represented a direct challenge to American domination of
the air, which we have seen represented a fundamental component of the American
geopolitical worldview. As a consequence, the American space program was strengthened
leading to moon landing in 1969. As the Cold War deepened, the relations between the two
superpowers continued to deteriorate. In 1962 the whole world was on the verge of the
nuclear war because of the Cuban crises. In 1959 the Cuban government has been taken over
by Fidel Castro. Castro turned Cuba into a socialist state and established close ties with the
Soviet Union. His hostility toward the USA grew when the Americans sponsored an
unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the socialist government in 1961 via the Bay of Pigs
invasion. By the summer of 1962 the Soviets had begun to send missiles to Cuba. The CubanSoviet alliance meant that the USSR was not only breaking out of its mutually decided sphere
of influence, but also entering the American one. The USA asked the Soviets to withdraw the
missiles from Cuba and the Soviet Union asked the Americans to withdraw their military
bases from Turkey. After a period of great tensions, the both respected the agreement. This
event lead to a significant lessening of tension between the Americans and the Soviets: several
agreements have been signed to reduce the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and to
limit the spread of nuclear technology to non-nuclear countries. For example, in 1972 the
USA and SU signed the agreement SALT I Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce their
anti-ballistic missiles systems and to eliminate their further testing and development. In mid
1980s Mikhail Gorbachev signed an arms control agreement concerning European missiles
with the west. During the summer of 1989, Gorbachev and George Bush announced plans to
reduce missiles and other armaments in Europe.
Visions of the post-Cold WarEra
The recent time has different meanings for different observers. Here are some of the ways the
post-1989 period is described and explained by the most influential books written in the last
years. The selection is sourced from a 2001 published text-book on the globalization of world
politics, edited by Baylis and Smith:
The End of History of Francis Fukuyama. This is an optimistic perspective which
consider the collapse of communism as a return to democracy and market economy.
The liberal capitalism is the only alternative and its values will prevail globally;
Back to the Future of John Mearsheimer. It is a realistic warning about the danger
and uncertainty generated by the end of the Cold War. The author appreciated the
security and order established and maintained by the bipolar world after the WWII.
The present is marked by increasing instability and ethnic unrest in Europe and
pessimistic prospects for further nuclear proliferation;
The Clash of Civilizations of Samuel Huntington. The author considers that tha
Cold War is over but the conflicts are not. The source is different this time, being
civilizational in nature. The clash emerges between the West which values the respect

for individual, human rights, democracy and secularism and those countries from
Middle East or Asia that promote different value systems;
The Coming Anarchy of Robert Kaplan. The assumption is that economic and
human collapse in parts of Africa are as relevant to understanding the future of world
politics as the Balkand were prior to the WWI. He warnes that the West ignores whar
is happening in these areas at its risk;
Nothing new of Noam Chomski. The post 1989 changes did not altered the essence
of the international system: it still remain divided between the rich powerful states
and the dependent Third World. The author draws our attention to the new
humanitarian interventions of the West which are in fact noting else but expressions
of imperialism with new clothes.

A new geopolitical world order?

After more than 40 years, the Cold War came to a sudden and surprising end in the late
1980s and early 1990s. Its formal end was declared in November 1990 at the Paris
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Mikhail Gorbachev and his
liberal policy have marked the beginning of this process. Gorbachev lifted restrictions on
trade and emigration, promoted cultural exchanges and permitted increased interaction
between the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe and the West. Within less than one year
communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and Romania were
replaced by elected democratic governments. Also, the ex Soviet republics especially the
Baltic ones declared their independence and also Georgia, made so the Soviet communism
had faded into the pages of history and the Cold War was now over. The others formed an
economic union known as the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The collapse of USSR and the other communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe
determined in fact the end of the Cold War World order and the changing of the geopolitical
codes at the international level.
The present is marked by the search for a new order. How it will be like? One of the
scenarios predicts a divide through the Atlantic, with Japan and the USA leading a Pacific
Rim bloc against a greater Europe incorporating the ex-USSR and dominating the Middle
East and Africa (Wallerstein, 1991). This new geopolitical arrangement, while still being bipolar, completely turns the Cold War pattern upside down in terms of who sides with whom.
The recent involvement of the USA into the Middle East (the Iraqi and Afghanistan
wars) under the umbrella of the fight against terrorism, show that this scenario is no longer
possible in its initial version. The domination of the USA on the Middle East will be greater
than that of the European Union which is still marked by individual responses of the member
countries.
With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, there remains only one superpower, the
USA. But the USA itself is facing a crisis of uncertainty at home as structural economic
problems (budget and trade deficits and international economic competitiveness) continue to
be manifest. The New World order seems to place the United States in the position of world
leader, either unilaterally, or more likely in concert with its close Western allies. The scenario

of a multi polar world raises questions on the number of the powers that will take the lead in
the future (Brzezinski, 2000). The opinions are divergent (Negu, 2005):
some speak about a new bipolar world divided between the US and renewed Russia
favored by size, population, huge mineral and energy resources; impressive military
potential, including nuclear;
others about the triadic competition between the US, Russia and China, the fastest
increasing economy in the world;
some argue that a pentapolar model of power has more chances to come true,
including the US, Russia, China and Japan and Germany, placed on the 2 nd and the 3rd
rank among the most industrialized countries of the world;
the regional pillars model comprises, besides the 5 five leading powers, Australia,
Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia;
The changing role of the United Nations is receiving much greater attention, and the
United States has coordinated its foreign actions since 1990 with its military French and
British and its German and Japanese economic allies. The U.S.-led UN military peacekeeping
and peace-building actions in Kuwait, Kurdistan, Somalia and former Yugoslavia announce
the future developments. Meanwhile, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere warn
of a continuing danger to the West of a heavily armed Russia and the great instability of
Eastern Europe. Many Third World commentators are concerned that the United Nations is
reverted to the period at the immediate end of World War II when the international body was
dominated by the United States.
The post Cold War world is supposed to signify, finally, the shift of world power
struggles from the political-military to the economic arena. This so-called new geopolitics
has been discussed since the turn of the century and it suggests that though the United States
is uncontested on the military front, it faces increased competition from its political allies,
Japan and European Community, for trade shares, new technologies and international
economic agreements. In any open contest among the Big Three, the weapons will likely be
tariffs, quotas, customs duty, export subsidies and other protectionist devices.
Another possible scenario, recently emerged on the world geopolitical scene, is that
the challenge would be likely to come not from any one state, but from the resurgence of
Islam activated during the Gulf War all along the southern crescent of Islamic peoples from
Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east.
Key points
The short 20th century unfolds from 1914 (the beginning of the WWI) and 1991 (the
dismantling of the Soviet Union) and was an age of extremes.
The key structural elements of the Cold War are political and military (above all
nuclear) rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, ideological conflict
between capitalism and communism, the division of Europe, and the extension of
superpower conflict to the Third World.

The collapse of communism was the most important cause of the end of the Cold War
but does not explain all aspects of the transformation of international politics since
1989.
The end of the Cold War was a major historical turning point as measured by changes
in the international system, the nation-state, and international organizations.
Many of the worlds new problems can be traced back to the end of the Cold War.

Key concepts
Truman doctrine statement made by President Harry Truman in March 1947 that it must be
the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities or by outside pressures. Intended to persuade Congress to support
limited aid to Turkey and Greece the doctrine came to underpin the policy of containment and
American economic and political support for its allies.
Containment American political strategy for resisting perceived Soviet expansion, first
publicly espoused by an American diplomat, George Kennan, in 1947. Containment became a
powerful factor in American policy towards the Soviet Union for the next forty years.
Superpower term used to describe the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945,
denoting their global political involvements and military capabilities, including in particular
their nuclear arsenals.
Wind of change reference by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in a speech in
South Africa in 1960 to the political changes taking place across Africa heralding the end of
European imperialism.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) organization established by treaty in April 1949
comprising initially 12 countries from Western Europe and North America. The most
important aspect of the NATO alliance was the American commitment to the defense of
Western Europe.
Dtente relaxation of tension between West and East; Soviet-American dtente lasted from
the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and was characterized by negotiations and nuclear arms
control agreements.
Rapprochement re-establishment of more friendly relations between the Peoples Republic
of China and the United States in the early 1970s.

