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Political geography
*** Shopping-Tip: 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 cloesly related to
International Relations.
Areas of Study
Political geography is interested in the relationship between
political power or poltics and gegoraphy. Geography offen influences political decisions and vice versa political power influences geographical space. It is often associated with the study of the pracitces of
sovereign states, but it consdiers politics of all
scales, from those of the
United Nations to those of day-to-day life.
In paticular, 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)
History
Pre World War Two
The term political geography was first used by
Friedrich Ratzel in his book 'Politische Geographie', published in
German (language) German in 18??. Geopolitics was then coined by the
Sweden Swede Rudolf Kejell Rudolf Kejellén.
The discipline gained attention largely through the work of
Halford John Mackinder 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
navy 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 politcally 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 Darwinsim. This stated that states were 'organisms' that needed sufficient room in which to live. Expansionist inclanations - such as the
British Empire British of
French Empire 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
Nazism 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 acutally did believe that they were conducting neutral scientific study, it is also almost impossible that they could not have forseen how their results would be used; Haushofer, in paticular, acutally 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
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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 becamore 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 subejct to a more rigorous, theoretically-grounded discipline. Ironically, this reflected closer the stances of inter-war geopoliticians, who casted themselves as scientific observers and analysers.
During this time, when geography took a
positivism 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
Economic core core and periphery were dominant, with a
Marxism Marxist informed critique of capitalism.
Critical Political Geography
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Notable Political Geographers
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Further reading
*'''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 – 40, 1992.
See also
*
Geopolitics
*
List of geography topics
*
List of countries
*
List of reference tables#Geography and places Geography reference tables
External links
Category:Political geography *
bs:PolitiÄ?ka geografija
de:Politische Geografie
es:GeografÃa polÃtica
fa:جغراÙ?یای سیاسی
fr:Géographie politique
lt:PolitinÄ— geografija
ro:Geografie politică
sv:Politisk geografi
uk:Політична географіÑ?
{{catmore}}
Category:Geography
Category:Human geography
Category:Politics
de:Kategorie:Politische Geographie
fr:Catégorie:Géographie politique
ko:분류:ì •ì¹˜ì§€ë¦¬í•™
uk:КатегоріÑ?:Політична географіÑ?
*** Shopping-Tip: Political geography
