Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969

www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Ratzel, the French School and the birth of
Alternative Geopolitics
Geoffrey Parker
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Abstract
Modern French political geography began as a response to Ratzels Politische Geographie
and then became an attempt to place ratzelian ideas into the context of French geographical
thought. What then emerged was a political geography which was set rmly in opposition to
German geopolitics. There were some geographers who felt that a more effective response
could be made by developing an indigenous French geopolitics. This can be seen as being the
origin of the alternative geopolitics which was favoured by some American geographers during
and after World War II and which subsequently became an important underlying theme in the
new geopolitics which arose in the 1970s. The concept of an alternative geopolitics has owed
a great deal to the French school of geography and has it roots in the original response of
Vidal 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 Ratzel
was a looming presence across the Rhine. As was the case elsewhere in Europe
and America, his work was a signicant benchmark in geographical study. Ratzels
Anthropogeographie was reviewed in the rst volume of Annales de Geographie
(189293) and, following the publication of Politische Geographie in 1897, this book
was also reviewed in Annales, the reviewer on this occasion being none other than
Vidal de la Blache himself (Vidal de la Blache, 1898). Vidal was already a major
force in French geography and this review was in its way as seminal as was Politische
Geographie since it sought to establish the ground rules for the application of the
vidalian methodology to the new eld of political geography. In his review, Vidal
clearly recognised the signicance of the ideas of Ratzel as being what Korinman
was later to call an epistemological moment (Korinman, 1983:12842). The real
signicance of Ratzels work, wrote Vidal, lay in the grouping and coordination
of phenomena so as to give the new political geography its own core of ideas
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958 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
(Vidal de la Blache, ibid:98). Ratzel undertook this grouping, wrote Vidal, with a
view to distinguishing laws, and in so doing he had aimed to establish a rm foun-
dation for the new political geography. While accepting the importance of this, Vidal
took issue both with a number of aspects of the ratzelian approach and with the
treatment of political geography as a separate sub-discipline. He refused to accept
that the state was, in ratzelian terminology, a living organism, and was prepared
only to concede that states resembled living things. Likewise he considered it as
premature to attempt to formulate laws at that stage and conned himself to accepting
only the existence of certain methodological principles (ibid:111). More fundamen-
tally, he was convinced that it was not possible for political geography to exist in
some kind of annexe adjacent to, but separate from, the rest of geography. According
to Vidal It (political geography) is far too deeply rooted in general geography for
such an approach to be at all viable (ibid:1034).
Running through this 1898 review of Politische Geographie is the clear sense that
Vidal was uneasy with political geography. He felt it to be menaced by political
ideas about the state which emanated from outside and which were foreign to
geography. Thus from the outset he saw the danger that political geography would
become vulnerable to political pressures and absorb preconceived and fundamentally
ungeographical notions about the nature of the state. Geographers must not be bound
by 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 geographical
thinking to bear on them. This meant that they had to be prepared to examine all
types of states including imperfect, embryonic or rudimentary forms of the state.
While he identied such forms in what he referred to as local government, the
higher forms, in Vidals estimation, included the nation and the city-state (ibid:107).
The phenomena of political geography are not xed entities %. Cities and states
represent forms which have already evolved to arrive at the point where we now
observe them and which may still continue to evolve. We must therefore see them
as being changing phenomena (les faits en mouvement) (ibid:108). Such changes
may be brought about by many factors, he concluded, but most signicantly they
were 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 which
was in many ways an even more radical concept at the end of the nineteenth century
than was geopolitical evolution in the the ratzelian sense. Vidal clearly envisaged
the 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. This
thinking 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 being
part of a wider holistic system, thus arises the necessity not to study the state as
an isolated compartment, some sort of a slice of the earths surface. By its origins,
its direction, its stages of development and the provisional nature of its existence it
959 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
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 geography
in France took a great leap forward. A number of French geographers had been
actively involved as advisers at the peace conference and the new political map
which emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles incorporated some, at least, of the
results of their thinking on major issues (Parker, 1987:14). Lucien Gallois used the
pages of Annales to urge French geographers to give more of their attention to the
study 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 the
understanding of the signicance of the immense changes which had taken place to
the political map of Europe and of their implications for France in particular. Vidal
de la Blache had died prematurely shortly before the end of the war, and it was left
to a new generation of geographers to take up the challenge. Until then French
political geography had consisted to a large extent of a kind of extended response
to Ratzel and this had entailed both a critical examination of ratzelian thought and
an 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 ideas
when this was considered necessary. Most signicant among those who now sought
such 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 the
conviction that the study of the state could not take place in isolation from the rest
of the phenomena of human geography. On the contrary, it had to be considered as
being essentially part of these phenomena and responsive to overall changes
within them.