IV. Geopolitical Concepts

Power, great powers, superpowers
The concept may refer to the relationship between an individual or group and the
natural world, but it is more frequently used to characterize interpersonal and inter-group
relationships, including those between states (Johnston et al., 1994). In this latter case, power
is synonym for influence, either direct (the power to do something) or indirect (the power
over something). Power can be achieved and maintained in different ways, ranging from force
(violent and non-violent), manipulation, persuasion and the creation of consensus, and
authority. Power is exercised at all scales and levels of society, from individual unit to the
global economy. Much of the exercise of power in contemporary societies involves the state
through its ability to intervene and regulate the most part of economic and social life. A major
feature of the states power is its territorial expression. A states sovereignty means the
recognition of the states authority over a territory. Within that territory the state exercises its
power, either in a despotic way through actions taken without negotiation with the population
as under totalitarianism, or in an infrastructural way whereby it influences most aspects of life
with consent, as under capitalism (Mann, 1984). State power is exercised from a central place
(the political capital) over a unified territory by means of four types of power: economic,
ideological, military and political. The interest groups exercise power only over a defined
territory. For example, the economic power implies a single currency and a uniform set of
laws over the whole territory. Similarly, the ideological interests are advanced through the
association of the state and its society within a defined territory. Clearly defined boundaries to
be defended are fundamental for the exercise of military power. Political power can be
expressed only if within the territory it succeeds to get support and legitimization.
Additionally, within societies there is a wide range of other types of power
relationships in different spheres, from work to civil society. Most of these relationships are
asymmetrical and reflect the relative dominance of certain groups over others involving
gender (men over women) or ethnic issues (white over non-white population). Unequal power
relationships are also particular to the interstate system.
Early geopolitical writings clearly made distinction between strong states and weak
states and their different behavior and fate. For long, power has been defined exclusively in
military strategic terms. Accordingly, states with more power enjoy a better chance of
surviving than states with less power (the German theory of lebensraum is argumentative in
this respect). Survival is the core of national interest of all states. If not realized, the very
existence of the state is at risk and its other interests (economic, environmental, humanitarian)
do not have any chance to be fulfilled. Since ancient times, the power politics has been fueled
by the inequalities between states. The most frequently cited example belongs to Thucydides,
the historian of the Peloponesian war, a conflict between two great powers in the ancient
Greek world, Athens and Sparta. In his writings, Thucydides makes it clear that Spartas
national interest, like that of all states, was survival and the changing distribution of power
represented a direct threat to its existence. Sparta was obliged to go to war in order to avoid
being conquered by Athens. At is turn, Athens felt equally obliged to go to war in order to

preserve the empire it had acquired. The famous Athenian leader, Pericles, claimed to be
acting on the basis of the most fundamental of human motivations: ambition, fear, and selfinterest. One of the most relevant episodes of the war between Athens and Sparta is known as
the Melian dialoque comprising the arguments of the Athenian leaders in sustaining their
right of conquest over the islanders, and the response this provoked on the part of the Melians.
The Athenians were using the logic of power politics, arguing that because of their superior
military force, the Melians have only two alternatives: either submit peacefully or be
exterminated. The Melians tried to persuade their counterparts by using arguments grounded
in justice, God and their allies the Spartans. As the dialogue makes clear, the Melians were
forced to submit to the law that the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak
accept what they have to accept. Starting from this example, many analysts consider the
logic of power politics has universal applicability. Looking to the more recent history, we can
easily substitute the example of Athens and Melos with those of Germany and Czechoslovakia
in 1939, the Soviet Union and Hungary in 1956, or Indonesia and East Timor in 1975 (Baylis
et al., 2001). In each case, the weaker state had to submit to the will of the stronger.
Power is closely related to wealth and prestige (Nivaldo, 2001), wherever one appears,
the others inevitably come next. All along the history of the humankind, the combination of
the three gave birth to great powers. This concept dates from the beginning of the 19 th century
being used at the Congress of Vienna in the issue of Napoleonic Wars. The term referred to
the countries engaged in the fight against France within the so called European Concert.
Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed an agreement of alliance against the
expansionistic tendency of Napoleonic France. More than that, each of them was supposed
not to take advantage of the geopolitical circumstances in the detriment of the others. In an
academic work, the concept was firstly explained by Rudolf Kjellen in his Stormakterna
(1905) meaning the Great Powers. He identified the great powers to be the most imposing
examples of states as powers. Their growth through colonial conquests displayed what he
perceived as a tendency toward fewer and greater states competing for space. In the second
edition of his book, Kjellen identified the United States as meeting the requirements for the
role of a great power (spaciousness, freedom of movement and internal cohesion).Russia was
the other candidate for this status at the level of the European continent (OLoughlin, 1994).
Great Powers have been defined according to different criteria. The most relevant for modern
times seem to be criteria regarding the possession of nuclear weapons, their status as cosmic
power and their membership to the UNO Council of Security (Negu, 2005). The list of great
powers since the 19th century up to now runs as follows:
Table 2.Great Powers and their main characteristics
Great Powers
Period
Nuclear Cosmic Membership to
arsenal power
UNO Council
of Security
Austria/Austro1815-1918
Hungarian Empire
Great Britain
From
18th
1958
*
Yes
century
Prussia/Germany
19th c.-1945
*
-

Russia/USSR
France
Italy

From 19th c.
From 19th c.
1870-1943

1953
1967
-

Yes
*
*

Yes
Yes
-

United States
Japan
China

From 1900
1900-1945
From 1945

1952
1965

Yes
Yes
Yes

Yes
Yes

Source: Negu, 2005, pp. 40-41; *they launched objects in outer space.

The end of the WWII and the beginning of the Cold War have brought into the
international geopolitical debate the concept of superpower, making reference to The United
States and the Soviet Union. They both emerged as such combining global political objectives
with military capabilities that included weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver
them over intercontinental distances (Baylis et al., 2001). The Cold War provides a prominent
example of the balance of power mechanism in action. The most common definition of the
term is that if the survival of a state or a number of weaker states is threatened by a
hegemonic state or coalition of stronger states, they should join forces, establish a formal
alliance and seek to preserve their own independence by checking the power of the opposing
side. The mechanism of the balance of power seeks to ensure an equilibrium of power in
which case no one state or coalition of states is in a position to dominate all the others. The
Cold War competition between the East and West tried to maintain the balance through the
formally institutionalized alliance system of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. Nevertheless, due to the arms race, especially nuclear race, the traditional
concept of balance of power translated into a balance of terror in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Besides the balance of power, interstates relationships could take the form of
hegemony. This is commonly defined as the political and/or economic domination of a region,
usually by a superpower (Baylis et al., 2001, p. 79). Another definition is: the influence a
great power is able to establish on other states in the system; extent of influence ranges from
leadership to dominance (idem, p. 158). Meaning authority in Greek, the notion of
hegemony was first used for the dominance of Athens over other Greek city states, later
applied to Prussia within Germany and, in more recent times, to the USA and USSR with
regard to the rest of the world (The Wordworth Encyclopedia, 1995). Tracing back the history
one can find several examples of hegemons which succeeded to rule the international relations
within the world-system: during Ancient Times the Roman Empire and Pax Romana; the
British Empire and the Pax Britanica in the 19 th century; and the United States in the second
half of the 20th century and its corresponding Pax Americana. The phrase Pax Roman,
Britanica or American implies a global peace dictated by the respective hegemon.
In the post-Cold War era, the geopolitical influence of both the United Sates and the
former Soviet Union in structuring the world order is in decline, generating a new
interpretation. This belongs to Kennedy (1988) who considers that the Great Powers that
overextend themselves geopolitically but are unable to innovate and reform at home, become
victims of their own imperial overstretch.
Spheres of influence
The geopolitics of modern times has been marked by two principles: the sovereignty
of states and the maintenance of peace between them. It has often been assumed that national

self-determination is compatible with these general principles. When disputes occur, there are
mechanisms exercised during the history of the international political system to secure peace
through binding agreements. But looking back in history we see also that there has often been
a conflict, sometimes leading to injustice. The principles of balance of power politics often
conflict with those of self-determination: the maintenance of peace between great powers may
generate agreement to have colonies or to delimit spheres of influence. The split of the world
into colonies or spheres of influence has a long history behind. Relevant examples come from
Ancient Times, to Middle Ages and modern times. The Age of Exploration and Discovery has
enhanced the competition between states and favored the powers of that time. In the race to
discover the New World, Portugal and Spain shared the same interest: to conquer and control
the new lands of South America. The two countries needed to sign an agreement in order to
avoid conflict. In 1494 they signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, a small town in the west of
Spain, in the Province of Valladolid, by which a demarcation line was marked in the west of
Green Cape Islands between the Spanish and Portuguese South America. In 1790s Russia and
Prussia partitioned Poland, before that an independent kingdom, between them as part of the
maintenance of the balance of power. In the late 19 th and early 20th centuries European states
agreed to the creation of colonies and spheres of influence in Africa and Asia.
Colonialism
In November 1884, the imperial chancellor and architect of the German Empire, Otto
von Bismarck, convened a conference of 14 states (including the United States) to settle the
political partitioning of Africa. Bismarck wanted not only to expand German spheres of
influence in Africa but also to play off Germanys colonial rivals against one another to the
Germans advantage. The major colonial contestants in Africa were: the British, who held
beachheads along the West, South, and East African coasts; the French whose main sphere of
activity was in the area of Senegal River and north of the Congo Basin; the Portuguese who
desired to extend their coastal stations in Angola and Mozambique deep into the interior;
Belgium who had control over the Congo Basin and Germany active in areas where the
designs of other colonial powers might be obstructed as in Togo (between British holdings),
Cameroon (a wedge into French spheres), South West Africa (taken although Britain was
interested in) and East Africa (where German Tanganyika broke the British design for a solid
block of territory from the Cape North to Cairo). When the Conference convened in Berlin,
more than 80% of Africa was still under traditional African rule. Nonetheless, the colonial
powers representatives drew their boundary lines across the entire map. These lines were
drawn through known as well as unknown regions and African real estate was exchanged
among European governments. In the process, African peoples were divided, unified regions
were ripped apart, hostile societies were thrown together, hinterlands were disrupted, and
migration routes were closed off. Not all of this was felt immediately, of course, but these
were some of the effects when the colonial powers began to consolidate their holdings and the
boundaries on paper became barriers on the African landscape. The Berlin Conference was
Africas undoing in more ways than one. By the time Africa regained its independence after
the late 1950s, the realm had acquired a legacy of political fragmentation that could neither be
eliminated nor made to operate satisfactorily. The African political and geographical map is

