I. Why geopolitics matters?

Living in a changing world At the beginning of the 21st century, the world in which we live is often characterized by the acceleration of time, the shrinking of space and the plurality of the political. Major political changes marked the turn of the last century. The Cold War Era was over after dominating the world for a half of century. A new category of countries has appeared on the international stage, in addition to industrialized and developing countries. It comprises countries at war or emerging from conflict in which the state has been foundering in genocide and intercommunal massacres. The Soviet Union and its satellites disappeared from the political map of the world, turning into the so called transition economies. The United States seemed to be the only one capable to run the world, its position of global policeman being enhanced by the new role the UN decided to play on the international arena. Old alliances broke up and new others started to be successful. The Warsaw Pact is now history, whereas NATO has recently enlarged its membership, reaching the Russian border. European integration is an on-going process aiming to give the Old World the place it used to have on the economic and political scene of the world. The world economy becomes more and more globalized and the hierarchy of key-players is changing permanently. China, still ruled by communism, has embarked successfully on free-market reforms. Other developing countries take advantage of the globalization attracting major flows of foreign investments, while others seem to suffer from the erratic boat syndrome being unable to set a course. The multiplication of conflict and the strengthening of differences have both gone together with momentous shifts in the geopolitical map of the world post-1989. Emerging in the wake of that specific moment, the post 1989 period bears witness to the development of a pervasive paradox. On the one hand powerful standardizing and normalizing forces are at work the engines of finance and technology become increasingly global; new forms of economic and political co-operation bring nation states closer; images and information circulate at the speed of light, and discourses of liberal democracy are projected planet-wide. On the other hand, federations break up, weaker nation states can hardly cope with the pressure of local and regional divisions and in some cases, religious or ethnic differences are made manifest with violence. The present world supplies the political thinking with abundant topics to be addressed: -contrasting trends and growing inequalities although there is strong evidence that during the last 2 or 3 decades the developed countries seem to slow down their pace of economic growth and the developing countries try to 1

catch up, these are only global trends. If you look at particular cases or at the variation of the relevant socio-economic indicators, such as GDP per capita or human development index, you will find out that in fact the gaps in economic terms between developed countries on one side and the developing countries on the other side have been widening lately. The sharpest disparities have occurred within the group of developing countries: only some of them have been able to take advantage of the benefits of globalization Brazil, China, Mexico, Indonesia have been attractive to international investment flows; others have experienced economic decline and stagnation, for example, in about 70 countries of the world average incomes are lower today than they were in 1980. -social conflicts and movements of resistance have two major origins: cultural one is based on the increasing pressure of the global forces and the local inertia trying to resist against the identity dilution (from the cultural point of view, the globalization process is considered to be a homogenization process are we going to deal with national identities in 50 years, in 100 years or we are going to deal with the world system as a uniform cultural entity; ethnic one caused by two apparently opposing trends: both reemergent nationalism and new supra-national identities are developing on the globe. Lets take Europe as an example: nationalistic tensions in Northern Ireland, in Basque Region Spain, in Corsican Island in France, in former Yugoslavian space, on one side and the enlargement process of the European Union, on the other side. -the environmental change as political subject is due to the fact that international security is largely dependent on healthy environment; the motto frequently used is think globally, act locally which means that the world-system is increasingly interdependent and that there are mutual relationships between nature and society. Up to the 1970s the general opinion was that human society can place any action on the physical environment without having any feedback; after the environmental and energy crises from the beginning of the 1970s, the human society became aware of the complex, dynamic and, sometimes, unpredictable response of the nature. The scientists try to analyze the human dimension of the global environmental changes, assessing the impact of green house gas emissions, ozone-layer reduction, acid rains, loss of biodiversity on the quality of the human life. -new forms of governance and democracy political actors try to set up efficient coalitions and regulating modes of the economic and social life. Democracy takes a variety of forms showing the efforts to meet the civil society needs as well as the civil society struggle to be better represented by the corresponding governments. More over, rethinking the state-society 2

relations across the national territory in different areas of the world is a vital component of the political geography. -resurgence of ethical-political concerns in relation to human rights there are internationally accepted human rights and international institutions monitoring the world in this respect. That is why the provision or not of human rights can be a tension source of international relations between different nation-states. -place of indigenous people vs. new comers the position of countries in the democratic transition process, the differences between the economic development, ethical and social conflicts stay at the root of international migration flows. The new composition of national population can sometimes be problematic. Maghreb immigrants living in the outskirts of Paris accused violently the French authorities of unequal treatment in summer of 2005. Also the displacement of peoples and the integration-segregation of the worlds refugee population are subject to geopolitical inquiry. -global significance of gender and race are there anthropological differences related to race (is white man superior to black people, is German pure, educated superior people to Jewish or Slav people) or are women given equal job opportunities as men (do they have equal rights, how can we explain the differences of individual income, are women well represented at the level of political and economic leadership) are important questions whose answers are relevant also for the political thinking. Different conceptual frames are used to bring some sense of understanding to these pressing themes which are constantly open to review, restructuring and radical change. The complex world we are trying to cope with, provides a field for a broad range of perspectives that focus on the increasingly significant web of relations connecting space, politics and power. That is one of the reasons the political issues should be addressed in an interdisciplinary way keeping open different lines of analytical approaches. This is especially crucial since we live in a world where conflicts in society as well as within and across our own ways of interpretation, have a tendency to proliferate and to become more complex. Different approaches to politics The range of issues or problems facing us seems to grow, rather than to shrink. An endless list of concerns would be worked out. Directly or indirectly politics influences our lives (Painter, 1995). Most of us usually operate with what we might call a common-sense or everyday understanding of what politics is. In the common sense view, politics is about governments, political parties, elections and public policy, or about war, peace and foreign affairs. All of these are immensely important, although these common sense assumptions about politics are rather limited 3

and they refer to the so called formal politics. According to the same author, the term formal politics means the operation of the constitutional system of government and its publicly defined institutions and procedures. Consequently, politics is a separate sphere of live involving certain types of people (politicians and civil servants) or organizations (state institutions). The rest of us interact with this sphere in limited and usually legally defined ways. The political system may give us formal political rights (such as the right to voting, or to own property) or formal political duties (such as the duty to pay tax). Alternatively, it may from time to time affect the society in which we live, through changes in public policy, for example in the spheres of education or environmental protection. By contrast informal politics might be summed up by the phrase: politics is everywhere (Painter, 1995, p. 9). There is an informal politics of the household (parents attempt to influence children, women do more housework than men), of education (some subjects or points of view are taught while others are not, some children benefit more from education than others), even of television (some people have more chances to have their say on TV than others, certain groups are shown in a more favorable light than others). Generally speaking, there is no aspect of life which is not political and that is why politics really is everywhere. Geopolitics, political geography, geography The starting point of our discussion will be the statement: geopolitics evolved from political geography, which is a branch of geography (Fifield, Pearcy, 1944). Geography Geography is the systematic study of location and place (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Geographers address questions concerning where and why various phenomena are located and distributed. After describing and explaining the spatial patterns, they examine and compare the uniqueness of places while considering the relationships between individual places and the global economy. The modern geography is similar to other fields of knowledge in content, but distinct in approach. The vast number of subjects analyzed by geography is equally studied by a large range of scientific disciplines (climatology, hydrology, soil science, biology, history, demography, sociology, economics, political sciences, and others). What distinguishes geography from these disciplines is its unique, holistic and integrative approach to knowledge. Geography pulls together knowledge of social, economic, political, cultural and environmental forces that shape human activity worldwide. Geography employs some major concepts when addresses various processes and phenomena. These usually refer to location, distance, direction, distribution, diffusion, place and region. 4

In examining the locations of places, geographers distinguish between absolute and relative location. The latter one is especially rich for geographical explanation. The location of a place in comparison with others shows the relative location, critical to the understanding of international geopolitics (Braden, Shelley, 2000). For example, Germanys position at the center of continental Europe, between France and England to the west and Russia and Eastern Europe to the east, has proven critical to the development of German geopolitics throughout its history. Distance is also relevant, both in relative and absolute terms. Relative distance is measured in terms of travel time or cost rather than in miles, kilometers or other spatial units. Knowledge of relative distance is critical in a contemporary world characterized by increasing worldwide interdependence, instantaneous telecommunications and reduced travel time between places. The nuclear weapons exerted a tremendous impact on reducing distances and getting enemies closer. The arm race between Soviet Union and USA during the Cold War Era could be explained, at least partially, by looking at the position of both superpowers on the two sides of the North Pole. The distribution of a phenomenon reflects its arrangement in space. Geography studies the geometric properties of distributions as well as the processes responsible for creating and changing distributions. Geopolitics and international relations are influenced by the distribution of population, natural resources, industries, military expenditures, cultures, ethnic groups and many others. Distributions are subject to change over time, and changes in distribution can have profound effects on international relations. Diffusion is the process by which new ideas, innovations or technologies are transmitted from one place to others across space and over time. For example, the Industrial Revolution diffused from its origin in England in the late 18th century to Europe and North America in the 19th century and to most other parts of the world in the 20th century. As a rule, distributions change as a result of diffusion processes. Hence, knowledge of diffusion helps in a critical way the understanding of changes in spatial distributions. These changes in turn often affect international relations and geopolitics. The place is a special concern of geography. It has its own history, culture, geography, whose combination makes it unique. The changing attributes of a place are explanatory factors of the nature of relations with other places. Given the increasing interdependency of todays world, geography cannot examine the unique qualities and characteristics of individual places without reference to relationships between them. For example, we can hardly understand the position of Europe during the Cold War Era without reference to its location between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geography focuses also on regions. A region can be defined as 5

a set of places with common attributes, such as culture, economy, political system, language, religion and many others. Region has gained more significance for the geographical analysis of Europe, since the integration process has the motto: The Europe of Regions. Geography has two major sub-disciplines: physical and human. The former examines the location and distribution of various components of the natural environment: landforms, climate, vegetation, soil cover. Knowledge of the physical geography of particular places is often critical to the understanding of international conflict. For example, Russias northern location and lack of access to warm-water ports that can be used for shipping throughout the year has made access to Mediterranean Sea an important goal of Russian foreign policy for centuries. The latter focuses on the relationships between human societies and cultures and the space on which they live. It is traditionally divided into a number of fields: urban geography, social geography, historical geography and so on. Given the breadth of the subject of human geography this is unsurprising and in many ways eminently practical. Political Geography One of the conventional sub-disciplines of human geography is political geography. It has all the characteristics of an institutionalized sub-discipline: special journals devoted to it called usually Political Geography, formally organized representations such as the Political Geography Study Group of the International Geographical Union, great thinkers of the past, and of course it has university courses and textbooks (Painter, 1995). There is no universally accepted definition of the field of enquiry called political geography. Anyway, it is worth mentioning the definition given by Yves Lacoste, an outstanding French geographer who wrote that political geography is the analysis of geographical features of political phenomena, such as the size and the shape of different nation-states, the location of their capital city, the tracing of the borders, as well as election issues and territorial planning problems (Lacoste, 1993). By geopolitical problems the same author understands rivalries of power on territories not only between different states but also within the same state or nation. And these rivalries do exist from the very beginning of the humankind history, but they have recently become major subjects of national and international debates due to the freedom of expression stronger nowadays. Other authors consider that political geography investigates the relationships between politics and geography at spatial scales ranging from local to international (Braden, Shelley, 2000). In their opinion, the usual topics for political geography are boundaries and boundary disputes, election procedures and outcomes, land use controversy, law and legal systems, and the management of common resources such as the oceans, Antarctica and outer space. The Dictionary of 6

Geopolitics, edited by John OLoughlin in 1994, gives the following definition: Political geography is that part of geographical inquiry which examines the territorial constitution of political power the sources of power, shifts in power, and the use of political power in relation to territorial location and characteristics and its corollary, the sculpting of territorial relations via the application of political power (p. 200). Traditionally the focus has been on nations and states, but increasingly it refers to class, race and gender, local communities as active powers in shaping territorial relations. Not only the subject is debatable, but also the status of political geography is not certain: is it a scientific discipline, is it a discourse or is it simply a way of thinking? The most frequent answer is that political geography could be conceived as any one of the three alternatives. Additionally, the concern of the political geography is also changing. Painter (1995) considers that early political geography was concerned mainly with the relationship between physical territory, state power and global military and political rivalries. These concerns continue to be important issues for contemporary political geography. But some others have been added meanwhile. Political geographers now take social and political struggles and social movements much more seriously than in the past. For example, the social movements which political geographers study more often than any other are those associated with regionalism and nationalism. These movements are the most relevant for geopolitical thinking because they are explicitly linked to territory. By contrast, although other social movements such as those associated with labor, women, minority ethnic groups and the environment, are all highly political and all exhibit marked geographical characteristics, have been until recently neglected by political geography because they do not fit so well with its traditional themes. Geopolitics The term geopolitics was first coined by Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish political scientist in 1899. Recently, the term has entered the common language and has been used at all scales, from neighborhood to global. Today, one can hear discussion of the geopolitics of technological hazards, of Islam or of the dismantling of the Cold War economy, and so forth, all referring to political geographies at scales below the international one. In this light, geopolitics seems to be shorthand for political geography. As in the case of political geography, geopolitics can be defined in different ways.The developer of the term, Kjellen defined it as: the theory of the state as a geographic organism or phenomenon in space, i.e. the state as land, territory, domain or most suggestively as realm (Kjellen, 1917, cited by OLoughlin, 1994). Geopolitics is a long-established area of geographical enquiry which considers space to be important in understanding the 7

constitution of international relations (Johnston et al., 1994). Since it was born in the late 19th century, geopolitics has tried to analyze the global, social, economic, political, military trends and to provide some key principles of the modern geopolitical imagination. The goal of geopolitics is to allow people to see the political-economic reality of the world (Blin et al., 2000). The link between geography and politics is obvious: geopolitics is the study of the geographical representations and practices that underpin world politics (Agnew, 1991). According to Braden and Shelley (2000), geopolitics is a subset of political geography that deals directly with international relations, international conflict and foreign policies. In the abstract, geopolitics traditionally indicates the links and causal relationships between political power and the geographic space; in concrete termes it is often seen as a body of thought assaying specific strategic prescriptions based on the relative importance of land power and sea power in world history. The geopolitical tradition had some consistent concerns, like the geopolitical correlates of power in world politics, the identification of international core areas, and the relationships between naval and terrestrial capabilities (Osterud, 1988, p. 191). Concisely, Chauprade and Thual (2003) consider that geopolitics is the study of geopolitical realities. More precisely, geopolitics is an interdisciplinary scientific field, placed at the interface of geography, history, political and social sciences which analyzes the relation between the political events and the geographical space as well as the distribution of power across the world(Negu, 2005, p. 7). Usually there are three ways of looking at geopolitics. For many, geopolitics is simply the geographic dimension of foreign policy. In this view, geopolitics has two levels: the former is the background study of places, people, resource distributions and so on that provides the data for the foreign policy choices, and the latter is the consequent formation of spatially based policies designed to achieve specific objectives. A second common definition of geopolitics is applied political geography. That means that each state has its own specific national aspirations defined accordingly with its position, historical background, and power. So, American geopolitics differs fundamentally from French geopolitics since each starts from a different point due to different national aspirations. A third kind of geopolitics is the interpretation of the games of the great powers. It is called critical geopolitics and it attempts to approach the subject from social theory, trying to understand the causes, consequences, methods and beliefs of the practice of geopolitics. A major part of the critical geopolitics literature is a close examination of language and discourse; by analyzing the speeches, documents, 8

treaties and memoirs, it is possible to interpret the aims and offer alternatives. Geopolitics is considered to be a 20th century concept as it did not come into widespread use until the 1930s when it was enlarged and transformed by the German political analysts. It is deeply associated with the Nazi Party policy as it was used to justify Germanys territorial expansion. It took the form of human geography ajusted to modern totalitarian politics, being derived from old environmental theories. Different formulations of environmental political theories can be found in ancient and medieval times and are related with the names of Aristotle, Lucretius, Strabo and far later Bodin. These lie at the basis of the theory of geographical determinism, developed by the German geopolitical school, aimed at explaining the nature, functions and political activities of the state from its geographical foundations such as space, land, or the influence of physical environment on the people. Later on, during the WWII, the term was rediscovered by the American foreign policy scientists who considered geopolitics to be essential if the United States was to become and think like a global power. During the Cold War era, geopolitics has been developed in different ways and at varying intensities by nation-states and other political actors according to their position, interests and goals. After 1990, it has been reactivated in a large number of countries as a form of spatial thinking and an insight into the nature of international relations. Different events of late 20th century contributed to this impressive revival: after the 50 year-Cold War period, the humankind entered the cold peace marked by uncertainty; the bi-polar world has turned for a while into hegemony of the United States; the sheres of influence still exist and are reinvented despite the fall of the Iron Curtain; many conflicts have emerged and diversified lately (Negut, 2005). Old and new factors of geopolitics During the WWII, seven world powers have ruled the greater part of the world: the United States of America, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. The geopolitical context of the world war inspired several authors (Russel P. Fifield, Geopolitics in Practice and Principle and Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, both published in 1944) to evaluate the relative power of states. From the geopolitical point of view, the world powers should be examined in terms of the six separate components: location, size and shape, climate, population and manpower, natural resources and industry, and social and political organizations. The analysis takes as an example the case of Germany. Location is the first element in determining a world power. Location is expressed in relative (neighbors, borders, accessibility) and comparative (political power, economic strength) terms. The size and shape of a country 9

are also crucial in assessing its power. Geography is a permanent topographical feature and should be closely tied to the countrys political actions. Topography can not be changed but can be used to national advantage of the country. Area, major landforms, permissive borders, physical obstacles, are all important to national security. Climate influences the agricultural and productivity potential of a country, being a critical condition in war times or for an expanding population. The access to warm water ports proved also to be vital to power. Frequent wars in recent history of humankind required a large population base to supply the army with soldiers and an ever larger pool of workforce to support the economic activities related to war. Thus, population and manpower are needed to sustain a world power. Natural resources and industry represent another component vital as supply sources for a country looking to expand and grow. Social and political organisations usually enhance the ability of a country to defend itself. The evolution of the world during the second half of the 20th century has given birth to new geopolitical concepts. According to Alvin Toffler and his Powershift (1991) now geopolitics has to take into consideration the power movements made by knowledge, technology and money. Knowledge is a form of fortune practically inexhaustible and inexclusive. The ones who hold the access to high military and civil technologies can change their position in the existing power relations. The poles of the world attract highly qualified professionals and the brain trade has reached an alarming level in the developing countries enhancing their technological gap.Toffler introduces the concept of access to information which is, in the 21st century, the main weapon of every state in a power-based relationships. The problem that arises is who takes control over the new informational and knowledgebased systems and monopoly could be a real danger. The world experiences an information war and the power will shift to those that have the best information about the limits of information. All big companies develop special departments to fight against the informational crime. Toffler introduces into the formula of global power another determinant: the time. The acceleration effect generates new mechanisms in economy, as well as new economymoney relations. Money means power and has deep implications on businesses, economies and global relations between the states. In a world system where the way of making money changed from the system of production to that of over symbolic values, marketed globally, the financial relations influence geopolitics. Huge banks influence the rate of exchange for other national currencies driving their economic systems on the verge of financial collapse. Big investment funds, huge withdrawal of capital, lack of liquidities could generate bankruptcies, unemployment increase and political instability. 10

Is geopolitics over? What comes next? The dismantling of the bipolar world and the end of the Cold War era in early 1990s has brought about a radically new geopolitical context. For some the world is passing through a transition between the old order and the new one. For others it is a transition between the industrial society and the informational capitalism along with the emergence of new values, norms, behaviors, relations. Some consider that the world has reached the end of history due to the victory of the neo-liberal world order. Others, on the contrary, say that this is impossible in a de-centered, polyglot world of emergent anarchy and pervasive indifference. The complex and rapidly changing geopolitical environment made room for different interpretations of the significance of geopolitics. Some authors argue that chronopolitics is now more important than geopolitics in contemporary international affairs. The loss of material space, of the significance of territory left governments only one strategic value: the time. Information, innovation, technology, are all related to the time race and the conclusion is that space is no longer in geography it is in electronics There is a movement from the geo- to chronopolitics: the distribution of territory becomes the distribution of time (Virilio, 1998). Others (Luttwak, 1998), warned that the waning of the Cold War has reduced the significance of military power in international affairs. Considering a supposed consensus within the western foreign policy community in the early 1990s, he announces a transition from geopolitics to geo-economics. Methods of commerce are displacing military ones, disposable capital becomes more important than firepower, civilian innovation than military technical advancement, market penetration than military bases. A new change is developing: the new world will be dominated by borderless capitalism which marks the end of the nation state. Thus the coming geo/economic age will not be one of harmonious global interdependence, but rather an age of continued state rivalry where the logic of conflict will be expressed in the grammar of commerce. On the other way, environmental and ecological crises threaten to alter radically the nature of international politics. For many environmentalists the real transition to be made is from geopolitics to eco-politics. As Gore (2000) pointed out the explosion of the world population, the loss of forest land, topsoil, stratospheric ozone, and biodiversity pose unprecedented challenges to our civilization. To deal with the deterioration of the global environment, humanity does not need a Strategic Defense Initiative but a Strategic Environmental Initiative. Combining elements of all, some analysts (Falk, 1995) argue that the world is moving rapidly away from geopolitics towards a more integrated 11

economic, cultural and political reality, a set of circumstances identified by him as geo-governance. The capacity of the sovereign territorial state as an actor to manage the history of humanity has diminished significantly; in many instances, the state is fragmenting scoring a decline in governmental capacity at the level of the nation-state. The dilemma of global politics is no longer geopolitics but geo-governance, the ongoing and often inefficient try to establish workable governance structures at the global scale. According to these arguments, geopolitics belongs to the past, to an earlier technological and territorial era dominated by the Cold War and state sovereignty. In reality, all these arguments are over-simplistic and limited in understanding and explaining the world politics. They miss to catch the whole meaning of geopolitics, the study of the dispersed cluster of changing elements synthesized into different historical orders of geographical knowledge and power. Obviously, the problematic of geopolitics the geography/power/knowledge of the production of global space demands our attention more than ever. KEY POINTS Geography is the systematic study of location and place. Professional geographers address questions concerning where and why various phenomena are located and distributed. In addition, they examine and compare the unique characteristics of places while considering the relationships between individual places and the global economy Political geography is the analysis of geographical features of political phenomena, such as the size and the shape of different nationstates, the location of their capital city, the tracing of the borders, as well as election issues and territorial planning problems Geopolitics is a subset of political geography that deals directly with international relations, international conflict and foreign policies The evolution of the world during the second half of the 20th century has given birth to new geopolitical concepts. The power of states used to be assessed in terms of location, size, population and labor, natural resources and industry, social and political organizations. Now, it means knowledge, technology and money The dismantling of the bipolar world and the end of the Cold War era in early 1990s has brought about a radically new geopolitical context.

