Review of International Studies (2001), 27, 451–463 Copyright © British International Studies Association

Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century

Rudolf Kjellén’s ‘The State as a Living
Organism’
OLA TUNANDER

1. Introduction

Rudolf Kjellén was an important political scientist during the first half of this
century. He is perhaps the most influential Scandinavian political scientist ever.
Together with the political geographer Fredrich Ratzel, Kjellén was the founder of
the German geopolitical school. All his major works were translated into German,
but they were, to my knowledge, never translated into English. They were important
sources of inspiration for the leading geopolitical theorist and military general, Karl
Haushofer.1 By the time of his visit to Sweden in 1935, Haushofer was about to
publish the 25th German edition of Kjellén’s Die Grossmächte [The Great Powers].2
The idea that states were not fixed juridicial entities but dynamic organisms com-
peting on the international scene, was something that appealed to Haushofer. He
was to fuse this thought with Ratzel’s concept of Lebensraum, that was later to reach
Hitler.
Kjellén, however, was no Nazi. His political thinking leaned less towards the
national-romantic Blut und Boden and more towards the German Cosmopolitan
tradition with its multicultural unity and drive towards a multinational league of
states; a union that would respect the freedom and independence of states under the
leadership of a central power.3 His description of this union is practically identical
with what was later to become NATO. He believed in Germany, not the USA, as the
guarantor power for the Continental European or at least for the Central European
states. NATO’s survival after the Cold War and its focus on ethnicity, territoriality
and discourse analysis makes Kjellén’s notions even more relevant. One can recog-
nize Kjellén’s geopolitical thoughts not only in the organic state of the early
twentieth century, but also in the multinational and cosmopolitan military union of
the latter half of the same century. We can also recognize the debate on ‘the clash
of civilizations’ in very recent years. All these notions are rooted in different aspects

1
Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (Berlin Grünewald: Kurt
Vowinckel Verlag, 1927); Dan Diner, ‘Grundbuch des Planeten’—Zur Geopolitik Karl Haushofer,
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 32: 1 (1984), pp. 1–28; Barbro Lewin, Johan Skytte och de
skytteanska professorerna [Johan Skytte and the Skyttean Professors]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis
(Skrifter utgivna av Statsvetenskapliga föreningen i Uppsala, 100), (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
International, 1985); Rainer Sprengel, ‘Land und Meer—Eine diskursanalytische Betrachtung’,
WeltTrends (1994), pp. 61–84.
2
Edward Thermænius, ‘Geopolitik och politisk geografi’ [Geopolitics and Political Geography],
Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 19 (1937), pp. 213–328.
3
Rudolf Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem [The Political Problems of the World War]
(Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1915).

451
452 Ola Tunander

of Kjellén’s thoughts and the history of geopolitics cannot be discussed without

reference to his works. He was in fact the political scientist who, as early as 1899,
coined the phrase ‘geopolitics’.4
Rudolf Kjellén was born in 1864. He studied in Gothenburg, defended his
doctoral thesis at Uppsala in 1890, and, in the following year, he began to teach
‘Political Science with Geography’ at the newly-instituted college in Gothenburg. In
1901, he had become professor in ‘Political Science with Statistics’. In 1916 he was
summoned to Uppsala, where he became professor in ‘Rhetoric and Political
Science’, which post he held until his death in 1922.5
Kjellén was a singer, politician and a scholar. He travelled the world with his
fellow singers and was also given the opportunity of visiting the USA where he was
fascinated by the ‘ “negroe” and his wordless elegance’.6 Kjellén was a conservative
parliamentarian, who worked to promote constitutional monarchy as opposed to
excessive parliamentarianism. He tried to define the ‘royal road’ of Swedish politics
as the undercurrent of a river following ‘a winding track between dangerous banks
on the right- and left-hand sides’.7 He was a socially concerned nationalist, who
fought against the liberals and their minimal state as well as against the socialists
and their maximal view of the state. Despite his hostility towards contemporary
socialism, his social ideals had similarities with latter day social democracy. He
influenced the Social Democrat economist and politician Gunnar Myrdal,8 and
advocated a ‘national-socialism’, unlike the ‘class-socialism’ of his time. The latter,
he regarded as destructive to the nation.9 But contrary to the later German national-
socialism, Kjellén was no anti-intellectual or racist. He advocated respect for other
races and cultures, and thought universal suffrage would function as a tool against
political extremism. His ideas were closer to the Swedish Social Democrat and
former prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, than to the Nazi leaders. But unlike the
Social Democrats, Kjellén regarded war as an instrument that could be used to
strengthen the nation, and rejected the pacifism, materialism and laxity of
liberalism.10 Kjellén found himself at the centre of politics in the formative years of
Swedish democracy. He was elected a member of the Second Chamber of parlia-
ment from 1905–8 and to the First Chamber from 1910–18, where he represented the
so-called ‘Young-Right’ or ‘Young Conservatives’.11
As a scholar, Kjellén worked for an independent discipline of political science
against liberal legalism. Political science, in his view, was not to be reduced to a sub-

