The Revenge of Geography (14 page)

As heirs to land power, Germans and Russians have over the centuries thought more in terms of geography than Americans and Britons, heirs to sea power. For Russians, mindful of the devastation wrought by the Golden Horde of the Mongols, geography means simply that without expansion there is the danger of being overrun. Enough territory is never enough. Russia’s need for an empire of Eastern European satellites during the Cold War, and its use of military power, subversion, and the configuration of its energy pipeline routes all designed to gain back its near-abroad, and thus reconstitute in effect the former Soviet Union, are the wages of a deep insecurity. But Germans, at least through the middle of the twentieth century, were more conscious of geography still. The shape of German-speaking territories on the map of Europe changed constantly from the Dark Ages through modern times, with the unification of a German state occurring only in the 1860s under Otto von Bismarck. Germany stood at
the very heart of Europe, a land and sea power both, and thus fully conscious of its ties to maritime Western Europe and to the Heartland of Russia–Eastern Europe. Germany’s victories against Denmark, Habsburg Austria, and France were ultimately the result of Bismarck’s strategic brilliance, anchored in his acute sense of geography, which was actually the recognition of limits: namely, those Slavic regions to the east and southeast where Germany dare not go. Germany’s abjuration of Bismarck’s caution led to its loss in World War I, which gave Germans a keener sense of their geographic vulnerability—and possibilities. Historically changeable on the map, lying between sea to the north and Alps to the south, with the plains to the west and east open to invasion and expansion both, Germans have literally lived geography. It was they who developed and elaborated upon geopolitics, or
Geopolitik
in German, which is the concept of politically and militarily dominated space. And it was such geographical theories, which in the first half of the twentieth century owed much to Mackinder, that was to lead to the Germans’ undoing—discrediting geography and geopolitics for generations of Germans since World War II.

The rise and fall of
Geopolitik
, in which one theoretician after another both built on and misused the work of his predecessor, began in earnest with Friedrich Ratzel, a late-nineteenth-century German geographer and ethnographer, who coined the idea of
Lebensraum
, or “living space.” The concept actually owes its origin to a German immigrant in early-nineteenth-century America, Friedrich List, a journalist, political science professor, business speculator, and friend of Henry Clay, who drew inspiration from the Monroe Doctrine, with its notion of a vast and virtually sovereign geographical area. As for Ratzel, he was also much influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, and thus developed an organic, somewhat biological sense of geography in which borders were constantly evolving depending upon the size and makeup of the human populations in the vicinity. While we regard borders as static, as the very representation of permanence, legality, and stability, Ratzel saw only gradual expansion,
contraction, and impermanence in the affairs of nations. For him the map
breathed
as though a living being, and from this came the idea of the organic-biological state whose expansion was written into natural law.

One of Ratzel’s students, a Swede, Rudolf Kjellén, would as a political scientist at the universities in Uppsala and Göteborg coin the word
“Geopolitik.”
Kjellén, an intense Swedish nationalist, feared Russian expansionism in quest of the relatively warm waters of the Baltic Sea. He wanted an expansionist Sweden and Finland to counter Russia’s designs. While Kjellén found support for his views with members of the aristocracy and upper middle classes, nostalgic for Sweden’s past grandeur under kings such as Gustavus Adolfus and Charles XII, there was ultimately too little public support for his views. The appetite for great power preoccupations in Scandinavia, even by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, was long past. Kjellén transferred all his hopes to a Greater Germany—to stand forth against Russia and England, both of which he especially detested. Kjellén’s German empire-of-the-future, as he cataloged it, included all of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Channel ports along the French coast, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, Ukraine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia (to be connected to Berlin by a great railway). Employing Ratzel’s ideas, Kjellén categorized human societies in racial, biological terms, conceiving of the state in terms of the
Volk
, which, if sufficiently virile and dynamic, would require an especially large amount of living space. It is the very glibness and windiness inhabiting the thought of Ratzel and Kjellén that a later generation of murderers would make use of to justify their acts. Ideas matter, for good and for bad, and hazy ideas can be especially dangerous. Whereas legitimate geography shows us what we are up against in the challenges we face around the world, Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s is an illegitimate geography that annihilates the individual and replaces him with the vast racial multitude.

This is all but prologue to the life of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism and steadfast admirer of Mackinder. The tragic perversion of Mackinder’s work by Haushofer, as well as the danger
posed by Nazi
Geopolitik
, is elegantly told in a largely forgotten but classic work of political science,
Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power
by Robert Strausz-Hupé, published in 1942. Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian immigrant to the United States, was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and a U.S. ambassador to four countries (including Turkey) during the Cold War years. In 1955 in Philadelphia, he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with which I have been loosely affiliated for two decades. Strausz-Hupé’s book, written before the tide turned in the Allies’ favor in World War II, was a clear-cut attempt not only to explain the danger of Nazi
Geopolitik
to the fellow citizens of his adopted country, but to explain what geopolitics is and why it is important, so that the forces of good can make use of it in a much different way than the Nazis were doing. Strausz-Hupé thus rescues the reputation of Mackinder and the discipline itself, while performing an act of individual agency in doing his intellectual part to win the war.