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II. Main schools of geopolitical thought (concepts, theories and representatives) The historical context Throughout history, authors from all over the world have identified and described the relationships between power, territory, conflict and location. Concepts relevant to geopolitical thought can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Confucius, Machiavelli and many other ancient and medieval authors. But the formal study of geopolitics began in the late 19th century with the end of the Age of Exploration. By 1900, the task of mapping and exploring the earth and its resources had largely been completed. All of the inhabitable or commercially valuable parts of the world had been divided into formal colonies controlled directly by the European powers as in Africa, or into less formal spheres of influence, which were nevertheless subject to European economic and political control as in East Asia (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Because the Age of Exploration had now passed into history, no longer could the European powers expand their resource bases through the incorporation of additional colonies outside Europe. Increasingly, the arena of conflict moved from outside Europe to Europe itself. It is no coincidence that the late 19 th century, a time in which the earths resources had been surveyed and the incorporation of the entire world into the European-dominated world economy had been completed, was the period in which formal geopolitical thinking emerged in Europe (idem). The modern world economy is characterized by capitalism, global economic interdependence and political fragmentation. The world economy as we understand it today began to emerge in Western Europe at the time of the Renaissance. As the world economy developed, the concept of a nationstate began to emerge. Nation-states were delimited territorially, and they linked cultures and ethnic groups to specific political units. By the end of the Middle Ages, many of todays major European nation-states, including England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, had already come into existence. At the same time that modern nation-states began to emerge, their economies became increasingly interdependent. Since that time, the modern world economy has expanded to encompass the entire world civilization. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distinct schools of thought emerged in many countries. In large measure, the geopolitical views were closely connected with the foreign policy goals of each country. Common to these approaches, however, was a concern with large-scale, systematic generalization along with particular emphasis on the role of each country within the volatile world political order. 13

British geopolitics Britain became the dominant power within the world economy during the 18th century and it maintained this domination during the 19th century. Its power depended basically on the control of the seas. The location of Great Britain on an island off the mainland of Europe had been a stimulus for maritime activities, and the British Navy was far stronger than its continental counterparts. British maritime power was seen to balance the larger populations and continental resources of Central Europe, especially Germany and Russia (Braden, Shelley, 2000). British concern with continental domination of the world order was summarized by the well known theory of Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), the leading geopolitical thinker in Britain during the early 20th century. He promoted imperialist ideas, analyzing mainly the ways to maintain the integrity of the British Empire and the threats to its hegemon position in the world (OLoughlin, 1994). In his 1904 presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, Mackinder describes a new geographical/geopolitical perspective that is made possible by the end of the geography era of exploration and discovery. In the new post-Columbian era of closed space, a global view was enabled. It was possible for the first time to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between macroscale geographical and historical generalizations. For the first time one could perceive something of a real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and might seek a formula to express a certain geographical causation in universal history. That formula helped setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics. In his first lecture Mackinders view upon the spinning globe of 1904 revealed what he termed the Natural Seats of Power, displayed as a lantern slide on an oval shaped Mercator map and comprising the pivot area, inner or marginal crescent and lands of outer or insular crescent. What Mackinder produced in his lantern slide show was an understanding of international politics as a spatial spectacle, as a theatrical drama (the stage of the whole world) to be explained by the unraveling of the geographical regions and laws beneath the surface of the world affairs. Mackinder summarized his view of geopolitics, in his work on The Geographical Pivot of History, as follows: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World islands; Who rules the world island commands the world. By the Heartland, Mackinder meant the core of the Eurasian continent, including the area of former Soviet Union. Around the Heartland lie the Rimlands peninsular Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China all of which link the Heartland to the World Ocean. Beyond the World Island lay Japan and Mackinders native Britain as 14

well as three islands of continental size Australia, and North and South America. Surrounded by seas and dependent on them, the island states have potential as sea powers. Control of the Heartland, in Mackinders view, implied control of the World Island, i.e. the great landmass of Europe, Asia and Africa. The Heartland was considered to be the pivot of history because of its central location, size, morphology and resource abundance. A vast resource-rich plain whose rivers empty the inaccessible Arctic or the plains inland seas, the Heartland is like a fortress for whatever land power controls it. Well equipped with industry and modern means of communication, a land power controlling the Heartland could exploit the regions interior lines to acquire control of portions of the Rimlands, gain access to the sea, and build a navy sufficient to overcome the insular sea powers. In his view, power originated in the Heartland and was expressed in recurrent expansionist tendencies of the rulers of the Heartland. Relative location allowed expansion in all directions, while the Heartland itself was protected from attacks by sea. In addition, as Napoleons failed efforts in 1812 had illustrated, even by land it was extremely difficult to destroy the Heartland powers. How could the British balance the potential threat of continental dominance in the world island? Mackinder regarded world history in terms of recurring conflict between land-based and sea-based powers. By achieving access to the sea, land powers have usually initiated that struggle: peninsular Greece versus insular Crete, peninsular Rome versus insular Britain, Peninsular Europe (as under Napoleon and Germany) versus insular Britain. During the Age of Exploration, technological advances in shipping and naval activities along with European emphasis on colonialism and overseas expansion had turned the balance of power in favor of the sea-based powers. But, by the end of the 19th century the Age of Exploration was almost over. The development of the railroad, the internal combustion engine, and other technologies facilitating land-based transportation and communication were seen by Mackinder as factors shifting the balance of power toward the landbased powers. The heartland, secure from maritime attack and with access to heavily populated and resource-rich areas of China, India and the Middle East as well as the Western Europe, was the natural center of land power. From the geographical and historical point of view, the Russian Empire had been best situated to control the Heartland. Despite this valuable asset, the Tsarist (Czarist) state of Russia was weaker than Germany at the end of the 19th century. On these grounds, Mackinder argued that it was necessary for Britain to dominate the worlds oceans as a check on possible German expansion. Hence, Mackinder argued that Britain should control the Rimland, or those areas of the world on and near the worlds oceans. Allied victory in WWI in which the sea-based powers of Britain and the United States defeated the land-based power of Germany and her allies, seemed to prove that 15

Mackinder projections were right. In a visionary way, Mackinder argued that Germany despite its defeat in WWI, could again rise into a world power through control of the continental resources of the Heartland. As a consequence, Mackinder stressed the importance of preventing a political or military alliance between Germany and Russia. All along the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Britain had made efforts to prevent an alliance between Russia and Germany. Analysing the WWI, Mackinder considered that Germany was wrong in focusing its efforts westward rather than first conquer Eastern Europe and gain dominion over the Heartland. Had it done so, Mackinder observed shortly after the wars end: The British and American insular peoples would not have realized the strategic danger until too late (cited by Sempa, 1998). When the peace settlement failed to secure Eastern Europe, Mackinder warned that the insular powers would soon face a renewed attempt to dominate the Heartland. That came in 1939 when Germany attacked part of Eastern Europe and two years later invaded the Soviet Union. Just before the end of the WWII, Mackinder suggested an alliance (recognizing the decline of British power) between Great Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union with the purpose of frustrating any future German attempt to control the Heartland. The Allied victory in WWII gave the Soviet Union control of the Heartland and East Europe, a position of strength soon enhanced by an alliance with China. Anticipating another global struggle, Mackinder introduced a new geopolitical concept: the Midland Ocean, defined as the North Atlantic Basin and its four neighboring seas Mediterranean, Baltic, Arctic and Caribbean. Only if the nations surrounding that basin Canada, the United States, France, Britain united could they resist the challenge coming from the Soviet Heartland. Placing a bridgehead in France and an aerodrome in Britain and using the trained manpower, agriculture and industries in eastern United States and Canada, the resistance against both land and sea wars could have been accomplished. One of the reasons NATO has been created was to ensure this unity. Looking to the post-Cold War future, analysts warned that Russia still controls much of the Heartland. So, the recent expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe is, presumably, an answer to this. Nevertheless, the heartland term continues to play a central role in many strategic analyses, although Mackinders theory has been criticized on the basis of its geographical determinism and has been judged outdated because of the deployment of long-range nuclear weapons, which have rendered the inner reaches of the Heartland as vulnerable as other parts of the globe (OLoughlin, 1994).

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Geopolitics in France The tradition of geopolitical thought in France is quite different from that of Britain. To understand the French geopolitics one should make reference to the French position within Mackinders scheme of recurring conflict between sea-based and land-based powers. Germany and Russia represented the major land-based powers of the world, whereas Britain and the United States were the worlds predominant maritime powers. Thus, France was situated between the centers of land-based and sea-based power. So, France is the only European power that can be considered part of both the Heartland and the Rimland (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Despite the victory of the Allies in WWI, France was concerned about the possible expansion of Germany within Europe. Being on the part of the winners, France supported the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that forced the Germans to cede the colonies and the European territory to the Allies. Resting uneasily behind the Maginot Line (fortification system along the German frontier from Switzerland to Luxembourg built 1929-1936 under the direction of the war minister Andr Maginot), the German forces succeeded to outflank it in 1940, passing over the Belgian border. The opposition between the two countries was reflected by the French school of geopolitics. This was mainly interested to establish the contrasts between West and East. According to it, the western tradition represented by France, Britain and the United States was based on cooperation and flexibility. The east symbolized by Germany was marked by dictatorship and rigidity. In the extent of the colonial empire, France surpassed Germany, but regarded German views of territorial expansion with suspicion and alarm. As a result, France strongly endorsed the League of Nations and advocated expanded international cooperation to settle disputes. The first French geopolitical study is considered to be La France de lEst published in 1917 by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918). He examined the question of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany in 1871, pleading strongly for the return of the provinces to France. Rejecting the German arguments of nationality based on race and language, he invoked the idea of la gographie active based on the importance of historical development in the formation of both national and regional character. He accepted only partially the Ratzels determinism and the organic view of a state, developing instead the idea of the state as a spatial unit in which the core and the political and psychological importance of the frontiers play the most considerable role. During the interwar period, the French geopolitical thinkers (Jacques Ancel and Albert Dmangeon are two of the most outstanding representatives) were critical of the German doctrine, considering the science of geopolitics to be la science propagandiste 17

allemande aiming to rationalize une expansion infinie. They countered lespace vital (the French for Ratzels lebensraum) with the concepts of entente (friendly agreement of two or more countries on issues of common interest, such as la petite entente established by Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania after WWI directed mainly against Hungary, which having lost two thirds of its prewar territory at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 was aggressively revisionist in regard to all three) and communaut europenne. This last term was initiated by Albert Dmangeon (1872-1940) in early 1920s, in his work Le Dclin de LEurope in which he argued that the European states should put an end to confrontation and work together in the common interest. The causes of the European decline were the rise of the United States to a hegemonic position and that of Japan to regional dominance in the Far East. He employed additional terms, such as: lunion europenne and les tats-unis de lEurope which were soon adopted and made famous across Europe. During the 1930s, the French geopolitics placed its attention on the pressing problems of Europe and less concern being given to the military and strategic questions as Germany did. The study of geopolitics in France came to a sharp end with the defeat by Germany in 1940. For many years after the end of WWII, the subject was avoided, particularly because of its associations with Nazi policies. It was only during the 1970s that the subject has been revisited by Yves Lacoste who advocated the leading role of geographers in developing a better understanding of the geopolitical reality of the world. The French periodical Hrodote (established in 1976) whose editor is Yves Lacoste, considers that the main objective in the filed of geopolitics is the critical examination of global issues from a geographical perspective, with a view to reaching an understanding which can lead to action. Another contribution of the French geopolitics lies in the replacement of the term geopolitics with la gographie politique du pouvoir, the study of the nature and distribution of power in the wider sense and its relationship to political power specifically (Claude Raffestin, 1980). Geopolitics in Germany Both British and French geopolitics evolved in accordance with their respective countries positions within the European world order of the late 19th and late 20th centuries. Similarly, geopolitics in Germany can best be understood with references to German history and geography (Braden, Shelley, 2000). In comparison with other Western European countries, Germany was disadvantaged by several aspects. First of all, Germany lagged behind in terms of political construction. France and Britain along with other nations of Western Europe, had achieved political unity, having emerged as nation18

states by the Renaissance. In contrast, German-speaking areas of central Europe were characterized by deep political fragmentation until mid 19th century. It was only under the dominance of Bismarcks Prussia in the mid19th century that Germany managed to achieve political unification. This triggered a sustained economic and social growth: by 1900, Germany was the third leading industrial country in the world, behind Britain and the United States. Another weakness regards the relative geographical position of Germany. Located at the center of the great European Plain, northern Germany had always been at crossroads, vulnerable to attack. Germany lacked the natural insularity of the British Isles, and was faced with traditionally hostile neighbors on both sides France on the west, and the Eastern European powers along with Russia on the east. During the late 19th century, German foreign policy emphasized rapid territorial expansion in order to counter the possibility of attacks on both fronts. A strong, united Germany or Mitteleuropa including all of the German speaking people of Central Europe would be the most effective means of preserving the integrity of German culture. The idea was that Central Europe was united by a common German heritage as a result of centuries of German expansion to the east, significant German minorities in the states bordering Germany, an affinity for German culture and traditions in the Low Countries, the Alps and Scandinavia and German economic dominance of the region. The German defeat in WWI confirmed these views. The Treaty of Versailles obliged Germany to recognize an independent Poland on its eastern frontier and to cede a substantial portion of East Prussia to the new Polish state. Poland, Czechoslovakia and other newly independent nations of Eastern Europe were established as a buffer between Germany and Russia. On its western border, Germany ceded Alsace-Lorraine back to France. The territorial and military losses suffered by the Germans in the WWI, rendered the German state even weaker than it had been prior to unification. In response to this increased vulnerability, German geopolitical thinkers stressed the need of territorial expansion along with the unification of German speaking people from Central Europe. The territorial expansion was the solution for the German state to secure itself from external attack on both the western and the eastern fronts. From the beginning of the 1920s, the German expression Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) became the priority for the German political actions. Hitler himself supported the orientation to the East in the view to conquest new lebensraum in Eastern Europe. The drive to the east began with the German attack on Poland in September 1939. German geopolitics was influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). At his turn, Ratzel, who is often regarded as the founder of the 19

modern, systematic political geography, was influenced by Darwins theory of evolution. Ratzel was the first one who understood the meaning of the relationships between the environment and the human groups. The environment should supply the human beings with what they need for their existence and to accomplish their activities; they compete for the limited resources and will survive only those best adapted. Ratzel argued that states act like organisms: obey laws of evolution, and fight to survive. Strong states prosper and expand, while weak states decline and die. Within this competitive framework, the expansion of a state, through war, is a natural progressive tendency. A major source of inspiration was the work of Rudolf Kjellen who invented the term of geopolitik and described it as the science which conceives the state as a geographical organism or as a phenomenon in space. In 1896 Ratzel published an article entitled: The Laws of the Territorial Growth of States, comprising seven fundamental rules that any state should obey if wishing to expand: 1. The space of states grows with Kultur as the population expands with the same cultural pattern, new territories occupied by these people enlarge the state; 2. The growth of states follows other manifestations of the growth of peoples, which must necessarily precede the growth of the state the idea of the flag following commercial expansion and missionary activity is considered valid; 3. The growth of states proceeds, to the degree of amalgamation, by the addition of smaller units the people and the soil must be welded together if the state is to be amalgamated; 4. The frontier is the peripheral organ of the state the frontier reflects not only the security of the state but also the growth of the state; 5. In their growth states strive for the absorption of politically valuable sections these valuable sections may be plains, rivers, coastal regions, or areas rich in mineral ores, oil, or food production; 6. The first impetus for territorial growth comes to primitive states from without the great states with Kultur bring their ideas to primitive peoples who through increasing population acquire the need of expansion; 7. The general tendency toward territorial annexation and amalgamation transmits the trend from state to state and increases its intensity the history of expansion indicate that appetite grows through eating. The organic analogy underlies several of the key concepts of German geopolitics. Central is the idea of Lebensraum (living space). Expansion of territory could help to ensure the long-run survival and competitive position of a state, and expansion was seen as a critical key to a states growth and development. Ratzel developed a theory of expansionism in which the need 20

for constant physical growth of the state was explained by his environmental determinist concept of Lebensraum. By that means, Ratzel supplied a scientific justification for imperialism and, ideologically, he was involved in the development of National Socialism. A recent use of the term occurred during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, when many American commentators referred to Kuwait as Saddam Husseins lebensraum. The basic principles of German geopolitics were developed further on by scholars of the Institut fur Geopolitik in Munich, headed by Karl Haushofer (1869-1946). Haushofer argued that a dynamic state required lebensraum to achieve autarcky, or economic and political self-sufficiency. Autarky is possible only if the state has a large territory in order to ensure a rich raw material base and expanding markets. The large area is a prerequisite for a state to prosper and develop. The territorial losses suffered after the WWI, pushed Germany to expand the territory and to conquer the eastern and southeastern Europe. This view of large scale German expansion contributed to a third fundamental concept of German geopolitics: that of pan-regions. For Haushofer, a logical consequence of competitive expansion would be the development of a small number of pan-regions, each consisting of a large area of the world under the domination of one country. During the 1930s a number of potential pan-regions were identified: one of these conceptions divided the world into three major spheres of influence: Europe and Africa (Eurafrica) under the influence of Germany, Asia and Australasia (Pan-Asia) under the domination of Japan, and the Americas (Pan-America) under the domination of the United States. During and after the WWII Haushofer was condemned as providing intellectual inspiration to Hitler and the rulers of Germany during the war. However, this inspiration is not certain, as Germany had always had the will to expand its territories. After the WWII the notion of pan-regions remained alive. Three possible scenarios envisaged at the end of the war reminded the division of the world into great spheres of influence. More recently, the discussion of competing blocs has turned around the competition between the European Community, Japan and the United States and there seems to be increasing evidence that a world of trade blocs will resemble the pan-regional world map of the German geopolitics (the expansion of the European Community, the growth of the NAFTA into South America, the so-called yen block indicate that the world of autarkic spheres of influence is still possible). Russian geopolitics Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has remained the largest country in land area in the world. Russias European territory, in fact, is nearly equal in size to the land area of the rest of that continent. The huge area of European Russia has strenghtened its influence in international 21