4
Thermænius, ‘Geopolitik’, pp. 213–328; Sprengel, ‘Land und Meer’, pp. 61–84; Peter J. Taylor,
‘Geopolitische Weltordnung’, WeltTrends, 4 (1994), pp. 25–37.
5
Ruth Kjellén-Björkquist, Rudolf Kjellén: En människa i tiden kring sekelskiftet [Rudolf Kjellén:
A Man at the Turn of the Century]. (Stockholm: Verbum, 1970); Lewin, Johan Skytte och de
skytteanska professorerna; Fredrika Lagergren, På andra sidan välfärdsstaten [On the Other Side of
the Welfare State] (Göteborg: Brutus Östlings förlag, 1999).
6
Lewin, Johan Skytte och de skytteanska professorerna, p. 168.
7
Rudolf Kjellén, Politiska essayer [Political Essays], vol. 2 (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers förlag, 1914),
p. 215.
8
Gunnar Falkenmark, ‘Rudolf Kjellén—Vetenskapsman eller humbug?’, in Gunnar Falkenmark (ed.),
Statsvetarporträtt—Svenska statsvetare under 350 år. (Stockholm: SNS förlag, 1992), pp. 89–109.
9
Kjellén, Politiska essayer, vol. 2 (1914), p. 22.
10
Nils Elvander, Harald Hjärne och konservatismen—Konservativ idédebatt i Sverige 1865–1922 [Harald
Hjärne and the Conservatism—Conservative Debate in Sweden 1865–1922] (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1961).
11
Kjellén, Politiska essayer [Political Essays], vol. 1 (1914); Lagergren, På andra sidan välfärdsstaten
(1999).
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 453

discipline of other sciences like law, geography, ethnology, national-economics or

history. According to Kjellén, it had to have its own identity. The state should not be
reduced and separated into its many different functions. To Kjellén the state did not
represent a mix of what he termed ‘geo-politics, ethno-politics, economy-politics,
socio-politics and regimental-politics’ but a unity, a living organism, a ‘force and will’
that incorporated all these political fields.
Due to the Nazi defeat in World War II, geopolitics, and primarily the Swedish-
German geopolitics, was tarnished. Numerous political scientists expressed repulsion
towards Kjellén. They have held his organism theory, his acceptance of the ‘great
power-morale’ and geopolitics in contempt.12 Yet today we see that Kjellén’s
thoughts—his focus on ethnicity and territoriality, his discourse analysis, and his
views on the genesis of states and the formation of political unions—once again
occupy the centre stage of scholarly discourse. Upon closer scrutiny his thoughts
have, in practice, been highly influential throughout the twentieth century. Kjellén,
however, was no real democrat, because ‘popular emotions are not governed by
reason’, and ‘majority concerns may not recognize the minority’. He was, mean-
while, in many respects, the political scientist of the ‘golden middle-way’ and he
achieved influence far beyond his conservative followers. However, despite his
importance on the Continent, his political thinking had virtually no impact on
Britain.
Kjellén’s practical political experiences were to shape his political thinking, with
texts such as Stormakterna I-IV [The Great Powers] (1911–13), Samtidens stormakter
[Contemporary Great Powers] (1914), Politiska essayer I-III [Political Essays] (1914-
15), Världskrigets politiska problem [The Political Problem of the World War] (1915)
and Statens som livsform [The State as a Living Organism] (1916). In the
introduction to the latter, Kjellén describes it as his ‘main work, that lends unity to
divergent works on subjects of theoretical and practical politics. The various studies
are like streams forming a common river of a unified political idea’.13

2. Kjellén’s organic concept of statehood—the state in general

Kjellén makes fascinating reading. The reader finds himself at the heart of the
current debate on ethnicity and territoriality, on power and identity, on metaphors
and discursive analysis, despite the fact that he is confined to a time in which
political science was in its infancy. His organic view of the state was an attempt to
regard the state as an independent object of study with its own dynamic and logic,
power and will, an organic unity of land and people, an organism with body and
soul, a personality on the international stage. He explains this thought by using
further metaphors from poetry and prose: like man, the state may lose a limb
without perishing, but ‘there are others, without which the state could not survive.

12
Falkenmark, ‘Rudolf Kjellén’ (1992), pp. 89–109.
13
Rudolf Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform [The State as a Living Organism] (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers
förlag, 1916), p. v; Rudolf Kjellén, Stormakterna I-11 earlier edition 1905 (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers
förlag,1911–13); Rudolf Kjellén, Politiska essayer [Political Essays], vols. I-III. (Stockholm: Hugo
Gebers förlag, 1914); Rudolf Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem [The Political Problems of the
World War] (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1915).
454 Ola Tunander

