Ratzel, The French School and the Birth of Alternative Geopolitics

Political Geography 19 (2000) 957–969www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Ratzel, the French School and the birth ofAlternative Geopolitics

Geoffrey ParkerThe University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

Abstract

Modern French political geography began as a response to Ratzel’sPolitische Geographieand then became an attempt to place ratzelian ideas into the context of French geographicalthought. What then emerged was a political geography which was set firmly in opposition toGerman geopolitics. There were some geographers who felt that a more effective responsecould be made by developing an indigenous French geopolitics. This can be seen as being theorigin of the alternative geopolitics which was favoured by some American geographers duringand after World War II and which subsequently became an important underlying theme in thenew geopolitics which arose in the 1970s. The concept of an alternative geopolitics has oweda great deal to the French school of geography and has it roots in the original response ofVidal de la Blache to Ratzel. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:Ratzel; Vidal de la Blache; Ancel; Geopolitics; Alternative geopolitics

From the beginnings of modern political geography in France, Friedrich Ratzelwas a looming presence across the Rhine. As was the case elsewhere in Europeand America, his work was a significant benchmark in geographical study. Ratzel’sAnthropogeographiewas reviewed in the first volume ofAnnales de Geógraphie(1892–93) and, following the publication ofPolitische Geographiein 1897, this bookwas also reviewed inAnnales, the reviewer on this occasion being none other thanVidal de la Blache himself (Vidal de la Blache, 1898). Vidal was already a majorforce in French geography and this review was in its way as seminal as wasPolitischeGeographiesince it sought to establish the ground rules for the application of thevidalian methodology to the new field of political geography. In his review, Vidalclearly recognised the significance of the ideas of Ratzel as being what Korinmanwas later to call “an epistemological moment” (Korinman, 1983:128–42). The realsignificance of Ratzel’s work, wrote Vidal, lay in the “grouping and coordination”of phenomena so as to give the new political geography its own “core of ideas”

0962-6298/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S0962 -6298(00 )00037-8

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(Vidal de la Blache, ibid:98). Ratzel undertook this grouping, wrote Vidal, with aview to distinguishing laws, and in so doing he had aimed to establish a firm foun-dation for the new political geography. While accepting the importance of this, Vidaltook issue both with a number of aspects of the ratzelian approach and with thetreatment of political geography as a separate sub-discipline. He refused to acceptthat the state was, in ratzelian terminology, a “living organism”, and was preparedonly to concede that states “resembled living things”. Likewise he considered it aspremature to attempt to formulate laws at that stage and confined himself to acceptingonly the existence of “certain methodological principles” (ibid:111). More fundamen-tally, he was convinced that it was not possible for political geography to exist insome kind of annexe adjacent to, but separate from, the rest of geography. Accordingto Vidal “It (political geography) is far too deeply rooted in general geography” forsuch an approach to be at all viable (ibid:103–4).

Running through this 1898 review ofPolitische Geographieis the clear sense thatVidal was uneasy with political geography. He felt it to be “menaced” by politicalideas about the state which emanated from outside and which were “foreign togeography”. Thus from the outset he saw the danger that political geography wouldbecome vulnerable to political pressures and absorb preconceived and fundamentallyungeographical notions about the nature of the state. Geographers must not be boundby some pre-existing model of the state in the ratzelian territorial sense, he warned.They should come to these questions with an open mind and bring geographicalthinking to bear on them. This meant that they had to be prepared to examine alltypes of states including “imperfect, embryonic or rudimentary” forms of the state.While he identified such forms in what he referred to as “local” government, thehigher forms, in Vidal’s estimation, included the nation and the city-state (ibid:107).“The phenomena of political geography are not fixed entities%. Cities and statesrepresent forms which have already evolved to arrive at the point where we nowobserve them and which may still continue to evolve. We must therefore see themas being changing phenomena (les faits en mouvement)” (ibid:108). Such changesmay be brought about by many factors, he concluded, but most significantly theywere likely to be brought about by advances in the methods of transport and com-munication.