thus a permanent liability that resulted from a ignorant, greedy acquisitiveness during a period
when Europes search for minerals and markets had become insatiable.
The century between 1820 and the First World War (1914-1918) saw the growth of a
modern colonial order backed by complete European hegemony over world trade, finance and
shipping, and by new forms of political and military authority sustained by technology,
applied science and information systems. Between 1870 and 1918, the colonial powers added
an average of 240,000 sq. miles each year to their possessions; between 1875 and 1915 onequarter of the globes land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among half a
dozen states (Hobsbawm, 1987). Britain, France and Germany increased their colonies by 4
million, 3.5 million, and 1 million sq. miles respectively; Belgium and Italy, and the USA and
Japan, each increased their holdings by roughly 1 million and 100,000 sq. miles respectively.
Colonialism has been regarded in opposing ways. It has been seen as a force of economic
modernization and social advancement, ensuring law and order, private property, basic
infrastructure and political and legal institutions. Another interpretation of the meaning of
colonialism has been related to its capacity to generate destruction, dependency, exploitation,
massive poverty. What is clear, however, is that the shift from informal spheres of influence to
formal colonial rule in the 19th century is rooted in the inter-capitalist rivalry and search for
raw materials, new markets and new investment opportunities. In the period after the WWII,
nationalist movements discredited colonialism politically and ideologically. More over, the
imperial powers found it to be expensive and increasingly ungovernable. The result was the
decolonization process by which the former colonies were granted independence, but the
consequences of the colonial order are still alive. Some argue that the former colonies do not
enjoy fully economic and politic independence as the persistence of primary export
production and the continuous dependency of political elites on former colonial powers
suggests that colonialism has been transformed into perpetual neocolonialism (Abdel-Fadil,
1989). The political instability of Africa and South-Eastern Asia is usually perceived as a
consequence of the colonial time and the way borders have been drawn by European
diplomats without any of with little knowledge of the historical and geographical background.
Today, debt-ridden Africa is again being told what to do, this time by foreign financial
institutions. The cycle of poverty that followed colonialism exacts a high price from African
societies. As for future development prospects, the disadvantages of peripheral location in
relation with the worlds core areas continue to handicap Subsaharan Africa.
During the Cold War and after, the western world permitted Russia to exercise
domination over peoples within Eastern Europe and within the USSR and Russia itself in
order not to compromise broader considerations of stability and security. Two examples could
be mentioned: the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Chechen rising of 1994 onwards. In
both cases there was no western official reaction to obvious denials of the right of peoples to
self-determination. In other parts of the world, legitimate claims for independence have been
ignored for reasons of regional security. From 1961, when war began, the African states
refused, until 1991, to recognize the right of Eritrea to independence from Ethiopia (Baylis,
Smith, eds., 2001)

States, Nations and Nation-States

A state is a political unit. In the modern international system, the entire inhabited world is
divided into states. Boundaries are drawn in order to separate states. The right of each state
to control the territory encompassed by its boundaries is recognized by the international
community. A state is an independent political unit occupying a defined, permanently
populated territory and having full sovereign control over its internal and foreign affairs.
Currently, the world political map includes approximately 200 states, but they contain
persons who belong to thousands of distinct nations. A nation is a group of people with a
common culture occupying a particular territory, bound together by a strong sense of unity
arising from shared beliefs and customs. Language and religion may be unifying elements,
but even more important are an emotional conviction of cultural distinctiveness and a sense
of ethnocentrism. The composite term nation-state properly refers to a state whose territorial
extent coincides with that occupied by a distinct nation or people, or at least, whose
population shares a general sense of cohesion and adherence to a set of common values.
There are four types of relations between states and nations:
A nation-state. There are few wholly uniform ethnically or culturally states. Some like
France, Britain, Spain became nation-states by joining over time different groups by a
strong centralizing force; others such as Germany or Italy were culturally associated
but politically fragmented groups Japans claim to be an example of a state occupied
by a distinct nation, or people, is weakened by the sizeable Korean and indigenous
Ainu populations that exist as unassimilated elements of the countrys population.
A multinational state. This is a state that contains more than one nation. Often no
single ethnic group dominates the population. The former Soviet Union was made up
of several nationalities: Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Estonians, and others. The
island of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, contains two distinct nations:
Greeks and Turks. After Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960, there was
an upsurge of violence between the two groups. Since 1974, Cyprus has been
partitioned with a United Nations-policed buffer zone separating Greeks and Turks.
A part-nation state. The Arab nation extends across and dominates 17 states in
northern Africa and the Middle East.
A stateless nation. An ancient group with a distinctive language, the Kurds are
concentrated in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Smaller numbers live in Syria, Armenia and
Azerbaijan. The Kurds are a nation of some 20-25 million people divided among six
states and dominant in none. More Kurds live in Turkey than in any other country
(perhaps as many as 14 million), possibly as many as 8 million in Iran, about half that
number in Iraq, and smaller numbers in Syria Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Kurds
have occupied the isolated, mountainous frontier zone between Turkey, Iran and Iraq
for over 3000 years. They are a nation, but they have no state, nor do they enjoy the
international attention that peoples of other stateless nations such as the Palestinians
receive. Turkish and Iraqi repressions of the Kurds and Iranian betrayal of their
aspirations, briefly make the news but are soon forgotten. Relative location has much

to do with his spatial remoteness and the obstacles created by the ruling regimes
inhibit access to their landlocked domain.
So, in terms of the relation between state-nation, one can distinguish: states dominated by one
nation (France, Japan) or by 2, or more large nations (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, South
Africa. On the other hand, many nations are divided among two or more states (the Arabs,
Kurds, Koreans). The lack of correspondence between national territories and state
boundaries is an especially significant problem in less developed countries. This failure
results from the colonial history of these regions. Boundaries between colonies were drawn at
conference tables in European capitals by diplomats with little or knowledge of local
conditions, but to suit the convenience of the European colonial masters. This situation is
especially evident in West Africa where tension between competing national groups remains
characteristic even today.
The precise number of nations depends on definition. Should nationality be determined by
language, culture, religion or historic evolution? There is no straight answer to this question.
Anyway, nationality is a rather vague expression of group identity, perhaps at the largest level
after family, clan and tribe. Take the example of the people living now in Slovakia, but who
during the 20th century have changed 5 times the nationality of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire till 1918, of Czechoslovakia after the WWI, of Hungary after 1938, of Czechoslovakia
after the WWII and from 1993 of Slovakia. Meanwhile their identity remained unchanged.
The concept of nationality was born out of the European nation-state system, which emerged
in late Middle Ages. Much older is the term of nation, dating back to the biblical times,
whereas the modern concept of nationalism has been defined only several hundred years ago.
Nationalism has been strengthened in the post Cold War world, due to the ending of the EastWest clear-cut division and the more chaotic world coming into being after it. Two trends
seem to emerge at the end of the Cold War: on the one hand national identities from former
multinational states such as USSR or Yugoslavia are calling out in force and resulting in
conflict areas on the world stage; on the other hand supra-nationalism or the tendency to
form alliances and political groups larger than national identities, continues and grows. This
latter process can be seen in two different ways: as a normal evolution of national identities,
taking the example of the Westphalian identity which has given way to the German one, and
this one can give way to European. Or, can be seen as unimportant having in mind that the
symbols of national identity will be strong for ever despite the selection of a flag or an anthem
for the Union.
States by shape
A look at the political map of the world shows that every state is unique. The size, shape and
location of any state combine to distinguish it from all others. The characteristics are of more
than academic interest, because they also affect the power and stability of states.
Boundaries define and delimit states; they also create the mosaic of often interlocking
territories that give individual countries their shape, also known as their morphology. The
territorial morphology of a state affects its condition, even its survival. A countrys shape can
affect its well-being as a state by fostering or hindering effective organization. There are five
types of states according to their shape:

Compact state the form is of a circle with the capital located as much as possible in
the center. All places could be reached from the center in a minimal amount of time
and with the least expenditure for roads, and railways. It would also have the shortest
borders to defend. Uruguay, Zimbabwe, Cambodia and Poland are examples.
Prorupt states are nearly compact but possess one or sometimes two narrow
extensions of territory. Proruption may simply reflect peninsular elongations of land
area as in the case of Myanmar and Thailand. In other instances, the extensions have
an economic or strategic significance, recording a past history of international
negotiation to secure access to resources or water routes or to establish a buffer zone
between states. Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Namibia fall into
this category.
Elongated states have length several times more the average width and hence parts
of the country far from the capital and likely to be isolated because great expenditures
are required to link them to the core. They are more difficult to be administrated, like
Norway, Vietnam or Chile.
Fragmented states are composed entirely of islands (the Philippines and Indonesia),
partly on islands and partly on mainland (Italy and Malaysia) and those that are
chiefly on the mainland but whose territory is separated by another state (United
States). Fragmentation and isolation can weaken centralized control of state territory
and increase the regionalism that may lead to separatist movements.
Perforated states completely surrounds a territory that it does not rule. It has an
enclave inside it which may be independent or may be part of another country. Two of
Europes smallest independent states, San Marino and Vatican City, are enclaves that
perforate Italy. As an exclave of former West Germany, West Berlin perforated the
national territory of former East Germany and was an enclave in it. Lesotho is an
example of enclave of South Africa.