Even state-bodies have their Achilles’ heels and hearts. These vital parts are first and
foremost the capitals and the arteries of communication’.14 Another example:
Napoleon ‘believed that by striking Moscow, he would strike at the heart of Russia;
that was a false generalization that lay behind his military strategy, for Russia as yet
had no heart in the Western sense of the word’.15 What has been termed, in the
literature of the West, ‘Russia’s nomadic character’, enabled Russia to withdraw
from its central cities without disintegrating as an empire.16
Kjellén approaches his object of study, not by creating a model but by using
metaphors formed by everyday experience, as will be evidenced by this article. It is
an empirical approach as to how we, or rather, politicians, journalists and writers,
speak of the state and how we immediately describe this general concept. He quotes
newspapers: ‘Austria comes forth as the champion of armed despotism’, ‘Turkey has
been ambushed’, ‘Germany has vengefully isolated England’, and he concludes: the
state obviously is more than just a legal entity. He seeks to analyse the state as it
appears to us, as judge and coercive power, as entrepeneur and parent, as diplomat
and warrior, because ‘the state must itself, by its actions, bear witness to its
essence’.17
According to Kjellén’s linguistic research, the states’s unity of ‘state and land’ has
been a connotation of the word from its introduction into the Swedish language in
the middle of the seventeenth century. And he specifically turns against the minimal
state of liberal individualism, that is reduced to a ‘grumpy and impolite old man
behind a wicket’.18 Kjellén’s ideal of science is centred on critical distance, empirical
scrutiny of current discurses and a striving to find the essence of things, but he
maintains a humorous and partly ironic distance from his own metaphors. Con-
ceptual dryness, models and a narrow description of the state’s random forms of
appearance, are not Kjellén’s style. The concept of state is developed by a myriad of
metaphors. By reading The State as a Living Organism we are invited into Kjellén’s
laboratory of political science.
To Kjellén, political science always risked being transformed into an apology for
the randomly realized ideal of statehood. But, Kjellén says in his critique of
liberalism, the state is inseparable from its land and people. We speak of England,
Finland, Poland, and Holland, of Denmark and Sverige (in Swedish), of Russland
and Frankreich (in German), of states as units comprised of land and people, as
geographic and ethnographic categories. He quotes Friedrich Ratzel’s Politiche
Geographie, ‘Every state is in part a piece of humanity and in part a piece of land’.19
We also speak of ‘Moder Svea’ (the Mother Sweden) and ‘Uncle Sam’. The state
comes across as an ‘organic individual’, with its feet on the ground. In a critique of
the then hegemonic school of liberalism, he once again quotes Ratzel and claims
that as long as political science remains ‘in the air’, then ‘geography must fill the
vacancy’.20

14
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, p. 50.
15
Ibid., p. 53.
16
Iver B. Neumann, ‘The Geopolitics of Delineating “Russia” and “Europe”—The Creation of the
“Other” in European and Russian Tradition’, in Ola Tunander, et al. Geopolitics in Post-Wall Europe:
Security, Territory and Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 147–73.
17
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, p. 9.
18
Ibid., p. 6.
19
Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (München & Berlin: R. Oldenburg, 1897 [1903]), p. 4.
20
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, p. 22.
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 455

As mentioned above, ‘the state-body’—as an organic unity of land and people,

and as an organic individual with vital parts like ‘heart’ and ‘arteries’—must be
regarded as a metaphor, illuminating a process or internal logic, not as a dog-
matically fixed concept. It is used by Kjellén to say that lost parts of a country must
not be compared to the loss of property, ‘but to an operation; a consequence of
which is not only a loss of removed tissue, but also of a certain strength. […W]here
health is yet present, one finds an instinctive need to regain what has been lost by
intensive internal development’.21 After the Swedish-Russian war and Sweden’s loss
of Finland in 1809, Sweden had, according to Kjellén, to substitute its loss through
internal development, especially by forest and river exploitation in the north. And he
refers to the words of Swedish poet Esaias Tegner (Svea, 1815): Finland that ‘had
just been torn like a pound of bloody flesh from the heart of the state!; […] Let,
Svea, your mountains doubly cast its tax; the harvest in your nocturnal forest
sprout; Lead the waves of the river like loyal subjects, and from within the Swedish
bounds Finland restore’.22
Today, we might add that some European and particularly Central-European
states seem eager to cut off parts of their territories. Underdeveloped, conflictual
and undemocratic regions are regarded as ‘proud flesh’, which one would seek to
amputate. This applies to Czech enthusiasm in granting Slovakia independence, and
to Slovenia’s (and Croatia’s) amputation of the militaristic/backward Serbia,
Montenegro and Macedonia, and to Russia of the early 1990s concerning its con-
scious exclusion of the Central Asian republics.23 In the aftermath of the fall of the
Berlin Wall, some Hungarian leaders began talking about border revisions including
a possible future regaining of the ‘cradle of Hungary’: the Romanian Transylvania.
Although after a couple of years, this idea was given up.24
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this tendency throughout Central Europe
has seemingly been contradictory to Kjellén’s way of thinking; in other words, the
21
Ibid., p. 50.
22
Tegner, Esaias, ‘Svea’, in Lars Gustavsson (ed.), Svensk Dikt (Stockholm: Wahlström och Widstrand
1978 [1815]), p. 255.
23
By amputating its Central Asian territories, mostly the Turkic republics—always backward, inefficient
and costly to Moscow—Russia became more of a European state, closer to the centre of Europe. In
October 1991, three liberal ministers—Gennady Burbulis, Andrei Kozyrev and Yegor Gajdar—sent a
memorandum to President Yeltsin, recommending that he grant independence to the Turkic republics
and thus get rid of this overpopulated, backward and undemocratic region. Two weeks before the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, the President of the Kazakh SSR, Nursultan Nazarbaiev, said: ‘I
am doing my best to preserve the USSR as an integral state but you, representatives of the Moscow
intelligentsia, should know that Yeltsin’s team has quite a different strategy’ (Alexander Tsipko, ‘A
New Russian Identity or Old Russia’s Reintegration?’, Security Dialogue, 25:4 (December 1994),
pp. 444–5). Despite the weak national movements in the Turkic republics, Moscow granted
independence to the Central Asian states in December 1991. It retained its military responsibility for
Central Asia and Transcaucasia—defined in the Tashkent Treaty—and became involved in the wars in
Georgia, Tadzhikistan and Chechnya. Generally, however, Moscow managed to cut loose from the
Turkic people’s backwardness and distance itself from the high birth-rate, which for years had been a
source of worry to the Russians. In 1993, the Chairman of the International Affairs committee of the
Russian Parliament, Evgeni Ambartsumov, stated that Russia was not interested in an alliance
predominantly with the Central Asian states, because that would pull Russia away from Europe (John
Lough, ‘Defining Russia’s Relation with Neighboring States’, RFE/RL Research Report, 2:20 (14 May
1993), p. 60.
24
Jószef Antáll declared in 1990 that he in his ‘soul’ was ‘Prime Minister of 15 million Hungarians’ (i.e.
including the Hungarian population in the neighbouring countries). However, in order to be accepted
by the EU and to develop a more efficient economy, Hungary found it had to emphasize a political
status quo. In 1995, the new Prime Minister Gyula Horn declared himself ‘Prime Minister of 10
million Hungarians’.
456 Ola Tunander