This vidalian idea of the evolution of state types represented something whichwas in many ways an even more radical concept at the end of the nineteenth centurythan was geopolitical evolution in the the ratzelian sense. Vidal clearly envisagedthe possibility of the development of different types of political entities which were,in the evolutionary terminology of the period, conceived of as being, in many cases,quite different geopolitical species from the contemporary territorial states. Thisthinking was the product of a political geography which was seen as being inextri-cably bound up with geography as a whole and therefore subject to the same basic‘principles’ as was general geography. Since the state was conceived of as beingpart of a wider holistic system, “thus arises the necessity not to study the state asan isolated compartment, some sort of a slice of the earth’s surface. By its origins,its direction, its stages of development and the provisional nature of its existence it

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is part of a wider group (of phenomena) the life of which interpenetrates its own”(ibid:109).

Two decades later, in the wake of World War I, the study of political geographyin France took a great leap forward. A number of French geographers had beenactively involved as advisers at the peace conference and the new political mapwhich emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles incorporated some, at least, of theresults of their thinking on major issues (Parker, 1987:14). Lucien Gallois used thepages ofAnnalesto urge French geographers to give more of their attention to “thestudy of states and of the new political organisations which are being established”(Gallois, 1919:248). From then on political geography assumed a central role in theunderstanding of the significance of the immense changes which had taken place tothe political map of Europe and of their implications for France in particular. Vidalde la Blache had died prematurely shortly before the end of the war, and it was leftto a new generation of geographers to take up the challenge. Until then Frenchpolitical geography had consisted to a large extent of a kind of extended responseto Ratzel and this had entailed both a critical examination of ratzelian thought andan attempt to apply vidalian principles to those areas judged to be of real importance.By implication, this also necessitated the search for alternatives to ratzelian ideaswhen this was considered necessary. Most significant among those who now soughtsuch alternatives were Albert Demangeon, Jacques Ancel and Yves-Marie Goblet.While all three paid respect to the great contribution made by Ratzel, all were geogra-phers in la tradition vidalienne, and the underlying theme of their work was theconviction that the study of the state could not take place in isolation from the restof the phenomena of human geography. On the contrary, it had to be considered asbeing essentially part of these phenomena and responsive to overall changeswithin them.

These geographers saw the relationship of political geography to the totality ofgeography as being most clearly demonstrated in the nation, and the relationshipwas revealed at its most subtle and sensitive in that carefully balanced structure, thenation-state. In vidalian geography the nation was regarded as being a product ofthe genre de vieof a people which had developed in a particular geographicalenvironment. The cultural characteristics of such a nation resulted from the creativeinterplay of the general and the local,civilisation andmilieu. At its most satisfactorythe state constituted the political expression of this cultural individuality. However,it was fully recognised by the French geographers that the state system at any parti-cular time and place all too rarely accorded absolutely with thegenre de vieof itsinhabitants. All too often the reality was that states lacked the responsiveness togenres de viewhich constituted, from the geographical perspective, the necessarycondition of their legitimacy. They were the products of wars and dynastic allianceswhich had been forged over long periods of time and they based their legitimacyon claims to legality deriving from the sanction of successive treaties. The extent towhich they could be said to be ‘deeply rooted in general geography’ was very muchopen to question. The old treaties, wrote Goblet, had been considered as being “asimmutable, as intangible, as tablets dictated on some Sinai” (Goblet, 1934:4). Suchpurely juridicial texts were supposedly eternal, he went on, “and could be transfor-


med or abolished only by force” (ibid:259). As a result, all too often in moderntimes it had been statism, claiming the right to act in response toraisons d’etat andriding roughshod over the rights and desires of peoples, rather than nationalism basedon those elements which have really been a basis for unity, which has become thenorm. This produced a political map which was frequently discordant with the otherphenomena of human geography. The result of this has been the creation of artificialgeopolitical structures established and maintained by force. Such structures, althoughgiving the appearance of possessing power and permanence, were in reality fragileand transitory. They were “worm-eaten empires” sustained by outmoded treaties andawaiting inevitable dissolution (ibid:8).