geopolitics for centuries, as Mackinder had recognized the role of Russia in defining the heartland. Yet, Russias impressive geopolitical potential started to be turned into account by the end of the 19th century. In comparison with the rest of Europe, the Czarist Empire was huge, peripheral, back-warded and isolated. Even so, the large and rich territory had long been an interesting target for invadors. For example, during the Middle Ages, Russia had been invaded by the German speaking Teutonic Knights from the west and by the Mongols and other asiatic nomads from the east. Meanwhile, Russias economic development lagged far behind that of Western Europe; industrialisation came late to Russia, which remained a feudal society long after Britain, France, Germany and other European powers had become characterized by industrial capitalism. Russian geopolitics is in large measure derived of Russia perception of itself as vulnerable, isolated and peripheral. This was recognized by Peter the Great, who travelled throughout western Europe before ascending the Russian throne in 1689. After he became Czar, tried to transform Russia into a major European power by encouraging Western influence. He opened Russia to Western trade and established the city of St. Petersburg on the Baltic as the new capital of the Russian state. Peter the Great and his successors established the traditional cornerstones of Russian international policy: secure borders, access to warm-water ports, elimination of economic dependency and expansion to the east. The borders of the Russian Empire display different geographical contexts: two safe borders, to the north - the Arctic Ocean, and to the south the great mountain ranges of Asia; and one problematic - the western border represented by the Russian Plain, always dangerous because of its accessibility. That is why, the western border has been secured constantly, especially against the expansion of Germany. Another geographic factor which has influenced the Russian geopolitics referred to the climatic constraints. The major rivers and ports of Russia are blockaded by ice for several months each winter, diminishing the Russian trade flows mainly to western Europe. Only Murmansk in far northern Russia is an ice-free port, but its remote location on the Arctic Ocean renders it of little value for trade with western Europe. Thus, a major objective of Russian policy has been expansion to warm-water ports and trading opportunities. In particular, Russia desired control of the Black Sea and the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and consequently to the Atlantic. Russian control of this territory stayed at the root of the Crimean War of 1853-1856 (Braden, Shelley, 2000). During the 18th and 19th centuries, Russia expanded steadily to the southwest and to the east, through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. The establishment of Vladivostok and other Pacific ports and the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway helped to 22

link Siberia with European Russia. Less-populated Siberia stands in opposition with the densely populated countries of eastern Asia to the south. The overthrow of the Czars and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union brought about some fundamental changes in Russias approach to geopolitics (Braden, Shelley, 2000). After the Russian Revolution had established a communist government in the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders argued the merits of using Russia as a base from which to encourage worldwide socialist revolution as opposed to concentrating on the economic development of the Soviet Union itself. This debate was critical to the struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky, the former sustained the policy of socialism within one country, whereas the latter intended to facilitate an international socialist revolution. Stalin viewed the Soviet state as a socialist island surrounded by hostile, capitalist enemies, so during the 1930s he sponsored large-scale industrial development programs, aiming to build a strong military system. During the existence of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, geopolitics was considered to be the preserve of the bourgeois democracies. The Russian geopolitika became a term of abuse, as it was equated with militaristic capitalism (OLoughlin, 1994). Its promoters were seen as lackeys of imperialism. In the mid-1950s the Soviet view of world affairs changed dramatically. The Soviet navy has changed its range from Soviet coastal waters to worldwide operations. At the same time, the demand for independence in the European colonies began to escalate, and the region became viewed as a zone of competition between the West, led by the US and the USSR. The USSR saw its role as assisting national liberation movements, later codified as part of the Brezhnev doctrine. According to this, USSR was supposed to intervene in Africa, Asia and Latin America to disrupt the capitalist order in the 1970s. The declaration of active support of revolution without frontiers was accompanied by practice in different places of the world. The Soviet Union provided military and economic aid to self-proclaimed revolutionary governments in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Laos and lesser amounts of aid to other Third World left-wing governments and movements. The other element of Brezhnevs Doctrine was the proclamation that Soviet control of Eastern Europe was irreversible, especially after 1968 when the Red Army had put down the Czech ambitions for independence. This was considered unquestionable until the so-called Sinatra Doctrine came into play in autumn 1989. The name came from Gennady Gerasimov, the Gorbachev spokesperson, who stated that Eastern European countries could do it their way, paraphrasing the popular Frank Sinatra song I did it my way. In effect, Soviet leader Gorbachev stated that the Eastern European states could follow their own destinies, as civil unrest was growing in all of the Eastern European countries. The result was the 23

rapid success of popular movements in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Romania, the unification of Germany and the replacement of Communist regimes by popularly elected governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria (OSullivan in OLoughlin, 1994). Geopolitics in the United States Although Europe was in the center of the geopolitical thinking in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the US had already emerged as one of the most powerful countries in the world in the aftermath of the WWI. In less than a century and a half, the US grew from a European colonial outpost on the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean to a leading military and economic power. In its rise to international prominence, the US enjoyed several strenghts: abundant natural resources, large land area and secure borders (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Thanks to its great distance from Europe, the United States could remain neutral in most European conflicts and, thus, allocated much less money for military purposes than the European countries. This money was in turn used to finance the industrialisation and economic development. Throughout American history, US foreign policy has shifted between introverted cycles in which American interest has been dominated by domestic concerns, and extroverted cycles when the US took a more active interest in international relations. Thus introvert phases represent periods dominated by a philosophy of American isolasionism, while extrovert periods are characterized by an attitude of intervention in foreign affairs. Between the granting of American independence following the Treaty of Paris in 1793 and the end of the WWII, three extrovert periods and three introvert periods are recognized. The extrovert phases include the early years of American independence prior to 1825, the period between 1845 and 1867 when America completed its teritorial expansion across North America, and the period from the late 1890s until the end of the WWI, when the United States emerged as a global power. The period during and after the WWII represents the fourth extrovert period. After the Revolutionary War, Americas main foreign policy concerns included ensuring sovereignty over its territory and removing European influence from the New World. Achievement of these objectives brought the newly independent state into conflict with Britain and France, including the War of 1812. The result was the Monroe Doctrine adopted in 1823 which established as a cornerstone of American foreign policy the opposition to any further European colonial expansion in North and South America. Geopolitical domination of the Americas has remained a central tenet of American geopolitics ever since. The first half of the 19th century was devoted to land 24

purchase of Louisiana in 1803, Florida in 1819, New Mexico and southern Arizona in 1853 and Alaska in 1867. The second half was devoted to the expansion of settlement across these new territories and the development of American industry. In the same time the role of the US was increased in Central and Southern Americas (the previously independent kingdom of Hawaii was annexed, and troops were sent to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Panama and the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to justify these incursions. The Monroe Doctrine embodied three principles. First, it restated the principle of noncolonization for the European powers in the Americas. Second, it asserted the nonintervention principle by announcing that the United States would stay apart in the case of European wars since the political systems were so different. Third, it formalized the principle of nontransfer, that the United States would not submit to any transfer of territory in the New World from any one European state to another. The Monroe Doctrine was invoked in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan when referring to the Soviet Union and Cuban support of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The end of the 19th century witnessed the released of two important contributions to the theoretical foundations of the American geopolitics. These were the works of Alfred Mahan (1840-1914): The Influence of Seapower upon History (1890) and The Interest of America in Seapower (1897). He was the first to distinguish seapowers and landpowers and to analyze their roles in world history. He considered that the worlds great powers, England and the United Provinces at that time, were seapowers favoured by their insular location, their far away position as against other powers, their defensible coastlines and easy control over land bases. Mahan proposed an American-British alliance that could rule the seas and oceans of the world and supported US takeovers in the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama as a means to supply the United States with vital bases.His work was influential nor only for the American administrations but also for scholars and politicians in Europe. Integrating Mahans and Mackinders ideas, Nickolas Spykman (18931943) argued that it was no longer in the interest of US to maintain an isolationist foreign policy after the WWII. He identified two basic geographical entities in global politics: the Old World comprising the Eurasian continent, Africa, Australia and the New World dominated by the United States. The best strategy for the United States was to keep the Old World divided through an active foreign policy. He took an in-depth look of the Old world, defining its main geographical features. In line with Mackinders view, Spykman identified similar components, but unlike Mackinder suggested that the most strategic one was the Rimland, i.e. the margins of the Eurasian continent. According to him, the Rimland provided the key to the balance of power in the Old world, thus the United States would have to project its power in this area. 25

The US entered the WWI as neutral but Woodrow Wilson, the president at that time, was concerned to maintain a balance of power in Europe, so in 1917 the US declared war against Germany. In fact, Americas entry into the war secured an Allied victory. President Wilson provided a set or principles that help war to be avoided. He defined fourteen points in calling for a new approach to international diplomacy. One of the most important outcome of the Wilsons Fourteen Points was the creation in 1919 of the League of Nations, as an international organization based on the principal of collective security, the first formalised attempt to create an international body designed to mediate disputes with permanent structures and a codified Charter. Despite its failure to take action against Japanese, Italian and German aggression in the 1930s, the League provided a model for the United Nations Organization in 1945. After the WWI, the US moved again into an introvert phase in its foreign relations. Only during the 1930s when the tensions mounted again in Europe, the US gave up of its international policy of isolation. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii caused the American declaration of war against the axis Powers (Japan, Germany and Italy). The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs demonstrated the immense power of nuclear weapons. The end of the war in 1945 left America the worlds strongest military and economic power. However, America did not retreat into isolationism as it had done following WWI. During the late 1940s the US expanded economic and military aid to Western Europe through the establishment of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In early 1950s a bipolar view of international relations, contrasting Soviet communism with American democracy, was characteristic of American foreign policy. The nuclear era and the increasing arms race between the US and the Soviet Union generated the beginning of a new era in world geopolitics. In addition to the tension between isolationism and internationalism and the Monroe Doctrine, two other considerations have influenced 20th century American geopolitics the role of aviation and the role of the Arctic regions. Throughout the 20th century, American foreign policy emphasized American dominance of the sky and outer space. The Arctic Region is important because it is located along the shortest air routes between Eurasia and North America. In this respect, Arctic has been regarded as an American Mediterranean, which explains why during the Cold War era the Arctic was considered very important to American defense. Numerous military bases and missile tracking stations were operated in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and Iceland. Key Points 26

The tradition of geopolitcal thought refects largely the geographical and historical setting. Many geopolitical concepts born in early 20th century are still relevant for the understanding of world politics one century after. Geopolitical theories and representatives were influential in determining the international relations of their countries.

Key Concepts Territory a portion of the earths surface appropriated by a political community, a state. State sovereignty a states characteristics being politically independent of all other states. Suzerain state a state which dominates and subordinates neighboring states, without taking them over. Empire a state which possesses both a home territory and foreign territories; an imperial state. Hegemony power and control exercised by a leading state over other states. Balance of power a doctrine and an arrangement whereby the power of one state (or group of states) is checked by the countervailing power of other states. International order a shared value and condition of stability and predictability in the relations of states. Third World term born in the context of the Cold War to define the countries that did not line up on one side (the western bloc The First World) or the other (the Soviet bloc the Second World), such as Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Cyprus, Indonesia, Ethiopia. In the long run, the term gained economic and social connotations. Brezhnev doctrine declaration by Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 that members of the Warsaw Pact would enjoy only limited sovereignty in their political development. Sinatra doctrine statement by the Soviet foreign ministry in October 1989 that countries of Eastern Europe were doing it their way and which marked the end of the Brezhnev doctrine and Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Glasnost policy of greater openness pursued by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985, involving greater toleration of internal dissent and criticism. Perestroika policy of restructuring, pursued by Gorbachev in tandem with Glasnost, and intended to modernize the Soviet political and economic system.

27

III. Geopolitical World Orders Contemporary geopolitical analysis The creation of a New World Order is the key issue in contemporary international politics. After the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, it has become generally accepted that the Cold War the Old World Order is finished and international politics has to be reconstructed in another form. To understand the current search for a new world order, it is necessary to explore this popular notion both within a theoretical and historical context. For doing so, world orders should be interpreted as relatively stable distributions of political power across the world. To explain the content of these world orders we need to relate them to other global patterns of social change, and the particular activities of governments that create the events that are the essence of international politics (Taylor, 2000). Two geopolitical world orders are identified in the 20th century, chronologically, they are: firstly, the geopolitical world order of British Succession and secondly, the Cold War geopolitical world order. Periods and cycles The starting point of the analysis is to locate geopolitical world orders within the periods and cycles that form the 20th century. The geopolitical world orders although seem to be randomly generated changes, in fact they can be related to other temporal sequences that are more patterned. One of the most frequent correlation links world orders with economic periods. The world economy is cyclical in nature, according to Immanuel Wallersteins famous theory Long waves as capitalist process released in 1984, and politicians have to accommodate to these systematically varying circumstances. Changing materials contexts profoundly alter the circumstances in which politicians act by providing new agendas for action. Cyclical changes on the global scale, is made up of basically two types of cycles: Kondratieff cycles of approximately half a century and hegemonic cycles of about a century in length and their corresponding geopolitical world orders. Kondratieff cycles (named after the Russian economist who first identified them) are usually described in strictly economic terms, but undoubtedly they have profound political impacts (Knox, Agnew, 1998). The fifty year cycle is divided into two approximately equal periods, an A-phase of growth and a B-phase of stagnation. In accordance with the timing of these cycles the 20th century covers the third and fourth Kondratieff cycles, with the 1980s bringing to the forefront the fifth Kondratieff cycle (Taylor, 2000). The most successful interpretation of these economic waves in relation to political processes has come through their linkage to hegemonic cycles. Hegemonic cycles focus upon one state, - the hegemon - that for a short 28

period is pre-eminently powerful economically, politically and culturally. The cycle consists of the rise and fall from this position. These can be explained as follows: the hegemon gradually gains a clear economic advantage in the field of production and extends its leadership to the commercial and financial spheres. At the same time it becomes politically dominant after leading a coalition of states against its main political rival. Henceforth it is able to order the world to its advantage using the balance of power. This is possible in part because of its cultural leadership in universal ideas, the hegemon being usually considered the champion of world liberalism. The period of high hegemony is relatively short and these leadership attributes from production to culture are progressively lost (Wallerstein, 1984). Geopolitical world orders are not as neatly related to the economic waves as they are to each other, i.e. the British succession and the Cold War. Although they show other pattern of temporal variation, they generally begin and end at roughly the same time as Kondratieff phases. More than that, both cycle phases and the world orders between them constitute the nature of the modern global times. For example, the processes making up the K4, US hegemonic practices and the Cold War are impossible to be taken separately when understanding the recent past of contemporary times.
Table 1. Kondratieff/hegemonic cycles and their corresponding world orders Time Kondratieff Hegemonic cycle Geopolitical cycle world orders th st nd 19 c. 1 and 2 K British World Order cycles Hegemonic cycle of (industrial (ascending Hegemony revolution hegemony of (Britains long industrial Britain ascending depression) declining hegemony hegemony (age Germany of imperialism, dominating new Europe, mercantilism) Britain still greatest world power) 20thc. 3rd K cycle (first American World Order 2 decades of Hegemonic cycle of the economic (increasing role British boom the of USA as world Succession great power (Germany depression of declining and USA 1913-1920) hegemony overtake th 4 K cycle (the because of the Britain as

29

post war boom after 1940 the long recession late 1960s-early 1970s)

Japanese and European rivalry)

Late 1980 s

5th K cycle

New Hegemonic cycle?

world powers) disintegratio n (Cold War World Order transition USA hegemony challenged by the ideological alternative offered by the USSR) Disintegrati on again New World Order transition 1989-1991 and then?

Source: Taylor, 2000, p. 35, synthesized. Geopolitics is centered on states. Governments conceptualize the distribution of political power beyond their boundaries as a precondition for conducting foreign policy in their special national interest. This is the way state elites make sense of the world in order to respond to or to create events to their states advantage (Taylor, 2000). Undoubtedly, all these political events and actions are the results of a very specific way each state assesses its power and communicate its objectives. This is expressed in a particular language in the same way human beings in their daily life develop social codes. Lets take for example the code of manners: it is made up of certain rules of behavior in different occasions, at different times, of addressing to different persons distinguished by their civic status, social position, sex or age. Accordingly, there is also a very strict geopolitical code. Geopolitical codes The term geopolitical code is to describe the output of practical geopolitical reasoning by which a government deals with the outside world (Gaddis, 1982). A national interest is defined and other states are evaluated in terms of whether they are real or potential aids or obstacles to that interest. A change of government in a state may change details in a code, although the foreign policy in the 20th century has come to be located within the consensus realm of most state politics. According to political changes in a state, we can identify general codes that transcend several governments and 30

specific codes incorporating different emphases for each of those governments. For instance, there is one code for the USA after the WWII but with distinctive features for successive Democrat and Republican administrations. The geopolitical code is easily understood through analyzing the foreign policies of governments: alliances, agreements, overseas bases, and levels of diplomatic status, indicate the content of the code. The geographical scale is a major component in geopolitical codes. In general the content of the geopolitical code of one state to another will vary in a greater or lesser extend, with distance (OSullivan, 1986). For all states their neighbors are crucial components of their code either as friends or enemies. Trade interactions, for example, generally occur between neighboring states, but also most wars are border wars. Every state, therefore, has its own local code. For the small states this constitutes the effective whole of their practical operations. For medium and large states the perspective is wider, including the regional level. Regional powers throughout the world define their national interests beyond the narrow confines of their borders. Brazil in South America, India in South Asia and Nigeria in West Africa are the clearest examples of states which include domination of their region as integral to their national interests. Finally there are world powers whose codes are global in extent. Their governments consider events across the world as being of potential relevance to their national interest as a great power. The USA and USSR as superpowers in the second half of the 20th century are classic examples of states claiming such worldwide interests. States can move between these categories. The most recent and dramatic example is that of the USSR, which gradually disengaged around the world in the late 1980s, leaving its major successor state, Russia, as a regional power. The geopolitical codes are strongly interrelated. Put it in the simplest way, the local codes of small states have to fit into the regional codes of medium states which in turn should fit into global codes of world powers. This leads to a series of bilateral and multilateral patterns of associated codes across the world. But the geographical organization of power across the world is more than an aggregation of these hierarchies of codes. Beyond any individual code, however powerful the state, there is a geographical order that defines the basic parameters of the international politics of the time. Such orders represent relatively stable patterns of geographical power distributions over distinctive periods of time. During that period, the geopolitical codes of most, though not necessarily all, states will accept the defining parameters of the order. World Orders in the 20th century 31

Geopolitically, there are two well marked world orders during the 20th century: one is from the beginning of the century to the end of the WWII, and that is the world order of the British Succession and the other is between 1945 to the late 1980s, the Cold War. The World Order of British Succession At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was still the most powerful empire in the world, but there were signs of relative decline as well. Several major events contributed to the change of the balance of power: the increasing role of Germany set up as an Empire in 1870 and the new agreements between France, Britain and Russia which placed Germany in the middle of a potential conflict. The Allies get the sympathy of the USA neutral at the time. In January 1896 Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed that Germany should pursue a policy of weltpolitik. By giving notice of a global geopolitical code, Germany was directly challenging Britains extra European supremacy (Taylor, 2000). The Franco-Russian alliance from 1898 had both an antiBritish and an anti-German character, the emergence of Japan as an Asian regional power after its defeat of China in 1894, and the extension of the USAs geopolitical code to Americas and eastern Pacific were essential contributions to the disintegration of the old world order. Under these circumstances, Britain showed the first signs of giving up the hegemon position: in 1901 Britain conceded USA predominance in Central America, in 1904 she signed the Entente Cordiale with France accepting the French domination in Morocco, and later she agreed with Russia on the partition of Persia between them. The beginning of the century has been characterized by a strong diplomatic fluidity: Germany and France came to a bilateral agreement over Morocco in 1909; Britain and Russia failed to prevent rivalry over Persia in 1911; in the same year Britain hardly accepted the renewal of the JapaneseBritish naval alliance. Britain and Germany were destined to conflict as the former has turned into a leading revisionist state in the inter-state system. The First World War was essentially a war between Britain and Germany fighting for the mastery of Europe and the global balance of power (Taylor, 2000). From 1915 Britain was financing its war effort through loans from the USA. By staying in a military war with Germany, it was effectively loosing a financial war with USA. As a consequence, the WWI marked the transfer of the centre of world finance from London to New York. The final tangible element of Britains financial hegemony was gone, whatever the outcome of the war. The USA was the real winner of the war even before she joined the Allies in 1917. Also as a result of WWI and the Versailles settlement, France became the leading power on continental Europe. But the position was quite artificial and therefore short-term, it was only a matter of 32

time before the larger and more industrially developed German state would be in the position to reassert her leadership of Europe. Outside Europe, Britains chief rivals during this phase were the USA and Japan. During the 1930s, the world has been again deeply divided. The Americas were under the USA leadership, Japan consolidated its position of regional power, occupying Manchuria in 1931 and bringing China into war in 1937. At the other end of the world, URRS embarked on an autarky program, termed as socialism in one country. But the key actors remained Britain and Germany. While the former has continuously lost ground as the world hegemon, the latter has enforced its expansionist foreign policy. The WWII has brought another fundamental change of geopolitical codes: the alliance of Germany with Japan, coupled with the joining of the USA with the Allies meant that this was the first truly global conflict with major confrontations outside Europe. Germany developed a new world plan whose end-result would be the dissolution of the British Empire, with Germany gaining African colonies, the USA inheriting Canada and the Caribbean, Russia conquering India and Japan likewise Australia and the Pacific Islands. But there were three major problems arising from the overlapping of the geopolitical codes of the Great Powers: USA had economic interest in eastern Asia competing with Japan on the same area, Russia and Germany could not limit their interest to Asia and Africa respectively, but disputed Eastern Europe. By the end of 1941 the division of the world into a power struggle between the two alliances was in place: the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy versus the Grand Alliance of Britain, the USA and the USSR. At the end of this war, Britain was again on the winning side, but this time its contribution was clearly secondary in both the European and the Pacific theatres of war. Germany may have been stopped a second time, but now the British succession could no longer be postponed. A very different geopolitical world order was ready to be put in place. The Cold war order The term was popularized by US political commentator Walter Lippmann in 1947 (Steel, 1980). It was born of disappointment in the new post-war era: the hot war with Germany and Japan was over, only to be replaced by new international tensions as the Grand Alliance broke up. For the USA the USSR soon replaced Germany as a great ideological enemy threatening the building of a liberal world order anchored in the United Nations. As the USSR slipped into Germany's role, the only change seemed to be the lack of military conflict, hence cold war (Taylor, 2000). The freezing of the inter-state system into two antagonistic blocs had an ideological basis, setting apart the civilized, democratic world and the totalitarianism, communist world. The new world order was proclaimed in civilization terms. 33