These geographers saw the relationship of political geography to the totality of
geography as being most clearly demonstrated in the nation, and the relationship
was revealed at its most subtle and sensitive in that carefully balanced structure, the
nation-state. In vidalian geography the nation was regarded as being a product of
the genre de vie of a people which had developed in a particular geographical
environment. The cultural characteristics of such a nation resulted from the creative
interplay of the general and the local, civilisation and milieu. At its most satisfactory
the 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 the genre de vie of its
inhabitants. All too often the reality was that states lacked the responsiveness to
genres de vie which constituted, from the geographical perspective, the necessary
condition of their legitimacy. They were the products of wars and dynastic alliances
which had been forged over long periods of time and they based their legitimacy
on claims to legality deriving from the sanction of successive treaties. The extent to
which they could be said to be deeply rooted in general geography was very much
open to question. The old treaties, wrote Goblet, had been considered as being as
immutable, as intangible, as tablets dictated on some Sinai (Goblet, 1934:4). Such
purely juridicial texts were supposedly eternal, he went on, and could be transfor-
960 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
med or abolished only by force (ibid:259). As a result, all too often in modern
times it had been statism, claiming the right to act in response to raisons detat and
riding roughshod over the rights and desires of peoples, rather than nationalism based
on those elements which have really been a basis for unity, which has become the
norm. This produced a political map which was frequently discordant with the other
phenomena of human geography. The result of this has been the creation of articial
geopolitical structures established and maintained by force. Such structures, although
giving the appearance of possessing power and permanence, were in reality fragile
and transitory. They were worm-eaten empires sustained by outmoded treaties and
awaiting inevitable dissolution (ibid:8).
Two decades after the death of Vidal, Ancel reiterated Vidals assertion that the
elements of political geography must always be regarded as being changing phenom-
ena rather than xed entities. However, in La Geographie des Frontie`res he reached
the conclusion that articial state structures are not so much part of an evolutionary
process as positive impediments to it. In this way what he termed the Anschluss
rhenane by Prussia had resulted in that Musspreussen (forced Prussianisation) which
had shattered the unity of Rhineland civilisation and stultied its further growth
(Ancel, 1938:113). Referring to the Anschluss with Austria, he observed that it was
now the turn of that country to be subjected to a similar fate. Yet, despite this, Ancel
concluded 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 and
sleeping nations (ibid:188). For Ancel, the desirable outcome was that exibility
and responsiveness should replace the iron and inexible rule. He saw frontiers less
as 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 balance
of 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 realities
beneath the articial barriers. In his book on the Rhine, written jointly with the
historian Lucien Febvre, he identied the great axes of movement as being the
real underlying geographical framework constituting the transcendent geopolitical
reality (Demangeon & Febvre, 1935:291). He opposed the negative idea of the river
as bloody and sterile frontier with the positive one of the rich and luminous
routeway. 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 its
translation 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 the
Rhine as watertight bulkhead and bloody and sterile frontier which had become
the menacing reality. Nevertheless, despite the divisive power of the riparian states,
Demangeon retained the belief that the force of unity which had always emanated
from the Rhine would eventually prevail.