Two decades after the death of Vidal, Ancel reiterated Vidal’s assertion that theelements of political geography must always be regarded as being changing phenom-ena rather than fixed entities. However, inLa Geographie des Frontie`reshe reachedthe conclusion that artificial state structures are not so much part of an evolutionaryprocess as positive impediments to it. In this way what he termed the “Anschlussrhenane” by Prussia had resulted in thatMusspreussen(forced Prussianisation) whichhad shattered the unity of Rhineland civilisation and stultified its further growth(Ancel, 1938:113). Referring to theAnschlusswith Austria, he observed that it wasnow the turn of that country to be subjected to a similar fate. Yet, despite this, Ancelconcluded his book on a general note of optimism. “The walls of these Jerichos”,he wrote, “will fall at the sound of the trumpets awakening the imprisoned andsleeping nations” (ibid:188). For Ancel, the desirable outcome was that flexibilityand responsiveness should replace the iron and inflexible rule. He saw frontiers lessas being some category of “natural” phenomena as rather “political isobars” indicat-ing the pressures of power at any given time and of necessity changing as the balanceof power itself changed . “It is impossible to envisage in civilised Europe”, he con-cluded, “the idea of the frontier which is a watertight bulkhead” (ibid:184).

Likewise Demangeon pointed to the existence of deeper geographical realitiesbeneath the artificial barriers. In his book on the Rhine, written jointly with thehistorian Lucien Febvre, he identified “the great axes of movement” as being thereal underlying geographical framework constituting “the transcendent geopoliticalreality” (Demangeon & Febvre, 1935:291). He opposed the negative idea of the riveras “bloody and sterile frontier” with the positive one of the “rich and luminousrouteway”. Demangeon recognised that, given the international situation in his time,this was little more than a vision and he was far from being optimistic that itstranslation into reality would be accomplished either swiftly or easily. As the inter-national storm clouds gathered and the sky darkened in the late 1930s, it was theRhine as ‘watertight bulkhead’ and ‘bloody and sterile frontier’ which had becomethe menacing reality. Nevertheless, despite the divisive power of the riparian states,Demangeon retained the belief that the force of unity which had always emanatedfrom the Rhine would eventually prevail.

A mechanism for moving towards the desired unity was proposed by Yves-MarieGoblet in 1934. Goblet considered that it was Sir William Petty, the seventeenthcentury English polymath, rather than Ratzel, who was the real founder of modernpolitical geography. He regarded Petty’sPolitical Anatomy of Irelandas having been


the seminal work in this regard and he contended that Ratzel had (unknowingly)adopted many of Petty’s ideas (Goblet, 1934:16). Goblet conceded that Ratzel had“formulated provisional laws and discovered certain methodological principles” andthat nothing was further from Ratzel’s truly scientific work than the “Geopolitikspagyrique” practised in Germany. Like Ancel, Goblet saw change and fluidity asbeing the principal characteristic of the world map arising from “the phenomena ofdissolution and evolution” which underlie it. In line with his contemporaries, Gobletalso considered that the nation constituted the most desirable geopolitical form tobe aspired to. Formerly “territorial and human factors (had been) treated simply aspawns in a game of chess” but now it had come to be realised that “the pawnsconcerned might have interests and feelings of their own” (ibid:243). While he wel-comed, as much as did Ancel, the awakening of the imprisoned and sleeeping nationsfrom their bondage, Goblet realised the fundamental error of elevating them to thestatus of completely sovereign and independent political entities, in other words, ofregarding them simply as being miniaturised versions of those ‘worm-eaten empires’which had preceded them and out of the fragmentation of which they had come intobeing. Such a development, he contended, constituted nothing more than a reversionto what he referred to as “the barbarous theory of economic nationalism” (ibid:244).He condemned the establishment of those states which had divided what should beunited, thus replacing one false and artificial territoriality by a similar one on asmaller scale. Such a development went completely against the interdependence ofgeographical and geopolitical phenomena and thus against the overall unity of humangeography itself.

The mechanism favoured by Goblet for reconciling the reality of the existence ofnations with the principle of interdependence entailed extending the realm of thegeopolitical more widely so as to include those major centres of industry and com-merce which he dubbed “international emporiums”. These were to be regarded asbeing geopolitical phenomena in their own right, essentially different from, and inde-pendent of, the nation-states. They constituted the coordinates of a potential networkof lines of communication linking together the various component parts of geographi-cal space. Goblet demonstrated that since such formations had existed in the past,and in certain forms continued to exist, they therefore lay firmly in the realms of thepossible. They constituted realities rather than figments of the hopeful and optimisticimagination and, using the terminology of geopolitics, they could thus be consideredto lie within the sphere ofRealpolitikrather than ofIdealpolitik. He cited the Hanse-atic League as an example and demonstrated how this open organisation had beendestroyed by the rise of the territorial states around the Baltic and North Seas(ibid:46–65). The essential corollary of the restoration of “the imprisoned and sleep-ing nations”, maintained Goblet, was the restoration also of the “Free City withcommerce as its vocation, subject to no hindrance”, in other words “modem Hanse-atic towns”. “Such emporiums have existed in all periods and in all parts of theworld” but they were destroyed by states “extensive enough to be able to claim that,in themselves, they constituted distinct economic organisms% powerful enough tosuppress the liberty of the great merchants”. These states had then gone on to


entrench their power by surrounding themselves with “economic Great Walls ofChina” (ibid:251).