Size
The area that a state occupies may be large, as is true of China, or small, as is Liechtenstein.
The worlds largest country, Russia, occupies over 17 million square kilometers, some 11% of
the earths land surface nearly as large as the whole continent of South America and more
than one million time as large as Nauru, one of the ministates found in all parts of the world.
An easy assumption would be that the larger states area, the grater is the chance that it will
include the ores, energy supplies, and fertile soils from which it can benefit. In general, that
assumption is valid, but much depends on accidents of location. Mineral resources are
unevenly distributed, and size alone does not guarantee their presence within a state.
Australia, Canada, and Russia, though large in territory, have relatively small areas capable
of supporting productive agriculture. Great size, in fact, may be a disadvantage. A very large
country may have vast areas that are remote, sparsely populated, and hard to integrate into
the mainstream of economy and society. Small states are more apt than large ones to have a
culturally homogeneous population. They find it easier to develop transportation and
communication systems to link the sections of the country, and, of course, they have shorter

boundaries to defend against invasion. Size alone is not critical in determining a countrys
stability and strength, but it is a contributing factor.
Location
The significance of size and shape as factors in national well-being can be modified by a
states location, both absolute and relative. Although both Canada and Russia are extremely
large, their absolute location in middle upper latitudes reduces their size advantages when
agricultural potential is considered. A states relative location, its position compared to that
of other countries, is as important as its absolute location. Landlocked states, those lacking
ocean frontage and surrounded by other states, are at a commercial and strategic
disadvantage. They lack easy access to both maritime trade and the resources found in
coastal waters and submerged lands. The number of landlocked states about 40 increased
greatly with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of new, smaller nation-states
out of such former multinational countries as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Several other
states are not totally landlocked, but their own coasts are unsuitable for port development, so
they rely on neighbors ports. Landlocked states may secure the right to use high seas, the
right of innocent passage through the territorial waters of coastal stats, port facilities along
suitable coasts, and transit facilities from the port to their own territory. Landlocked or
partially landlocked states may gain access to the sea in one of the three ways. First, any
navigable river that reaches the sea may be declared open to the navigation of all states.
Freedom of navigation on rivers that flow through several countries was first proclaimed by
France in 1792. The revolutionary government proclaimed that the freedom of rivers was a
natural law. International commissions regulate navigation on many international rivers,
and often these same commissions guard against pollution and regulate the drawing of
irrigation waters from the rivers. Second, a landlocked state may obtain a corridor of land
reaching either to the sea or to a navigable river. Several countries have long, thin extensions
out to seaports. Some of these, such as the Congos corridor to the Atlantic Ocean, are
important ransport routes, but others, such as Namibias Caprivi Strip to the international
Zambezi River, serve no significant traffic function. The third way a landlocked state can gain
access to the sea is to obtain facilities at a specific port plus freedom of transit along a route
to the port. Coastal states have signed international agreements promising to assist the
movement of goods across their territories from landlocked states without levying
discriminatory tolls, taxes or freight charges. Chile, for example, helped build a railroad
connecting La Paz, Bolivias capital city to the Chilean port of Arica, and Chile guarantees
free transit. Argentina grants Bolivia a free zone at the Argentine city of Rosario on the
Parana River, and Peru gives Bolivia a free trade zone in the port of Ilo. In 1993 Ethiopia
joined the ranks of the landlocked states when its coastal province of Eritrea gained
independence. Eritrea promised to assist Ethiopian import and export trade, but in fact most
of Ethiopia has long relied on transit via the port of Djibouti. The 1998 treaty between the
Ecuador and Peru guaranteed Ecuador navigation rights in Peruvian ports on the Amazon
River. In a few instances, a favorable relative location constitutes the primary resource of a
state. Singapore, a state of only 580 square km is located at a crossroads of world shipping
and commerce.

A special case is represented by exclaves a pocket of territory surrounded by another state.

One example is that of the two exclaves the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and
Azeri Nachichevan in Armenia. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Armenians found
themselves at war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the fate of some 150,000 Armenians
living in Nagorno-Karabakh. This exclave has been created by Soviet sociopolitical planners
who, while acknowledging the Christian distinctiveness of this cluster of Armenians,
nevertheless gave Muslim Azerbaijan jurisdiction over it. That was a recipe for trouble: the
arrangement was made to work under authoritarian Soviet rule, but once this rule ended, the
Christian Armenians encircled by Muslim Azerbaijan felt insecure and appealed to Armenia
for help. Armenian troops entered Azerbaijan and gained control over the exclave, even
ousting Azerbaijanis from the zone between the main body of Armenia and NagornoKarabakh. The international community has not recognized Armeniaa occupation and
officially the territory remains a part of Azerbaijan. The fundamental issue remained
unsolved.
Territoriality and power
In international relations, control of territory usually increases power, while increased power
can expand control of territory. More powerful states exercise direct or indirect territorial
control over weaker ones. In many cases, power implies direct, formal political sovereignty
over designated territories. Throughout history, many wars have been fought for control of
specific territories, and the foreign policies of many countries have been influenced by the
desire to control additional territory for economic, military or political purposes. Countries
that have been defeated in wartime have often been obliged to cede control of territory to their
victorious opponents.
Relations between power and territory can be observed at all geographical scales. Power
implies the opportunity to exercise the control or influence over others and territorial control
is a major prerogative of organized government. In some societies, territorial control is
exercised in order to privilege certain members of society above others. For example, the
majority population of South Africa did not have the right to choose the residence place
during the apartheid times, or before the 1960s, in the United States, the African-Americans in
the South were denied the right to attend integrated schools and otherwise associate with
whites on an equal basis.
Many wars throughout history have arisen as a result of disputes over control of territory.
Certain territories are particularly desirable because of specific attributes or location
considerations. For example, Iraqs takeover of Kuwait in August 1990 was occasioned in part
by the presence of valuable petroleum reserves in Kuwait, while the American response was
explained as the desire to protect petroleum reserves. Other territories have strategic locations.
Some are valuable for military purposes. Hence the Israelis have long desired control of the
Golan Heights and the British have long maintained control on Gibraltar as the gateway to the
Mediterranean. Other territories are valuable because their control can facilitate trade or
economic growth. For example, Russia long desired an outlet to the Mediterranean. Hence,
the Russians have long undertaken efforts to obtain control of the Straits of Bosphorus and
Dardanelles connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea on her southern border. Likewise,

American control of the Panama Canal Zone enabled the United States to control shipping
between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Even when the United States ceded control of the
Canal Zone to Panama in the late 1970s, the treaty stipulated that America could continue to
dominate international trade in the region. A special role is played by chokepoints sea
passages of strategic significance causing marine traffic congestion, requiring reduces speeds
and sharp turns and increasing the risk of collision as well as vulnerability to attack. In 1986,
President Reagan explained that the US bases in the Philippines would help the military
protect vital sea lanes passing through straits or canals that the Soviet Union would try to
close in a conflict. The Pentagon officials identified the US Navys set of world maritime
chokepoints. In the Americas these include the Straits of Florida between Florida and Cuba,
the Panama Canal, the Strait of Magellan, and the Gulf of Alaska. In the Western Pacific: the
Korean Straits, Makassar Strait between Sulawesi and Borneo, Sunda between Java and
Sumatra, the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. The Strait of
Hormuz, commanding the Persian Gulf, Bab el Mandeb commanding the Red Sea, the Suez
Canal and the Cape of the Good Hope are part of the same set. For many years, the Strait of
Malacca has been a notorious choke point because reduced speeds give pirates the opportunity
to board the vessels and plunder them or worse, kill their crews, and take them over. Since the
1980s, hundreds of acts of piracy have made this the worlds least safe waterway, especially
for smaller sips. One of the worlds busiest chokepoints is the Strait of Gibraltar which was in
the news in late 2002 when an al-Qaeda document was found that referred to plans for an
attack on Western ships slowing down through this 58-km long funnel that narrows to 13-km
in width and is subject to high winds and fast currents. Another risky choke point is the Bab el
Mandeb Strait between Djibouti and Yemen at the southern entrance to the Red Sea and
controlled by Yemen, partially blocked by the Perim Island. Reunited in 1991 Yemen is
vulnerable due to internal conflicts over oilfields, the pressure of Washington-Cairo-Ryad
axis, especially after offering support to Iraq, the Eritrean-Israeli cooperation. Oil tankers, one
of which was attacked by al-Qaeda in 2002, and freighters as well as cruise ships approach
this strait via all-too-predictable routes. The Strait of Hormuz is controlled by the Oman
Sultanate. The majority of oil routes from the Gulf pass through Oman seawaters. It maintains
close ties with the USA and other NATO countries as a guaranty for its stability. Unsafe
because of the war against terrorism. The chokepoints and many other route-shortening canals
are vulnerable at a time when the risk of hostile action looms larger than the risk of collision.
Types of boundaries
Boundaries can be classified genetically, that is, as their evolution relates to the cultural
landscapes they traverse. A leading political geographer, Richard Hartshorne, proposed a fourlevel genetic boundary classification. Certain boundaries were defined and delimited before
the present-day human landscape developed. Let us the example of the Southeastern Asia, a
region placed under the control of colonial powers for a long time. For example, the boundary
between Malaysia and Indonesia on the island of Borneo is an antecedent boundary. Most of
this boundary passes through sparsely inhabited tropical rainforest, and the break in settlement
can even be detected on the small-scale world population map. A second category of
boundaries evolved as the cultural landscape of an area took share, part of the ongoing

