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To cite this article: H. van der Wusten & G. Dijkink (2002) German, British and French Geopolitics:
The Enduring Differences, Geopolitics, 7:3, 19-38, DOI: 10.1080/714000970
H E R MA N VA N D ER W USTEN
A N D G E RT J A N D I J K I N K
Geopolitical discourses for Germany, Britain and France are outlined for several
periods since 1870. They are also categorised as to their orientations to different scales
(regional, European, global). These discourses remain different over time. Differences
are interpreted in terms of situation, state age and state organisation. At the same time
these discourses change on the basis of state system characteristics and mutual
interactions.
Introduction
For some time now the concept of ‘geopolitics’ has been disconnected from
its overly intimate relation with one group of writers who published in one
particular journal during a short period in recent German history. An
advantage is that this provides better conditions for comparative work, once
one accepts that outside Germany in the same period, and in other periods,
something that can be called ‘geopolitics’ was present. A disadvantage is
the loss of precision and historical specificity, but this argument should not
be taken too far: German geopolitical writers in the interwar period were
inspired by earlier, foreign authors like Mahan, Mackinder and Kjellen.1
In this paper we want to reap some fruits of a more general concept of
geopolitics, with an eye to interwar German geopolitics. It is our intention
to take a few steps in the direction of a comparative analysis of German,
British and French geopolitics since 1870, taking mutual impacts into
account. In this way we hope to contribute to a better understanding of
geopolitical ways of self-reflection in these three countries and their
interrelations, and to gain a sharper insight in the conjunction of factors that
gave rise to German interwar geopolitics as a particular case.
A comparative perspective may help sort out factors that have been
operative in producing the extraordinary train of events in Germany during
Herman van der Wusten, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Amsterdam,
Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands, e-mail:
<hvanderwusten@fmg.uva.nl>. Gertjan Dijkink, Department of Geography and Planning,
University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands, e-
mail: <g.j.w.dijkink@frw.uva.nl>.
Geopolitics, Vol.7, No.3 (Winter 2002) pp.19–38
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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1918–1939 coping with mass democracy Europe down coping with former
status
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elaborate on more widely held points of view like the theologically justified
arguments for a German Weltpolitik advanced before the war by journalist
Paul Rohrbach.12 The mood of the general intellectual discussion has even
been characterised as Raum-euphoria.13 Interwar German geopolitics was
about the space that should be available for Germany on account of cultural
extension, the need to dispose of sufficient natural resources, the desired
relationships between European powers and the possibilities for worldwide
bloc formation and Germany’s role in such blocs. Although there was
definitely a general tendency to introduce racial distinctions to ground
territorial claims and to muse about national power characteristics, racism –
particularly antisemitism but also antislavism – as an all important driving
force only became preponderant with the accession of the Nazis to power.14
After the initial secession movements had been defeated, the Weimar
republic retained its federative character, but with a substantial reduction of
financial autonomy and constitutional power. It was an involuntary
transition toward the unitary state that Germany actually became during the
Nazi period.
The irreparable defeat of 1945 left the future of Germany for a long
time in doubt. The division of Germany was the outcome of a conflict
between the former victorious allies. In West Germany, the most important
part, the first and foremost geopolitical issue was a negative notion: to keep
Germany’s borders an open question. There was hardly place for a
substantive, geopolitical debate during the first period of its existence. A
huge gap remained between the highly abstract declaratory policies about
re-unification, the possibility of regaining territory or compensation for
those Germans who lost out in Central-eastern Europe and the general
unwillingness to make these into central policy concerns. The first
substantive priorities were close connections with the West generally and
the nurture of the Franco–German tandem, crucial to European
cooperation. As these two policies did not easily coincide, there was a lot
of strain to be softened and no way to bring the ‘German question’ itself to
the fore. This remained very much a secondary theme, only to be made
public when the domestic situation made it unavoidable. West German
regionalism itself hardly was an issue at all as it was nicely captured –
though in a new shape – by the federal constitution crafted by the
occupying forces.15
Only in the late 1960s did the German government start its own political
policy towards the East, and there was a widespread debate about the merits
of the so-called Ostpolitik.16 Because the notion is particularly tainted in
Germany, the Ostpolitik debate was never called geopolitical in nature, but
it was. It was aimed at the position of the West German state vis à vis a
number of other states by virtue of their positions on the map that involved
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Britain
After 1870 the world looked less friendly and benevolent from a British
perspective. Britain, deriving its hegemony primarily from economic
preponderance and gentle persuasion without strong needs for coercion,
did not seem to operate so smoothly anymore. Irish (Fenian) violence
manifested itself on the English mainland, but the prospect of a basic
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France
The defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870 left two important traces in the
French worldview. In the first place national self-reflection, previously
obsessed with the heritage of the French revolution, now began to fret about
the opposition between France and Germany.26 In the second place the idea
of Europe as a cramped space impeding national vitality suggested the
importance of lifelines to the world outside Europe. The combined
messages of an unfavourably changed and heavily secured eastern
boundary, the rise of other strongly competitive economies and the prospect
of industrial production rising everywhere seemed to be that new and
preferably submissive markets were inevitable. Colonies could provide such
markets as well as grandeur, always pursued in France.