For the USSR this meant that the Cold War was just a step on the road to world revolution to create a new civilization. Western politicians were thinking in similar terms. In his famous speech to Congress in 1947 US President Harry Truman talked of the world having to choose between two ways of life: freedom or totalitarianism. Nazi Germany had been the totalitarian symbol, so by branding the USSR with the same label the recent mobilization of resources and peoples for freedom could be continued: it justified the conversion of ally into enemy. The Cold War covers the period of US hegemony in the world-system. At the first sight, the world order seems very straightforward, with and East-West geographical pattern of power conflict dominating the inter-state system. In fact, an alternative North-South geographical pattern is added, and US political hegemony came to be challenged by a new Third World as well as the USSR (Krasner, 1985). The antagonism between US and SU actually began at the end of WWI with the establishment of the USSR from the ruins of the old Tsarist state. The intervention of the West Britain, France, Japan and the USA in the Russian civil war in 1920-21 was the first war with communism at the inter-state level and may be interpreted as a prologue to the Cold War world order. The world order was totally transformed: the USA replaced Britain as leader, and the USSR replaced Germany as challenger. The nature of international politics was turned upside-down. The British succession was settled, and a different politics would have to be built in place of it, but it was by no means obvious that the new world order would take the form of the Cold War. When the term superpower was coined in 1944, it was applied as much to the British Empire as to the USA and USSR. At the end of the war, the peace was in the hands of the Big Three, with Britain accorded equal status in negotiations. Despite its rapidly diminishing power, Britain was surprisingly influential in creating the new geopolitical world order. In 1945 five potential patterns of power were possible (Taylor, 2000): One world, where the Grand Alliance survives to lead an undivided and peaceful world; Three monroes, where the three superpowers split apart and each concentrates on their division of the world; An anti-imperial front producing two worlds where the USA and USSR combine to oppose Britain and other European Empires; An anti-hegemonic front producing two worlds where Britain and the USSR combine perhaps as socialist states after Labors 1945 election victory in Britain, to confront the overwhelming economic power of the USA; An anti-communist front producing two worlds with Britain and the USA confronting the USSR. 34

How did this last option become the next world order? The answer came from Britain. It was afraid of the option termed as the three monroes where both the USA and the USSR possessed relatively compact and contiguous spheres of influence, leaving Britain with leftover western colonies that would be impossible to defend in any future conflict. Britain feared that SU would promote an autarky policy and the USA would return to its isolationism that had dominated American foreign policy long time ago. In the same time, Britain had little faith in the United Nations as a defense umbrella to shelter British interests, so the best solution to cope with Britains vulnerability was to promote a two-world division. The Prime Minister Winston Churchill used his influence to speed up the process of world division with his famous iron curtain speech opposing the dark forces of communism and Anglo-American liberties. Another major event that helped the Cold War to be put in place was the confrontation between USA and USSR over Iran because the latter delayed the withdrawing its troops. So, very shortly, Britain succeeded to speed the USA commitment to defend all countries against the spread of communism. More over, Britain declared her inability to afford continuing the defense of Greece and Turkey, and the USA stepped in as new guarantor. Ironically, in 1947 after Indian independence and other British crises that the Big Three became definitively reduced to two and the world entered the bipolar system of the Cold War. This period began with the division of Europe in two blocs, strengthened by the Marshall Plan in 1947 through which the US capital was made available to reconstruct Europe. The U.S. Secretary of State, George Marshall, proposed a European Recovery Program designed to counter the effects of the war and to create stable political conditions in which democracy would survive. Over the next four years, the United States provided about $13 billion in assistance to Europe (almost $100 billion in todays money). Since the USSR refused to allow states it controlled to accept such funds, the operation of the plan in 1948 applied solely to 16 European countries, included defeated West Germany and Turkey and effectively divided Europe into two economic regions. Till the early 1950s the geopolitical codes of the two superpowers have become clear. For the USSR, Eastern Europe was strategic, since it had been invaded twice through this region, the Soviet state insisted on political control of a ring of buffer states from the Black Sea to the Baltic. On the other side, the USA was interested to maintain Britain, Germany and Japan under its influence. Hence, the rapid conversion of former enemies West Germany and Japan to friends, plus the Marshall aid for Britain and the rest of Europe. In this way, Europe was no longer at the center of the global political economy and no longer in the position to initiate geopolitical change. It rather was a battleground, both militarily and economically, between the 35

competing interests of the USA and the SU. By the 1950s, Western Europe had become incorporated into the American dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO-1949) and thousands of American troops were stationed in Western Europe with the intention of protecting it from potential Russian attacks. Similarly, the Warsaw Pact (1955) symbolized the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence. Sir Winston Churchills famous phrase: an iron curtain has descended across the continent came to symbolize Europes position in post-WWII geopolitics (Braden, Shelley, 2000). The confruntation between the SU and the US over Europe got momentum in early 1960s. In 1961 the Soviet Premier Khrushchev demanded that western troops be withdrawn from West Berlin. So, the East German government constructed a wall across Berlin to prevent East German citizens to escape to the west. For a while, American and Soviet tanks faced each other across the wall and this remained in place until November 1989 as a symbol of the Cold War. At the same time, America has become more and more concerned that the Soviets would continue to extend their influence beyond Eastern Europe. The Domino theory which suggested that countries were successively vulnerable to communist influence like a row of falling dominoes, was often proposed as a metaphor for possible communist takeover of additional countries. The Domino Theory expresses the belief that Communism diffuses from state to state by a contagious process. The interpretation belongs to a former US ambassador in Moscow, William Bullitt, who described the monolithic Communism spreading outward from SU, sweeping through China and Southeast Asia to eventually engulf the world, unless the USA intervened to stop it. In response, President Harry Truman established the Truman Doctrine in 1947 in which the US offered military and economic assistance to European countries threatened by communist takeover. The Truman Doctrine served to legitimize American interests in European politics which were reinforced by the Marshall plan beginning with 1948. The American aid was also provided to fight communist insurgency in Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine marks the beginning of a new, post-war American globalism wherein the US government saw it as its duty to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. The competition between USA and SU went beyond the borders of Europe, to Asia and the best examples are China (the American-supported Nationalist Government of China fell to Mao Zedong and the Communists in 1949 and especially Korea, the northern part was helped by the SU whereas the southern part was backed by the USA. The result was the Korean War between 1950 and 1953 in which more than 50 thousand American soldiers 36

died (Braden, Shelley, 2000). The Truman Doctrine justified the intervention of the United States into Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s under the umbrella of sound words such as vital interest, national security, free world, and peace is at stake that suggest the US power to decide matters all over the world. The most dramatic example refers to the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict during the 1960s. Vietnam was split between the communist dominated North Vietnam and a western oriented South Vietnam. In 1964 the US Senate decided the involvement into the conflict and by 1966 400,000 troops were sent in Vietnam. In the late 1960s the President Johnsons decision to supply large numbers of troops and military aid to Vietnam came to be questioned increasingly by the American public opinion. The Americans began to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and the opposition against the American involvement was increasing. As the 1970s began, it became clear that American military victory in Vietnam could not be achieved, and the Americans turned over conduct of military operations to the South Vietnamese army. The Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. By that time, American activities in Vietnam had resulted in nearly 60,000 American military casualties. Acknowledging this failure, the United States entered an introvert cycle, which remained until the end of the Cold War. Later on, the geopolitical code of the USA gave way to a more pluralistic balance of power model. A pentagonal distribution of power was envisaged, with the two superpowers being joined by China, Europe (in fact European Community) and Japan. This was a way to recognize the economic achievements of the latter two and the long-standing potential of China. More formally, this was the time when the leaders of the seven largest capitalist economies USA, West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Britain and Canada began their regular series of G7 meetings. Other parts of the Third World have been subject to American-Soviet confruntation, too. Many former European colonies were granted political independence during the 1950s and the 1960s. They also became battlegrounds of the Cold War, with East and West backing rival factions in internal power struggles. The USA and the Soviet Union donated large amounts of military and economic assistance to newly independent nations. Support for Israel in the Middle East made it difficult for the USA to keep allies in this region. All radical Arab regimes Egypt, Syria, Iraq, later Lybia distanced themselves from the USA to become friendly with the USSR. Irrespective of the more tensed or released periods they were passing through, the two superpowers struggled to maintain order within their spheres of influence: in 1970 the USSR interfered in the workers revolt in Poland, in 1973 the USA participated in a coup to remove the socialist government in Chile. Furthermore, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war found the USA and the USSR in their familiar positions on either side of the conflict. But 37

some other events suggested that the USSR was going to enhanced its position in the detriment of the USA: more colonies turned into new states of Marxist orientation (Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia), Iran became explicitly anti-American after the popular overthrow of the Shah, and the radical Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua brought fears of a communist regime on the American mainland. During the Cold War, hundreds of wars took place across the less developed world. Nevertheless, hostilities were concentrated especially in a few critical regions known as shatterbelts (Braden, Shelley, 2000). Four major shatterbelts of the Cold War have been identified: 1. the Middle East and Southwest Asia; 2. Southeast Asia; 3. Southern Africa; 4. Southeastern Europe. These areas have been identified as shatterbelts for two reasons: major strategic importance to the two superpowers and long-standing rivalry between indigenous ethnic groups with distinctive and often incompatible goals. The Middle East stands as a major crossroads, has vast petroleum deposits that have proven critical to the economies of the industrialized nations throughout the world. Long-standing ethnic tension was exacerbated by the movement of European Jews to Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Successive wars between Israel and Arabs, Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, United Nations and Iraq over Kuwait in 1991 are some examples of violent confrontations in the area. Southeast Asia includes a large variety of ethnic groups with different religious views and divergent national objectives. Its strategic importance to the both sides of the Cold War derives from the located along the major trade route between East Asia, South Asia, Middle East and Europe. South Africa is strategic for its large mineral deposits of gold, silver, iron, diamonds, and also for being located along the main sea trade route between Europe and Asia. Another reason for the local tensions was the conflict between the white minority and the black majority, generating the apartheid policy. South Eastern Europe is characterized by ethnic tensions as well, former Yugoslavian people being on the top. The region was an important battleground of the Cold War: it was in Greece and Turkey that the Truman Doctrine was first formulated. Later the United States donated substantial amounts of aid to ethnically divided Yugoslavia in order to encourage Yugoslavias independent, anti-Soviet foreign policies. During the post-Cold War era, the region was again the theatre of violent ethnically grounded confrontations which reignite from time to time. 38

The worlds geopolitics was also altered radically by new military technologies, which reduced the distance between competing nations. The atomic detonation of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 for the first time showed the destructive power of the atomic weapons. By the early 1950s the Russians had also developed and tested nuclear weapons, and the destruction of the entire civilization through atomic war became possible for the first time. The traditional concept of balance of power translated into a balance of terror in the 1950s and the 1960s (Braden, Shelley, 2000). By the middle of the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had become locked in an increasing arms race. In 1957 the Soviet Union announced the launching of its first satellite Sputnik. That increased the fears that the Soviets surpassed the USA in technological development and also represented a direct challenge to American domination of the air, which we have seen represented a fundamental component of the American geopolitical worldview. As a consequence, the American space program was strengthened leading to moon landing in 1969. As the Cold War deepened, the relations between the two superpowers continued to deteriorate. In 1962 the whole world was on the verge of the nuclear war because of the Cuban crises. In 1959 the Cuban government has been taken over by Fidel Castro. Castro turned Cuba into a socialist state and established close ties with the Soviet Union. His hostility toward the USA grew when the Americans sponsored an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the socialist government in 1961 via the Bay of Pigs invasion. By the summer of 1962 the Soviets had begun to send missiles to Cuba. The Cuban-Soviet alliance meant that the USSR was not only breaking out of its mutually decided sphere of influence, but also entering the American one. The USA asked the Soviets to withdraw the missiles from Cuba and the Soviet Union asked the Americans to withdraw their military bases from Turkey. After a period of great tensions, the both respected the agreement. This event lead to a significant lessening of tension between the Americans and the Soviets: several agreements have been signed to reduce the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and to limit the spread of nuclear technology to non-nuclear countries. For example, in 1972 the USA and SU signed the agreement SALT I Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce their anti-ballistic missiles systems and to eliminate their further testing and development. In mid 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev signed an arms control agreement concerning European missiles with the west. During the summer of 1989, Gorbachev and George Bush announced plans to reduce missiles and other armaments in Europe. Visions of the post-Cold WarEra 39

The recent time has different meanings for different observers. Here are some of the ways the post-1989 period is described and explained by the most influential books written in the last years. The selection is sourced from a 2001 published text-book on the globalization of world politics, edited by Baylis and Smith: The End of History of Francis Fukuyama. This is an optimistic perspective which consider the collapse of communism as a return to democracy and market economy. The liberal capitalism is the only alternative and its values will prevail globally; Back to the Future of John Mearsheimer. It is a realistic warning about the danger and uncertainty generated by the end of the Cold War. The author appreciated the security and order established and maintained by the bipolar world after the WWII. The present is marked by increasing instability and ethnic unrest in Europe and pessimistic prospects for further nuclear proliferation; The Clash of Civilizations of Samuel Huntington. The author considers that tha Cold War is over but the conflicts are not. The source is different this time, being civilizational in nature. The clash emerges between the West which values the respect for individual, human rights, democracy and secularism and those countries from Middle East or Asia that promote different value systems; The Coming Anarchy of Robert Kaplan. The assumption is that economic and human collapse in parts of Africa are as relevant to understanding the future of world politics as the Balkand were prior to the WWI. He warnes that the West ignores whar is happening in these areas at its risk; Nothing new of Noam Chomski. The post 1989 changes did not altered the essence of the international system: it still remain divided between the rich powerful states and the dependent Third World. The author draws our attention to the new humanitarian interventions of the West which are in fact noting else but expressions of imperialism with new clothes. A new geopolitical world order? After more than 40 years, the Cold War came to a sudden and surprising end in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its formal end was declared in November 1990 at the Paris Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Mikhail Gorbachev and his liberal policy have marked the beginning of this process. Gorbachev lifted restrictions on trade and emigration, promoted cultural exchanges and permitted increased interaction between the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe and the West. Within less than one year communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East 40

Germany and Romania were replaced by elected democratic governments. Also, the ex Soviet republics especially the Baltic ones declared their independence and also Georgia, made so the Soviet communism had faded into the pages of history and the Cold War was now over. The others formed an economic union known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. The collapse of USSR and the other communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe determined in fact the end of the Cold War World order and the changing of the geopolitical codes at the international level. The present is marked by the search for a new order. How it will be like? One of the scenarios predicts a divide through the Atlantic, with Japan and the USA leading a Pacific Rim bloc against a greater Europe incorporating the ex-USSR and dominating the Middle East and Africa (Wallerstein, 1991). This new geopolitical arrangement, while still being bi-polar, completely turns the Cold War pattern upside down in terms of who sides with whom. The recent involvement of the USA into the Middle East (the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars) under the umbrella of the fight against terrorism, show that this scenario is no longer possible in its initial version. The domination of the USA on the Middle East will be greater than that of the European Union which is still marked by individual responses of the member countries. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, there remains only one superpower, the USA. But the USA itself is facing a crisis of uncertainty at home as structural economic problems (budget and trade deficits and international economic competitiveness) continue to be manifest. The New World order seems to place the United States in the position of world leader, either unilaterally, or more likely in concert with its close Western allies. The scenario of a multi polar world raises questions on the number of the powers that will take the lead in the future (Brzezinski, 2000). The opinions are divergent (Negu, 2005): some speak about a new bipolar world divided between the US and renewed Russia favored by size, population, huge mineral and energy resources; impressive military potential, including nuclear; others about the triadic competition between the US, Russia and China, the fastest increasing economy in the world; some argue that a pentapolar model of power has more chances to come true, including the US, Russia, China and Japan and Germany, placed on the 2nd and the 3rd rank among the most industrialized countries of the world; the regional pillars model comprises, besides the 5 five leading powers, Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia; The changing role of the United Nations is receiving much greater attention, and the United States has coordinated its foreign actions since 1990 with its military French and British and its German and Japanese 41

economic allies. The U.S.-led UN military peacekeeping and peace-building actions in Kuwait, Kurdistan, Somalia and former Yugoslavia announce the future developments. Meanwhile, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere warn of a continuing danger to the West of a heavily armed Russia and the great instability of Eastern Europe. Many Third World commentators are concerned that the United Nations is reverted to the period at the immediate end of World War II when the international body was dominated by the United States. The post Cold War world is supposed to signify, finally, the shift of world power struggles from the political-military to the economic arena. This so-called new geopolitics has been discussed since the turn of the century and it suggests that though the United States is uncontested on the military front, it faces increased competition from its political allies, Japan and European Community, for trade shares, new technologies and international economic agreements. In any open contest among the Big Three, the weapons will likely be tariffs, quotas, customs duty, export subsidies and other protectionist devices. Another possible scenario, recently emerged on the world geopolitical scene, is that the challenge would be likely to come not from any one state, but from the resurgence of Islam activated during the Gulf War all along the southern crescent of Islamic peoples from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. Key points The short 20th century unfolds from 1914 (the beginning of the WWI) and 1991 (the dismantling of the Soviet Union) and was an age of extremes. The key structural elements of the Cold War are political and military (above all nuclear) rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, ideological conflict between capitalism and communism, the division of Europe, and the extension of superpower conflict to the Third World. The collapse of communism was the most important cause of the end of the Cold War but does not explain all aspects of the transformation of international politics since 1989. The end of the Cold War was a major historical turning point as measured by changes in the international system, the nation-state, and international organizations. Many of the worlds new problems can be traced back to the end of the Cold War. Key concepts 42

Truman doctrine statement made by President Harry Truman in March 1947 that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. Intended to persuade Congress to support limited aid to Turkey and Greece the doctrine came to underpin the policy of containment and American economic and political support for its allies. Containment American political strategy for resisting perceived Soviet expansion, first publicly espoused by an American diplomat, George Kennan, in 1947. Containment became a powerful factor in American policy towards the Soviet Union for the next forty years. Superpower term used to describe the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945, denoting their global political involvements and military capabilities, including in particular their nuclear arsenals. Wind of change reference by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in a speech in South Africa in 1960 to the political changes taking place across Africa heralding the end of European imperialism. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) organization established by treaty in April 1949 comprising initially 12 countries from Western Europe and North America. The most important aspect of the NATO alliance was the American commitment to the defense of Western Europe. Dtente relaxation of tension between West and East; Soviet-American dtente lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and was characterized by negotiations and nuclear arms control agreements. Rapprochement re-establishment of more friendly relations between the Peoples Republic of China and the United States in the early 1970s. IV. Geopolitical Concepts Power, great powers, superpowers The concept may refer to the relationship between an individual or group and the natural world, but it is more frequently used to characterize interpersonal and inter-group relationships, including those between states (Johnston et al., 1994). In this latter case, power is synonym for influence, either direct (the power to do something) or indirect (the power over something). Power can be achieved and maintained in different ways, ranging from force (violent and non-violent), manipulation, persuasion and the creation of consensus, and authority. Power is exercised at all scales and levels of society, from individual unit to the global economy. Much of the exercise of power in contemporary societies involves the state through its ability to intervene and regulate the most part of economic and social life. A major feature of the states power is its territorial expression. A states sovereignty means the recognition of the states authority over a territory. 43