loss of a part of the ‘state-body’ has been accepted but only in order to strengthen
the state’s position in a greater ‘organic’ community and to get rid of less ‘efficient’
peripheral areas. In Czechoslovakia, Slovak leaders mobilized popular nationalism
against Prague as a card in the Czech-Slovak power game. The Czechs then chose to
take the Slovak quest for independence seriously in order to liberate themselves from
the Slovak burden—its inefficiency and traditionalism. To quote a Prague weekly
Respect, immediately prior to secession: ‘Alone to Europe, or together to the
Balkans’.25 Prague was willing to let Slovakia go—or rather, important power elites
in Czechia happily cut off its ‘proud flesh’, amputating its nationalistic East—in
order to strengthen the Czech economy, make negotiations easier with the Western
institutions, and move its centre of gravity westwards towards the EU and NATO.
The fact that the more cosmopolitan West aims for centrality—and access to the EU
and NATO—indicates a new European geopolitics less inclined to stress the state’s
own territory and more inclined to stress its ranking in the international hierarchy.
However, this idea of ‘amputation of proud flesh’ does not contradict Kjellén’s
universe. On the contrary, it draws on his metaphors to explain the radical changes
that have taken place. This way of approaching the state as an object of study—to
listen to the spoken word, to utilize the daily metaphors that describe a process and
transform it into a concept—radically departs from the juridical, and even more so
from the economists’ approach. In the calamities of World War I, to speak of actors
of war as economic or juridicial objects struck Kjellén as meaningless. On the other
hand, war and diplomacy cannot just be removed to the domain of historians. They
are an integral part of activities of states and, if excluded from political science, the
state in general cannot be understood: a state’s declaration of independence is worth
naught unless recognized by international law, which is tantamount to recognition
by the Great Powers. The current system of international law has no ‘room for
newcomers […] who are by their very birth guilty of breaches to that law. The
established system with its neat portioning and minutely balanced juridicial relations
must after all be rearranged to make room for the newcomer. In the eyes of the
international law and morale, the birth of every new state is obviously a scandal and
the infant will be regarded as a bastard in the inqusitional books of international
law’.26
To Kjellén, the problem with political science of the time was its interdisciplinary
and sub-divided nature, and its lack of an independent identity. For the political
scientist of today this is a strange problem. Political science suffers neither lack of
identity nor lack of students. Rather, it concentrates on limiting its territory and
refining its identity to avoid intrusion from other disciplines, which would give it
an interdisciplinary, ‘multi-cultural’ character which would naturally devalue a
professor’s competence and limit his power. Even the specific political science
identity, as described by Kjellén, is met with resistance at many universities, since he
advocates essay form and a plethora of metaphors to approach his concept. Mean-
while, Kjellén’s early analyses have not only had a direct influence on Continental
political science during the first half of this century, they also find resonance in the
politics of the Cold War era, and not least the political discussions of today’s
international politics.
25
Jacques Rubnik, ‘The International Context’, in Jiri Musil (ed.), The End of Czechoslovakia
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), p. 274.
26
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, pp. 163–4.
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 457

3. ‘Geo-politics’ and ‘ethno-politics’