process of accommodation. This subsequent boundary is represented by the example of the

border between Vietnam and China. This border is the result of a long process of adjustment
and modification, the end of which may not yet have come. The third category involves
boundaries drawn forcibly across a unified or at least homogeneous cultural landscape. The
colonial powers did this when they divided the island of New Guinea by delimiting a
boundary in a nearly straight line (curved in only one place to accommodate a bend in the Fly
River), as shown in the lower-left map. The superimposed boundary they delimited gave the
Netherlands the western half of New Guinea. When Indonesia became independent in 1949,
the Dutch did not yield their part of New Guinea, which is peopled mostly by ethnic Papuans,
not Indonesians. In 1962, the Indonesians invaded the territory by force of arms, and in 1969
the United Nations recognized its authority there. This made the colonial, superimposed
boundary the eastern border of Indonesia and had the effect of extending Indonesia from
Southeast Asia into the Pacific Realm. Geographically, all of New Guinea forms part of the
Pacific Realm. The fourth genetic boundary type is the so called relict boundary a border
that has ceased to function but whose imprints and sometimes influence are still evident in the
cultural landscape. The boundary between the former North and South Vietnam is a classic
example: once demarcated militarily, it has had relict status since 1976 following the
reunification of Vietnam in the aftermath of the Indochina war (1964-1975). Southeast Asias
boundaries have colonial origins, but they have continued to influence the course of events in
postcolonial times. Take one instance: the physiographic boundary that separates the main
island of Singapore from the rest of the Malay Peninsula, the Johor Strait. That
physiographic-political boundary facilitated, perhaps crucially, Singapores secession from the
state of Malaysia. Without it, Malaysia might have been persuaded to stop the separation
process; at the very least, territorial issues would have arisen to slow the sequence of events.
As it was, no land boundary needed to be defined. The Johor Strait demarcated Singapore and
left no question as to its limits.
Boundary disputes
Boundaries create many possibilities for conflict. Since WWII almost half of the worlds
sovereign states have been involved in border disputes with neighboring countries. States are
more likely to have disputes with their neighbors than with more distant parties. Although the
causes of boundary disputes and open conflict are many and varied, they can reasonably be
placed into four categories.
Positional disputes occur when states disagree about the interpretation of documents
that define a boundary or the way the boundary was delimited. The boundary between
Argentina and Chile, originally defined during Spanish colonial rule, was to follow
the most elevated crests of the Andean Cordillera dividing the waters. Because the
southern Andes had not been adequately explored and mapped, it was not apparent
that the highest peaks and the watershed divides do not always coincide. A long,
narrow area of more than 50,000 square km is still in dispute. In Latin America, as a
whole, the 21st century began with at least 10 unresolved border disputes, some dating
back to colonial times.

Territorial disputes over the ownership of a region, though not always, arise when a
boundary divides an ethnically homogeneous population. Each of the two states has
some justification for claiming the territory inhabited by the ethnic group in question.
Conflicts may arise if the people of one state want to annex a territory whose
population is ethnically related to that of the state but now subject to a foreign
government. Somalia had many border clashes with Ethiopia and the area of Kashmir
is a cause of dispute between India and Pakistan. The most serious flashpoint in South
Asia is Kashmir where India and Pakistan meet in the mountains of the far north,
because this is an international not a domestic problem. When the boundary between
Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan was hastily delimited in 1947 it stopped short of the
northern territory of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the 562 Native states recognized by
the British colonial administration. Kashmir had a Hindu Maharajah but a majority
Muslim population and both Pakistan and India wanted it. When British rule ended,
Pakistani and Indian armies were soon at war in Kashmir. After repeated rounds of
conflict, Kashmir today is divided along the latest armistice line but neither side is
prepared to yield. When this dispute started, India and Pakistan were armed with
conventional weapons, today they are both nuclear powers, which transforms
Kashmir from another of the worlds problem frontiers into a potentially catastrophic
flashpoint for nuclear war.
Resource disputes neighboring states are likely to covet the resources such as
mineral deposits, fertile farmland, rich fishing grounds lying in the border areas and
to disagree over their use. USA has been recently involved in disputes with Mexico
over the shared resources of the Colorado River and Gulf of Mexico and with Canada
over the Georges Bank fishing grounds in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the causes of the
1990-91 war in the Persian Gulf was the huge reservoir known as the Rumaila field,
lying mainly under Iraq with the small extension into Kuwait. Because the two
countries were unable to come to an agreement, Kuwait pumped oil without any
international agreement. Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil and justified its
invasion.
Functional disputes arise when neighboring states disagree over policies to be
applied along a boundary. Such policies may concern immigration, customs
regulations, or land use. USA relations with Mexico have been affected by the
increasing number of illegal immigrants and the flow of drugs entering from Mexico.
A special case is represented by extraterritoriality. During the 19th century, as China
weakened and European colonial invaders entered Chinas coastal cities and sailed up its
rivers, the Europeans forced China to accept a European doctrine of international law
extraterritoriality. Under this doctrine, foreign states and their representatives are immune
from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are based. Today, this applies to embassies
and diplomatic personnel, but in Qing China it went far beyond that. The European, Russian
and Japanese invaders established as many as 90 treaty ports, extraterritorial enclaves in
Chinas cities under unequal treaties enforced by gun-boat diplomacy. Diplomats and traders
were exempt from Chinese law. Not only port areas but also the best residential suburbs of

large cities were declared to be extraterritorial and made inaccessible to Chinese citizens. In
the city of Guangzhou (Canton in colonial times), Sha Mian Island in the Pearl River was a
favorite extraterritorial enclave. A sigh at the only bridge to the island stated, in English and
Cantonese, No dogs or Chinese. Christian missionaries fanned out into China, their
residences and churches fortified with extraterritorial security. In many places, Chinese found
themselves unable to enter parks and buildings without permission from foreigners. This
involved a loss of face that contributed to bitter opposition to the presence of foreigners a
resentment that exploded in Boxer Rebellion in 1900. After the collapse of the Qing Dinasty
in 1911, the Chinese Nationalists negotiated an end to all commercial extraterritoriality in
China proper; the Russians however would not yield in then-Manchuria. Only Hong Kong
and Macau retained their status as colonies. When Chinas government in 1980 embarked on
a new economic policy that gave major privileges and exemptions to foreign firms in certain
coastal areas and cities, opponents argued that this policy revived the practice of
extraterritoriality in a new guise. This issue remains a sensitive issue in a China that has not
forgotten the indignities of the colonial era.
Nationalism and related notions
The issue of nationalism is of a central significance for the geopolitical analysis, at least for
three reasons:
-most states in the world today contain minority groups; provision of rights to minorities is a
key to avoiding internal conflict;
-2 apparently opposing trends are evident with respect to national identity: both re-emergent
nationalism and new supra-national identities are emerging on the globe;
-the idea of a nation-state is increasingly a symbol of the past geopolitical order of the world.
What is nationalism?
Nations can be defined on the basis of culture, language, ethnicity, and religion. The word
nation derives from the Latin root indicating to be born and initially referred to a stock of
people. As the modern state system emerged in Europe in the late 1600s, a national
consciousness also developed. The best definition of nation may be that it is a group of people
with a common heritage or a common culture, i.e. a group sharing one or more important
culture traits like religion, language, political institutions, values or historical identity.
Nations contain persons who share common cultural traits and a sense of self-identification
enabling them to be distinguished from other groups of people living outside the national
territory. Examples include the Arabs, Basques, Quebecois, Welsh, Scottish and many others.
Another definition is that a nation is a cultural territory made up of communities of
individuals who see themselves as one people on the basis of common ancestry, history,
society, institutions, ideology, language, territory and often religion. The historical evolution
suggests that boundaries of nations are more long-lasting and meaningful for peoples lives
than the state borders. The idea of nation may be difficult to maintain outside of set spatial
boundaries constituting a homeland, as cultures meet and mix, and change, and nationalities
in turn are modified. For example, would Irish Americans consider themselves more Irish or
more American by national identity? Major nations exist even in a scattered state among

