Rudolf Kjellen was the student and follower of another prominent thinker in the realm of political geography studies, Friedrich Ratzel. Ratzel came into geography after advanced training in zoology. However, the knowledge background received in this field was not an obstacle for him to become the founder of a new discipline. Lack of knowledge in political and social sciences had blocked his access to the theories and methodologies of the disciplines. However, his acquaintance in the natural science stimulated him to put forward his vision on the state and politics. Ratzel interpreted the state like any other “natural phenomenon in a deterministic fashion, as the eternal “power of the soil”[…] True realist politics has always had a strong geographical essence […] The essence provides the supply of political egoism which has to act according to the rule of its soil”.[1]
Throughout the 19th century, the ideas of Charles Darwin on biological law of natural selection and environmental adaptation and the theory of evolution based upon these concept, got popularity among social scientist. They have tried to adopt those in their studies of human societies. The pioneer in this field, which now is referred as “social Darwinism”, was English philosopher Herbert Spencer who made the analogies of human societies to natural organisms. Influenced by the idea of “social Darwinism”, Ratzel was the one who introduced the “organismic theory of the state” to the academic circles, which viewed the “sovereign political entities as living organisms, fixed in space and, like other organisms in nature, involved in the constant struggle for larger living space. As Fisher wrote, Ratzel has predicted the transformation of the global political map in the conditions of Industrial Revolution, transportation and technology development, which, in his view, would cause the attempts to expand the territorial space over which political power and control could be exercised resulting in “struggle between rival states organisms for space in which to live” [2]
Ratzel had developed his ideas in his “Politische Geographie” (1897) and, thus, gave the start to the development of a new sub-discipline, which will analyze the state as a living organism. For Ratzel, state was the most essential unit in the interpretation of the modern world. The assumptions of the idea of “state as a living organism” were based on two major themes of Darwin’s evolution theory themes: one that community is as an organism which must struggle for space and its resources in order to survive and the second one that life cycle of birth, growth, expansion and decline are common to all living organisms. Taking this as a core, as living organism within the nature struggle for space to exist and grow, the “history of nations could be interpreted as the struggle for political territory” and like organisms in nature are going through the same processes of evolution of growing and decay, since they can never be still and motionless.[3]
Ratzel has emphasized the interrelationship between state and concept of space: the land is the best indicator of state’s political power. According to Ratzel, state has to develop a “space conception” – an idea of the possible limits of its territorial control. As larger is the “space conception” of the population residing the state, as much is the pressure from the side of population towards the expansion of the state. Following this idea, the decline of the state literally means lack of the “space conception”. Subsequently, Ratzel has tried to study what are those factors that determine the growth of the state, or how he called it “laws of the spatial growth of the states”. Those laws found their reflection in Ratzel’s article “The Laws of the Spatial Growth of States: A Contribution to Scientific Political Geography” (1896). Those laws could be summarized as follows:
- Political geography is related primarily to the population movements. People are joined to the area of the state. Together with the territory people live on and express their spiritual ties to, they form a state.
- For political geography, group of people living on the essentially fixed area represents the living organism, which differentiated itself from other such bodie
- Once a fragment of land or an earlier possession is occupied, internal movement is turned into an external movement. This happens in the way of either penetrations or displacements or combination of small areas with their population into larger units, without changing their location
- These spatial transformations have inevitable consequences on all neighboring areas, and transformation of territory possible “motifs” of historical development.
- There are two tendencies: enlargement and reproduction, both of which can be regarded as continuous stimulus towards mobility. The nature of the relationship of the state to the land, which determines the rate of its growth, can be named as the third “motif”.[4]
As Kost claims, Ratzel political geography had drawn an image of “everlasting battle of states for the largest possible and most valuable property in land” Accordingly, if the power concept does not match the geographical knowledge, the existence of the state is threatened by the struggle for power.[5]
Discussing the Ratzel’s impact and input in the development of the political geography and geopolitics, it would be important to mention that Ratzel was the one claiming that there are three most important geographic facts, which according to him, determined the nature and growth of states. Those facts such as territory, population and expansion within the “natural frontier” later became a basis for the concept of “natural boundaries”, discussed previously.
Last but not the least Ratzel’s contribution to the political geography discipline was the concept of Lebensraum, or living space. This was meant by Ratzel as ”living area within which living organisms develop”.[6] Ratzel has stated that as population of a state is growing, a more territory is needed. This leads to the struggle for the space, in which a gain in territory of more powerful becomes a loss of its weaker neighbors. Thus, in the cases of the states, as well as in the life of living organism we observe an ongoing struggle for survival, where the fittest wins. Ratzel had distinguished between two types of Lebensraum: one was the general one, and another one was natural Lebensraum of human groups viewed as a biological habitat. Ratzel’s term Lebensraum became popular among German war strategists and determined policy of Nazi Germany in 1930-1940. Moreover, it contributed to the popularization of the term Geopolitik or geopolitics, however, as the history had shown the misused concept of Lebensraum led to the point that geopolitics has long suffered from being associated with German school of geopolitics as well as Nazi barbarianism. [7]
[1] Gerard Toal, “Critical Geopolitics and Development Theory: Intensifying the Dialogue”. Institute of British Geographers. vol. 19 no. 2, (1994): 228-233 quoted by Mattew David Greenwood, International Aid and the Geopolitical Imagination after the Cold War: A Case Study of Development Aims and Aid Policies for post-Soviet Russia, (Master’s Thesis, Durham University, 2010), 24.
[2] Charles Alfred Fisher, Essays in Political Geography, (Michigan: Methuen, 1968) quoted by Ramesh Dutta Dikshit, Political Geography: The Spatiality of Politics, 3rd edition, (New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Company LTD, 2000): 18.
[3] Dikshit, age, 19.
[4] age, 20.
[5] Klaus Kost, “The Conception of Politics in Political Geography and Geopolitics in Germany until 1945”, Political Geography Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4 (1989); 369-385 quoted by Ramesh Dutta Dikshit, Political Geography: The Spatiality of Politics, 3rd edition, (New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Company LTD, 2000): 24.
[6]Dikshit, age, 21.
[7] Pascal Venier, Main Theoretical Currents in Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century, L’Espace Politique, vol. 12 (2010). DOI : 10.4000/espacepolitique.1714.