To Kjellén, ‘geo-politics’, the geographical influence on the behaviour of states, must

be supplemented by ‘ethno-politics’, which is the study of the ‘ethnic organism’, the
population as a people. While ‘geo-politics’ looks to the state, ‘ethno-politics’ looks
to the nation. ‘One cannot divorce land from the state, without the state as a concept
losing its meaning, and, the people leaving the land, kills the state’.27 ‘Geo-politics’
and ‘ethno-politics’ are, according to Kjellén, complementary aspects of the state.
Together they form the ‘nature-side’ of the state, while the ‘economy-politics’ (the
household), ‘socio-politics’ and ‘regiment politics’ or the ‘politics of the executive’
(governmental) form the ‘culture-side’ of the state, in which ‘it will appear more
creative and free’.28 Nations are thus to be regarded as nature, ‘like organisms in a
biological sense, whose only fixed points are their interests, prejudices and urges: the
desire for realisation and growth, the will to life and the will to power. We shall not
deny altruistic tendencies, and they may sometimes even get into power [sic], but
they will develop only when not directly conflicting with the egoistic tendencies.’ 29
In his writings, Kjellén tends to emphasize the ‘nature-side’ of the state believing
that this limits and shapes the ‘cultural-side’, while it is through the rationality of
the latter that the former can be disciplined. ‘The nation has feelings, society (and
the household) interests; regiment implies duties. The regiment [the governmental
apparatus] pits its rational ambitions against the nation’s essence of desire; the
regiment pits its permanent institutions and its legally defended freedoms against
the class struggle and coercion of society. The regiment is accordingly the essence of
the “culture-side” of the state. It tries to transcend the superpower of nature/desire
in free and purposeful acting.’ 30
‘Swedish-German geopolitics’, as expressed by Kjellén with his organic fusion of
the ethnic, the geographic, the economical and political, is well reflected in today’s
political development, but this geopolitical tradition constitutes an extension and
redefinition of his geopolitical concept. This is something we are compelled to
accept. As geopolitics in today’s usage has come to be associated with a particular
discipline of political science, and not, as with Kjellén, an aspect of the state, the
term ‘geopolitics’ has also come to include what he termed ‘ethno-politics, economy-
politics, socio-politics, and regimental politics’.
Kjellén regarded the nation-state as a natural expression of the unity between
land and people—a land with more or less ‘natural boundaries’ and with a degree of
self-sufficiency. To Kjellén, geo-politics, ethno-politics, and economy-politics seem to
have found their natural form in the nation-state. The people seek freedom through
the state, while the state seeks ‘spiritual content’ in the people.31 The previous dyna-
mics seem to work in a dual way in reference to the developments in the Balkans, on
the one hand, and Italy, on the other: ‘As a centrifugal force in which several nations
fixed in the same state yearned for freedom, and as a centripetal force in which
different states of the same nation yearned for unity’.32 He was obviously influenced
27
Ibid., p. 40.
28
Ibid., p. 38.
29
Ibid., p. 96.
30
Ibid., p. 149.
31
Ibid., p. 112.
32
Ibid., p. 106.
458 Ola Tunander

by Hegel and writes that ‘[t]he state offers the nation a spiritual content, which it in
itself lacks. The blind instincts of the nation are mitigated and controlled by
juridical and rational ideas. Its force of nature has entered a higher level of
consciousness giving it a rational form. Under the light of freedom, it has tied itself
to historical responsibility’.33
In the preceding paragraphs, the people and the land with its ‘natural bound-
aries’, are imagined as something given. We picture island-states like Britain, or
peninsular-states like Spain, Italy and the Scandinavian ones with their marked
borders and relatively homogeneous populations. But to Kjellén this is simply a
tendency. The peoples are shaped through the centuries. He describes how the
Spanish people grew out of the most diverse peoples. ‘England conjures the same
image; on the basis of Celts, Roman and Germanic races: you have Picts and Scots,
Brits and Gaules of different sorts, Roman and French nomads are gathered therein;
Danes arrived directly from southern Scandinavia and Angles and Saxons from
North-west Germany; nevertheless, no-one disputes the English nation’s distinct and
fixed form. […] The truth is that there is no such thing as a pure race; to base
politics on ethnographic analysis is to base it on an illusion’.34
Consequently one must distinguish the idea of the nation-state from practical
politics, and it was apparent to Kjellén that the nation-state was becoming too small
to correspond to the twenthieth century’s political and economic necessities. ‘The
classic example is close: if Fredric The Great’s Prussia was enough for the eighteenth
century balance, then Bismarck’s Germany was needed for that of the nineteenth
century. And now, when the standard has swollen to include the vast empires of
England, Russia and the USA, the balance seems to advocate a Mittel Europa, be it
in the minor form of Germany-Austria-Hungary (Naumann) or rather in the greater
form, to include the Levant (Jaeckh). This is the picture of a state-complex or a
state-block to meet geographical changes.’ 35 In other words, these are indicators
pointing towards unions like NATO or the EU. Kjellén, meanwhile, stresses that
such a block of states lacks an ethnic unity and must respect the particular nations’
identities, so as not to be transformed into a regime that ‘smothers all autonomous
life with the force of its culture’.36 ‘Neither Mittel Europa nor Pan-America have any
relation to ethnic units. The former seeks to unite such diverse races as Germans,
Slavs, Finns and Turks, and the latter strives to ignore the fundamental racial
contradiction and unite Germans (together with the other ingredients in the Yankee
blood) with Romans. Here, geography has a clear advantage over ethnography.’ 37
Swedish-German geopolitics constitutes a fusion of geographic, ethnic and
economic elements, that shape state politics and through ‘regimental politics’ mould
its ‘nature-side’ by the reason of culture. This train of thought radically differs from
Anglo-Saxon geopolitics, as we know it from the Cold War imagery. Swedish-
German geopolitics, despite its shady past, is today revealed in a more relevant light.