Within that territory the state exercises its power, either in a despotic way through actions taken without negotiation with the population as under totalitarianism, or in an infrastructural way whereby it influences most aspects of life with consent, as under capitalism (Mann, 1984). State power is exercised from a central place (the political capital) over a unified territory by means of four types of power: economic, ideological, military and political. The interest groups exercise power only over a defined territory. For example, the economic power implies a single currency and a uniform set of laws over the whole territory. Similarly, the ideological interests are advanced through the association of the state and its society within a defined territory. Clearly defined boundaries to be defended are fundamental for the exercise of military power. Political power can be expressed only if within the territory it succeeds to get support and legitimization. Additionally, within societies there is a wide range of other types of power relationships in different spheres, from work to civil society. Most of these relationships are asymmetrical and reflect the relative dominance of certain groups over others involving gender (men over women) or ethnic issues (white over non-white population). Unequal power relationships are also particular to the interstate system. Early geopolitical writings clearly made distinction between strong states and weak states and their different behavior and fate. For long, power has been defined exclusively in military strategic terms. Accordingly, states with more power enjoy a better chance of surviving than states with less power (the German theory of lebensraum is argumentative in this respect). Survival is the core of national interest of all states. If not realized, the very existence of the state is at risk and its other interests (economic, environmental, humanitarian) do not have any chance to be fulfilled. Since ancient times, the power politics has been fueled by the inequalities between states. The most frequently cited example belongs to Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponesian war, a conflict between two great powers in the ancient Greek world, Athens and Sparta. In his writings, Thucydides makes it clear that Spartas national interest, like that of all states, was survival and the changing distribution of power represented a direct threat to its existence. Sparta was obliged to go to war in order to avoid being conquered by Athens. At is turn, Athens felt equally obliged to go to war in order to preserve the empire it had acquired. The famous Athenian leader, Pericles, claimed to be acting on the basis of the most fundamental of human motivations: ambition, fear, and self-interest. One of the most relevant episodes of the war between Athens and Sparta is known as the Melian dialoque comprising the arguments of the Athenian leaders in sustaining their right of conquest over the islanders, and the response this provoked on the part of the Melians. The Athenians were using the logic of power politics, 44

arguing that because of their superior military force, the Melians have only two alternatives: either submit peacefully or be exterminated. The Melians tried to persuade their counterparts by using arguments grounded in justice, God and their allies the Spartans. As the dialogue makes clear, the Melians were forced to submit to the law that the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept. Starting from this example, many analysts consider the logic of power politics has universal applicability. Looking to the more recent history, we can easily substitute the example of Athens and Melos with those of Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Soviet Union and Hungary in 1956, or Indonesia and East Timor in 1975 (Baylis et al., 2001). In each case, the weaker state had to submit to the will of the stronger. Power is closely related to wealth and prestige (Nivaldo, 2001), wherever one appears, the others inevitably come next. All along the history of the humankind, the combination of the three gave birth to great powers. This concept dates from the beginning of the 19th century being used at the Congress of Vienna in the issue of Napoleonic Wars. The term referred to the countries engaged in the fight against France within the so called European Concert. Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed an agreement of alliance against the expansionistic tendency of Napoleonic France. More than that, each of them was supposed not to take advantage of the geopolitical circumstances in the detriment of the others. In an academic work, the concept was firstly explained by Rudolf Kjellen in his Stormakterna (1905) meaning the Great Powers. He identified the great powers to be the most imposing examples of states as powers. Their growth through colonial conquests displayed what he perceived as a tendency toward fewer and greater states competing for space. In the second edition of his book, Kjellen identified the United States as meeting the requirements for the role of a great power (spaciousness, freedom of movement and internal cohesion).Russia was the other candidate for this status at the level of the European continent (OLoughlin, 1994). Great Powers have been defined according to different criteria. The most relevant for modern times seem to be criteria regarding the possession of nuclear weapons, their status as cosmic power and their membership to the UNO Council of Security (Negu, 2005). The list of great powers since the 19th century up to now runs as follows:
Table 2.Great Powers and their Great Powers Period Nucle ar arsen al Austria/Austro- 1815-1918 Hungarian main characteristics Cosm Membership ic to UNO powe Council of r Security -

45

Empire Great Britain Prussia/Germa ny Russia/USSR France Italy

From 18th century 19th c.1945 From 19th c. From 19th c. 1870-1943

1958 1953 1967 -

* * Yes * *

Yes Yes Yes -

United States Japan China

From 1900 19001945 From 1945

1952 1965

Yes Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Source: Negu, 2005, pp. 40-41; *they launched objects in outer space.

The end of the WWII and the beginning of the Cold War have brought into the international geopolitical debate the concept of superpower, making reference to The United States and the Soviet Union. They both emerged as such combining global political objectives with military capabilities that included weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them over intercontinental distances (Baylis et al., 2001). The Cold War provides a prominent example of the balance of power mechanism in action. The most common definition of the term is that if the survival of a state or a number of weaker states is threatened by a hegemonic state or coalition of stronger states, they should join forces, establish a formal alliance and seek to preserve their own independence by checking the power of the opposing side. The mechanism of the balance of power seeks to ensure an equilibrium of power in which case no one state or coalition of states is in a position to dominate all the others. The Cold War competition between the East and West tried to maintain the balance through the formally institutionalized alliance system of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Nevertheless, due to the arms race, especially nuclear race, the traditional concept of balance of power translated into a balance of terror in the 1950s and the 1960s. Besides the balance of power, interstates relationships could take the form of hegemony. This is commonly defined as the political and/or economic domination of a region, usually by a superpower (Baylis et al., 2001, p. 79). Another definition is: the influence a great power is able to establish on other states in the system; extent of influence ranges from leadership to dominance (idem, p. 158). Meaning authority in Greek, the notion of hegemony was first used for the dominance of Athens over other Greek city states, later applied to Prussia within Germany and, in more recent times, to 46

the USA and USSR with regard to the rest of the world (The Wordworth Encyclopedia, 1995). Tracing back the history one can find several examples of hegemons which succeeded to rule the international relations within the world-system: during Ancient Times the Roman Empire and Pax Romana; the British Empire and the Pax Britanica in the 19th century; and the United States in the second half of the 20th century and its corresponding Pax Americana. The phrase Pax Roman, Britanica or American implies a global peace dictated by the respective hegemon. In the post-Cold War era, the geopolitical influence of both the United Sates and the former Soviet Union in structuring the world order is in decline, generating a new interpretation. This belongs to Kennedy (1988) who considers that the Great Powers that overextend themselves geopolitically but are unable to innovate and reform at home, become victims of their own imperial overstretch. Spheres of influence The geopolitics of modern times has been marked by two principles: the sovereignty of states and the maintenance of peace between them. It has often been assumed that national self-determination is compatible with these general principles. When disputes occur, there are mechanisms exercised during the history of the international political system to secure peace through binding agreements. But looking back in history we see also that there has often been a conflict, sometimes leading to injustice. The principles of balance of power politics often conflict with those of self-determination: the maintenance of peace between great powers may generate agreement to have colonies or to delimit spheres of influence. The split of the world into colonies or spheres of influence has a long history behind. Relevant examples come from Ancient Times, to Middle Ages and modern times. The Age of Exploration and Discovery has enhanced the competition between states and favored the powers of that time. In the race to discover the New World, Portugal and Spain shared the same interest: to conquer and control the new lands of South America. The two countries needed to sign an agreement in order to avoid conflict. In 1494 they signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, a small town in the west of Spain, in the Province of Valladolid, by which a demarcation line was marked in the west of Green Cape Islands between the Spanish and Portuguese South America. In 1790s Russia and Prussia partitioned Poland, before that an independent kingdom, between them as part of the maintenance of the balance of power. In the late 19 th and early 20th centuries European states agreed to the creation of colonies and spheres of influence in Africa and Asia. Colonialism In November 1884, the imperial chancellor and architect of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, convened a conference of 14 states (including 47

the United States) to settle the political partitioning of Africa. Bismarck wanted not only to expand German spheres of influence in Africa but also to play off Germanys colonial rivals against one another to the Germans advantage. The major colonial contestants in Africa were: the British, who held beachheads along the West, South, and East African coasts; the French whose main sphere of activity was in the area of Senegal River and north of the Congo Basin; the Portuguese who desired to extend their coastal stations in Angola and Mozambique deep into the interior; Belgium who had control over the Congo Basin and Germany active in areas where the designs of other colonial powers might be obstructed as in Togo (between British holdings), Cameroon (a wedge into French spheres), South West Africa (taken although Britain was interested in) and East Africa (where German Tanganyika broke the British design for a solid block of territory from the Cape North to Cairo). When the Conference convened in Berlin, more than 80% of Africa was still under traditional African rule. Nonetheless, the colonial powers representatives drew their boundary lines across the entire map. These lines were drawn through known as well as unknown regions and African real estate was exchanged among European governments. In the process, African peoples were divided, unified regions were ripped apart, hostile societies were thrown together, hinterlands were disrupted, and migration routes were closed off. Not all of this was felt immediately, of course, but these were some of the effects when the colonial powers began to consolidate their holdings and the boundaries on paper became barriers on the African landscape. The Berlin Conference was Africas undoing in more ways than one. By the time Africa regained its independence after the late 1950s, the realm had acquired a legacy of political fragmentation that could neither be eliminated nor made to operate satisfactorily. The African political and geographical map is thus a permanent liability that resulted from a ignorant, greedy acquisitiveness during a period when Europes search for minerals and markets had become insatiable. The century between 1820 and the First World War (1914-1918) saw the growth of a modern colonial order backed by complete European hegemony over world trade, finance and shipping, and by new forms of political and military authority sustained by technology, applied science and information systems. Between 1870 and 1918, the colonial powers added an average of 240,000 sq. miles each year to their possessions; between 1875 and 1915 one-quarter of the globes land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among half a dozen states (Hobsbawm, 1987). Britain, France and Germany increased their colonies by 4 million, 3.5 million, and 1 million sq. miles respectively; Belgium and Italy, and the USA and Japan, each increased their holdings by roughly 1 million and 100,000 sq. miles respectively. Colonialism has been regarded in opposing ways. It has 48

been seen as a force of economic modernization and social advancement, ensuring law and order, private property, basic infrastructure and political and legal institutions. Another interpretation of the meaning of colonialism has been related to its capacity to generate destruction, dependency, exploitation, massive poverty. What is clear, however, is that the shift from informal spheres of influence to formal colonial rule in the 19th century is rooted in the inter-capitalist rivalry and search for raw materials, new markets and new investment opportunities. In the period after the WWII, nationalist movements discredited colonialism politically and ideologically. More over, the imperial powers found it to be expensive and increasingly ungovernable. The result was the decolonization process by which the former colonies were granted independence, but the consequences of the colonial order are still alive. Some argue that the former colonies do not enjoy fully economic and politic independence as the persistence of primary export production and the continuous dependency of political elites on former colonial powers suggests that colonialism has been transformed into perpetual neocolonialism (Abdel-Fadil, 1989). The political instability of Africa and South-Eastern Asia is usually perceived as a consequence of the colonial time and the way borders have been drawn by European diplomats without any of with little knowledge of the historical and geographical background. Today, debt-ridden Africa is again being told what to do, this time by foreign financial institutions. The cycle of poverty that followed colonialism exacts a high price from African societies. As for future development prospects, the disadvantages of peripheral location in relation with the worlds core areas continue to handicap Subsaharan Africa. During the Cold War and after, the western world permitted Russia to exercise domination over peoples within Eastern Europe and within the USSR and Russia itself in order not to compromise broader considerations of stability and security. Two examples could be mentioned: the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Chechen rising of 1994 onwards. In both cases there was no western official reaction to obvious denials of the right of peoples to self-determination. In other parts of the world, legitimate claims for independence have been ignored for reasons of regional security. From 1961, when war began, the African states refused, until 1991, to recognize the right of Eritrea to independence from Ethiopia (Baylis, Smith, eds., 2001) States, Nations and Nation-States A state is a political unit. In the modern international system, the entire inhabited world is divided into states. Boundaries are drawn in order to separate states. The right of each state to control the territory encompassed by its boundaries is recognized by the international community. A state is an independent political unit occupying a defined, permanently populated 49

territory and having full sovereign control over its internal and foreign affairs. Currently, the world political map includes approximately 200 states, but they contain persons who belong to thousands of distinct nations. A nation is a group of people with a common culture occupying a particular territory, bound together by a strong sense of unity arising from shared beliefs and customs. Language and religion may be unifying elements, but even more important are an emotional conviction of cultural distinctiveness and a sense of ethnocentrism. The composite term nation-state properly refers to a state whose territorial extent coincides with that occupied by a distinct nation or people, or at least, whose population shares a general sense of cohesion and adherence to a set of common values. There are four types of relations between states and nations: A nation-state. There are few wholly uniform ethnically or culturally states. Some like France, Britain, Spain became nation-states by joining over time different groups by a strong centralizing force; others such as Germany or Italy were culturally associated but politically fragmented groups Japans claim to be an example of a state occupied by a distinct nation, or people, is weakened by the sizeable Korean and indigenous Ainu populations that exist as unassimilated elements of the countrys population. A multinational state. This is a state that contains more than one nation. Often no single ethnic group dominates the population. The former Soviet Union was made up of several nationalities: Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Estonians, and others. The island of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, contains two distinct nations: Greeks and Turks. After Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960, there was an upsurge of violence between the two groups. Since 1974, Cyprus has been partitioned with a United Nations-policed buffer zone separating Greeks and Turks. A part-nation state. The Arab nation extends across and dominates 17 states in northern Africa and the Middle East. A stateless nation. An ancient group with a distinctive language, the Kurds are concentrated in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Smaller numbers live in Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Kurds are a nation of some 20-25 million people divided among six states and dominant in none. More Kurds live in Turkey than in any other country (perhaps as many as 14 million), possibly as many as 8 million in Iran, about half that number in Iraq, and smaller numbers in Syria Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Kurds have occupied the isolated, mountainous frontier zone between Turkey, Iran and Iraq for over 3000 years. They are a nation, but they have no state, nor do they enjoy the international attention that peoples of other stateless nations such as the Palestinians receive. Turkish and 50

Iraqi repressions of the Kurds and Iranian betrayal of their aspirations, briefly make the news but are soon forgotten. Relative location has much to do with his spatial remoteness and the obstacles created by the ruling regimes inhibit access to their landlocked domain. So, in terms of the relation between state-nation, one can distinguish: states dominated by one nation (France, Japan) or by 2, or more large nations (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, South Africa. On the other hand, many nations are divided among two or more states (the Arabs, Kurds, Koreans). The lack of correspondence between national territories and state boundaries is an especially significant problem in less developed countries. This failure results from the colonial history of these regions. Boundaries between colonies were drawn at conference tables in European capitals by diplomats with little or knowledge of local conditions, but to suit the convenience of the European colonial masters. This situation is especially evident in West Africa where tension between competing national groups remains characteristic even today. The precise number of nations depends on definition. Should nationality be determined by language, culture, religion or historic evolution? There is no straight answer to this question. Anyway, nationality is a rather vague expression of group identity, perhaps at the largest level after family, clan and tribe. Take the example of the people living now in Slovakia, but who during the 20th century have changed 5 times the nationality of the AustroHungarian Empire till 1918, of Czechoslovakia after the WWI, of Hungary after 1938, of Czechoslovakia after the WWII and from 1993 of Slovakia. Meanwhile their identity remained unchanged. The concept of nationality was born out of the European nation-state system, which emerged in late Middle Ages. Much older is the term of nation, dating back to the biblical times, whereas the modern concept of nationalism has been defined only several hundred years ago. Nationalism has been strengthened in the post Cold War world, due to the ending of the East-West clear-cut division and the more chaotic world coming into being after it. Two trends seem to emerge at the end of the Cold War: on the one hand national identities from former multinational states such as USSR or Yugoslavia are calling out in force and resulting in conflict areas on the world stage; on the other hand supranationalism or the tendency to form alliances and political groups larger than national identities, continues and grows. This latter process can be seen in two different ways: as a normal evolution of national identities, taking the example of the Westphalian identity which has given way to the German one, and this one can give way to European. Or, can be seen as unimportant having in mind that the symbols of national identity will be strong for ever despite the selection of a flag or an anthem for the Union. States by shape 51

A look at the political map of the world shows that every state is unique. The size, shape and location of any state combine to distinguish it from all others. The characteristics are of more than academic interest, because they also affect the power and stability of states. Boundaries define and delimit states; they also create the mosaic of often interlocking territories that give individual countries their shape, also known as their morphology. The territorial morphology of a state affects its condition, even its survival. A countrys shape can affect its well-being as a state by fostering or hindering effective organization. There are five types of states according to their shape: Compact state the form is of a circle with the capital located as much as possible in the center. All places could be reached from the center in a minimal amount of time and with the least expenditure for roads, and railways. It would also have the shortest borders to defend. Uruguay, Zimbabwe, Cambodia and Poland are examples. Prorupt states are nearly compact but possess one or sometimes two narrow extensions of territory. Proruption may simply reflect peninsular elongations of land area as in the case of Myanmar and Thailand. In other instances, the extensions have an economic or strategic significance, recording a past history of international negotiation to secure access to resources or water routes or to establish a buffer zone between states. Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Namibia fall into this category. Elongated states have length several times more the average width and hence parts of the country far from the capital and likely to be isolated because great expenditures are required to link them to the core. They are more difficult to be administrated, like Norway, Vietnam or Chile. Fragmented states are composed entirely of islands (the Philippines and Indonesia), partly on islands and partly on mainland (Italy and Malaysia) and those that are chiefly on the mainland but whose territory is separated by another state (United States). Fragmentation and isolation can weaken centralized control of state territory and increase the regionalism that may lead to separatist movements. Perforated states completely surrounds a territory that it does not rule. It has an enclave inside it which may be independent or may be part of another country. Two of Europes smallest independent states, San Marino and Vatican City, are enclaves that perforate Italy. As an exclave of former West Germany, West Berlin perforated the national territory of former East Germany and was an enclave in it. Lesotho is an example of enclave of South Africa. Size 52

The area that a state occupies may be large, as is true of China, or small, as is Liechtenstein. The worlds largest country, Russia, occupies over 17 million square kilometers, some 11% of the earths land surface nearly as large as the whole continent of South America and more than one million time as large as Nauru, one of the ministates found in all parts of the world. An easy assumption would be that the larger states area, the grater is the chance that it will include the ores, energy supplies, and fertile soils from which it can benefit. In general, that assumption is valid, but much depends on accidents of location. Mineral resources are unevenly distributed, and size alone does not guarantee their presence within a state. Australia, Canada, and Russia, though large in territory, have relatively small areas capable of supporting productive agriculture. Great size, in fact, may be a disadvantage. A very large country may have vast areas that are remote, sparsely populated, and hard to integrate into the mainstream of economy and society. Small states are more apt than large ones to have a culturally homogeneous population. They find it easier to develop transportation and communication systems to link the sections of the country, and, of course, they have shorter boundaries to defend against invasion. Size alone is not critical in determining a countrys stability and strength, but it is a contributing factor. Location The significance of size and shape as factors in national well-being can be modified by a states location, both absolute and relative. Although both Canada and Russia are extremely large, their absolute location in middle upper latitudes reduces their size advantages when agricultural potential is considered. A states relative location, its position compared to that of other countries, is as important as its absolute location. Landlocked states, those lacking ocean frontage and surrounded by other states, are at a commercial and strategic disadvantage. They lack easy access to both maritime trade and the resources found in coastal waters and submerged lands. The number of landlocked states about 40 increased greatly with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of new, smaller nation-states out of such former multinational countries as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Several other states are not totally landlocked, but their own coasts are unsuitable for port development, so they rely on neighbors ports. Landlocked states may secure the right to use high seas, the right of innocent passage through the territorial waters of coastal stats, port facilities along suitable coasts, and transit facilities from the port to their own territory. Landlocked or partially landlocked states may gain access to the sea in one of the three ways. First, any navigable river that reaches the sea may be declared open to the navigation of all states. Freedom of navigation on rivers that flow through several countries was first proclaimed by France in 1792. The revolutionary 53

government proclaimed that the freedom of rivers was a natural law. International commissions regulate navigation on many international rivers, and often these same commissions guard against pollution and regulate the drawing of irrigation waters from the rivers. Second, a landlocked state may obtain a corridor of land reaching either to the sea or to a navigable river. Several countries have long, thin extensions out to seaports. Some of these, such as the Congos corridor to the Atlantic Ocean, are important ransport routes, but others, such as Namibias Caprivi Strip to the international Zambezi River, serve no significant traffic function. The third way a landlocked state can gain access to the sea is to obtain facilities at a specific port plus freedom of transit along a route to the port. Coastal states have signed international agreements promising to assist the movement of goods across their territories from landlocked states without levying discriminatory tolls, taxes or freight charges. Chile, for example, helped build a railroad connecting La Paz, Bolivias capital city to the Chilean port of Arica, and Chile guarantees free transit. Argentina grants Bolivia a free zone at the Argentine city of Rosario on the Parana River, and Peru gives Bolivia a free trade zone in the port of Ilo. In 1993 Ethiopia joined the ranks of the landlocked states when its coastal province of Eritrea gained independence. Eritrea promised to assist Ethiopian import and export trade, but in fact most of Ethiopia has long relied on transit via the port of Djibouti. The 1998 treaty between the Ecuador and Peru guaranteed Ecuador navigation rights in Peruvian ports on the Amazon River. In a few instances, a favorable relative location constitutes the primary resource of a state. Singapore, a state of only 580 square km is located at a crossroads of world shipping and commerce. A special case is represented by exclaves a pocket of territory surrounded by another state. One example is that of the two exclaves the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Azeri Nachichevan in Armenia. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Armenians found themselves at war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the fate of some 150,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. This exclave has been created by Soviet sociopolitical planners who, while acknowledging the Christian distinctiveness of this cluster of Armenians, nevertheless gave Muslim Azerbaijan jurisdiction over it. That was a recipe for trouble: the arrangement was made to work under authoritarian Soviet rule, but once this rule ended, the Christian Armenians encircled by Muslim Azerbaijan felt insecure and appealed to Armenia for help. Armenian troops entered Azerbaijan and gained control over the exclave, even ousting Azerbaijanis from the zone between the main body of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The international community has not recognized Armeniaa occupation and officially the territory remains a part of Azerbaijan. The fundamental issue remained unsolved. Territoriality and power 54