many political boundaries (Kurds, Jews, Chinese). There are very few examples of pure
nation-states in the world today. Much more common on the world map is the multinational
state, the mixture of nationalities into one political unit which may or may not be cohesive
over time.
The changing pattern of the population and the recent flows of in-migration add a new
dimension to nationalism. Let us take the example of Europe. Today Europes indigenous
population unlike most of the rest of the worlds is actually shrinking. Such negative
population growth poses serious challenges for any nation. When the population pyramid
becomes top-heavy, the number of workers whose taxes pay for the social services of the aged
goes down, leading to reduced pensions and diminishing funds for health care. Governments
that impose tax increases endanger the business climate, therefore their options are limited.
Europe, and especially Western Europe, is experiencing a population implosion that will be a
tremendous challenge in the decades to come. Meanwhile, immigration is partially offsetting
the losses European countries face. Millions of Turkish Kurds (mainly to Germany), Algerians
(France), Moroccans (Spain), West Africans (Britain) and Indonesians (the Netherlands) are
changing the social fabric of what once were monocultural nation-states. One key dimension
of this change is the spread of Islam in Europe. The vast majority of these immigrants are
intensely devout, politically aware and culturally insular. They continue to arrive in a Europe
where native populations are stagnant or declining, where religious institutions are
weakening, where secularism is rapidly rising, where political positions often appear to be
anti-Islamic, and where cultural norms are incompatible with Muslim traditions. Muslim
communities tend to resist assimilation, making Islam the essence of their identity. In Britain
alone there are more than 1500 mosques, in themselves a transformation of local cultural
landscapes.
Supranationalism is another specific on-going process in Europe. The Marshall Plan not only
stimulated European economies, but it showed European leaders that their countries needed
a joint economic-administrative structure in order to: coordinate the financial assistance, to
ease the flow of resources and products across Europes mosaic of boundaries, to lower
restrictive trade tariffs, to seek ways to effect political cooperation. The economic steps soon
led to greater political cooperation as well. In 149, the participating governments created the
Council of Europe, the beginnings of what was to become a European Parliament meeting in
Strasbourg, France. Europe was embarked on still another political revolution, the formation
of a multinational union involving a growing number of European states. Supranationalism is
defined as a voluntary association in economic, political or cultural spheres of more
independent stats willing to yield some measure of sovereignty for their mutual benefit. After
changing the name several times and enlarging the membership from six to 27, the European
Union is not just a paper organization for bankers and manufacturers. It has a major impact
on the daily lives of its member countries citizens in countless ways. One of the most
powerful objectives of EU was the accomplishment of the European Monetary Union to
symbolize its strengthening unity and to establish a counter-weight to American dollar.
Expansion was another EU objective, although hotly debated, it reached momentous in 2004
with ten new members and in 2007 with other two.

For all its dramatic progress toward unification, Europe remains a realm of geographic
contradictions. Europeans are well aware of their history of conflict, division and repeated
self-destruction. Even as Europes states have been working to join forces in the EU, many of
those same states are confronting severe centrifugal stresses. The term devolution has come
into use to describe the powerful centrifugal forces whereby regions or peoples within a state,
through negotiation or active rebellion, demand or gain political strength and sometimes
autonomy at the expense of the center. Most states exhibit some level of internal regionalism,
but the process of devolution is set into motion when a key centripetal driving force the
nationally accepted idea of what a country stands for erodes to the point that a regional
drive for autonomy, or for outright secession is launched. The UK comprises the core of
England and three other entities: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland attached to England
in centuries. Neither time nor representative democratic government was enough to eliminate
all latent regionalism in these. During the 1960s and 1970s the British government
confronted a virtual civil war in Northern Ireland and rising tides of nationalism in Scotland
and Wales. In 1997, the government in London gave the Scots and Welsh the opportunity to
vote for greater autonomy in new regional parliaments that would have limited but significant
powers over local affairs. Other examples refer to Spain facing severe devolutionary forces in
the Basque, Catalonia and Galicia; France contends with a secessionist movement in
Corsica; Belgium is riven by Flemish-Walloon separatism; Italy confronts devolutionary
pressures in South Tyrol and Lombardy. In recent decades Eastern Europe has been
dramatically affected by devolution as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia collapsed, Moldova
and Ukraine suffered from their historical Russian-penetrated geography.
Political devolution is not the only centrifugal force to buffer European states. As the
European Union materialized, its freedoms in the form of money flow, labor movements led to
the emergence of powerful urban regions as hubs of economic power and influence, in some
ways beyond the control of their national governments. Examples include the Rhne-Alpes
region in France (Lyon), Lombardy in Italy (Milan), Catalonia in Spain (Barcelona), BadenWrttemberg in Germany (Stuttgart). This group known as the four motors of Europe
bypasses not only their national governments in dealing with each other but even extends
their business channels to span the world (de Blij, Muller, 2006). Such powerful economic
houses are called regional states, entities that defy old borders and are shaped by the
globalizing economy of which they have become a part (Ohmae, 1993).
Multinationalism is usually a pressure factor on the state capacity to maintain unity and act
effectively. Russias great expansion had brought many nationalities under tsarist control. The
tsars had conquered but they had done little to bring Russian culture to the peoples they
ruled. The Georgians, Armenians, Tatars and residents of the Muslim states of Central Asia
were among dozens of individual, cultural, linguistic and religious groups that had not been
Russified. In 1917, the Russians themselves constituted only about one-half of the
population of the empire. Thus it was impossible to establish a Russian state instantly over
this vast political region, and these diverse national groups had to be accommodated. It was
decided to divide the vast realm into Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs), each of which was
delimited to correspond broadly to one of the major nationalities. Within the SSRs, smaller

minorities were assigned political units of lesser rank. These were called Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republics (ASSRs) which in effect were republics within republics. The republics
quarreled among themselves over boundaries and territory. Demographic changes,
migrations, war, and economic factors have changed the initial layout. The Soviet planning
policy relocated entire populations from their home-lands in order to better fit the grand
design, and to reward of punish. The overall effect was to move minority peoples eastward
and to replace them with Russians. This Russification of the Soviet Empire produced
substantial ethnic Russian minorities in all the non-Russian republics.
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, Russias former empire devolved into 14 independent
countries, and Russia itself was a changed nation. Russians now made up about 83% of the
population of under 150 million, a far higher proportion than in the days of the Soviet Union
(77%). But numerous minority peoples remained under Moscows new flag, and millions of
Russians found themselves under new governments in the former Republics. Soviet planners
had created a complicated administrative structure and Russias postcommunist leaders had
to use this framework to make their country function. In 1992, most of Russias internal
republics, autonomous regions, oblasts and krays signed a document known as the Russian
Federation Treaty, committing them to cooperate in the new federal system. At first a few
units refused to sign, including Tatarstan and a republic in the Caucasus periphery, then
known as Chechenya-Ingushetia, where Muslim rebels waged a campaign for independence.
Later, the republic split into two separate republics, and eventually only Chechnya refused to
sign the Russian Federation Treaty, and subsequent Russian military intervention led to a
prolonged and violent conflict, with disastrous consequences for Chechnyas people and
infrastructure. The Chechnya war continues today and is a disaster for Russias government
as well.
Many people living in multinational states have expressed a desire to attain greater political
autonomy or independence. The expression of these goals is known as nationalism. A closely
related concept is ethnicity. Ethnic groups are people who feel bound by a common culture
and heritage, although their ties may also be associated with social perceptions of race.
Ethnicity is associated with territoriality in that spatial identity may be an important
component of ethnic identity. The word ethnicity is from the Greek meaning people or nation
and is also closely aligned with cultural traits such as language. Algerians in France may feel
that ethnically they are Arab, but by citizenship French. If they have been in France long
enough to develop a sense of national identity, they may also regard themselves as French by
nationality. Or another example is that of people in Bulgaria who are ethnically Moslems, but
Bulgarians by nationality, may feel distinct from other Bulgarians because of religious
conversions that occurred generations earlier, even though by other measures they are
indistinct from their fellow Bulgarians. Within the modern state of Bulgaria, there are
200,000 Bulgarians who are Moslem and one million Bulgarian citizens who are also
Moslems but Turkish by nationality. Another example of confused identities over ethnic and
nationality heritage occurs in the state of Somalia. In the past, this country was often cited as
one of the few examples in Africa as a nation-state, a country composed ethnically of only
Somalis. Inside, the perception was different: the Somalis continued to distinguish themselves