Major General Professor Doktor Karl Haushofer was born in 1869 in Munich. His grandfather, uncle, and father all wrote about cartography and travel. Thus was his life marked. Haushofer joined the Bavarian army and in 1909 was appointed artillery instructor to the Japanese army. He became infatuated with the military rise of Japan, with which he advocated a German alliance. Haushofer fought in World War I as a brigade commander, and had as his aide the Nazi Rudolf Hess, to whom he would later dedicate several books. After the war Haushofer was appointed to the chair of geography and military science at the University of Munich, where Hess followed him as a disciple. It was through Hess that Haushofer met the “rising agitator” Adolf Hitler, whom Haushofer would visit and provide academic briefings on geopolitics while Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg fortress, following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Hitler was writing
Mein Kampf
at the time, and as a partially educated man, he needed, despite his intuition, to know more about the real world. And here was this university professor who could fill
some of the gaps in his knowledge. Chapter 14 of
Mein Kampf
, which defines Nazi foreign policy and the Nazi ideal of
Lebensraum
, was possibly influenced by Haushofer, who was in turn influenced by, among others, Ratzel, Kjellén, and especially Mackinder. For Mackinder had written that world history has always been made by the great outward thrusts of landlocked peoples located near Eastern Europe and the Heartland of Eurasia.
¹

Strausz-Hupé takes us on a journey along the line of thought by which Haushofer came to be mesmerized by his contemporary Mackinder. Mackinder, though obsessed with land power, never actually denigrated the importance of sea power. But he was pessimistic about the ability of British sea power to prevent a raid on the Heartland by German land power. And once in possession of the Heartland, Germany could build a great navy to aid in its conquest of the World-Island. In the twentieth century, Mackinder explained that, more than ever, sea power required a broader and deeper landward reach to take advantage of industrialization. The Industrial Age meant a world of big states, and the strong ate the weak. Haushofer adopted this theory of Mackinder “to the opposite German point of view,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “and concluded that the path to German world power lay along the lines that had frightened the English, i.e., consolidation of the German and Russian ‘greater areas.’ ” Haushofer, in the words of Strausz-Hupé, goes positively cloudy and mystical and nebulous when describing Mackinder’s Heartland. It is the “cradle of world conquerors,” “a gigantic citadel reaching from ‘the Elbe to the Amur,’ ” that is, from central Germany to Manchuria and the Russian Far East, deep into which Germany can withdraw her vital war industries while its army and navy can strike outward in all directions.
²

Whereas Mackinder, influenced by Wilsonianism and the need to preserve the balance of power in Eurasia, recommended in 1919 a belt of independent states in Eastern Europe, Haushofer, inverting Mackinder’s thesis, calls a few years later for the “extinction of such states.” Haushofer, Strausz-Hupé reports, calls them “bits of states … fragments,” whose inhabitants think only in terms of “narrow space,” which to Haushofer, as Strausz-Hupé explains, “is the unmistakable
symptom of decay.” Strausz-Hupé goes on, uncovering Haushofer’s “neat logic” about the dissolution of the British Empire and the need to break up the Soviet Union into its component ethnic parts, which will all lean on a Greater Germany, which in Haushofer’s view is the only state entitled to national self-determination. For in Haushofer’s own words, “one-third of the German people [are] living under alien rule outside the borders of the Reich.” German
Geopolitik
, Strausz-Hupé warns, is a world of “acrobatics on the ideological trapeze,” with conclusions of “stark simplicity.” The German new world order presupposes a Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a U.S.-dominated “Pan-America,” and a German-dominated Eurasian Heartland with a “Mediterranean–North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.” But for Haushofer, this is only an intermediate step: for, according to Mackinder, the Heartland dominates the World-Island and hence the world.
³

Strausz-Hupé tells us that Mackinder’s concept of the Heartland “is colored by the very personal point of view of an Edwardian Englishman.” For Mackinder’s generation, Russia had been Great Britain’s antagonist for almost a century, and consequently British statesmen lived with the fear of a Russia that would control the Dardanelles, consume the Ottoman Empire, and fall upon India. Thus, Mackinder fixated upon a tier of independent buffer states between Russia and maritime Europe, even as he identified the Heartland inside Russia itself as a visual tool of strategy. “Mackinder’s vision,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “accorded only too well with the morbid philosophy of world power or downfall which explains so much about German national pathology. There is in Mackinder’s dogma just the kind of finality for which the Wagnerian mentality yearns.” And yet Strausz-Hupé ultimately rescues Mackinder’s reputation:

Strausz-Hupé and Mackinder both believe in human agency, in the sanctity, as they say, of the individual, whereas the German
Geopolitikers
do not.

Whereas in Mackinder’s hands the Heartland is an arresting way to explain geopolitics, in Haushofer’s hands it becomes both a crazed and dreamy ideology. Yet Strausz-Hupé takes it very seriously, and informs his fellow Americans to do likewise: “To the Nazis,” Strausz-Hupé writes, Haushofer “transmitted something that the vaporous cerebrations of Adolf Hitler had failed to provide—a coherent doctrine of empire.” While Mackinder saw the future in terms of a balance of power that would protect freedom, Haushofer was determined to overthrow the balance of power altogether: thus he perverted geopolitics. To wit, just as Haushofer distorted Mackinder, he also distorted Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Curzon delivered a lecture in 1907 about “Frontiers.” Haushofer, inspired by Curzon, wrote a book entitled
Frontiers
, which was, in fact, about how to break them. According to Haushofer, only nations in decline seek stable borders, and only decadent ones seek to protect their borders with permanent fortifications: for frontiers are living organisms. Virile nations build roads instead. Frontiers were but temporary halts for master nations. To be sure, German
Geopolitik
is perpetual warfare for “space,” and thus akin to nihilism. Strausz-Hupé adds: