Do the politicians and pundits who speak of geopolitics really know what they are talking about? Geopolitics is a classically ambiguous or nebulous term, with an innocent and a dangerous use. For some, it is a vague sense of continents and big geographical spaces, or just that geography matters in the sense that the United Kingdom is more likely to trade with France and Ireland than with New Zealand; for others, it is about a claim that reality consists of endless conflict and struggle, in which space matters more than ideas, maps more than chaps. This is a bleak, conflictual, zero-sum world.
Space and place clearly matter. At some times, the attention of the world focuses on particular geographic hotspots: some dominate the geopolitical imagination, the eastern Mediterranean, the Dardanelles. The passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean assumes a global significance, a thin needle that connects the grain-producing areas of autocratically controlled central Eurasia to starving consumers.
It is worth asking where all this demand for geopolitics originated, where the link between geopolitics and humiliation was born. What could be further from the carnage of Ukraine, the tensions in the Taiwan Straits or Gaza, or the busy waters of the Bosporus, than a peaceful Bavarian farm? Set in the green rolling hills to the south-west of Munich, near Lake Ammer, and just a few miles away from a Benedictine monastery on a hill overlooking the water, it’s where thousands of Bavarians come annually in a pilgrimage – for beer. Unlike most Bavarian cattle farms, the cows are not a mottled brown and white, but heavier, bigger, with a thick tousled black coat: a Scottish breed, Galloways. The farm, the Hartschimmelhof, has been in family hands since the beginning of the 20th century, when it was given as a wedding present from his father-in-law to Karl Haushofer, the most influential figure in the development of the study of geopolitics in the early 20th century.
It was Haushofer who laid the basis for the definitional shiftiness of the term. He saw himself as the prophet of geopolitics, but – typically and revealingly – could never clearly explain what it actually was. A characteristic attempt was ‘the science of the political life form in its natural living space’. Or a normative demand that ‘geopolitics will and must be the geographic conscience of the state’.