Political geography
Political geography is a field of
human geography that is concerned with
politics. It is closely related to
geopolitics, which is seen as the strategic,
military and governmental application of political geographies. It is also closely related to
International Relations.
Political geography is interested in the relationship between
political power or poltics and geography. Geography often influences political decisions and vice versa political power influences geographical space. It is often associated with the study of the practices of
sovereign states, but it considers politics of all
scales, from those of the
United Nations to those of day-to-day life.
In particular, then, modern political geography often considers:
* How and why states are organized into regional groupings, both formally (e.g. the
European Union) and informally (e.g. the
Third World)
* The relationship between states and former colonies, and how these are propogated over time through
neo-colonialism* The relationship between a
government and its people
* The relationships between states including international trades and treaties
* The functions, demarcations and policings of boundaries
* How
imagined geographies have political implications
* The influence of political power on geographical space
* The study of election results (election geography)
Pre-World War Two
The term political geography was first used by
Friedrich Ratzel in his book 'Politische Geographie', published in
German in 1897. Geopolitics was then coined by the
Swede Rudolf Kejell.
The discipline gained attention largely through the work of
Sir Halford Mackinder in England and his formulation of the
Heartland Theory in 1904. This theory involved concepts diametrically opposed to the notion of
Alfred Thayer Mahan about the significance of
navies (Mahan coined the term
sea power) in world conflict. The Heartland theory, on the other hand, hypothesized the possibility for a huge empire to be brought into existence which didn't need to use coastal or transoceanic transport to supply its military industrial complex, and that this empire could not be defeated by all the rest of the world coalitioned against it.
The Heartland Theory depicted a world divided into a
Heartland (Eastern Europe/Western Russia);
World Island (Eurasia and Africa);
Peripheral Islands (British Isles, Japan, Indonesia and Australia) and
New World (The Americas). Mackinder claimed that whoever controlled the Heartland would have control of the world. He used this warning to politically influence events such as the
Treaty of Versailles, where
buffer states were created between the
USSR and
Germany, to prevent either of the them controlling the Heartland.
Ratzel, at the same time, was creating a theory on states baced around the concepts of
Lebensraum and
Social Darwinism. This stated that states were 'organisms' that needed sufficient room in which to live. Expansionist inclanations - such as the
British of
French empires were a result of this. Both these two writers created the idea of a political and geographical
science, with an
objective God's Eye View of the world.
Pre-
World War Two political geography was concerned largely with these issues of global power struggles and influencing state policy. The above theories were both taken on board by German geopoliticians (see
Geopolitik) such as
Karl Haushofer who - they claim inadvertedly - greatly influenced
Nazi political theory. The politics that were legitimated by 'scientific' theories such as a 'nautral' requirement for state expansion are those that were ingaged in during World War Two. Though modern geographers have been more sympathetic to the likes of Haushofer, suggesting that he and his colleagues actually did believe that they were conducting neutral scientific study, it is also almost impossible that they could not have foreseen how their results would be used; Haushofer, in particular, actually tutored
Rudolf Hess and is anacdotely said to have passed a copy of Ratzel's
Politische Geographie onto
Adolf Hitler, whilst he was writing
Mein Kampf.
Cold War Geopolitics
After World War Two, the demonization of Nazi geopolitics lead to a fall in the popularity and legitimacy of the subject. Geographers of this time became more engaged in
economic geography, and
regional geography. Geography as a discipline went through what is called the
quantitative revolution in the 1960s, moving it from a descriptive subject to a more rigorous, theoretically-grounded discipline. Ironically, this reflected closer the stances of inter-war geopoliticians, who cast themselves as scientific observers and analysers.
During this time, when geography took a
positivist stance, political geography remained a fairly narrow subject. It was still interested in the division of the world into different groupings - theories such as
core and periphery were dominant, with a
Marxist informed critique of capitalism.
Critical Political Geography
Critical political Geography is mainly concerned with the criticism of traditional political geographies. Focusing on the expansion of geographical knowledge, within each critical argument is generally nested an alternative cause for the issue at hand, such as within Andrew Feenberg's
Critical Theory of Technology.
*
John Agnew*
Halford Mackinder* GearĂ³id Ă" Tuathail
*
Derek Gregory*
Doreen Massey*
Karl Haushofer*
Friedrich Ratzel* Lynne Staeheli
* Colin Flint
* Joni Seager
*
Yves Lacoste*
Buleon, P.:
The state of political geography in France in the 1970s and 1980s., Progress in Human Geography. Vol. 16, No. 1. Edward Arnold, Kent, p. 24 â€" 40, 1992.
*
Feenberg, Andrew. "CRITICAL THEORY OF TECHNOLOGY." SFU. 22 May 2006
.*Geopolitics
*List of geography topics
*List of countries
*Geography reference tables*Capital Cities and Countries of the World