A mechanism for moving towards the desired unity was proposed by Yves-Marie
Goblet in 1934. Goblet considered that it was Sir William Petty, the seventeenth
century English polymath, rather than Ratzel, who was the real founder of modern
political geography. He regarded Pettys Political Anatomy of Ireland as having been
961 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
the seminal work in this regard and he contended that Ratzel had (unknowingly)
adopted many of Pettys ideas (Goblet, 1934:16). Goblet conceded that Ratzel had
formulated provisional laws and discovered certain methodological principles and
that nothing was further from Ratzels truly scientic work than the Geopolitik
spagyrique practised in Germany. Like Ancel, Goblet saw change and uidity as
being the principal characteristic of the world map arising from the phenomena of
dissolution and evolution which underlie it. In line with his contemporaries, Goblet
also considered that the nation constituted the most desirable geopolitical form to
be aspired to. Formerly territorial and human factors (had been) treated simply as
pawns in a game of chess but now it had come to be realised that the pawns
concerned 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 nations
from their bondage, Goblet realised the fundamental error of elevating them to the
status of completely sovereign and independent political entities, in other words, of
regarding 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 into
being. Such a development, he contended, constituted nothing more than a reversion
to 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 be
united, thus replacing one false and articial territoriality by a similar one on a
smaller scale. Such a development went completely against the interdependence of
geographical and geopolitical phenomena and thus against the overall unity of human
geography itself.
The mechanism favoured by Goblet for reconciling the reality of the existence of
nations with the principle of interdependence entailed extending the realm of the
geopolitical more widely so as to include those major centres of industry and com-
merce which he dubbed international emporiums. These were to be regarded as
being geopolitical phenomena in their own right, essentially different from, and inde-
pendent of, the nation-states. They constituted the coordinates of a potential network
of 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 rmly in the realms of the
possible. They constituted realities rather than gments of the hopeful and optimistic
imagination and, using the terminology of geopolitics, they could thus be considered
to lie within the sphere of Realpolitik rather than of Idealpolitik. He cited the Hanse-
atic League as an example and demonstrated how this open organisation had been
destroyed by the rise of the territorial states around the Baltic and North Seas
(ibid:4665). The essential corollary of the restoration of the imprisoned and sleep-
ing nations, maintained Goblet, was the restoration also of the Free City with
commerce 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 the
world but they were destroyed by states extensive enough to be able to claim that,
in themselves, they constituted distinct economic organisms % powerful enough to
suppress the liberty of the great merchants. These states had then gone on to
962 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
entrench their power by surrounding themselves with economic Great Walls of
China (ibid:251).
Implicit in the work of Goblet and the others was the evidence of the existence
of another Great Wall running straight though the middle of political geography
itself. This divided those geographers who largely accepted the continued existence
of the territorial state as the basic constituent feature of the political map from those
who advocated moving towards a different type of state founded on alternative prin-
ciples (Parker, 1996:21213). These latter proposed more fundamental changes to
the 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 envisaged
as practicable. They could thus be called radical geographers well before the term
came into general use.
The fundamental proposition of such geographers as these was that the territorial
state created by its very existence an environment of closed geographical space, and
it stood in contrast to the non-territorial state, the successful functioning of which
necessitated 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 conict and the replacement of this by an environment of cooperation
and peace could only be assured by the existence of mechanisms guaranteeing the
maintenance of openness. Political geography, asserted Goblet, is above all a task
of peace and its achievement lay now in the sphere of the experimental sciences.
What Goblet termed experimental political geography entailed the widening of the
realm of the geopolitical and the examination of alternative forms of organisation.
This approach was rmly embedded in the vidalian principle of examining all types
of states so as to assess their respective roles and relevance. The experiment was
based upon what Goblet termed reconstruction and synthesis and this entailed the
application 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 geopolitical
phenomenon and the testing out of its effectiveness in present day conditions. For
Goblet this necessitated that the city-state and the territorial (nation) state, which
had acted in totally different ways in their relationship to geopolitical space and had
followed one another chronologically in modern times, should now be assembled
chorologically. Each of these categories of state possessed certain inherent weak-
nesses, and it was these weaknesses which had made them inadequate in the past
as the unique or dominant forms of spatial political organisation (Parker, 1997:33
4). Together, in some kind of spatial synthesis, Goblet contended that they could
more effectively contribute to the creation of a more balanced and stable system.
