Geopolitics
Geopolitics
Geopolitics means politics as determined by geographical variables. The relationship between sates and their natural conditions has always generated considerable philosophical interest among scholars, politicians, historians and geographers. The term "geopolitics" was coined by a Swedish scholars Kjellen (1864-1922). He defined geopolitics as "the theory of the state as a geographic organism or phenomenon in space, i.e. as a land territory, area or most especially, as a "country". Houshofer and his colleagues defined geopolitics as "the science of earth relationships to political developments" and geopolitics was distinguished from political geography in the sense that while political geography studied the state from the view point of space, geopolitics studied space from the view point of the state". Geopolitics is "the science of the relationship between space and politics which attempts to put geographical knowledge at the service of political leaders. It is more than political geography, which is descriptive. It springs from national aspirations, searches out facts and principles which can serve national ends. According to geopolitical theory a nation or state is a supraindividual organism. Like all organisms the nations are engaged in a perpetual struggle for life. The earth is by its natural formation divided into a number of spaces, which from the geographical background for the struggle of the nation. This makes politics spacebound, following definable laws which are independent of human influence and to which all nations appearing in historical succession in a given spaces are subject.
As a description the relationship between geography and politics is not new. One of the earliest political geographers was the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who presented a model idea of state in which the two chief ingredients were the size of population and the nature of territory and that these together determined the strength or weakness of a given...
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