33
Ibid., p. 103.
34
Ibid., pp. 86–8.
35
Ibid., p. 67.
36
Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem, p. 167.
37
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, p. 115.
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 459

4. Germanic and Anglo-Saxon geopolitics

During the Cold War, geopolitics played a central role, not so much in the academic
as in the political-military sphere. The formulation of the containment policy and
the NATO alliance from the end of the 1940s, and its development in past decades,
alongside weapons deployments from the 1970s and 1980s, were all motivated by
geopolitical arguments. But officially, these arguments were supported first and
foremost by the Anglo-Saxon geopolitics advanced by Halford Mackinder, Nicholas
Spykman, Colin Gray and Zbigniew Brzezinski.38 Like Kjellén, Mackinder warned
of a Russian expansion on account of the new railroad’s advantage to sea-transport.
But unlike the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Kjellén and German geopolitics stressed not
only, or even primarily, the relation between development of technology and geo-
graphy, but also their connection with ethnicity, political thought and economic
space. Undoubtedly, American political science, particularly Hans Morgenthau, has
inherited important ideas from the German tradition, not least from Max Weber
and Carl Schmitt,39 but to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the state and identity was
more or less fixed. To the ‘Germans’ this was something that constituted a con-
tinuous process. Anglo-Saxon universalism stood in opposition to the German
‘culturalism’ or ‘contextualism’.
In today’s Europe, with unclear and changeable identities, focusing primarily on
weapons and the reach of communication systems seems passé. One can no longer
think politics without considering ethnicity, cultural identity and political ideas.
When Samuel Huntington40 discusses ‘the clash of civilizations’ it is an indication
that politics has become something much closer to the ideas presented by Kjellén.
The geographical dividing line that Huntington draws between East and West is
almost identical to the one Kjellén, 80 years earlier, had stressed and termed ‘the
great cultural line between Russia and Europe’. Kjellén turned against Pushkin’s
thought that ‘all small Slavic streams float to the Russian sea’.41 That which is to the
west of this historic dividing-line, ‘[t]he White Sea–the Lake of Pejpus–the Rokitno
Marshes–the River Don–[…] belongs to Europe—with culture preceding the race.
The great divide is not Germanics versus Slavs, but GermanicsWest- and South
SlavsFinnish cultural tribes versus Eastern Slavs [sic]. The concept of race is
eliminated’.42
38
Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Norton Library, 1919); Nicholas J.
Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1942); Nicholas J. Spykman, Geography of Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1944); Colin Gay, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands and the Technological
Revolution (New York: Crane, Rusak, 1977); Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategic
Framework for the Conduct of the US–Soviet Contest (Boston & New York: The Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1986).
39
Alfons Söllner, ‘German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism’, in Telos, 72
(Summer 1987), pp. 161–77; Tarak Barkawi, ‘Strategy as a Vocation: Weber, Morgenthau and
Modern Strategic Studies’, Review of International Studies, 24:2 (1998), pp. 159–84; Hans-Karl
Pichler, ‘The Godfathers of “Truth”: Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s Theory of Power
Politics’, Review of International Studies, 24: 2 (April 1998), pp. 185–200.
40
Samuel Huntington, ‘No Exit—The Errors of Endism’, The National Interest, 17 (Fall 1989),
pp. 3–11; Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (1993), pp. 22–49;
Samuel Huntington, ‘The West is Unique—Not Universal’, Foreign Affairs, 75: (Nov.-December
1996), pp. 28–46.
41
Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem, p. 122.
42
Ibid., p. 124.
460 Ola Tunander