Implicit in the work of Goblet and the others was the evidence of the existenceof another ‘Great Wall’ running straight though the middle of political geographyitself. This divided those geographers who largely accepted the continued existenceof the territorial state as the basic constituent feature of the political map from thosewho advocated moving towards a different type of state founded on alternative prin-ciples (Parker, 1996:212–13). These latter proposed more fundamental changes tothe political map than were ever seriously contemplated during the 1930s when get-ting the states to accept certain rules of behaviour was the most which was envisagedas practicable. They could thus be called radical geographers well before the termcame into general use.

The fundamental proposition of such geographers as these was that the territorialstate created by its very existence an environment of closed geographical space, andit stood in contrast to the non-territorial state, the successful functioning of whichnecessitated and depended upon the existence of open geographical space. The clos-ure of geographical space had in the past been invariably associated with confron-tation and conflict and the replacement of this by an environment of cooperationand peace could only be assured by the existence of mechanisms guaranteeing themaintenance of openness. Political geography, asserted Goblet, is above all “a taskof peace” and its achievement lay now “in the sphere of the experimental sciences”.What Goblet termed “experimental political geography” entailed the widening of therealm of the geopolitical and the examination of alternative forms of organisation.This approach was firmly embedded in the vidalian principle of examining all typesof states so as to assess their respective roles and relevance. The experiment wasbased upon what Goblet termed “reconstruction and synthesis” and this entailed theapplication of a diversity of geopolitical phenomena to real world situations (Goblet,ibid:245). An example of this was the resurrection of the city as a geopoliticalphenomenon and the testing out of its effectiveness in present day conditions. ForGoblet this necessitated that the city-state and the territorial (nation) state, whichhad acted in totally different ways in their relationship to geopolitical space and hadfollowed one another chronologically in modern times, should now be assembledchorologically. Each of these categories of state possessed certain inherent weak-nesses, and it was these weaknesses which had made them inadequate in the pastas the unique or dominant forms of spatial political organisation (Parker, 1997:33–4). Together, in some kind of spatial synthesis, Goblet contended that they couldmore effectively contribute to the creation of a more balanced and stable system.“The concept of commercial centres outside states and nations again presents itselfas one of the ways in which the world will be able to be organised for the achieve-ment of the ideal of peace”. (Goblet, 1934:256–7). He considered that such a processof geopolitical engineering lay well within the realms of the possible. Since theproposed engineering was being applied to real and existing phenomena he regardedit as being realistic and as such it was by definition to be regarded as being a “scien-tific” project.

As has been observed, Goblet’s approach, whilst deriving much from Petty’sPolit-


ical Anatomy, was nevertheless firmly withinla tradition vidalienne. Throughout hecontrasted “La geógraphie politique scientifique” with “Geopolitik spagyrique”.While the object of the former was to engage in assembling geographical facts andcoming to objective conclusions about their relationships, the latter he regarded asbeing no more than a kind of political alchemy based on a mystic conception ofthe state as a territorial entity and seeking to justify territorial aggrandisement inmetaphysical terms (ibid:11–22). WhileGeopolitikwas loosely assumed to have beenderived from the ideas of Ratzel — a figure much better known than was RudolfKjellen, the real inventor of the termGeopolitik — the French geographers werequick to deny the connection between the two. “It is sad to see all this happeningin the land of Ritter and Ratzel”, observed Goblet. “Nothing could be further (thanGeopolitik) from the science founded by Ratzel” (ibid:16).

