Additives to the Evolution of Geopolitics

Abstract

This paper aims to introduce the reader to the early years of geopolitics. In the beginning of the ninteen-twenties there was a strong desire led by German scientists to separate geopolitics from political geography, and to get it acknowledged as an independent discipline. This effort started a debate between the geographers about geopolitics, what it actually is, and how it differs from political geography. The central figure of the geopolitical movement was Karl Haushofer, one of the most (in)famous geopolitical thinker of the twentieth century, and the founder of the German geopolitical school. His and his colleagues main goal was to establish the solid scientifical basis of this new acedemic field. In 1928 they published their work with the title Bausteine zur Geopolitik, which contained numerous of their studies with their thoughts about the theoretical and historical principles of geopolitics. In this short study we tried to compare them with the phlyogeny of political geography read in the great synthesis of Otto Maull, with the headtitle Politische Geographie (Political Geography). Similarly to Haushofer, Otto Maull was also significant geographer and political geographer of that time, and he also participated as an author in the publishing of Bausteine zur Geopolitik. Maull traced the roots of the modern political geography back to antiquity, and described its scientific development until the first decades of the twentieth century. Overall, the two disciplines have a great many of mutual traits regarding their histoical essentials, their methodology and their subjects of research, which is not surprising considering that geopolitics started to evolve from the academic field of political geography. The main difference between them, according to Haushofer and his colleagues, is that geopolitics has a speical point of view. It means that its aim is to solve the problems of space and power with scientific intensity, but these results must also be made available to the politicians and statesmen. Thus, geopolitics, according to them, must become an academic field with the purpose to aid the state.