In international relations, control of territory usually increases power, while increased power can expand control of territory. More powerful states exercise direct or indirect territorial control over weaker ones. In many cases, power implies direct, formal political sovereignty over designated territories. Throughout history, many wars have been fought for control of specific territories, and the foreign policies of many countries have been influenced by the desire to control additional territory for economic, military or political purposes. Countries that have been defeated in wartime have often been obliged to cede control of territory to their victorious opponents. Relations between power and territory can be observed at all geographical scales. Power implies the opportunity to exercise the control or influence over others and territorial control is a major prerogative of organized government. In some societies, territorial control is exercised in order to privilege certain members of society above others. For example, the majority population of South Africa did not have the right to choose the residence place during the apartheid times, or before the 1960s, in the United States, the AfricanAmericans in the South were denied the right to attend integrated schools and otherwise associate with whites on an equal basis. Many wars throughout history have arisen as a result of disputes over control of territory. Certain territories are particularly desirable because of specific attributes or location considerations. For example, Iraqs takeover of Kuwait in August 1990 was occasioned in part by the presence of valuable petroleum reserves in Kuwait, while the American response was explained as the desire to protect petroleum reserves. Other territories have strategic locations. Some are valuable for military purposes. Hence the Israelis have long desired control of the Golan Heights and the British have long maintained control on Gibraltar as the gateway to the Mediterranean. Other territories are valuable because their control can facilitate trade or economic growth. For example, Russia long desired an outlet to the Mediterranean. Hence, the Russians have long undertaken efforts to obtain control of the Straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea on her southern border. Likewise, American control of the Panama Canal Zone enabled the United States to control shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Even when the United States ceded control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the late 1970s, the treaty stipulated that America could continue to dominate international trade in the region. A special role is played by chokepoints sea passages of strategic significance causing marine traffic congestion, requiring reduces speeds and sharp turns and increasing the risk of collision as well as vulnerability to attack. In 1986, President Reagan explained that the US bases in the Philippines would help the military protect vital sea lanes passing through straits or canals that the Soviet Union would try to close in a conflict. The Pentagon officials identified the US Navys set of world maritime 55

chokepoints. In the Americas these include the Straits of Florida between Florida and Cuba, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Magellan, and the Gulf of Alaska. In the Western Pacific: the Korean Straits, Makassar Strait between Sulawesi and Borneo, Sunda between Java and Sumatra, the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. The Strait of Hormuz, commanding the Persian Gulf, Bab el Mandeb commanding the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the Cape of the Good Hope are part of the same set. For many years, the Strait of Malacca has been a notorious choke point because reduced speeds give pirates the opportunity to board the vessels and plunder them or worse, kill their crews, and take them over. Since the 1980s, hundreds of acts of piracy have made this the worlds least safe waterway, especially for smaller sips. One of the worlds busiest chokepoints is the Strait of Gibraltar which was in the news in late 2002 when an al-Qaeda document was found that referred to plans for an attack on Western ships slowing down through this 58-km long funnel that narrows to 13-km in width and is subject to high winds and fast currents. Another risky choke point is the Bab el Mandeb Strait between Djibouti and Yemen at the southern entrance to the Red Sea and controlled by Yemen, partially blocked by the Perim Island. Reunited in 1991 Yemen is vulnerable due to internal conflicts over oilfields, the pressure of Washington-Cairo-Ryad axis, especially after offering support to Iraq, the Eritrean-Israeli cooperation. Oil tankers, one of which was attacked by al-Qaeda in 2002, and freighters as well as cruise ships approach this strait via all-too-predictable routes. The Strait of Hormuz is controlled by the Oman Sultanate. The majority of oil routes from the Gulf pass through Oman seawaters. It maintains close ties with the USA and other NATO countries as a guaranty for its stability. Unsafe because of the war against terrorism. The chokepoints and many other route-shortening canals are vulnerable at a time when the risk of hostile action looms larger than the risk of collision. Types of boundaries Boundaries can be classified genetically, that is, as their evolution relates to the cultural landscapes they traverse. A leading political geographer, Richard Hartshorne, proposed a four-level genetic boundary classification. Certain boundaries were defined and delimited before the present-day human landscape developed. Let us the example of the Southeastern Asia, a region placed under the control of colonial powers for a long time. For example, the boundary between Malaysia and Indonesia on the island of Borneo is an antecedent boundary. Most of this boundary passes through sparsely inhabited tropical rainforest, and the break in settlement can even be detected on the small-scale world population map. A second category of boundaries evolved as the cultural landscape of an area took share, part of the ongoing process of accommodation. This subsequent boundary is 56

represented by the example of the border between Vietnam and China. This border is the result of a long process of adjustment and modification, the end of which may not yet have come. The third category involves boundaries drawn forcibly across a unified or at least homogeneous cultural landscape. The colonial powers did this when they divided the island of New Guinea by delimiting a boundary in a nearly straight line (curved in only one place to accommodate a bend in the Fly River), as shown in the lower-left map. The superimposed boundary they delimited gave the Netherlands the western half of New Guinea. When Indonesia became independent in 1949, the Dutch did not yield their part of New Guinea, which is peopled mostly by ethnic Papuans, not Indonesians. In 1962, the Indonesians invaded the territory by force of arms, and in 1969 the United Nations recognized its authority there. This made the colonial, superimposed boundary the eastern border of Indonesia and had the effect of extending Indonesia from Southeast Asia into the Pacific Realm. Geographically, all of New Guinea forms part of the Pacific Realm. The fourth genetic boundary type is the so called relict boundary a border that has ceased to function but whose imprints and sometimes influence are still evident in the cultural landscape. The boundary between the former North and South Vietnam is a classic example: once demarcated militarily, it has had relict status since 1976 following the reunification of Vietnam in the aftermath of the Indochina war (1964-1975). Southeast Asias boundaries have colonial origins, but they have continued to influence the course of events in postcolonial times. Take one instance: the physiographic boundary that separates the main island of Singapore from the rest of the Malay Peninsula, the Johor Strait. That physiographic-political boundary facilitated, perhaps crucially, Singapores secession from the state of Malaysia. Without it, Malaysia might have been persuaded to stop the separation process; at the very least, territorial issues would have arisen to slow the sequence of events. As it was, no land boundary needed to be defined. The Johor Strait demarcated Singapore and left no question as to its limits. Boundary disputes Boundaries create many possibilities for conflict. Since WWII almost half of the worlds sovereign states have been involved in border disputes with neighboring countries. States are more likely to have disputes with their neighbors than with more distant parties. Although the causes of boundary disputes and open conflict are many and varied, they can reasonably be placed into four categories. Positional disputes occur when states disagree about the interpretation of documents that define a boundary or the way the boundary was delimited. The boundary between Argentina and Chile, originally defined during Spanish colonial rule, was to follow the most elevated 57

crests of the Andean Cordillera dividing the waters. Because the southern Andes had not been adequately explored and mapped, it was not apparent that the highest peaks and the watershed divides do not always coincide. A long, narrow area of more than 50,000 square km is still in dispute. In Latin America, as a whole, the 21st century began with at least 10 unresolved border disputes, some dating back to colonial times. Territorial disputes over the ownership of a region, though not always, arise when a boundary divides an ethnically homogeneous population. Each of the two states has some justification for claiming the territory inhabited by the ethnic group in question. Conflicts may arise if the people of one state want to annex a territory whose population is ethnically related to that of the state but now subject to a foreign government. Somalia had many border clashes with Ethiopia and the area of Kashmir is a cause of dispute between India and Pakistan. The most serious flashpoint in South Asia is Kashmir where India and Pakistan meet in the mountains of the far north, because this is an international not a domestic problem. When the boundary between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan was hastily delimited in 1947 it stopped short of the northern territory of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the 562 Native states recognized by the British colonial administration. Kashmir had a Hindu Maharajah but a majority Muslim population and both Pakistan and India wanted it. When British rule ended, Pakistani and Indian armies were soon at war in Kashmir. After repeated rounds of conflict, Kashmir today is divided along the latest armistice line but neither side is prepared to yield. When this dispute started, India and Pakistan were armed with conventional weapons, today they are both nuclear powers, which transforms Kashmir from another of the worlds problem frontiers into a potentially catastrophic flashpoint for nuclear war. Resource disputes neighboring states are likely to covet the resources such as mineral deposits, fertile farmland, rich fishing grounds lying in the border areas and to disagree over their use. USA has been recently involved in disputes with Mexico over the shared resources of the Colorado River and Gulf of Mexico and with Canada over the Georges Bank fishing grounds in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the causes of the 1990-91 war in the Persian Gulf was the huge reservoir known as the Rumaila field, lying mainly under Iraq with the small extension into Kuwait. Because the two countries were unable to come to an agreement, Kuwait pumped oil without any international agreement. Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil and justified its invasion.

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Functional disputes arise when neighboring states disagree over policies to be applied along a boundary. Such policies may concern immigration, customs regulations, or land use. USA relations with Mexico have been affected by the increasing number of illegal immigrants and the flow of drugs entering from Mexico. A special case is represented by extraterritoriality. During the 19th century, as China weakened and European colonial invaders entered Chinas coastal cities and sailed up its rivers, the Europeans forced China to accept a European doctrine of international law extraterritoriality. Under this doctrine, foreign states and their representatives are immune from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are based. Today, this applies to embassies and diplomatic personnel, but in Qing China it went far beyond that. The European, Russian and Japanese invaders established as many as 90 treaty ports, extraterritorial enclaves in Chinas cities under unequal treaties enforced by gun-boat diplomacy. Diplomats and traders were exempt from Chinese law. Not only port areas but also the best residential suburbs of large cities were declared to be extraterritorial and made inaccessible to Chinese citizens. In the city of Guangzhou (Canton in colonial times), Sha Mian Island in the Pearl River was a favorite extraterritorial enclave. A sigh at the only bridge to the island stated, in English and Cantonese, No dogs or Chinese. Christian missionaries fanned out into China, their residences and churches fortified with extraterritorial security. In many places, Chinese found themselves unable to enter parks and buildings without permission from foreigners. This involved a loss of face that contributed to bitter opposition to the presence of foreigners a resentment that exploded in Boxer Rebellion in 1900. After the collapse of the Qing Dinasty in 1911, the Chinese Nationalists negotiated an end to all commercial extraterritoriality in China proper; the Russians however would not yield in then-Manchuria. Only Hong Kong and Macau retained their status as colonies. When Chinas government in 1980 embarked on a new economic policy that gave major privileges and exemptions to foreign firms in certain coastal areas and cities, opponents argued that this policy revived the practice of extraterritoriality in a new guise. This issue remains a sensitive issue in a China that has not forgotten the indignities of the colonial era. Nationalism and related notions The issue of nationalism is of a central significance for the geopolitical analysis, at least for three reasons: -most states in the world today contain minority groups; provision of rights to minorities is a key to avoiding internal conflict;

59

-2 apparently opposing trends are evident with respect to national identity: both re-emergent nationalism and new supra-national identities are emerging on the globe; -the idea of a nation-state is increasingly a symbol of the past geopolitical order of the world. What is nationalism? Nations can be defined on the basis of culture, language, ethnicity, and religion. The word nation derives from the Latin root indicating to be born and initially referred to a stock of people. As the modern state system emerged in Europe in the late 1600s, a national consciousness also developed. The best definition of nation may be that it is a group of people with a common heritage or a common culture, i.e. a group sharing one or more important culture traits like religion, language, political institutions, values or historical identity. Nations contain persons who share common cultural traits and a sense of self-identification enabling them to be distinguished from other groups of people living outside the national territory. Examples include the Arabs, Basques, Quebecois, Welsh, Scottish and many others. Another definition is that a nation is a cultural territory made up of communities of individuals who see themselves as one people on the basis of common ancestry, history, society, institutions, ideology, language, territory and often religion. The historical evolution suggests that boundaries of nations are more long-lasting and meaningful for peoples lives than the state borders. The idea of nation may be difficult to maintain outside of set spatial boundaries constituting a homeland, as cultures meet and mix, and change, and nationalities in turn are modified. For example, would Irish Americans consider themselves more Irish or more American by national identity? Major nations exist even in a scattered state among many political boundaries (Kurds, Jews, Chinese). There are very few examples of pure nation-states in the world today. Much more common on the world map is the multinational state, the mixture of nationalities into one political unit which may or may not be cohesive over time. The changing pattern of the population and the recent flows of in-migration add a new dimension to nationalism. Let us take the example of Europe. Today Europes indigenous population unlike most of the rest of the worlds is actually shrinking. Such negative population growth poses serious challenges for any nation. When the population pyramid becomes top-heavy, the number of workers whose taxes pay for the social services of the aged goes down, leading to reduced pensions and diminishing funds for health care. Governments that impose tax increases endanger the business climate, therefore their options are limited. Europe, and especially Western Europe, is experiencing a population implosion that will be a tremendous challenge in the decades to come. Meanwhile, immigration is partially offsetting the losses 60

European countries face. Millions of Turkish Kurds (mainly to Germany), Algerians (France), Moroccans (Spain), West Africans (Britain) and Indonesians (the Netherlands) are changing the social fabric of what once were monocultural nation-states. One key dimension of this change is the spread of Islam in Europe. The vast majority of these immigrants are intensely devout, politically aware and culturally insular. They continue to arrive in a Europe where native populations are stagnant or declining, where religious institutions are weakening, where secularism is rapidly rising, where political positions often appear to be anti-Islamic, and where cultural norms are incompatible with Muslim traditions. Muslim communities tend to resist assimilation, making Islam the essence of their identity. In Britain alone there are more than 1500 mosques, in themselves a transformation of local cultural landscapes. Supranationalism is another specific on-going process in Europe. The Marshall Plan not only stimulated European economies, but it showed European leaders that their countries needed a joint economic-administrative structure in order to: coordinate the financial assistance, to ease the flow of resources and products across Europes mosaic of boundaries, to lower restrictive trade tariffs, to seek ways to effect political cooperation. The economic steps soon led to greater political cooperation as well. In 149, the participating governments created the Council of Europe, the beginnings of what was to become a European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France. Europe was embarked on still another political revolution, the formation of a multinational union involving a growing number of European states. Supranationalism is defined as a voluntary association in economic, political or cultural spheres of more independent stats willing to yield some measure of sovereignty for their mutual benefit. After changing the name several times and enlarging the membership from six to 27, the European Union is not just a paper organization for bankers and manufacturers. It has a major impact on the daily lives of its member countries citizens in countless ways. One of the most powerful objectives of EU was the accomplishment of the European Monetary Union to symbolize its strengthening unity and to establish a counter-weight to American dollar. Expansion was another EU objective, although hotly debated, it reached momentous in 2004 with ten new members and in 2007 with other two. For all its dramatic progress toward unification, Europe remains a realm of geographic contradictions. Europeans are well aware of their history of conflict, division and repeated self-destruction. Even as Europes states have been working to join forces in the EU, many of those same states are confronting severe centrifugal stresses. The term devolution has come into use to describe the powerful centrifugal forces whereby regions or peoples within a state, through negotiation or active rebellion, demand or gain 61

political strength and sometimes autonomy at the expense of the center. Most states exhibit some level of internal regionalism, but the process of devolution is set into motion when a key centripetal driving force the nationally accepted idea of what a country stands for erodes to the point that a regional drive for autonomy, or for outright secession is launched. The UK comprises the core of England and three other entities: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland attached to England in centuries. Neither time nor representative democratic government was enough to eliminate all latent regionalism in these. During the 1960s and 1970s the British government confronted a virtual civil war in Northern Ireland and rising tides of nationalism in Scotland and Wales. In 1997, the government in London gave the Scots and Welsh the opportunity to vote for greater autonomy in new regional parliaments that would have limited but significant powers over local affairs. Other examples refer to Spain facing severe devolutionary forces in the Basque, Catalonia and Galicia; France contends with a secessionist movement in Corsica; Belgium is riven by Flemish-Walloon separatism; Italy confronts devolutionary pressures in South Tyrol and Lombardy. In recent decades Eastern Europe has been dramatically affected by devolution as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia collapsed, Moldova and Ukraine suffered from their historical Russian-penetrated geography. Political devolution is not the only centrifugal force to buffer European states. As the European Union materialized, its freedoms in the form of money flow, labor movements led to the emergence of powerful urban regions as hubs of economic power and influence, in some ways beyond the control of their national governments. Examples include the Rhne-Alpes region in France (Lyon), Lombardy in Italy (Milan), Catalonia in Spain (Barcelona), BadenWrttemberg in Germany (Stuttgart). This group known as the four motors of Europe bypasses not only their national governments in dealing with each other but even extends their business channels to span the world (de Blij, Muller, 2006). Such powerful economic houses are called regional states, entities that defy old borders and are shaped by the globalizing economy of which they have become a part (Ohmae, 1993). Multinationalism is usually a pressure factor on the state capacity to maintain unity and act effectively. Russias great expansion had brought many nationalities under tsarist control. The tsars had conquered but they had done little to bring Russian culture to the peoples they ruled. The Georgians, Armenians, Tatars and residents of the Muslim states of Central Asia were among dozens of individual, cultural, linguistic and religious groups that had not been Russified. In 1917, the Russians themselves constituted only about one-half of the population of the empire. Thus it was impossible to establish a Russian state instantly over this vast political region, and these diverse national groups had to be accommodated. It was decided to divide 62

the vast realm into Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs), each of which was delimited to correspond broadly to one of the major nationalities. Within the SSRs, smaller minorities were assigned political units of lesser rank. These were called Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs) which in effect were republics within republics. The republics quarreled among themselves over boundaries and territory. Demographic changes, migrations, war, and economic factors have changed the initial layout. The Soviet planning policy relocated entire populations from their home-lands in order to better fit the grand design, and to reward of punish. The overall effect was to move minority peoples eastward and to replace them with Russians. This Russification of the Soviet Empire produced substantial ethnic Russian minorities in all the non-Russian republics. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, Russias former empire devolved into 14 independent countries, and Russia itself was a changed nation. Russians now made up about 83% of the population of under 150 million, a far higher proportion than in the days of the Soviet Union (77%). But numerous minority peoples remained under Moscows new flag, and millions of Russians found themselves under new governments in the former Republics. Soviet planners had created a complicated administrative structure and Russias postcommunist leaders had to use this framework to make their country function. In 1992, most of Russias internal republics, autonomous regions, oblasts and krays signed a document known as the Russian Federation Treaty, committing them to cooperate in the new federal system. At first a few units refused to sign, including Tatarstan and a republic in the Caucasus periphery, then known as Chechenya-Ingushetia, where Muslim rebels waged a campaign for independence. Later, the republic split into two separate republics, and eventually only Chechnya refused to sign the Russian Federation Treaty, and subsequent Russian military intervention led to a prolonged and violent conflict, with disastrous consequences for Chechnyas people and infrastructure. The Chechnya war continues today and is a disaster for Russias government as well. Many people living in multinational states have expressed a desire to attain greater political autonomy or independence. The expression of these goals is known as nationalism. A closely related concept is ethnicity. Ethnic groups are people who feel bound by a common culture and heritage, although their ties may also be associated with social perceptions of race. Ethnicity is associated with territoriality in that spatial identity may be an important component of ethnic identity. The word ethnicity is from the Greek meaning people or nation and is also closely aligned with cultural traits such as language. Algerians in France may feel that ethnically they are Arab, but by citizenship French. If they have been in France long enough to develop a sense of national identity, they may also regard themselves as French by 63

