1.2 Geopolitics and imperial rivalry

‘Geopolitics’ is a term that has entered the popular lexicon and is often quoted in academic works, newspapers and the media. However, there is often little attention given to what the term actually means. Kathleen Braden and Fred Shelley define geopolitics as ‘the study of International Relations from a geographical perspective’ (2000, p. 5). From this more disciplinary perspective, space and place remain of primary importance in international relations, and thus issues of place, location, scale, region and boundaries are emphasised – in other words, a spatial perspective on human behaviour. As such, the state remains an important tool for geopolitical analysis.

Historically, the term ‘geopolitics’ is often associated with the ideas of Halford Mackinder in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in particular, his 1904 ‘heartland theory’, based on the particularities of British sea power during the age of empire and the historical dominance of land-based power evidenced by the Mongols in their conquest of much of Eurasia. For Mackinder (1904), whoever exercised control of the central Eurasian land mass – an area centred on the Eurasian steppe and Central Asia that he termed the ‘geographical pivot of history’ – would be the dominant global force. This region now comprises a number of independent states that have emerged from successive waves of conquest by and competition between imperial powers (namely British and Russian, then later Soviet). The area is rich in resources and forms an important focus of Russian and Chinese desire to counter United States (US) dominance in international relations. This reconstituted ‘heartland’ is also a site of competition between its constituent states, still grappling with the legacies of a complex and contested political geography originally decreed in a faraway capital, and where conflict over resources is an ever-present threat.

Geopolitical thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be understood in terms of classical realism in so much as it involved balances of power and rivalries between the great powers of the day (such as the British, French, Russian, Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman Empires). David Atkinson and Klaus Dodds (2000) have highlighted how the discipline became tainted as the German school of geopolitics, with its ideas of living space or ‘lebensraum’ and came to be viewed by some as the field that allowed Adolf Hitler to articulate his expansionist ambitions. However, the place of geography remains of major importance to IR scholarship, forming a key determining factor in the neorealist theorising of scholars such as John Mearsheimer (2001) with its emphasis on the impact of land force in determining relations between great powers.