The concept of commercial centres outside states and nations again presents itself
as one of the ways in which the world will be able to be organised for the achieve-
ment of the ideal of peace. (Goblet, 1934:2567). He considered that such a process
of geopolitical engineering lay well within the realms of the possible. Since the
proposed engineering was being applied to real and existing phenomena he regarded
it as being realistic and as such it was by denition to be regarded as being a scien-
tic project.
As has been observed, Goblets approach, whilst deriving much from Pettys Polit-
963 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
ical Anatomy, was nevertheless rmly within la tradition vidalienne. Throughout he
contrasted La geographie politique scientique with Geopolitik spagyrique.
While the object of the former was to engage in assembling geographical facts and
coming to objective conclusions about their relationships, the latter he regarded as
being no more than a kind of political alchemy based on a mystic conception of
the state as a territorial entity and seeking to justify territorial aggrandisement in
metaphysical terms (ibid:1122). While Geopolitik was loosely assumed to have been
derived from the ideas of Ratzel a gure much better known than was Rudolf
Kjellen, the real inventor of the term Geopolitik the French geographers were
quick to deny the connection between the two. It is sad to see all this happening
in the land of Ritter and Ratzel, observed Goblet. Nothing could be further (than
Geopolitik) 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 be
used legitimately in a generic sense. Jacques Ancel believed that geopolitics could
quite properly be considered as being something different from political geography
and that it was necessary to use the terminology in order to indicate this. We must
not let the German pseudo-science monopolise this term he contended and
announced that he intended to repossess it. He went on to dene geopolitics quite
simply as being the study of external political geography. Its approach was a
dynamic one, something which he contrasted with French political geography which
he criticised for having been far too internal, static (Ancel, 1936:5). Such political
geography lacked the real credentials either to formulate a critique of Geopolitik or
to be the basis for a viable alternative to it. Ancel made it clear that the principal
concern of la geopolitique as he conceived it was with international relations rather
than the internal geography of states. His analysis and critique of the concept Hitler-
ien was therefore to be done from inside rather than outside and it could be properly
refuted only from a geopolitical perspective. He was well aware that this would be
an unpopular approach with his colleagues and not one which they were likely to
follow readily. The attempt to transfer geopolitics across the Rhine, and in so doing
to gallicise it, was fraught with such problems that it proved to be too much for one
single protagonist. Ancel needed allies and it is signicant that he looked for them
outside geography. He had considerable contacts in the wider international eld and
these included a long association with the Carnegie Foundation (Dotation Carnegie),
the European Centre of which was located in Paris. In this context he paid tribute
to the work of the Dotations journal, LEsprit International, to which he was a
frequent contributor, and expressed the opinion that it was thanks to its perspicacity
and vigilance that the teaching of la geopolitique has seen the light of day in France
(Ancel, 1933:6). It was Ancel himself who was principally instrumental in introduc-
ing the geopolitical perspective into LEsprit International, an inuential journal at
the 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
964 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
this journal that he considered geopolitics to be the most appropriate vehicle for
introducing the geographical perspective into the wider international eld.
Ancel was virtually alone among the French geographers of this period in accord-
ing a degree of academic respectability to geopolitics. The others continued to
emphasise the gulf which existed between it and la geographie politique, considering
geopolitics not only to be inherently unscientic but also impregnated with those
ideas foreign to geography which had from the beginning so troubled Vidal de la
Blache. If during the rst two decades of the twentieth century French political
geography had been largely an extended response to Ratzel, during the next two
decades, 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 the
refutation of Geopolitik, Ancel was clearly of the opinion that political geography
as then practised was inadequate for the task which he considered to be of the greatest
importance: the formulation of a viable alternative to the German version.