In the 1880s the ‘global view’ had thoroughly entered French
statesmen’s thinking; witness the judgment of Jules Ferry in 1885: ‘it is not
in the Mediterranean or in the Channel that the decisive engagement will be
fought; Marseille and Toulon will be defended as much in the China sea as
in the Mediterranean’.27 But this global conception of national interest
would soon evoke serious doubts about French naval potency and paranoid
obsessions with events in all corners of the world. When the US started its
Cuban war with Spain (1898), the French minister of foreign affairs
Delcassé was anxious to mediate between Spain and the United States out
of fear that the Americans might venture a landing in Morocco and become
a Mediterranean power.28 The turn of the century showed a reorientation on
North Africa as France’s main colonial aim.
Such changing geopolitical visions do not seem to have had close
parallels in academic or (pseudo-)scientific theory in France. Reflection in
geography at the turn of the century – particularly Vidal de la Blache’s
writings – was rather a rejection of the political in geography, either as a
response to Ratzel’s work or as a way to emphasise the element of human
choice and natural harmony between ‘genres de vie’.29 Only in his Tableau
de la géographie de la France did Vidal put some work into the proposition
that the lost area of Alsace–Lorraine actually belonged to France.
France had not been defeated during the First World War, but it had
experienced the most awful destruction ever seen during a war. After
Versailles little room was left for daring geopolitical visions, rather than
obsession with the German danger and the likelihood of a next war. The
French reflex was to search for European alliances (Poland, Czechoslovakia,
etc.) that, however militarily weak, would nevertheless frustrate German
plans for a federated Mitteleuropa.30 In 1929 Aristide Briand, in a speech to
the assembly of the League of Nations, pronounced his wish that the peoples
of Europe would become integrated in a kind of federal unit. He perhaps
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Conclusions
The German geopolitical discourse of the last 130 years has been centred on
shape, the shape of the German state on the map. It is the most obviously
cartographic discourse of the three. The British geopolitical discourse has in
many respects been its polar opposite. Its most central concern has been the
space of flows that make up the global system. In its economic orientation
it has sometimes been able to nearly forget about the map. The French
geopolitical discourse is the most complicated to summarise, though it is
clear in its outline. The French have always been active players in two
arenas simultaneously, the European and the global, on the basis of a steady
French state. In the European arena France has longed for a hegemonic
position, trying to overcome the obvious material shortcomings for its
realisation. In the global arena it has realised a separate, integral world on
the basis of cultural dominance that has declined and shrunk over time. The
discourse therefore presupposes two maps, both centred on an
unproblematic hexagon.
There have been incidental deviations and emulations, like Germany’s
sudden preference for Weltpolitik in a truly global sense around 1900 (with
free copies of a translated Mahan, courtesy the German navy), or
Mackinder’s insistence on a space of places, that largely fell on deaf ears in
Britain (but not in Germany), or the French widespread acceptance of new
power-political realities during Vichy. But these deviations are small
disturbances of a longer term, pretty stable configuration.
This conclusion emphasises types of geopolitics according to countries
(larger European powers in this instance) rather than according to period
like in Agnew’s periodisation of civilisational, natural and ideological
geopolitics.36 Apart from the fact that ‘naturalisation’ is already a very old
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NOTES
1. L.W. Hepple, ‘The Revival of Geopolitics’, Political Geography Quarterly 5/4 (1996)
pp.21–36; S. Dalby, D. Atkinson and L.W. Hepple, ‘Classics in Human Geography
Revisited’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) pp.423–30.
2. G. O’Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Social Construction of State and Place in The
Practice Of Statecraft (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1989); an overview of
the current literature is in V.D. Mamadouh, ‘Geopolitics in the Nineties: One Flag, Many
Meanings’, GeoJournal 46/4 (1998) pp.237–53.
3. Y. Lacoste, Dictionnaire de géopolitique (Flammarion: Paris 1993) pp.1–45.
4. See S. Rokkan, ‘Dimensions of State-formation and Nation-building: A Possible
Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of
National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975)
pp.562–600; Tilly, C., Coercion, Capital and European States. Oxford: Blackwell 1992);
G. Modelski and W.R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics, 1494–1993. Basingstoke:
Macmillan 1998.
5. P.J. Taylor, ‘Geopolitical World Orders’, in P.J. Taylor (ed), Political Geography of the
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32. C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre III: Le Salut (Paris: Plon 1959) pp.346–7.
33. Larsen (note 25).
34. J.F.V. Keiger, France and the World since 1870 (London: Arnold 2001).
35. H. Védrine, Les cartes de la France à l’heure de la mondialisation. Dialogue avec
Dominique Moïsi (Paris: Fayard 2000).
36. J. Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (London: Routledge 1998).
37. J. Nijman and H. van der Wusten, ‘Breaking the Cold War Mould in Europe: A
Geopolitical Tale of Gradual Change and Sharp Snaps’, in J. O’Loughlin and H. van der
Wusten (eds), The New Political Geography of Eastern Europe (London: Belhaven 1993)
pp.15–30.