Kjellén points to the cultural divide between the Germanic/Western Slavic

Central-Europe and the East Slavic Russia. This divide, he predicted, may come to
play host to a higher political organization, either in the form of a centralistic
regime, or in the form of a Central European league of states under German
leadership. A federal league of nations with Germany–Austria at the centre would
give the West-Slavic peoples their only chance to avoid Russian domination. This,
however, would require a Germany choosing its cosmopolitan, Austrian
(Habsburgian) face, rather than its Prussian one. The Prussian racial intolerance
towards the Poles must change towards respect for individual customs and culture
similar to the Austrian state-concept with its multinational ‘system of freedom vis-à-
vis Czechs, Poles et al.43 We now know that this Central European union or league
never materialized. After World War I, the victors, instead, created a broad buffer
zone of independent states that were to perish during World War II. Only thereafter
did the Allies feel compelled to create a political-military union, a league of states
under the leadership of a central power. This role was, however, reserved for the
USA and not for Germany.
The resemblance between Kjellén’s ideas and the ideas that shape NATO is
striking. The thought of a multinational and non-hegemonic league of states under
the leadership of a central power that guarantees liberty and security is thus no
current innovation. Kjellén assumed that Germany would be accepted by its Slavic
neighbours, if it chose its multi-ethnic, Austrian-Habsburgian, face. Such a multi-
national union under German military and political leadership would be recognised
as legitimate, and Kjellén assumed that the Central European peoples would turn to
Germany in the same way as once Western Europe and now the Central-European
peoples have turned to the USA.
This interpretation provokes us, once again, to look at the nature of NATO.
During the Cold War, NATO came across to most of us as an alliance fortifying the
West against an external enemy: the Soviet Union. But then this alliance should have
collapsed after the Soviet disintegration. This did not happen despite the predictions
made by neorealism.44 NATO seems to have possessed an organizational and
political identity, as well as a significant leadership, that has kept the organization
alive. NATO signifies certain values—democracy, rule of law, market economy,
individual liberty, national pluralism—that demand a political-military organization,
or, if preferred, union. This political-military organization that has dominated the
West bears a greater resemblance to what Kjellén describes as a solution to the
Central European problem, than anything else that has traditionally been associated
with the term ‘alliance’.
A contemporary of Kjellén and the father of British geopolitics, Halford
Mackinder, presented his solution for Central Europe.45 He advocated the creation
of a zone of minor independent states between Germany and Russia, to contain
these major powers from dominating Europe. Mackinder looked at the states as
autonomous units that could, from a traditional British view of balance of power,
secure territorial integrity, for example, through an alliance with Great Britain. This

43
Ibid., p. 171.
44
John Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International
Security, 15: 1 (1990), pp. 5–56.
45
Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 461

proved to be a major mistake. World War II erased these states’ independence. The
minor states turned instead to the major powers for protection, and were subjugated
to these powers’ political agenda, precisely as Kjellén had anticipated. The proposi-
tion for an alliance was presented during the war by Mackinder’s follower, the
American geopolitician Nicolas Spykman.46 He believed an American alliance with
the West European states would be essential for containing the Soviet Union. But he
spoke, as did Mackinder, in terms of an alliance, not in terms of a political-military
union under leadership of a central power. NATO came to be regarded as an
alliance of independent states; in other words, a practical realization of Spykman’s
thoughts.
It is only after the Cold War ended that we can say with impunity that these ideas
were wrong. Now we see NATO as something more than an alliance. The fact that
NATO did not disintegrate after the fall of the Soviet Union indicates that NATO
has been more integrated—with a common political idea and with common values
under a clearly defined leadership. This hierarchic construction was in reality almost
identical to what Kjellén termed ‘a union of states’ or what the German geopolitical
philosopher Carl Schmitt termed a ‘Grossraum’.47 However, both these writers
assumed German, not American leadership. And they spoke primarily of Central
Europe, rather than Western Europe. But it was the German geopolitics, in its
cosmopolitan shape, that proved itself to be accurate in describing the future of
Europe. With the more unified NATO, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ geopolitics was replaced by the
‘German’ geopolitics, even if, as yet, this has remained unrecognized.
German geopolitics, with its Kjellénean roots, is best divided into two currents:
on the one hand the urban, cosmopolitan and multinational tradition, which Kjellén
describes as the ‘Austrian face’, and which rests on the Habsburgian Empire’s
recognition of the individual people’s own identity and relative freedom; on the
other hand, the more rural national-romantic Blut und Boden tradition, ‘the Prussian
face’, that regards borders as war-zones between different people and states, and
regards the possibility of minor peoples creating their own states as the random
weakness of the great powers. This latter thought influenced theorists like Karl
Haushofer. His critique of the Jews was directed toward the metaphoric, the urban
and cosmopolitan Jew, not the Zionist Jew who sought his own home and soil. His
geopolitical thoughts were in truth transmitted to Hitler through their mutual
acquaintance, Rudolf Hess, but Haushofer’s criticism of Nazi anti-Jewish sentiments
excluded him from the Nazi party.48
To Haushofer, the outcome of World War I—the creation of both Central
European as well as the Balkan states—was a result of the weakness of Russia and
Germany. When Russia and Germany regained their strength, the small neutral
states in the grey zone between were forced into submission (cf. the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact). To Haushofer, Russia was the natural ally. He preferred ‘the
robbers of the steppe’ to those of ‘the sea’. The German attack on Russia was to
him both politically and militarily, a disaster.49 The essential element for Haushofer

46
Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942);
Spykman, Geography of Peace (1944).
47
Carl Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für Raumfremde Mächte—
Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff in Völkerrecht (Berlin: Deutcher Rechtsverlag, 1941 [1939]).
48
Diner, ‘Grundbuch des Planeten’ (1984) pp. 1–28.
49
Ibid., pp. 10–16.
462 Ola Tunander