Implicit in all such thinking was the dichotomy between an irrational and politi-cally contaminated geopolitics and a rational and academically pure political geogra-phy. Nevertheless, there was one French geographer who put forward the view that,in presenting an alternative to the German version, the term geopolitics could beused legitimately in a generic sense. Jacques Ancel believed that geopolitics couldquite properly be considered as being something different from political geographyand that it was necessary to use the terminology in order to indicate this. “We mustnot let the German pseudo-science monopolise this term” he contended andannounced that he intended to “repossess” it. He went on to define geopolitics quitesimply as being the study of “external political geography”. Its approach was adynamic one, something which he contrasted with French political geography whichhe criticised for having been far too “internal, static” (Ancel, 1936:5). Such politicalgeography lacked the real credentials either to formulate acritique of Geopolitikorto be the basis for a viable alternative to it. Ancel made it clear that the principalconcern ofla geopolitiqueas he conceived it was with international relations ratherthan the internal geography of states. His analysis andcritique of the “concept Hitle´r-ien” was therefore to be done from inside rather than outside and it could be properlyrefuted only from a geopolitical perspective. He was well aware that this would bean unpopular approach with his colleagues and not one which they were likely tofollow readily. The attempt to transfer geopolitics across the Rhine, and in so doingto gallicise it, was fraught with such problems that it proved to be too much for onesingle protagonist. Ancel needed allies and it is significant that he looked for themoutside geography. He had considerable contacts in the wider international field andthese included a long association with the Carnegie Foundation (Dotation Carne´gie),the European Centre of which was located in Paris. In this context he paid tributeto the work of the Dotation’s journal,L’Esprit International, to which he was afrequent contributor, and expressed the opinion that it was “thanks to its perspicacityand vigilance that the teaching ofla geopolitiquehas seen the light of day in France”(Ancel, 1933:6). It was Ancel himself who was principally instrumental in introduc-ing the geopolitical perspective intoL’Esprit International, an influential journal atthe time, and in acquainting its readership with the work of such important geogra-phers as De Martonne, Sorre, Sion and Goblet. It is clear from his contributions to


this journal that he considered geopolitics to be the most appropriate vehicle forintroducing the geographical perspective into the wider international field.

Ancel was virtually alone among the French geographers of this period in accord-ing a degree of academic respectability to geopolitics. The others continued toemphasise the gulf which existed between it andla geographie politique, consideringgeopolitics not only to be inherently unscientific but also impregnated with thoseideas “foreign to geography” which had from the beginning so troubled Vidal de laBlache. If during the first two decades of the twentieth century French politicalgeography had been largely an extended response to Ratzel, during the next twodecades, the inter-war period, it developed in many ways into a kind of anti-geopoli-tics, the main task of which was refutation. While fully sharing the objective of therefutation ofGeopolitik, Ancel was clearly of the opinion that political geographyas then practised was inadequate for the task which he considered to be of the greatestimportance: the formulation of a viable alternative to the German version.

Within a year of the publication of Ancel’sLa Geographie des Frontie´res WorldWar II had broken out and the last hopes that peace could be maintained were shat-tered once and for all. By the summer of 1940 France had fallen and this broughtto an abrupt end the whole intense discourse within French political geography.During the occupation there was no political geography in France and the pagesof the slimmed-down and censoredAnnaleswere filled with more bland and lesscontroversial items. GermanGeopolitikhad, for the time being, smothered the infantFrenchgeopolitique and Haushofer’s concept of frontiers asechte Grenze, naturaland genuine boundaries, appeared to have triumphed over Ancel’s concept of thefrontier asperipherie toujours provisoireand isobare politique.

However, just as the French geographical scene was being decimated by war anddefeat, across the Atlantic a new American geopolitics was beginning to take shape.As in France, this was initially conceived of as a response toGeopolitik and theAmerican response was along much the same lines as that of the French geographers(Bowman, 1942). However, after an examination of the works of Karl Haushoferand Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, certain American geographers reached the generalconclusion that its study was a legitimate one and advocated that it be fully under-stood and responded to. In adopting this approach, they were clearly following inthe footsteps of Ancel rather than Demangeon or Goblet, although they did not appearto make much distinction between them. This approach was demonstrated by HansWeigert inHarper’s Magazine, when he observed that the French geographers hadbeen “closer than we are to the arising dangers from without” and were thereforeahead of their Anglo-Saxon colleagues in understanding and responding toGeopoli-tik. Significantly referring to the French political geographers as “geopoliticians” heasserted that they “have for years criticised the way of German geopolitical thinkingby the accusation that, to it, space and earth meant everything; the human beingalmost nothing. They tried to fight against the fatalistic conception which makesman more or less an object of geographical factors” (Weigert, 1941:11). Thus theemergence in America of the idea that there could be a different geopolitics fromthat practiced in Germany owed something to the understanding that certain French“geopoliticians” had been of the same opinion. Following the fall of France and the


heightened awareness of the dangers now beginning to confront America, geopoliticsbecame suddenlya la modeand Tagoff wrote wryly in theNew Yorkerof the “bravenew geopolitics” then spreading across the New World (Weigert, 1942:133).

