Geopolitics, << `jee` oh POL uh tihks, >> attempts to explain world political developments in terms of geographic space. According to this theory, the world contains a limited amount of space, and all countries struggle among themselves to get enough to survive. Geopolitics tries to describe the relationship between geographic space and foreign policy. A Swedish scholar, Rudolf Kjellen, first used the term. Geographers, historians, and political scientists study the influence of geography on foreign policy. But the term geopolitics is rarely used today because it seems to emphasize only one factor in explaining the power of great nations.
In the early 1900’s, Sir Halford Mackinder, an English geographer, advanced a theory of geopolitics that emphasized the importance in world politics of nations that controlled great land areas. He called the great land mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the World Island. All other areas were only satellites. The central land of Europe and Asia, including Germany and Russia, was the Heartland. Control of the Heartland was supposed to be the key to world power. Nicholas Spykman, an American scholar, argued that it was also important to control what he called the Rimland. The Rimland consisted of Western Europe, the Middle East, and southern and eastern Asia.
German geopoliticians, especially Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), combined Mackinder’s theory with some of their own theories and developed geopolitics into a pseudoscience. Haushofer and others argued that oceanic countries would have to grant lebensraum (living space) to the newer, more dynamic continental countries. German dictator Adolf Hitler tried to put these theories of geopolitics into practice.