nationality. Or another example is that of people in Bulgaria who are ethnically Moslems, but Bulgarians by nationality, may feel distinct from other Bulgarians because of religious conversions that occurred generations earlier, even though by other measures they are indistinct from their fellow Bulgarians. Within the modern state of Bulgaria, there are 200,000 Bulgarians who are Moslem and one million Bulgarian citizens who are also Moslems but Turkish by nationality. Another example of confused identities over ethnic and nationality heritage occurs in the state of Somalia. In the past, this country was often cited as one of the few examples in Africa as a nation-state, a country composed ethnically of only Somalis. Inside, the perception was different: the Somalis continued to distinguish themselves largely by clan identity, despite a common language and Islamic faith. Somalia deteriorated into open warfare between major clans in the 1990s as the world watched the mounting casualties and disintegration of a central government. Another related notion is that of irredentism, namely the desire to bring into a state all areas that had once been part of it or areas where members of the nationality group live. Originally, the term was used to refer to an area in northern Italy which remained part of Austria in 1871. Italian nationalists referred to the region as Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy). Areas of the world today which may be subject to conflict due to irredentist sentiments include Central Europe where Hungarians inhabit states neighboring Hungary in significant numbers; northern Kazakhstan where the Russian populations outnumbers Kazakhs, northern Pakistan where the Pathan people are linked by nationality to people in Afghanistan; and the Caucasus where Armenia and Azerbaijan both expressed irredentist claims (Nagorno Karabakh is an enclave of Armenia within Azerbaijan, Nakhichevan is an enclave of Azerbaijan within Armenia). In response to nationalism, states often develop symbols intended to promote unity, such as mottoes, flags, national anthems or in the landscape historical monuments or place-names. The last one is especially important, having a strong patriotic significance. For example, states of the former USSR are experiencing with independence a rush of renaming places in local languages or reviving pre-Soviet names. Think about St. Petersburg, named Leningrad in honor of Lenin but renamed St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Minority groups Minority status implies not only lesser numbers but also the perception that one is not fully part of the whole nation. The United States Human Rights Sub-commission defines a minority as a group numerically smaller than the rest of the population of a state and in a non-dominant position whose members are distinct from others in the population and have a sense of 64

solidarity for preserving their culture. Very few examples of true nation-states exist now on Earth, therefore, every country has some minority population, including Japan and Iceland, which are often cited as the best examples of nation-states. In some African and Asian states, mainly as a result of colonial boundary policies, it is very difficult to determine which group constitutes a majority within the states population (in Ivory Coast the majority accounts for only 23% of the total population, the rest being minorities, or in the case of China, only 7% of the population is not Han Chinese, but the resulting number of minorities is equal to at least 80 million people). The behavior of minorities is different: Swedish speaking population of Finland seems content to remain Finnish citizens, while in the case of the Basque population in Spain there is a strong and sometimes violent movement to create a nation-state. At times, the balance of rights for a minority group and the desire to create a sense of national identity in a multinational state may be difficult to achieve. Failure can result in civil wars or cultural genocide. History suggests that nations are not that much more durable than states in terms of existence, as cultural convergence and mixing has eliminated many nations. Language alone is one indicator of the loss of cultures on the globe. Linguists predict that by the middle of the 21st century, at the current rate of language loss, there will be only 300 spoken languages on earth, down from approximately 6,000 in the 20th century. One driving force behind aspirations for minorities within multinational states to form their own independent political areas may be the perception of uneven development: that some regions are favored over others in terms of investment and economic growth. For example, the recent devolutions of the states of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia occurred in part due to separate national identities and in part to perceptions that regions in each state were not developing in equal rates as for example the Czech Republic versus Slovakia. The concept of enemy All these centripetal forces are aiming to establish a common identity. At times, this process is served by the creation of a real or imagined enemy, generating a sense of us versus them, the idea of otherness or distinctiveness. In all cases of international conflict that become violent, the notion of enemy is vital. The utility of the concept in nation-building and state power seems clear: having enemies is a useful way of defining nationhood and national purpose. Enemy is a key concept in understanding the system of international relations and conflict. What are the sources of enemies in geopolitics? There are many cases of nations or states which seem to have experienced a disproportionate number of enemies or conflicts compared with the world average. The first factor explaining this is geographic: the location of states. Conflict over borders and territory is common enough to 65

suggest that the prime candidate for enemy might be neighbor, although distortions to the distance factor in this notion are created due to colonial expansion and overseas extension of military power. The concept has been clearly defined during the Cold War era: Soviets and Americans were the best example. After 1990s, many changes have occurred: the Americans have only smaller enemies: Noriega in Panama, Castro in Cuba, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, whereas the Russians fell their stronger enemies in the newly independent states. A related notion is racism helping to create a successful enemy image. For example, some Americans think that their chief rival is Japan because of the economic increase and Japanese FDI in USA. There were articles in newspapers entitled for example Japan moves in showing Japanese flags planted all over the Tennessee state (due to the Nissan factory located there). The creation of enemy is so important in geopolitics that a new discipline has been defined - the political psychology exploring the relationship between the individual human behavior and the behavior of states or nations with respect to enemy creation. This process is unfolded during peace times, preparing in fact the human being to kill during the times of war. Without this feeling the human being is more likely to refuse to kill. The creation and portrayal of enemies has often resulted in discrimination against individuals whose cultural backgrounds or physical appearance is consistent with the stereotype of the enemy. Many German Americans anglicized their names after the WWI, and half the states enacted laws prohibiting the teaching of the German language in schools. During the Cold War the Russian government was often portrayed in American political cartoons as a hungry bear ready to take over much of the globe. Soviet newspaper cartoons in turn portrayed Uncle Sam as a greedy capitalist with dollar signs for eyes. Security and conflict More people have been killed in warfare during the 20th century than in all previous history combined. Violent conflict is a sign of failure in international and national relations. Wars are never planned to be long, bloody or senseless. They are always necessary, a last resort, a test of national will. There are many metaphors for warfare. Religious philosophy may tell us that it derives from human sinfulness; psychologists that it is a type of mass hysteria controlled and manipulated by states and those who stand for benefit from war; strategists analyze it as a form of international relations. War has been viewed similar to a disease in its spread and effect, or to natural disasters in its impact on societys structure. What role does geography play in war? 66

Since ancient times, military analysts have recognized that spatial factors have played a critical role in the resolution of armed conflict. The discipline of geography has much to contribute to understanding the questions of warfare. First, spatial strategic factors are a crucial part of warfare planning and conduct. Military analysts view geography as a key element in the success of campaigns and the ability to understand where a state may be vulnerable. Classic geopolitics is based on detailed geographical analyses such as movement of military vessels through international straits, distribution of troops and weaponry for battle. Some of the most interesting analyses of campaigns during the American Civil War or the Boer War in South Africa focused on geographic factors. A common approach which is inherently geographic is the analysis of a states industrial resources and capabilities for waging war, vulnerability of trade and supply lines. Governments have often used professionally trained geographers in order to undertake these military and economic analyses. Indeed, the government of Imperial Germany in the late 19th century created professorships of geography at every university of the country for that specific purpose. Second, many conflicts arise from border disputes. Geographers classify and describe various types of borders and border violations. Beside geographical inquiry, these matters imply also international relations and international law. The psychology of space may be a topic for geographic analysis. The importance of territoriality and defending home are the links between geography and psychology. Of particular interest here is research on place annihilation, or the death of places during warfare. Geographers have recognized that wars do not occur randomly in space around the globe. Distance plays a key role in most conflicts over history, as neighboring states are more apt to war with each another. Yet some areas of the world are especially prone to conflict, for example the shatterbelts as the Middle East and Southeast Asia have experienced numerous armed conflicts over the past centuries. In addition to these more traditional ways in which geographic inquiry helps us understand warfare, a new element relating geography and war has been occurring since WWII: the globalization of security threats. This process takes us to look not only at the geography of war but also at the geography of security. In terms of external threats to citizens of a state, borders are becoming more and more permeable despite the best efforts of even wealthy states to protect their citizens. Thus, a new kind of geography, one that looks beyond physical definition of space to explore perceptual space, and one that moves beyond the state level to global security questions is essential. Four examples of such threats may be noted already within world geopolitics: 67

Weapons technology changes: as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons evolve, they overcome space barriers more and more effectively. Even so-called conventional weapons are now reaching a level of technology that will make them similar in terms of destructive power to nuclear ones. The technology is driving the need for new theories about geography and interstate conflict as the potential for destruction moves far beyond the scale of national borders. Terrorism: security threats which derive from determined small groups, outside the level of regular wars, are presented few handicaps by traditional border barriers, yet represent prime security threat to many states. International crime rings, piracy and illegal drug trafficking: it is no accident that the United States government speaks of a war on drugs and has even given some responsibilities for fighting that war from civil to military authorities. Well-armed and large private mafias evolving on the world scene may be the upcoming international security threat of the 21st century and show every indication of an ability to operate quite easily across international borders. Environmental damage: trans-boundary environmental security risks are becoming recognized as an important element of international relations, conflicts and legal questions. War in geopolitics Three types of wars are distinguished in geopolitics: -interstate wars (one state undertakes warfare on another state); -civil wars (the state is a combatant on one side against an insurrection, or two or more groups are battling within a state); -world wars (blocks of alliances are drawn into war, or superpowers engaged in warfare). Interstate wars. Conflicts between states may seem out of date in the modern world, and yet when one examines yearly lists of conflicts on the globe, this type of war is still very much present. Recent examples include the Falkland Island conflict between Great Britain and Argentina in 1982, war between Israel and its Arab neighbors in 1967, 1973; the conflict between Iran and Iraq 1980-1988, the ongoing Libya-Chad conflict in North Africa; India and Pakistan off and on again conflict over the Kashmir region; the Vietnam-Kampuchean conflict in 1970s. In almost all cases, territorial issues between neighbors were of fundamental concern. Even the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was in part grounded in Iraqs ongoing claim to Kuwaiti territory dating back to the days of British control over both states. In some parts of the world, boundaries were imposed on local people by outside forces. The most frequent examples are in the former European colonies, where 1. nations are united artificially and civil war erupts the case 68

of Nigeria in West Africa which underwent a costly civil war in 1967 when the Ibo people in the east tried to create a new independent state called Biafra (Ibo the largest ethnic group in Nigeria about 16 million people but the attempt was over by 1970, leaving behind up to 1 million dead, many of whom were children who died primarily of starvation); and 2. nations are divided by international boundaries and irredentist, interstate wars result the case of Somalia versus Ethiopia over the Ogaden region (it belongs to Ethiopia but it is inhabited by a large number of Somalis; the historical arguments are very complicated because Somalia has been conquered over time by Great Britain and then by Italy, every time with new boundaries). Civil wars are conflicts between groups within a state occurring on a frequent basis under the state system which evolved into the 20th century. Some scholars take this as evidence that states are in essentially artificial creations unrelated to aspiration of nations. Sometimes the rights of national groups to self-determination have been offset in the modern world against the rights of territorial integrity and sovereignty for a state. There are also conflicts which can exist for many years but at such a low level that violence only breaks out occasionally, or an overlap occurs with the popular definition of terrorism such as the case of the Basque secessionist movement in Spain or Corsicans against France. Others are influenced by ideological battles between the superpowers and often presented as political struggles, when they were in fact related to ethnic rivalries. For example, the war in Afghanistan between rival tribes and political factions intensified only after the withdrawal of the USSR. World wars this category is used to describe wars that take place between blocs of states, often resulting from complicated alliances which draw to many states in wars that would otherwise have been limited to neighbors, such as the 1st and the 2nd WW in the 20th century. The hegemonic aspirations of the superpowers during the Cold War era have been the major cause for civil wars in the Third World. Superpower competition to establish spheres of influence reached out to worldwide proportions with conflict zones particularly in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia and allied states of USSR such as Eastern Europe, Cuba, Nicaragua, South Yemen, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Angola; and allied states of the US Israel, South Korea, Philippines and Somalia. Through military alliances (NATO, Warsaw Pact, Seato - South East Asia Treaty Organization) states not directly involved in conflict were drawn into military unions and in some cases into wars themselves. The ultimate world war has been considered to be the nuclear war which could have drawn in states not aligned to one side or another due to global climate patterns of damage. East and Southern Asian states may have suffered the most severe losses if climate change models were accurate in 69

their prediction of temperature drops due to dust concentrations in the atmosphere. Failure of the Asian rice crop would have resulted in massive famines and perhaps a higher total loss of lives than even direct damage to either the US or the USSR. Thus, China and India with large rural populations spatially concentrated and dependent on rice, would be particularly affected by the possibility of a world nuclear war. Even without a nuclear conflict, a new major superpower war would allow few bystanders because of environmental damage and economic disruption. New security threats as stated by the National Military Strategy paper in the USA in 1992 are the threats of the unknown, the uncertain. The threat is instability and being unprepared to handle a crisis or war that no one predicted or expected. General world instability, international crime, environmental problems and new types of weapons especially in the hands of developing countries are the most important threats at least for the people of the US. There is evidence in many parts of the world that the elite are reverting to systems akin to the Middle Ages when wealthy people and small communities established personal protection. For example private armies are springing up in the former USSR to protect the new rich from the criminals or multinational firms around the world spend money acquiring technology to help protect their workers against terrorism. War and religious beliefs During the Ancient Times, churches support the pacifism. By the Middle Ages, the church became deeply involved in all aspects of societys life, and argued that good Christians could participate in just wars. The war was accepted if unavoidable to restore peace. Some churches accepted the just war, such as the Protestant Reformation, Luther and Calvin, others held to a pacifist dogma (Mennonite, Anabaptist). Judaism stresses the search for peace as part of Gods original purpose for people, but that sometimes destruction is required if it is for a good end. The Talmud distinguishes between optional and obligatory or defensive wars. Within Jewish traditions there is room for a variety of interpretations and moral guidance, and thus much latitude of choice for the individual believer. Perhaps the best word to express the tradition of Judaism is shalom meaning peace not just as absence of war, but also as a general condition of well-being. Islam is sometimes viewed by non-adherents in Western cultures as a war-like religion, but in actual fact the teachings of Islam do not argue for war any more than Christian or Jewish traditions. The Jihad is the idea of holy war in Islam and Muhammed the Prophet was certainly a military as well as a spiritual leader. However, Jihad means striving, not actual war, and can refer to evangelical activities of the religion which do not require the use of force. The Hindu faith, prevalent in India and other parts of Asia, recognizes a warrior caste within its system, but 70

also argues that killing should be avoided if possible. Buddhism, the faith that was originated in the sixth century out of Hinduism, teaches that one of the right actions people must strive for is non-violence. In fact, killing for gain in war, murder, or even killing for food, must all be regarded as immoral. But non-violence must be a personal ethic, requiring meditation and reflection to attain. One religious group that has come on the world scene only recently and has suffered great losses due to adherence to non-violence is the Bahai faith. This religion originated in Iran of the 19th century and offers a vision of a single, unified faith and moral code for the world. New security threats After 1990s when the SU broke up and, so, the big enemy disappeared, the United States reformulated its strategic principles: readiness, collective security, arms control, maritime and aerospace superiority, strategic agility, power protection, technological superiority and decisive force. According to these new principles, the biggest threat pf all to US security was the threat of the unknown, the uncertain - the threat of uncertainty and being unprepared to handle a crisis or war that no one predicted or expected (National Military Strategic Paper). General world instability, international crime, environmental problems, and new types of weapons were all noted as threats to the people of the United States. Of interest to the geographer is the fact that most of these threats operate out of the traditional borders. They therefore create a new type of geopolitical security space, which is based more on psychological, perceptual, or jurisdictional space than on defensible physical boundaries. If wars in the next century become harder to classify using traditional definitions of conflict, security threats will increasingly become global and move beyond the control of state borders. Nuclear war. Atomic weapons have not been used in war since 1945, and yet they dominated the defense of the superpowers during the Cold War and still exist in plentiful numbers in the world. With the end of the Cold War, new threats related to nuclear weapons have emerged: do North Korea and Iraq have the capability to create nuclear weapons? Will the non-proliferation treaty continue to be respected? Is nuclear terrorism a possibility? Nuclear weapons are unique geopolitically because they alone offer the possibility of total destruction of the planets ecosystem. If the nuclear winter theory is correct, the war between the United States and the Soviet Union might have caused the destruction of much life on the planet a type of terracide. While the largest arsenals are still held by Russian and the United States, the United Kingdom, France and China also possess nuclear weapons. The production of nuclear arms is a major industry and many allied states host nuclear weapons without having sovereign control over their use. There have been almost 2,000 nuclear weapons explosions since 1945, mainly for 71

testing. People who have died directly because of nuclear weapons since 1945 total over 100,000, including people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others may have had their lives shortened due to contamination by nuclear testing. Beside SALT I signed by US and SU in 1972, another agreement was designed in 1991 to cut US and Soviet strategic arsenals. START II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) calls for a 50% reduction in strategic nuclear arms by the year 2003. Terrorism is difficult to define because the violent act one group regards as terrorism may be seen as patriotic act by another. The concept of terrorism could be defined by taking into account the following elements: -political motivation rather than economic gain; -threat of violence, particularly of a surprise nature and directed at innocent civilians -maximum use of publicity the draw the worlds attention; -committed by a group, not part of a sovereign state government. It is a phenomenon that occurs beyond the constraints of borders and distance, despite efforts to protect citizens through metal detectors. Europe has been an especially prime location for terrorist attacks due to its geographic location as a world air travel crossroads, the number of nationalist disputes within Europe, and past colonial ties to Third World states. The opening of borders with the European Union plans have made police wary about their ability to provide security within Europe as goods and people circulate more freely. Can there be a military solution to terrorism? The 1993 bombing of a highrise building in New York City proven that even the United States may not stay immune to such security threats. The fatal day of September 11, 2001 and the destroying of the Twins as symbols of American power opened the way to fight terrorism at an international scale. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein became the most popular and wanted characters and stay as the big enemies of the world ever since after. The latter has been captured some time ago. Illegal drug trafficking, international crime. Drug trade has become lately an international security issue moving from the civil crime domain into the military one, and the possibility that international crime rings may now be dealing in nuclear and other advanced weaponry items is increasing the fear. In addition, international crime groups have also affected states security in absolute disregard for traditional border defense in areas such as money laundering, illegal immigrant traffic, and even the growing black market for human body organs thanks in part to technology for transplant operations. The breakdown of borders in Europe following the European Union agreements and the demise of the tight control under the USSR have added two elements that have facilitated the international flow of illegal activities. 72

Many of the crime groups are related to major ethnicities (Sicilian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese) and therefore can take advantage of family-like connections as well. At the start of the 21st century, conflict and security matters for states become more complicated and traditional defenses less effective. Geography is proving a diminishing barrier to a host of security threats, which may affect citizens even of wealthy countries. Security threats now have much more of a collective nature and therefore require collective solutions and more international cooperation among governments who serve states and international agencies. Religion as a geopolitical factor Religion, like language, is a symbol of group identity and a cultural rallying point. Religious enmity forced the partition of the Indian subcontinent between Muslims and Hindus after the departure of the British in 1947. French Catholics and French Huguenots (Protestants) freely slaughtered each other in the name of religion in the 16th century. English Roman Catholics were hounded from their country after the establishment of the Anglican Church. Religion has continued to be a root cause of many local and regional conflicts throughout the world during the 20th and into the 21st century including confrontations between Catholic and Protestant Christian groups in Northern Ireland; Muslim sects in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Algeria; Muslims and Jews in Palestine; Christians and Muslims in the Philippines and Lebanon; and Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka. More peacefully, in the name of their beliefs, American Amish, Hutterite, Shaker, and other religious communities have isolated themselves from the secular world and pursued their own ways of life. Religions are cultural innovations. They may be unique to a single culture group, closely related to the faiths professed in nearby areas, or derived from or identical to beliefs far away placed. There is a distinction between monotheism, belief in a single deity and polytheism, belief in many gods, although they are not particularly spatially relevant. There are differences in religions patterns and processes of diffusion and distributions. There are different classes of religions: universalizing, ethnic or tribal. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are the major world universalizing religions, faiths that claim applicability to all humans and that seek to transmit their beliefs through missionary work and conversion. Membership in universalizing religions is open to anyone who chooses to make some sort of symbolic commitment, such as Baptism in Christianity. No one is excluded because of nationality, ethnicity, or previous religious belief. Ethnic religions have strong territorial and cultural group identification. One becomes a member of an ethnic religion by birth or by adoption of a complex life-style and cultural identity, not by simple declaration of faith. These religions do not usually proselytize, and their members form distinctive closed communities identified with a particular ethnic group or political unit. An ethnic religion for example Judaism, Indian Hinduism, or Japanese Shinto is an integral element of a specific culture; to be part of the religion is to be immersed in the totality of the culture. 73