Like Ancel before him, Weigert clearly saw political geography as being inad-equate to the task lying ahead and like his French predecessor he identified geopoli-tics with the dynamic rather than the static approach. Echoing Ancel’s condemnationof French political geography as “internal, static”, Weigert advocated sweeping away“yesterday’s geography” and so “letting us see the world in the image of dynamicmaps, instead of the static maps of times past” (Weigert, 1942:131). Identifying themain problem of German geopolitics as being its obsessive concern with ideas andtheories, Weigert went on to call for what he referred to as a “humanised geopolitics”which should make the wellbeing of humanity its central concern. He was followedby others who saw the answer to the problem in the introduction of alternative per-spectives. Notable among them was Edmund Walsh, Jesuit priest and self-proclaimedgeopolitician, who expressed the opinion that geopolitics should develop what hecalled a “spiritual dimension”. Defining geopolitics as being “a combined study ofhuman geography and applied political science” he maintained than that it was poss-ible to view it in many different ways. He pointed out that the geopolitical perspectivehad in fact been widely applied although it had been rarely acknowledged as suchand he commented that there had been and still were in America many “geopoli-ticians without portfolio”. He went on to express the then astonishing view thatgeopolitics could “ennoble as well as corrupt” and concluded that “It can choosebetween two alternatives — the value of power and the power of values” (Walsh,1943:13). The main problem with the German variety, he contended, was that it wasabout power and, as a result of this, was entirely materialistic in its approach.

Just as Ratzel had, according to Goblet, “unknowingly” followed the ideas ofPetty, so Americans such as Weigert and Walsh appear to have based their ideas,rather less unknowingly, on those of Ancel in respect of the legitimacy of geopolitics.However, despite such powerful advocacy, in the years following World War II theNazi legacy proved to be too strong and there were few who were prepared to followWalsh’s line and concede anything good, let alone “spiritual”, in geopolitics (Parker,1998:41–2). It had been far too tarnished by its association with the Third Reich forwhat had originally been Ancel’s intention of “reclaiming” it to be widely acceptablein the immediate post war years. Indeed, in Ancel’s last book,Slaves et Germains,published posthumously in 1947 but completed in the wake of the fall of Poland atthe beginning of World War II, there is no further mention of the “reclamation” ofgeopolitics.Geopolitik (sic) was described as having had the sole task of providingso-called “scientific” arguments to justify renewed German expansion. In his finalwork there is nothing further on an alternative geopolitics as such to counter “lapolitique hitlerienne” (Ancel, 1947:211). Ancel, however, returned to such essentiallyalternative concepts as “grouping” and “community” to counter the threat of the riseof Pan-Germanism (Parker, 1998:53).

Five years later, in the first major French contribution to political geography afterWorld War II, Jean Gottmann launched a criticism of Ancel for his attempt torehabilitate geopolitics. Gottmann considered this to have been “a bad attempt at


compromise between French and German methods”. It had been too influenced byGeopolitikand had done little to clarify the subject or to develop on it (Gottmann,1952:56). Yet Gottman then went on to base his ideas on many of the same basicprinciples advocated by Ancel. Writing of the “closure of the inhabited world” andthe “compartmentalisation of space” as the basic facts of the political map, he pointedto the basic dichotomy of “systems of movement and systems of resistance to move-ment” (ibid:214). His contrast of the fluid and the static elements echoes Ancel’scontrast of the “dynamic” and the “static” which he equated with geopolitics andpolitical geography. In the post-war years Gottmann found it impossible to acceptthe existence of a legitimate terminological distinction between the two. In emphasis-ing the vital role of the crossroads (carrefour), Gottmann was also using Goblet’sidea of the international emporium as the necessary counterweight to the detrimentaleffects of the closure of space. In his final work, published in 1956, but consistingbasically of ideas which had been formulated during the 1930s, Goblet again com-pletely dismissed geopolitics although he added mysteriously, and without furtherelaboration, that “certain geopoliticians have done some fairly good work in humangeography”(Goblet, 1956:14). It is interesting that the main substance of Goblet’sfinal condemnation was less its political involvement than its attempt to reduce whatGoblet considered to be the most complex and subtle part of geography to crudeand simplistic laws.