was the cultural basis for the state, which put him in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon
(but also to the Bolshevik) universalism—its individualism, liberalism and
democracy—that perceives its own culture to be universal. The same critique is
found in the writings of Kjellén and Carl Schmitt, but their ideals and political
points of view are different. And the same debate is currently found in Huntington’s
criticism of Francis Fukuyama.50 In Huntington`s words: ‘The west is unique, not
universal’.51
Kjellén refers to an article by Albert Gottlieb (1914) and speaks of the
dual universal world: ‘ “die zentralistiche Herrscaft” and “die patriarchalische
Vorrherrscaft”. The former is ancient Rome, which smothers all independent life by
the power of its culture; the same ideal as Russia, the modern Byzantine, now wishes
to realize. The latter is contemporary Britain: she nurses her children beyond the sea,
binds them with loose ties, but lacks any understanding and respect for their
unfamiliar identity […]. In the name of Volk-freedom, Gottlieb introduces a third
type: “Fuhrung ohne Herrschaft”. Herrschaft [Dominion, OT] is based on force or
cunning, leadership demands more; it demands not only superiority but also the
ability to understand the alien [culture] and to respect and preserve its identity. But
this is precisely the heritage of Germany.’ 52
Besides Kjellén’s blood-metaphors and certain historical exaggerations, this
entails relevant criticism of universalism. It was, according to Kjellén, universalism
and its individualistic idea, as expressed by Napoleon Bonaparte, that created
nationalism. ‘This abuse, this overstretching of individualism, was necessary to make
the nations in general wake up. It was on them, and only on them—on Spain’s,
Germany’s and Russia’s down-trodden and resurrected national consciousness—that
the mighty stumbled. And by then a political discovery, the likes of which had not
been seen since Christianity’s discovery of the individual, was made: there is another
character in history, and this character is the nation.’53
Contrary to Haushofer’s Great German construction, Kjellén’s Greater Germany
constituted a cosmopolitan league of states, a Central European union with respect
for the particular nation’s identity and idiosyncrasies. Kjellén’s idea was a league of
states made up of independent states under German leadership, that would guaran-
tee their security and create an economic sphere of interest for Germany, in the same
way as the colonies had come to represent a similar sphere to England. Or, to once
again quote Kjellén’s image of a future state-block: ‘And now, when the standard has
swollen to include vast empires of England, Russia and the USA, the balance seems
to advocate a Mittel Europa.[…] This is the image of a state-complex or a state-
block to meet geographical changes.’54
This idea was further developed by Carl Schmitt (1941), who instead of
Haushofer’s Lebensraum, spoke of a Central Europe with Germany as leading force
or Reich. Schmitt based his idea on the Monroe doctrine, that denied European and
other powers’ right to interfere in North and South American affairs. This gave the
USA hegemony and leadership, while offering considerable independence to the

50
Huntington, ‘No Exit’ (1989), pp. 3–11; Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ (1993), pp. 22–49;
Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, National Interest, 16: (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18.
51
Huntington, ‘The West is Unique—Not Universal’ (1996), pp. 28–46.
52
Kjellén, Världskrigets politiska problem, pp. 167–8.
53
Kjellén, Staten som Lifsform, p. 104.
54
Ibid., p. 67.
 Swedish-German geopolitics for a new century 463

Latin-American states. The Monroe doctrine opposed the European colonial

powers’ demands for intervention in Latin America and brought this principle into
being by a league of independent states, whose security was guaranteed by the USA.
Carl Schmitt sought to apply this thought to Central Europe with Germany as
military guarantor: a league of independent states under German leadership and
belonging to the German sphere of interest. This thought flourished as a result of
President Woodrow Wilson’s suggestion of a universal league of states: an extension
of the Monroe-doctrine to a ‘world doctrine’. A non-interventional Grossraum
concept was, according to Schmitt, to be provoked by the US ‘imperialistic world
doctrine’ which, on humanitarian principle, could legitimize interventions anywhere
appropriate.55
In the same way as Kjellén described nationalism as the antithetical creation of
Napoleon’s universalism, Schmitt describes how the Wilsonian and the Bolshevik
universalism—on a higher level—creates the Grossraum concept as its counterpart; a
thought that already existed, if only in the bud, in Kjellén’s works. Historically there
is no doubt that, towards the end of the 1940s, the Red Army’s advances in the East,
together with an impotent United Nations, led to the creation of a Euro–Atlantic
‘league of states’, a Grossraum we call NATO that was orchestrated around Western
political ideas and guaranteed by its central military power, the USA. But it was
only after the end of the Cold War that it has been realized that this league does not
constitute an alliance, such as Anglo-Saxon political tradition believes, but a
Grossraum under a clearly defined leadership in accordance with the Swedish-
German geopolitical school of thought. This hierarchic political union once again
raises the debate on nation-state, sovereignty and a union of ‘concentric circles’.56
The Anglo-Saxon discourse, however, has to reinvent these ideas. In Germany, there
are twelve translated titles and twenty-five editions of Kjellén’s works to refer to.
There are, to my knowledge, no English translations at all. As underlined by Ole
Wæver,57 Anglo-Saxon International Relations theory may not be as universal as we
would like to believe.

55
Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung, p. 23.
56
See the debate between Stephen M. Walt, Ole Wæver and Charles A. Kupchan in Charles A.
Kupchan (ed.), Atlantic Security—Contending Visions (New York: A Council of Foreign Relations
Book, 1998).
57
Ole Wæver, ‘The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European
Developments in Itnternational Relations’, International Organization, 52: 4 (Autumn 1998).