Within a year of the publication of Ancels La Geographie des Frontieres World
War 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 brought
to an abrupt end the whole intense discourse within French political geography.
During the occupation there was no political geography in France and the pages
of the slimmed-down and censored Annales were lled with more bland and less
controversial items. German Geopolitik had, for the time being, smothered the infant
French geopolitique and Haushofers concept of frontiers as echte Grenze, natural
and genuine boundaries, appeared to have triumphed over Ancels concept of the
frontier as peripherie toujours provisoire and isobare politique.
However, just as the French geographical scene was being decimated by war and
defeat, across the Atlantic a new American geopolitics was beginning to take shape.
As in France, this was initially conceived of as a response to Geopolitik and the
American response was along much the same lines as that of the French geographers
(Bowman, 1942). However, after an examination of the works of Karl Haushofer
and Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, certain American geographers reached the general
conclusion 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 in
the footsteps of Ancel rather than Demangeon or Goblet, although they did not appear
to make much distinction between them. This approach was demonstrated by Hans
Weigert in Harpers Magazine, when he observed that the French geographers had
been closer than we are to the arising dangers from without and were therefore
ahead of their Anglo-Saxon colleagues in understanding and responding to Geopoli-
tik. Signicantly referring to the French political geographers as geopoliticians he
asserted that they have for years criticised the way of German geopolitical thinking
by the accusation that, to it, space and earth meant everything; the human being
almost nothing. They tried to ght against the fatalistic conception which makes
man more or less an object of geographical factors (Weigert, 1941:11). Thus the
emergence in America of the idea that there could be a different geopolitics from
that 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
965 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
heightened awareness of the dangers now beginning to confront America, geopolitics
became suddenly a` la mode and Tagoff wrote wryly in the New Yorker of the brave
new 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 identied geopoli-
tics with the dynamic rather than the static approach. Echoing Ancels condemnation
of French political geography as internal, static, Weigert advocated sweeping away
yesterdays geography and so letting us see the world in the image of dynamic
maps, instead of the static maps of times past (Weigert, 1942:131). Identifying the
main problem of German geopolitics as being its obsessive concern with ideas and
theories, 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 followed
by 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-proclaimed
geopolitician, who expressed the opinion that geopolitics should develop what he
called a spiritual dimension. Dening geopolitics as being a combined study of
human 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 perspective
had in fact been widely applied although it had been rarely acknowledged as such
and 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 that
geopolitics could ennoble as well as corrupt and concluded that It can choose
between 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 was
about power and, as a result of this, was entirely materialistic in its approach.
Just as Ratzel had, according to Goblet, unknowingly followed the ideas of
Petty, 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 the
Nazi legacy proved to be too strong and there were few who were prepared to follow
Walshs line and concede anything good, let alone spiritual, in geopolitics (Parker,
1998:412). It had been far too tarnished by its association with the Third Reich for
what had originally been Ancels intention of reclaiming it to be widely acceptable
in the immediate post war years. Indeed, in Ancels last book, Slaves et Germains,
published posthumously in 1947 but completed in the wake of the fall of Poland at
the beginning of World War II, there is no further mention of the reclamation of
geopolitics. Geopolitik (sic) was described as having had the sole task of providing
so-called scientic arguments to justify renewed German expansion. In his nal
work there is nothing further on an alternative geopolitics as such to counter la
politique hitlerienne (Ancel, 1947:211). Ancel, however, returned to such essentially
alternative concepts as grouping and community to counter the threat of the rise
of Pan-Germanism (Parker, 1998:53).