What had been realised by certain American geographers of the 1940s was thatthe distinction between political geography and geopolitics was at best blurred andat worse false. There had indeed been many ‘geopoliticians without portfolio’ whohad yet sought to maintain their credentials as political geographers. They had takenrefuge in the supposed purity of political geography and in so doing had often suc-ceeded in making it rather less pure than it had been. As Walsh pointed out, muchof what went under the name of political geography at that time in America was infact virtually covert geopolitics. Many such geographers had come to regard geopoli-tics as providing the best methodology for examining and interpretating the worldscene not only from a geographical, but also from an American, perspective. Amongthem was George Renner who advocated not so much an alternative as an unreformedgeopolitics. He appears to have seen virtually no distinction at all between politicalgeography and geopolitics and even at one stage pronounced that “geopolitics maybe regarded as a shortened designation for political geography” (Renner, 1948:3).He considered that any distinctions which did exist were “in the last analysis, aminor matter — of interest primarily to the philosopher”(ibid:15).

In the autumn of 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, Walsh hadinterviewed Karl Haushofer and came away with a positive view of the work of theGerman geopolitician. It was the Nazi philosophy, and not geopolitics, which, in hisview, stood condemned. In any case, during the final years of the war, the Germangeopoliticians had become more distanced from the Nazi leadership and Karl’s son,Albrecht, had been executed in the last days of the war as a result of his allegedlinks with those who had planned to kill Hitler at Rastenberg in July 1944 (Parker,1998:36–7). This all reinforced Walsh’s view that the real intellectual and moraldistinction cut right through the middle of both political geography and geopolitics.


Both could be ennobling or corrupting and what really mattered, maintained Walsh,was the nature of the ends being served. This was something which had also beenimplicit in the ideas of Ancel, but the French geographer had made the distinctionmore of an academic than a moral one: between open and closed geopolitical struc-tures; between those who were engaged in the segmentation and division of theworld and those who sought to reassemble it. It was the attempt to achieve theproductive cohabitation of the two which had been the essence of the ongoing projectin French political geography which the war brought to an abrupt end.

The ground on which this whole debate within French, and subsequently Amer-ican, political geography took place during the first half of the 20th century had beenstaked out at the end of the 19th century by Vidal de la Blache in his response toRatzel. This response had emphasised three fundamental ideas. First, the necessityfor all types of states to be studied; second, the importance of the link between cityand state and, third, the concept of the evolution of states. The reason given by Vidalfor linking city and state in this way was both that the city was an essential part ofstate formation and also that it was, in Vidal’s phrase, the agent for “emancipationfrom the tyranny of the localmilieu”. It is this idea of “emancipation from” whichis at the root of the idea of “alternative to”. Evolution and emancipation are twoprocesses which run concurrently. They entail the idea of development from onetype of formation to another and freedom from the tyranny of any particular set ofideas. They both contain the possibility of the acceptance of radical change. It mattersless whether such an ‘alternative’ is considered to be within the realms of politicalgeography or geopolitics as whether the alternative represents a radically differentapproach to the nature of the world political order and the problems of geopoliti-cal organisation.

A generation after World War II, in the wake ofles evenementswhich shookFrance and Europe in 1968, Yves Lacoste embarked on theHerodote project formoving geography from the periphery back into the centre of the debate about howthe world should now move forward in the social, political and international fields.For this purpose he reinvented the term geopolitics and employed the phrase “unegeographie alternative” to indicate its position in relation to what had preceded it(Herodote, 1 1976) . Thirty years after Ancel’s death geopolitics had at last beensuccessfully ‘reclaimed’. The new geopolitics was an alternative, said Lacoste, to“la geographie dominante” which had camouflaged the state with the nation. TheHerodoteproject sought to address the concerns of the dominated rather than thoseof the dominators and aimed to do this by means of “the investigation of alternativegeopolitical scenarios” to those of the past. Far from being above the battle it wasthus manifestly a part of it. It was, in Lacoste’s phrase, both “alternative et com-battante”.