Tribal or traditional religions are special forms of ethnic religions distinguished by their small size, their unique identity with localized culture groups not yet fully absorbed into modern society, and their close ties to nature. Animism is the name given to their belief that life exists in all objects, from rocks and trees to lakes and mountains, or that such inanimate objects are the abode of the dead, of spirits and of gods. Shamanism is a form of tribal religion that involves community acceptance of a shaman, a religious leader, healer, and worker of magic who, through special powers, can intercede with and interpret the spirit world. Patterns and flows The nature of the different classes of religions is reflected in their distributions over the world and in their number of adherents. Universalizing religions tend to be expansionary, carrying their message to new peoples and areas. Ethnic religions, unless their adherents are dispersed, tend to be regionally confined or to expand only slowly and over long periods. Tribal religions tend to contract spatially as their adherents are incorporated increasingly into modern society and converted by proselytizing faiths. Religion as a culture trait is dynamic. Personal and collective beliefs may alter in response to developing individual and societal needs and challenges. Religions may be imposed by conquest, adopted by conversion, or be defended and preserved in the face of surrounding hostility and indifference. Few societies are homogeneous and most modern ones contain a variety of different faiths or at least variants of the dominant professed religion. Frequently, members of a particular religion show areal concentration within a country. Thus, in urban Northern Ireland Protestants and Catholics reside in separate areas whose boundaries are clearly understood and respected. The Green Line in Beirut, marked a guarded border between the Christian East and the Muslim West sides of the city, while within the country as a whole regional concentration of adherents of different sects and faiths are clearly recognized. Religious diversity within countries may reflect the degree of toleration a majority culture affords minority religions. In dominantly 90% Muslim Indonesia, Christian Bataks, Hindu Balinese, and Muslim Javanese for many years lived in peaceful coexistence. By contrast, the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran has persecuted and executed those of the Bahais faith. More than half of the worlds population probably adheres to one of the major universalizing religions: Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. Of these three, Christianity and Islam are most wide-spread, Buddhism is largely an Asian religion. Hinduism, the largest ethnic faith is essentially confined to the Indian subcontinent, showing the spatial restriction characteristic of most ethnic and traditional religions even when found outside of their homeland area. Small Hindu emigrant communities in Africa, southeast Asia, England or the United States tend to remain isolated even in densely crowded urban areas. Although it is not localized, Judaism is also included among the ethnic religions because of its identification with a particular people and cultural tradition. Tribal religions are found in principally among peoples who have not yet been fully absorbed into modern cultures and economies or who are on the margins of more populous and advanced societies. Secularism, on the other part, is an indifference to or rejection of religion and an increasing part of many modern societies, particularly of the industrialized nations and those 74

now or formerly under communist regimes. In England, the state Church of England claims 20% of the British population as communicants, but only 2% of the adult population attends its Sunday services. Two-thirds of the French describe themselves as Catholic and less than 5% regularly go to church. Even in South American countries where Roman Catholicism is very strong, there is a low church attendance, in Colombia, for example, only 18% of people attend Sunday services. The Principal Religions Judaism, whose belief in one god laid the foundation for both Christianity and Islam. Judaism is closely identified with a single ethnic group and with a complex and restrictive set of beliefs and laws. It emerged some 3000 to 4000 years ago in the Near East, one of the ancient culture hearth regions. The Israelites conviction that they were a chosen people, bound with God through a covenant of mutual loyalty and guided by a complex formal rules of behaviour, set them apart from other peoples of the Near East. Theirs became a distinctively ethnic religion, the determining factors of which descend from Israel, the Torah (law and scripture) and the traditions of the culture and the faith. Early military success gave the Jews a sense of territorial and political identity to supplement their religious self-awareness. Later conquest by nonbelievers led to their dispersion to much of the Mediterranean world and farther east into Asia by A.D. 500. The Jews retained their faith and sense of community even though two separate branches of Judaism developed in Europe during the Middle Ages. The Sephardim were originally based in the Iberian Peninsula and expelled from there in the late 15th century; with ties to North African and Babylonian Jews they retained their native Judeo-Spanish language (Ladino) and culture. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Ashkenazim, seeking refuge from intolerable persecution in the western and central Europe, settled in Poland, Lithuania and Russia. It was from Eastern Europe that many of the Jewish immigrants to the United States came during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though German-speaking areas of central Europe were also important source areas. The Ashkenazim constitute perhaps 80% of all Jews in the world and differ from the Sephardim in cultural traditions, for example their widespread use of Yiddish. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of the goal of Zionism, the belief in the need to create an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine. It demonstrated a determination that Jews not lose their identity by absorption into alien cultures and societies. The new state represented a reversal of the preceding 2000-year history of dispersal and relocation diffusion. Israel became largely a country of immigrants, an ancient homeland again identified with a distinct people and an ethnic religion. The synagogue as place of worship has tended to be less elaborated than its Christian counterpart. The essential for religious service is a community of at least 10 adult males, not a specific structure. Christianity had its origin in the life and teachings of Jesus, a Jewish preacher of the 1st century of the modern era, whom his followers believed was the messiah promised by God. The new covenant he preached was not a rejection of traditional Judaism but a promise of salvation to all humankind than to just a chosen people. Christianitys mission was conversion. As a universal religion of salvation and hope, it spread quickly among the underclasses of both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire, 75

carried to major cities and ports along the excellent system of Roman roads and sea lanes. Expansion diffusion followed the establishment of missions and colonies of converts in locations distant from the hearth region. Important among them were the urban areas that became administrative seats of the new religion. For the western church, Rome was the principal center for dispersal, through hierarchical diffusion, to provincial capitals and smaller Roman settlements of Europe. From those nodes and from monasteries established in rural pagan areas, contagious diffusion disseminated Christianity throughout the continent. The acceptance of Christianity as the state religion of the empire by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 313 was also an expression of hierarchical diffusion of great importance in establishing the faith throughout the full extent of the Roman world. Finally, and much later, relocation diffusion brought the faith to the New World with European settlers. The dissolution of the Roman Empire into a western and a eastern half after the fall of Rome also divided Christianity. The western church, based in Rome, was one of the very few stabilizing and civilizing forces uniting western Europe during the Dark Ages. Its bishops became the civil as well as ecclesiastical authorities over vast areas devoid of other effective government. Parish churches were the focus of rural and urban life, and the cathedrals replaced Roman monuments and temples as the symbols of the social order. Secular imperial control endured in the eastern empire, whose capital was Constantinople. Thriving under its protection, the Eastern Church expanded into the Balkans, eastern Europe, Russia and the Near East. The fall of the Eastern Empire to the Turks in the 15th century opened eastern Europe temporarily to Islam, though the Eastern Orthodox Church remains in its various ethnic branches a major component of Christianity. The Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries split the church in the west, leaving Roman Catholicism supreme in southern Europe but installing a variety of Protestant denominations and national churches in western and northern Europe. The split was reflected in the subsequent widespread dispersion of Christianity. Catholic Spain and Portugal colonized Latin America, taking both their languages and the Roman church to that area, as they did to colonial outposts in the Philippines, India and Africa. Catholic France colonized Quebec in North America. Protestants, many of them fleeing Catholic or repressive Protestant state churches were primary early settlers of Anglo America, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and South Africa. In Africa and Asia, both Protestant and Catholic missions attempted to convert nonbelievers. Both achieved success in sub-Saharan Africa, though traditional religions are dominant in that area. Neither was particularly successful in China, Japan or India, where strong ethnic religious cultural systems were barriers largely impermeable to the diffusion of the Christian faith. Although accounting for nearly one-third of the worlds population and territorially the most extensive belief system, Christianity is no longer numerical important in or near its original hearth. Nor is it any longer dominated by Northern Hemisphere adherents. In 1900, two-thirds of all Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, two-thirds of an estimated 2 billion total lived elsewhere in South America, Africa and Asia. 76

Islam the word means submission to the will of God springs from the same Judaic roots as Christianity and embodies many of the same beliefs. There is only one God, who may be revealed to humans through prophets, Adam was the first human, Abraham was one of his descendants. Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, succeeding and completing the work of earlier prophets of Judaism and Christianity, including Moses, David and Jesus. The Koran, the word of Allah revealed to Mohammed contains not only rules of worship and details of doctrine, but also instructions on the conduct of human affairs. For fundamentalists, it thus becomes the unquestioned guide to matters both religious and secular. Observance of the five pillars and surrender to the will of Allah unites the faithful into a brotherhood that has no concern with race, colour, or caste. That law of brotherhood served to unify an Arab world divided by tribes, social ranks and multiple local deities. Mohammed born in Mecca, fled in A.D. 622 to Medina, where the prophet proclaimed a constitution and announced the universal mission of the Islamic community. That flight hegira marks the starting point of the Islamic calendar. By the time of Mohammed death in 11 A.H. all of Arabia had joined Islam. The new religion swept quickly by expansion diffusion outward from that source region over most of Central Asia and, at the expense of Hinduism, into northern India. The advance westward was particularly rapid and inclusive in North Africa. In western Europe, 700 years of Muslim rule in much of Spain ended by Christian reconquest in 1492. In Eastern Europe, conversions made under an expansionary Ottoman Empire are reflected in Muslim components in Bosnia and Kosovo regions of former Yugoslavia, in Bulgaria and in the 70% Muslim population of Albania. Later, Islam was dispersed into Indonesia, southern Africa, and the western hemisphere. Muslims now form the majority population in 39 countries. Asia has the largest absolute number and Africa the highest proportion of Muslims among its population, more than 42%. Islam, with an estimated 1.25 billion adherents worldwide, is the fastestgrowing major religion at the present time and a prominent element in recent and current political affair. Sectarian hatreds fuelled the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq, Afgan mujahedeen holly worriers found inspiration in their faith to resist Soviet occupation of their country, and Chechens drew strength from their faith in resisting the Russian assaults on their Caucasian homeland during the 1990s and after. Islamic fundamentalism led to the 1979 overthrow of Irans shah. Muslim separatism is a recurring theme in Philippine affairs, and militant groups seek establishment of religiously rather than secularly-based governments in several Muslim states. Islam initially united a series of separate tribes and groups, but disagreements over the succession of leadership after the prophet led to a division between two groups, Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis, the majority of Muslims (80 to 85%) recognise the first four caliphs (originally successor and later the title of the religious and civil head of the Muslim state) as Mohammeds rightful successors. The Shiites reject the legitimacy of the first three and believe that Muslim leadership rightly belong to the fourth caliph, the prophets son in law, Ali, and his descendants. At the start of the 21st century, Sunnis constitute the majority of Muslims in all countries except Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and perhaps Yemen. Hinduism is the worlds oldest religion. Some evidence traces its origin 4000 or more years. Hinduism is not just a religion but an intricate web of religious, 77

philosophical, social, economic, and artistic elements comprising a distinctive Indian civilization. Its estimated 780 million adherents are largely confined to India, where it claims 80% of the population. It derives its name from the cradle area in the valley of the Indus River. From that district of present day Pakistan, it spread eastward down the Ganges River and southward throughout the Indian subcontinent and adjacent regions by amalgamating, absorbing earlier native religions and customs. Its practice eventually spread throughout southeastern Asia, into Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, as well as into neighbouring Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The largest Hindu temple complex is in Cambodia, not in India, and Bali remains a Hindu pocket in dominantly Islamic Indonesia. A Hindu is one born in a caste, a member of a complex social and economic as well religious community. Hinduism accepts and incorporates all forms of belief, adherents may believe in one God or many or none. It emphasizes the divinity of the soul and is based on the concepts of reincarnation and passage from one state of existence to another in an unending of birth and death in which all living things are caught. Ones position in this life is determined by ones kharma, or deeds and conduct in previous lives. Upon that conduct depends the condition and the being plant, animal, or human into which a soul after a stay in heaven or hell is reborn. All creatures are ranked, with humans on the top of the ladder. But humans themselves are ranked, and the social caste into which a an individual is born is an indication of that persons spiritual status. The goal of existence is move up the hierarchy, eventually to be liberated from the cycle of rebirth and redeath and to achieve salvation and eternal peace through union with the Brahman, the universal soul. The caste, meaning birth, structure of society is an expression of the eternal transmigration of souls. For the Hindu, the primary aim of this life is to conform to prescribed social and ritual duties and to the rules of conduct for the assigned caste and profession. Those requirements comprise that individuals dharma law and duties. To violate them upsets the balance of society and nature and brings undesirable consequences. To observe them improves the chance of promotion at the next rebirth. The largest periodic gathering of humans in the world of millions of Hindus of all castes, classes, and sects gather about once in 12 years for ritual washing away of sins in the Ganges River, near Allahabad. The doctrine of ahimsa instructs Hindus to refrain from harming any living being. Buddhism. Numerous reform movements have derived from Hinduism over the centuries, some of which have endured to the present day as major religions on a regional or world scale. Sikhism developed in the Punjab area of northwestern India in the late 15th century A.D. rejecting the formalism of both Hinduism and Islam and proclaiming a gospel of universal toleration. The great majority of some 20 million Sikhs still live in India, mostly in the Punjab, though others have settled in Malaysia, Singapore, East Africa, the United Kingdom and North America. The largest and most influential of the dissident movements has been Buddhism, a universalizing faith founded in the 6th century B.C. in northern India by Buddha, the enlightened one. The Buddha teachings were more a moral philosophy that offered an explanation for evil and human suffering than a formal religion. He viewed the road to enlightenment and salvation to lie in understanding the four noble truths: existence involves suffering, 78

suffering is the result of desire, pain ceases when desire is destroyed, the destruction of desire comes through knowledge of correct behaviour and correct thoughts. In Buddhism, which retains the Hindu concept of kharma, the ultimate objectives of existence are the achievement of nirvana, a condition of perfect enlightenment, and cessation of successive rebirths. The belief was spread throughout India where it was made the state religion in the 3rd century B.C. It was carried elsewhere to Asia by missionaries, monks and merchants. While expanding abroad, Buddhism began to decline at home as early as the 4th century A.D. slowly but irreversibly absorbed into a revived Hinduism. By the 8th century its dominance in northern India was broken by conversions to Islam; by the 15th century, it had essentially disappeared from all of the subcontinent. There are several schools of thought or vehicles that explain the present day spatial patterns of Buddhism. One was implanted in Sri Lanka and southeast Asia beginning in the 3rd century B.C. stressing personal salvation through the four noble truths, other was accepted in China, Japan and Korea in the 4th century A.D. emphasizing meditation, and other as a revived Lamaist tradition in Tibet in the 7th to the 10th centuries highlighting self-discipline, meditation, and the study of philosophy. Later, it elevated Dalai Lama as the reincarnated Buddha, who became spiritual ruler. Before Chinese conquest and the flight of Dalai Lama in 1959, as many as one in four Tibetan males was a monk whose celibacy helped keep population number stable. Tibetan Buddhism was firther dispersed, beginning in the 14th century, to Mongolia, northern China, and parts of southern Russia. When Buddhism reached China from the south some 1500-2000 years ago and was carried to Japan from Korea in the 7th century, it encountered and later amalgamated with already well established ethnical belief systems. In China, the union was with Confucianism and Taoism, in Japan it was with Shinto, a polytheistic animism and shamanism. Religion and Culture Unlike language, which is an attribute of all people, religion varies in its cultural role, dominating among some societies, unimportant or denied totally in others. All societies have value systems common beliefs, understandings, expectations and controls that unite their members and set them off from other, different culture groups. Such a value system is termed a religion when it involves systems of formal or informal worship and faith in the sacred and divine. Since religions are formalized views about the relation of the individual to this world and to the hereafter, each carries a distinct conception of the meaning and value of this life, and most contain strictures about what must be done in order to achieve salvation. These rules become interwoven with the traditions of a culture. For Muslims, the observance of Sharia (law) is a necessary part of Islam, submission to Allah. In classical Judaism, the keeping of the Torah, the Law of Moses, involved ritual and moral rules of holy living. For Hindus, the dharma, or teaching, includes the complex laws enunciated in the ancient book of Manu. Ethics of conduct and humane relations rather than religious rituals are central to the Confucian tradition of China, while the Sikh khalsa, or holy community, is defined by various rules of observance, such as prohibiting the cutting of ones hair. Economic patterns may be intertwined with past and present religious beliefs. Traditional restrictions on food and drink may affect the kinds of animals that are raised or avoided, the crops that are grown, and the 79

importance of those crops in the daily diet. Occupational assignment in the Hindu caste system is in part religiously supported. In many countries, there is a state religion that is religious and political structures are intertwined. Buddhism, for example, has been the state religion in Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. By their official names, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran proclaim their identity of religion and government. Despite Indonesias overwhelming Muslim majority, that country sought and formerly found domestic harmony by recognizing five official religions and a state ideology pancasila whose first tenet is belief in one god. Religion and Economics The religion that predominates in any region may have a significant impact on that societys economy. Elaborate burial practices, for example, can drain a society of capital. Many peoples have buried their dead along with their possessions. Some societies lavish expenditure on houses of worship and other religious institutions. In some Buddhist societies high percentages of the male labor force spend several years, or even their whole lives as monks. Furthermore, religious teachings may affect the way people view the accumulation of money. For example, the scriptures of most religions bar the charging of interest on a loan as taking advantage of another person. Christian teachings differentiate between two reasons of borrowing money: for needs and for investment. In the first case it is sinful to charge interest. The religious leaders in some societies do not accept such a distinction. Islamic financial system forbid interest, but encourage instead risk sharing. Eight Muslim nations support the Islamic Financial Services Board in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which bring together scholars to debate the issues related to money management. In practice, financial structures and compromises have to be defined in each Islamic country. Protestantism. German sociologist, Max Weber, linked Protestantism with capitalism in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1904. According to him, Protestantism encourages individualism, and with the rise of Protestantism in western Europe, moneymaking became a virtue. This explains why the spread of Protestantism is widely reported and welcome in Americas business press. The Wall Street Journal and other publications all devote extensive coverage to the spread of Protestantism. They report it as economic news, not just religious news. The Roman Catholicism. In 1991 Pope John Paul II wrote that the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. In 1992, the Universal Catechism notes that markets do not always meet human needs and governments should regulate markets according to the hierarchy of values. It also demands that every worker receive a just salary. The church attitudes toward markets, speculation and worker-management relations may influence the behaviour of individuals and governments in Roman Catholic countries. 80

Confucianism. The Confucian tradition in East Asian societies may exemplify another religious influence on economic development. Confucianism recommends societal leadership by an intelligent elite with the moral obligation to guide the people. Confucianism enhances the status of jobs in government bureaucracies, there is a strong competition for young graduates in Japan and Korea for positions in central administration. Also, diligence, obedience, and high savings rates characterize the peoples of neo-Confucian Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore and of every Chinese community in the world. Religion and Politics Almost all countries guarantee freedom of religion and most governments observe a form of secularism. Many governments nevertheless favour one religion over others implicitly or explicitly. Theocracy is a form of government where a church rules directly. The Vatican is a theocracy. Morocco may be a modified theocracy, because the kings legitimacy derives partly from his descend from Mohammed. Many theocracies existed in history: Tibet is an example, or Utah was once a Mormon theocracy, and although it is today increasingly cosmopolitan, no Utah politician can ignore Mormon Church leaders. Recent laws in Israel ban the production or sale of pork and prohibit activities on the Sabbath. In Christianity, it is widely accepted that the church and state, religion and politics must be separated. Nevertheless, several countries are today explicitly Christian or at least support various Christian sects (called established churches) with public funds. These include Argentina, Peru, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, The United Kingdom, and Finland. At the same time, other countries are disestablishing official churches. For example, Italy disestablished Roman Catholicism in 1984, Spain in 1988, and Colombia in 1991. Sweden disestablished Lutheranism in 2000, and the government of Greece stopped listing religious affiliation on state identity cards in 2000. Theoretically, no distinction can be made between Church and state in Islam, which teaches that the only purpose of government is to ensure that each person can lead a good Muslim life. Church and state should be the same, and thus Islam is inherently political. Countries that are officially Islamic include Mauritania, Afghanistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. These countries may be considered modified theocracies. Islamic states enact Islamic teachings into law and establish Sharia courts to rule whether secular law conforms to Islamic teaching. All legislation in Iran, for example, must be approved by a body of 12 religious judges, who enforce fundamentalist beliefs. Indonesia, which has the worlds largest Muslim population but which is officially a secular country, has recognized Sharia rulings on family law. 81