Five years later, in the rst major French contribution to political geography after
World War II, Jean Gottmann launched a criticism of Ancel for his attempt to
rehabilitate geopolitics. Gottmann considered this to have been a bad attempt at
966 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
compromise between French and German methods. It had been too inuenced by
Geopolitik and 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 basic
principles advocated by Ancel. Writing of the closure of the inhabited world and
the compartmentalisation of space as the basic facts of the political map, he pointed
to the basic dichotomy of systems of movement and systems of resistance to move-
ment (ibid:214). His contrast of the uid and the static elements echoes Ancels
contrast of the dynamic and the static which he equated with geopolitics and
political geography. In the post-war years Gottmann found it impossible to accept
the existence of a legitimate terminological distinction between the two. In emphasis-
ing the vital role of the crossroads (carrefour), Gottmann was also using Goblets
idea of the international emporium as the necessary counterweight to the detrimental
effects of the closure of space. In his nal work, published in 1956, but consisting
basically of ideas which had been formulated during the 1930s, Goblet again com-
pletely dismissed geopolitics although he added mysteriously, and without further
elaboration, that certain geopoliticians have done some fairly good work in human
geography(Goblet, 1956:14). It is interesting that the main substance of Goblets
nal condemnation was less its political involvement than its attempt to reduce what
Goblet considered to be the most complex and subtle part of geography to crude
and simplistic laws.
What had been realised by certain American geographers of the 1940s was that
the distinction between political geography and geopolitics was at best blurred and
at worse false. There had indeed been many geopoliticians without portfolio who
had yet sought to maintain their credentials as political geographers. They had taken
refuge 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, much
of what went under the name of political geography at that time in America was in
fact virtually covert geopolitics. Many such geographers had come to regard geopoli-
tics as providing the best methodology for examining and interpretating the world
scene not only from a geographical, but also from an American, perspective. Among
them was George Renner who advocated not so much an alternative as an unreformed
geopolitics. He appears to have seen virtually no distinction at all between political
geography and geopolitics and even at one stage pronounced that geopolitics may
be regarded as a shortened designation for political geography (Renner, 1948:3).
He considered that any distinctions which did exist were in the last analysis, a
minor 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 had
interviewed Karl Haushofer and came away with a positive view of the work of the
German geopolitician. It was the Nazi philosophy, and not geopolitics, which, in his
view, stood condemned. In any case, during the nal years of the war, the German
geopoliticians had become more distanced from the Nazi leadership and Karls son,
Albrecht, had been executed in the last days of the war as a result of his alleged
links with those who had planned to kill Hitler at Rastenberg in July 1944 (Parker,
1998:367). This all reinforced Walshs view that the real intellectual and moral
distinction cut right through the middle of both political geography and geopolitics.
967 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
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 been
implicit in the ideas of Ancel, but the French geographer had made the distinction
more 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 the
world and those who sought to reassemble it. It was the attempt to achieve the
productive cohabitation of the two which had been the essence of the ongoing project
in 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 rst half of the 20th century had been
staked out at the end of the 19th century by Vidal de la Blache in his response to
Ratzel. This response had emphasised three fundamental ideas. First, the necessity
for all types of states to be studied; second, the importance of the link between city
and state and, third, the concept of the evolution of states. The reason given by Vidal
for linking city and state in this way was both that the city was an essential part of
state formation and also that it was, in Vidals phrase, the agent for emancipation
from the tyranny of the local milieu. It is this idea of emancipation from which
is at the root of the idea of alternative to. Evolution and emancipation are two
processes which run concurrently. They entail the idea of development from one
type of formation to another and freedom from the tyranny of any particular set of
ideas. They both contain the possibility of the acceptance of radical change. It matters
less whether such an alternative is considered to be within the realms of political
geography or geopolitics as whether the alternative represents a radically different
approach to the nature of the world political order and the problems of geopoliti-
cal organisation.
A generation after World War II, in the wake of les evenements which shook
France and Europe in 1968, Yves Lacoste embarked on the Herodote project for
moving geography from the periphery back into the centre of the debate about how
the world should now move forward in the social, political and international elds.
For this purpose he reinvented the term geopolitics and employed the phrase une
geographie alternative to indicate its position in relation to what had preceded it
(Herodote, 1 1976) . Thirty years after Ancels death geopolitics had at last been
successfully reclaimed. The new geopolitics was an alternative, said Lacoste, to
la geographie dominante which had camouaged the state with the nation. The
Herodote project sought to address the concerns of the dominated rather than those
of the dominators and aimed to do this by means of the investigation of alternative
geopolitical scenarios to those of the past. Far from being above the battle it was
thus manifestly a part of it. It was, in Lacostes phrase, both alternative et com-
battante.