Some twenty years after the debut of theHerodoteproject, in the mid 1990s, thepolitical geographer Claude Raffestin reviewed its effects with particular referenceto the extent to which it had employed — and transformed — geopolitics. In thewider context of the history of geopolitics Raffestin maintained that, after all, “lageopolitique herodotienne” had not proved to be all that different fromGeopolitik.The conclusion which he reached from this was that geopolitics could not really


change; ultimately it was always bound up in some way or another with power andfrom this with conflict. The idea that there could be “d’autres geópolitiques”, whichwere radically different in method and objective, was dismissed by Raffestin as beingnothing more than an illusion (Raffestin, 1995:304).

This conclusion reached by Raffestin in the mid 1990s was totally at variancewith that which had been reached by Ancel just sixty years earlier in the mid 1930s.Ancel had then considered it as being essential that the science of Kjelleń, whichhe defined as being the study of the relations among states viewed spatially, shouldbe “repossessed”. Its approach was a dynamic geographical one and he was con-vinced that it was only through such dynamism that geopolitical phenomena couldbe observed and analysed in thevidalien manner as “des faits en mouvement”. ForAncel it provided a methodology by the use of whichGeopolitikcould be effectivelycountered and international problems could be addressed objectively and scientifically.Not only did the use of geopolitics signify a dynamic and international approach but,as he emphasised inL’Esprit International, one which was most appropriate to theapplication of the geographical perspective in international relations. To the questionwhether there was a geopolitics which was essentially different from political geogra-phy, and needed to be studied as such, Ancel gave a decidedly affirmative answer towhich Walsh later added the caveat “but it depends how you use it”.

The examination of the alternatives open to humanity has always been the centraltheme of the work of the possibilist school of French geographers. Possibilism wasthus linked to evolutionary terminology to produce the “calculus of probability”which permitted a reconciliation of science and creativity (Berdoulay, 1978:85–6).It was this possibilist spirit which underlay the work of the French political geogra-phers in the years before World War II. The essence of the alternative for them wasthe replacement of walls by bridges and, in geopolitical terms, the replacement ofterritorial segmentation by networks of communication. Ancel repossessed the termgeopolitics in order to indicate a dynamic “external” geography which recognisedthat in the flux of evolution and dissolution new geopolitical species are born andnew ways of moving forward become possible. He perceived clearly the nature ofthe radical alternative, and proposed that it should be placed inside rather than outsidegeopolitics. Above all this approach was about breaking the mind set which regardedthe territorial state as being a given and which reduced political geography to amatter of solving its problems and making it more effective.

In his 1933 article inL’Esprit International entitled “La frontiere Adriatique”Ancel used Ritter’s words to describe Italy as “a terrestrial bridge” extending fromNorth to South and from the Occident to the Orient (Ancel, 1933:233). Anceldescribed graphically the route followed by the Orient Express, at the time the mostimportant train connecting Western Europe to the Balkans and the Near East, as itcrossed from northern Italy into Yugoslavia. He wrote of the famous train “roundingthe Gulf of Trieste and, after Trieste, cutting through the first karst slopes which gavethe traveller the impression of crossing the boundaries of one world” before enteringanother (ibid:236). Ancel was here using the Orient Express to illustrate his main themewhich was that the Adriatic had been a line of contact and communication long beforeit became a watertight bulkhead between hostile states. Ritter, said Ancel, had pointed


to the existence of certain undisputed geographical realities. These are the geographicalconditions which constitute the basic facts of existence and Ancel went on to pose thequestion: what is the part which humanity chooses to play?

The facts of existence contain within them the possiblity of unification as well asdivision; of contact as well as separation. As Walsh pointed out, the choice alwaysexists between two alternatives and, through this, for the possibility of that ‘alterna-tive’ geopolitics identified by geographers from Ancel to Walsh and on to Lacoste.This choice is in turn founded on the vidalian principle which insists that all possi-bilities must be explored and that nothing must be excluded. In Vidal’s words, thephenomena of political geography must never be regarded as being “fixed entities”.Rather they must be seen as being “changing phenomena” and as such open tothe possibility of those alternatives which are as present in political geography andgeopolitics as in all other realms of human geography. The search for these, andtheir application to the contemporary world, remains the ongoing project of the alter-native geopolitics.

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Documents

Ratzel, The French School and the Birth of Alternative Geopolitics