The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Chapter V

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THE NAZI DISTORTION
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

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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