Some twenty years after the debut of the Herodote project, in the mid 1990s, the
political geographer Claude Raffestin reviewed its effects with particular reference
to the extent to which it had employed and transformed geopolitics. In the
wider context of the history of geopolitics Raffestin maintained that, after all, la
geopolitique herodotienne had not proved to be all that different from Geopolitik.
The conclusion which he reached from this was that geopolitics could not really
968 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
change; ultimately it was always bound up in some way or another with power and
from this with conict. The idea that there could be dautres geopolitiques, which
were radically different in method and objective, was dismissed by Raffestin as being
nothing more than an illusion (Raffestin, 1995:304).
This conclusion reached by Raffestin in the mid 1990s was totally at variance
with 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 Kjellen, which
he dened as being the study of the relations among states viewed spatially, should
be repossessed. Its approach was a dynamic geographical one and he was con-
vinced that it was only through such dynamism that geopolitical phenomena could
be observed and analysed in the vidalien manner as des faits en mouvement. For
Ancel it provided a methodology by the use of which Geopolitik could be effectively
countered and international problems could be addressed objectively and scientically.
Not only did the use of geopolitics signify a dynamic and international approach but,
as he emphasised in LEsprit International, one which was most appropriate to the
application of the geographical perspective in international relations. To the question
whether there was a geopolitics which was essentially different from political geogra-
phy, and needed to be studied as such, Ancel gave a decidedly afrmative answer to
which Walsh later added the caveat but it depends how you use it.
The examination of the alternatives open to humanity has always been the central
theme of the work of the possibilist school of French geographers. Possibilism was
thus linked to evolutionary terminology to produce the calculus of probability
which permitted a reconciliation of science and creativity (Berdoulay, 1978:856).
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 was
the replacement of walls by bridges and, in geopolitical terms, the replacement of
territorial segmentation by networks of communication. Ancel repossessed the term
geopolitics in order to indicate a dynamic external geography which recognised
that in the ux of evolution and dissolution new geopolitical species are born and
new ways of moving forward become possible. He perceived clearly the nature of
the radical alternative, and proposed that it should be placed inside rather than outside
geopolitics. Above all this approach was about breaking the mind set which regarded
the territorial state as being a given and which reduced political geography to a
matter of solving its problems and making it more effective.
In his 1933 article in LEsprit International entitled La frontie`re Adriatique
Ancel used Ritters words to describe Italy as a terrestrial bridge extending from
North to South and from the Occident to the Orient (Ancel, 1933:233). Ancel
described graphically the route followed by the Orient Express, at the time the most
important train connecting Western Europe to the Balkans and the Near East, as it
crossed from northern Italy into Yugoslavia. He wrote of the famous train rounding
the Gulf of Trieste and, after Trieste, cutting through the rst karst slopes which gave
the traveller the impression of crossing the boundaries of one world before entering
another (ibid:236). Ancel was here using the Orient Express to illustrate his main theme
which was that the Adriatic had been a line of contact and communication long before
it became a watertight bulkhead between hostile states. Ritter, said Ancel, had pointed
969 G. Parker / Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969
to the existence of certain undisputed geographical realities. These are the geographical
conditions which constitute the basic facts of existence and Ancel went on to pose the
question: what is the part which humanity chooses to play?
The facts of existence contain within them the possiblity of unication as well as
division; of contact as well as separation. As Walsh pointed out, the choice always
exists between two alternatives and, through this, for the possibility of that alterna-
tive geopolitics identied 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 Vidals words, the
phenomena of political geography must never be regarded as being xed entities.
Rather they must be seen as being changing phenomena and as such open to
the possibility of those alternatives which are as present in political geography and
geopolitics as in all other realms of human geography. The search for these, and
their application to the contemporary world, remains the ongoing project of the alter-
native geopolitics.
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