largely by clan identity, despite a common language and Islamic faith. Somalia deteriorated
into open warfare between major clans in the 1990s as the world watched the mounting
casualties and disintegration of a central government.
Another related notion is that of irredentism, namely the desire to bring into a state all areas
that had once been part of it or areas where members of the nationality group live. Originally,
the term was used to refer to an area in northern Italy which remained part of Austria in
1871. Italian nationalists referred to the region as Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy). Areas
of the world today which may be subject to conflict due to irredentist sentiments include
Central Europe where Hungarians inhabit states neighboring Hungary in significant
numbers; northern Kazakhstan where the Russian populations outnumbers Kazakhs, northern
Pakistan where the Pathan people are linked by nationality to people in Afghanistan; and the
Caucasus where Armenia and Azerbaijan both expressed irredentist claims (Nagorno
Karabakh is an enclave of Armenia within Azerbaijan, Nakhichevan is an enclave of
Azerbaijan within Armenia).
In response to nationalism, states often develop symbols intended to promote unity, such as
mottoes, flags, national anthems or in the landscape historical monuments or place-names.
The last one is especially important, having a strong patriotic significance. For example,
states of the former USSR are experiencing with independence a rush of renaming places in
local languages or reviving pre-Soviet names. Think about St. Petersburg, named Leningrad
in honor of Lenin but renamed St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Minority groups
Minority status implies not only lesser numbers but also the perception that one is not fully
part of the whole nation. The United States Human Rights Sub-commission defines a minority
as a group numerically smaller than the rest of the population of a state and in a nondominant position whose members are distinct from others in the population and have a sense
of solidarity for preserving their culture. Very few examples of true nation-states exist now on
Earth, therefore, every country has some minority population, including Japan and Iceland,
which are often cited as the best examples of nation-states. In some African and Asian states,
mainly as a result of colonial boundary policies, it is very difficult to determine which group
constitutes a majority within the states population (in Ivory Coast the majority accounts for
only 23% of the total population, the rest being minorities, or in the case of China, only 7% of
the population is not Han Chinese, but the resulting number of minorities is equal to at least
80 million people). The behavior of minorities is different: Swedish speaking population of
Finland seems content to remain Finnish citizens, while in the case of the Basque population
in Spain there is a strong and sometimes violent movement to create a nation-state.
At times, the balance of rights for a minority group and the desire to create a sense of
national identity in a multinational state may be difficult to achieve. Failure can result in civil
wars or cultural genocide. History suggests that nations are not that much more durable than
states in terms of existence, as cultural convergence and mixing has eliminated many nations.
Language alone is one indicator of the loss of cultures on the globe. Linguists predict that by
the middle of the 21st century, at the current rate of language loss, there will be only 300
spoken languages on earth, down from approximately 6,000 in the 20th century.

One driving force behind aspirations for minorities within multinational states to form their
own independent political areas may be the perception of uneven development: that some
regions are favored over others in terms of investment and economic growth. For example,
the recent devolutions of the states of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia occurred in part due to
separate national identities and in part to perceptions that regions in each state were not
developing in equal rates as for example the Czech Republic versus Slovakia.
The concept of enemy
All these centripetal forces are aiming to establish a common identity. At times, this process is
served by the creation of a real or imagined enemy, generating a sense of us versus them, the
idea of otherness or distinctiveness. In all cases of international conflict that become violent,
the notion of enemy is vital. The utility of the concept in nation-building and state power
seems clear: having enemies is a useful way of defining nationhood and national purpose.
Enemy is a key concept in understanding the system of international relations and conflict.
What are the sources of enemies in geopolitics? There are many cases of nations or states
which seem to have experienced a disproportionate number of enemies or conflicts compared
with the world average. The first factor explaining this is geographic: the location of states.
Conflict over borders and territory is common enough to suggest that the prime candidate for
enemy might be neighbor, although distortions to the distance factor in this notion are created
due to colonial expansion and overseas extension of military power. The concept has been
clearly defined during the Cold War era: Soviets and Americans were the best example. After
1990s, many changes have occurred: the Americans have only smaller enemies: Noriega in
Panama, Castro in Cuba, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, whereas the Russians fell their
stronger enemies in the newly independent states.
A related notion is racism helping to create a successful enemy image. For example, some
Americans think that their chief rival is Japan because of the economic increase and
Japanese FDI in USA. There were articles in newspapers entitled for example Japan moves
in showing Japanese flags planted all over the Tennessee state (due to the Nissan factory
located there). The creation of enemy is so important in geopolitics that a new discipline has
been defined - the political psychology exploring the relationship between the individual
human behavior and the behavior of states or nations with respect to enemy creation. This
process is unfolded during peace times, preparing in fact the human being to kill during the
times of war. Without this feeling the human being is more likely to refuse to kill. The creation
and portrayal of enemies has often resulted in discrimination against individuals whose
cultural backgrounds or physical appearance is consistent with the stereotype of the enemy.
Many German Americans anglicized their names after the WWI, and half the states enacted
laws prohibiting the teaching of the German language in schools. During the Cold War the
Russian government was often portrayed in American political cartoons as a hungry bear
ready to take over much of the globe. Soviet newspaper cartoons in turn portrayed Uncle Sam
as a greedy capitalist with dollar signs for eyes.

Security and conflict

More people have been killed in warfare during the 20th century than in all previous history
combined. Violent conflict is a sign of failure in international and national relations. Wars are
never planned to be long, bloody or senseless. They are always necessary, a last resort, a test
of national will. There are many metaphors for warfare. Religious philosophy may tell us that
it derives from human sinfulness; psychologists that it is a type of mass hysteria controlled
and manipulated by states and those who stand for benefit from war; strategists analyze it as a
form of international relations. War has been viewed similar to a disease in its spread and
effect, or to natural disasters in its impact on societys structure.
What role does geography play in war?
Since ancient times, military analysts have recognized that spatial factors have played a
critical role in the resolution of armed conflict. The discipline of geography has much to
contribute to understanding the questions of warfare.
First, spatial strategic factors are a crucial part of warfare planning and conduct.
Military analysts view geography as a key element in the success of campaigns and
the ability to understand where a state may be vulnerable. Classic geopolitics is based
on detailed geographical analyses such as movement of military vessels through
international straits, distribution of troops and weaponry for battle. Some of the most
interesting analyses of campaigns during the American Civil War or the Boer War in
South Africa focused on geographic factors. A common approach which is inherently
geographic is the analysis of a states industrial resources and capabilities for waging
war, vulnerability of trade and supply lines. Governments have often used
professionally trained geographers in order to undertake these military and economic
analyses. Indeed, the government of Imperial Germany in the late 19 th century created
professorships of geography at every university of the country for that specific
purpose.
Second, many conflicts arise from border disputes. Geographers classify and describe
various types of borders and border violations. Beside geographical inquiry, these
matters imply also international relations and international law.
The psychology of space may be a topic for geographic analysis. The importance of
territoriality and defending home are the links between geography and psychology. Of
particular interest here is research on place annihilation, or the death of places during
warfare.
Geographers have recognized that wars do not occur randomly in space around the
globe. Distance plays a key role in most conflicts over history, as neighboring states
are more apt to war with each another. Yet some areas of the world are especially
prone to conflict, for example the shatterbelts as the Middle East and Southeast Asia
have experienced numerous armed conflicts over the past centuries.
In addition to these more traditional ways in which geographic inquiry helps us understand
warfare, a new element relating geography and war has been occurring since WWII: the
globalization of security threats. This process takes us to look not only at the geography of

war but also at the geography of security. In terms of external threats to citizens of a state,
borders are becoming more and more permeable despite the best efforts of even wealthy states
to protect their citizens. Thus, a new kind of geography, one that looks beyond physical
definition of space to explore perceptual space, and one that moves beyond the state level to
global security questions is essential.
Four examples of such threats may be noted already within world geopolitics:
Weapons technology changes: as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons evolve,
they overcome space barriers more and more effectively. Even so-called conventional
weapons are now reaching a level of technology that will make them similar in terms
of destructive power to nuclear ones. The technology is driving the need for new
theories about geography and interstate conflict as the potential for destruction moves
far beyond the scale of national borders.
Terrorism: security threats which derive from determined small groups, outside the
level of regular wars, are presented few handicaps by traditional border barriers, yet
represent prime security threat to many states.
International crime rings, piracy and illegal drug trafficking: it is no accident that the
United States government speaks of a war on drugs and has even given some
responsibilities for fighting that war from civil to military authorities. Well-armed and
large private mafias evolving on the world scene may be the upcoming international
security threat of the 21st century and show every indication of an ability to operate
quite easily across international borders.
Environmental damage: trans-boundary environmental security risks are becoming
recognized as an important element of international relations, conflicts and legal
questions.
War in geopolitics
Three types of wars are distinguished in geopolitics:
-interstate wars (one state undertakes warfare on another state);
-civil wars (the state is a combatant on one side against an insurrection, or two or more groups
are battling within a state);
-world wars (blocks of alliances are drawn into war, or superpowers engaged in warfare).
Interstate wars. Conflicts between states may seem out of date in the modern world, and yet
when one examines yearly lists of conflicts on the globe, this type of war is still very much
present. Recent examples include the Falkland Island conflict between Great Britain and
Argentina in 1982, war between Israel and its Arab neighbors in 1967, 1973; the conflict
between Iran and Iraq 1980-1988, the ongoing Libya-Chad conflict in North Africa; India and
Pakistan off and on again conflict over the Kashmir region; the Vietnam-Kampuchean conflict
in 1970s. In almost all cases, territorial issues between neighbors were of fundamental
concern. Even the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was in part grounded in Iraqs ongoing
claim to Kuwaiti territory dating back to the days of British control over both states.
In some parts of the world, boundaries were imposed on local people by outside forces. The
most frequent examples are in the former European colonies, where 1. nations are united
artificially and civil war erupts the case of Nigeria in West Africa which underwent a costly

