Geopolitik - Geopolitik Rises

Geopolitik Rises

German geopolitik contributed to Nazi foreign policy chiefly in the strategy and justifications for lebensraum. Geopolitik contributed five ideas to German foreign policy in the interwar period: the organic state; lebensraum; autarky; pan-regions; and the land power/sea power dichotomy.

Geostrategy as a political science is both descriptive and analytical like Political Geography, but adds a normative element in its strategic prescriptions for national policy. While it stems from earlier American and British geostrategy, German geopolitik adopts an essentialist outlook toward the national interest, oversimplifying issues and representing itself as a panacea. As a new and essentialist ideology, geopolitik found itself in a position to prey upon the post–World War I insecurity of the populace.

In 1919, General Karl Haushofer would become professor of geography at the University of Munich. This would serve as a platform for the spread of his geopolitical ideas, magazine articles and books. By 1924, as the leader of the German geopolitik school of thought, Haushofer would establish the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik monthly devoted to geopolitik. His ideas would reach a wider audience with the publication of Volk ohne Raum by Hans Grimm in 1926, popularizing his concept of lebensraum. Haushofer exercised influence both through his academic teachings, urging his students to think in terms of continents and emphasizing motion in international politics, and through his political activities. While Hitler's speeches would attract the masses, Haushofer's works served to bring the remaining intellectuals into the fold.

Geopolitik was in essence a consolidation and codification of older ideas, given a scientific gloss:

• Lebensraum was a revised colonial imperialism;
• Autarky a new expression of tariff protectionism;
• Strategic control of key geographic territories exhibiting the same thought behind earlier designs on the Suez and Panama canals; and
• Pan-regions based upon the British Empire, and the American Monroe Doctrine, Pan-American Union and hemispheric defense.

The key reorientation in each dyad is that the focus is on land-based empire rather than naval imperialism.

Ostensibly based upon the geopolitical theory of American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan, and British geographer Halford J. Mackinder, German geopolitik adds older German ideas. Enunciated most forcefully by Friedrich Ratzel and his Swedish student Rudolf Kjellén, they include an organic or anthropomorphized conception of the state, and the need for self-sufficiency through the top-down organization of society. The root of uniquely German geopolitik rests in the writings of Karl Ritter who first developed the organic conception of the state that would later by elaborated upon by Ratzel and accepted by Hausfhofer. He justified lebensraum, even at the cost of other nation's existence because conquest was a biological necessity for a state's growth.