civil war in 1967 when the Ibo people in the east tried to create a new independent state called
Biafra (Ibo the largest ethnic group in Nigeria about 16 million people but the attempt was
over by 1970, leaving behind up to 1 million dead, many of whom were children who died
primarily of starvation); and 2. nations are divided by international boundaries and irredentist,
interstate wars result the case of Somalia versus Ethiopia over the Ogaden region (it belongs
to Ethiopia but it is inhabited by a large number of Somalis; the historical arguments are very
complicated because Somalia has been conquered over time by Great Britain and then by
Italy, every time with new boundaries).
Civil wars are conflicts between groups within a state occurring on a frequent basis under the
state system which evolved into the 20th century. Some scholars take this as evidence that
states are in essentially artificial creations unrelated to aspiration of nations.
Sometimes the rights of national groups to self-determination have been offset in the modern
world against the rights of territorial integrity and sovereignty for a state. There are also
conflicts which can exist for many years but at such a low level that violence only breaks out
occasionally, or an overlap occurs with the popular definition of terrorism such as the case of
the Basque secessionist movement in Spain or Corsicans against France. Others are
influenced by ideological battles between the superpowers and often presented as political
struggles, when they were in fact related to ethnic rivalries. For example, the war in
Afghanistan between rival tribes and political factions intensified only after the withdrawal of
the USSR.
World wars this category is used to describe wars that take place between blocs of states,
often resulting from complicated alliances which draw to many states in wars that would
otherwise have been limited to neighbors, such as the 1st and the 2nd WW in the 20th century.
The hegemonic aspirations of the superpowers during the Cold War era have been the major
cause for civil wars in the Third World. Superpower competition to establish spheres of
influence reached out to worldwide proportions with conflict zones particularly in the Middle
East, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia and allied states of USSR such as Eastern
Europe, Cuba, Nicaragua, South Yemen, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Angola; and allied states of
the US Israel, South Korea, Philippines and Somalia. Through military alliances (NATO,
Warsaw Pact, Seato - South East Asia Treaty Organization) states not directly involved in
conflict were drawn into military unions and in some cases into wars themselves.
The ultimate world war has been considered to be the nuclear war which could have drawn in
states not aligned to one side or another due to global climate patterns of damage. East and
Southern Asian states may have suffered the most severe losses if climate change models were
accurate in their prediction of temperature drops due to dust concentrations in the atmosphere.
Failure of the Asian rice crop would have resulted in massive famines and perhaps a higher
total loss of lives than even direct damage to either the US or the USSR. Thus, China and
India with large rural populations spatially concentrated and dependent on rice, would be
particularly affected by the possibility of a world nuclear war. Even without a nuclear conflict,
a new major superpower war would allow few bystanders because of environmental damage
and economic disruption.

New security threats as stated by the National Military Strategy paper in the USA in 1992 are
the threats of the unknown, the uncertain. The threat is instability and being unprepared to
handle a crisis or war that no one predicted or expected. General world instability,
international crime, environmental problems and new types of weapons especially in the
hands of developing countries are the most important threats at least for the people of the US.
There is evidence in many parts of the world that the elite are reverting to systems akin to the
Middle Ages when wealthy people and small communities established personal protection.
For example private armies are springing up in the former USSR to protect the new rich from
the criminals or multinational firms around the world spend money acquiring technology to
help protect their workers against terrorism.
War and religious beliefs
During the Ancient Times, churches support the pacifism. By the Middle Ages, the church
became deeply involved in all aspects of societys life, and argued that good Christians could
participate in just wars. The war was accepted if unavoidable to restore peace. Some
churches accepted the just war, such as the Protestant Reformation, Luther and Calvin, others
held to a pacifist dogma (Mennonite, Anabaptist). Judaism stresses the search for peace as
part of Gods original purpose for people, but that sometimes destruction is required if it is for
a good end. The Talmud distinguishes between optional and obligatory or defensive wars.
Within Jewish traditions there is room for a variety of interpretations and moral guidance, and
thus much latitude of choice for the individual believer. Perhaps the best word to express the
tradition of Judaism is shalom meaning peace not just as absence of war, but also as a
general condition of well-being. Islam is sometimes viewed by non-adherents in Western
cultures as a war-like religion, but in actual fact the teachings of Islam do not argue for war
any more than Christian or Jewish traditions. The Jihad is the idea of holy war in Islam and
Muhammed the Prophet was certainly a military as well as a spiritual leader. However, Jihad
means striving, not actual war, and can refer to evangelical activities of the religion which
do not require the use of force. The Hindu faith, prevalent in India and other parts of Asia,
recognizes a warrior caste within its system, but also argues that killing should be avoided if
possible. Buddhism, the faith that was originated in the sixth century out of Hinduism, teaches
that one of the right actions people must strive for is non-violence. In fact, killing for gain in
war, murder, or even killing for food, must all be regarded as immoral. But non-violence must
be a personal ethic, requiring meditation and reflection to attain. One religious group that has
come on the world scene only recently and has suffered great losses due to adherence to nonviolence is the Bahai faith. This religion originated in Iran of the 19 th century and offers a
vision of a single, unified faith and moral code for the world.
New security threats
After 1990s when the SU broke up and, so, the big enemy disappeared, the United States
reformulated its strategic principles: readiness, collective security, arms control, maritime and
aerospace superiority, strategic agility, power protection, technological superiority and
decisive force. According to these new principles, the biggest threat pf all to US security was
the threat of the unknown, the uncertain - the threat of uncertainty and being unprepared to

handle a crisis or war that no one predicted or expected (National Military Strategic Paper).
General world instability, international crime, environmental problems, and new types of
weapons were all noted as threats to the people of the United States. Of interest to the
geographer is the fact that most of these threats operate out of the traditional borders. They
therefore create a new type of geopolitical security space, which is based more on
psychological, perceptual, or jurisdictional space than on defensible physical boundaries. If
wars in the next century become harder to classify using traditional definitions of conflict,
security threats will increasingly become global and move beyond the control of state borders.
Nuclear war. Atomic weapons have not been used in war since 1945, and yet they dominated
the defense of the superpowers during the Cold War and still exist in plentiful numbers in the
world. With the end of the Cold War, new threats related to nuclear weapons have emerged:
do North Korea and Iraq have the capability to create nuclear weapons? Will the nonproliferation treaty continue to be respected? Is nuclear terrorism a possibility? Nuclear
weapons are unique geopolitically because they alone offer the possibility of total destruction
of the planets ecosystem. If the nuclear winter theory is correct, the war between the United
States and the Soviet Union might have caused the destruction of much life on the planet a
type of terracide.
While the largest arsenals are still held by Russian and the United States, the United
Kingdom, France and China also possess nuclear weapons. The production of nuclear arms is
a major industry and many allied states host nuclear weapons without having sovereign
control over their use. There have been almost 2,000 nuclear weapons explosions since 1945,
mainly for testing. People who have died directly because of nuclear weapons since 1945 total
over 100,000, including people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others may have had
their lives shortened due to contamination by nuclear testing. Beside SALT I signed by US
and SU in 1972, another agreement was designed in 1991 to cut US and Soviet strategic
arsenals. START II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) calls for a 50% reduction in strategic
nuclear arms by the year 2003.
Terrorism is difficult to define because the violent act one group regards as terrorism may be
seen as patriotic act by another. The concept of terrorism could be defined by taking into
account the following elements:
-political motivation rather than economic gain;
-threat of violence, particularly of a surprise nature and directed at innocent civilians
-maximum use of publicity the draw the worlds attention;
-committed by a group, not part of a sovereign state government.
It is a phenomenon that occurs beyond the constraints of borders and distance, despite efforts
to protect citizens through metal detectors.
Europe has been an especially prime location for terrorist attacks due to its geographic
location as a world air travel crossroads, the number of nationalist disputes within Europe,
and past colonial ties to Third World states. The opening of borders with the European Union
plans have made police wary about their ability to provide security within Europe as goods
and people circulate more freely.

Can there be a military solution to terrorism? The 1993 bombing of a high-rise building in
New York City proven that even the United States may not stay immune to such security
threats. The fatal day of September 11, 2001 and the destroying of the Twins as symbols of
American power opened the way to fight terrorism at an international scale. Osama Bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein became the most popular and wanted characters and stay as the big
enemies of the world ever since after. The latter has been captured some time ago.
Illegal drug trafficking, international crime. Drug trade has become lately an international
security issue moving from the civil crime domain into the military one, and the possibility
that international crime rings may now be dealing in nuclear and other advanced weaponry
items is increasing the fear. In addition, international crime groups have also affected states
security in absolute disregard for traditional border defense in areas such as money
laundering, illegal immigrant traffic, and even the growing black market for human body
organs thanks in part to technology for transplant operations. The breakdown of borders in
Europe following the European Union agreements and the demise of the tight control under
the USSR have added two elements that have facilitated the international flow of illegal
activities. Many of the crime groups are related to major ethnicities (Sicilian, Russian,
Japanese, Chinese) and therefore can take advantage of family-like connections as well.
At the start of the 21st century, conflict and security matters for states become more
complicated and traditional defenses less effective. Geography is proving a diminishing
barrier to a host of security threats, which may affect citizens even of wealthy countries.
Security threats now have much more of a collective nature and therefore require collective
solutions and more international cooperation among governments who serve states and
international agencies.