A primer in how power waxed and waned among nations this century-and what the changes portend. by Patrick O'Sullivan

"Manifest destiny," a phrase first uttered by an American journalist in 1845, suggested that somehow Americans were providentially destined to annex all territory west of the Mississippi, and possibly beyond. At the very end of the 19th century, U.S. naval officer and historian Admiral Alfred T. Mahan (1840-1914) prescribed how the idea could be carried well beyond the shores of North America. To do this, the U.S. had to string naval stations from the Caribbean across the Pacific, after the pattern set by the Royal Navy, Mahan argued.

In 1897, a German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), provided a coherent pattern for political geography, or geopolitics, emphasizing territory as the basis of power. Ratzel regarded political states as biological organisms, possessed of a natural need to grow. He originated the concept of lebensraum, or "living space." The idea, later corrupted by Adolf Hitler, basically relates the affairs of humans to the space in which they live.

It took an Englishman, however, to conjure out of these elements from Mahan and Ratzel the geographic image which was to haunt international affairs till the last decade of this century. In 1904 Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) published his catchy, simple map dividing the Old World into a "heartland" and a "rimland," dichotomizing land and sea power, with the pivot of history in the heart of Eurasia.

Revolutionary Geopolitics

Engels and Marx were not geographers-they were German classical economists. They argued that Germany was the most likely venue for the kind of revolution they envisioned. Rural Russia would be the laggard in Europe's brave new world, they predicted.

But when it came to practice rather than theory, the man who came out on top was Vladimir Ilich Lenin, a talented, Russian opportunist. In 1917, Lenin found himself in the saddle of a largely rural, Eurasian empire in chaos. To legitimize leading the communist revolution from this position, it was necessary to respecify the geography of Marxist doctrine, as well as its constitutional provisions. So, by 1914, Lenin was ready to lead the German revolution from Zürich.

But in 1917, when the German Foreign Office shipped Lenin back to Russia to stir up insurrection, he devised a new theory of revolution with Russia as the starting place. The nature of the battle for power in the Russian empire led Lenin to depend heavily on non-Russian nationalists for support. By 1920 Russian Asia had become Lenin's new base for the attack on capitalism, in the form of world revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Geopolitics provided the ostensible issue of contention when Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky duked it out for Lenin's throne in 1922. Trotsky championed Russia as the epicenter of a permanent, international revolution, bringing communism to Germany and Britain. These countries would then exchange their manufactured goods for Russian raw materials. Stalin won with a revamped version of Lenin's doctrine of "socialism in a single country."

In 1914, the "single country" had been Germany. In the 1920s the doctrine was reinterpreted to imply that Russia could go it alone without having to wait for the West. This was the justification for the brutal collectivization of farming, to feed rapid industrialization to arm the Soviets against western enemies.

Geopolitik

Mackinder's notions proved to be far too abstract for the British politicians for whom they were devised as guides to action. They did, however, appeal to Germans raised in the Ratzel tradition. Speculation in this vein came to be called "Geopolitik," from which the English usage "geopolitics" derives. A Bavarian soldier, Karl Haushofer, proposed to overcome the Royal Navy's global domination by seeking a German accommodation with Russia for "he who rules the Heartland ... rules the World."

After the Great War, in which Rudolf Hess served as his aide-de-camp, Haushofer founded Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, with German domination of world affairs as his editorial mission. Despite personal links with the Nazis, Haushofer's part in forming Hitler's foreign policy is debatable. Although Mein Kampf does contain the semblance of a plan to control the heartland and destroy British and American naval powers, elsewhere Hitler expressed intentions of avoiding a final showdown with the Royal Navy, since he regarded the British Empire as an indispensable part of the world order. Hitler's vision seems to have been fixed more firmly on Festung Europa, which bore a close resemblance to some current visions of Europe's future. Indeed, in launching Barbarossa, the attack on Russia, in 1941 Hitler violated the central precept of Haushofer's Geopolitik, dividing the heartland.

In the Allied camp, the philosophy behind geopolitics was perceived to be important to Hitler. Mackinder's works were dusted off and revisited. In 1943, Nicholas Spykman, professor of international relations at Yale, reemphasized sea power dominating the rimland, surrounding the heartland. He argued that once an alliance between Anglo-American sea power and Soviet land power had driven Germany from the Eurasian shoreline, U.S. policy should continue to exclude Russia from the rimland.

The Cold War

Spykman predicted what was to become the principle component of world politics from 1945 to 1990-the contest between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to direct global fortunes.

When Germany fell in 1945, Stalin's immediate concern was to establish a deep cordon of defense to block any western attempt to conquer the U.S.S.R while it was weak from the devastation and exertions of war. The American soldier most admired by the Russians, Gen. George S. Patton, was openly advocating having it out with the Reds while they only had 60 divisions of battle weary troops in eastern Europe and the American war machine was intact in the field. After Roosevelt's death and Churchill's deposition, attitudes hardened and crystallized into the Truman Doctrine, the Marshal Plan and the H bomb program. Churchill provided the image of the new state of the world in March 1946. Suddenly, an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe. Communist victory in China in 1949 pulled attention back to the Pacific rim and the American ocean. Here a line of containment was not so easy to inscribe and the image of a "shatterbelt" of nations between the wholly dominated spheres of the great powers emerged. The image was geologic, referring to the zone of crushed rock along a fault line. When the Soviets went nuclear in 1949, the enthusiasm for a full-frontal showdown evaporated and indirect competition for hegemony in the "shatterbelt" became the norm.

At a 1953 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford proposed to help out the French Foreign Legion besieged at Dien Bien Phu with a nuclear bombing strike against the Viet Minh. His justification likened the loss of nations to the communist camp to the chain reaction of a falling row of dominos. Eisenhower liked a catchy phrase and so this image was broadcast.

By 1961, the Kennedy administration had transformed a simile into a theory. Nixon, Kissinger and Reagan subscribed to the "domino theory" and this geopolitical specter still haunts the words and deliberations of American and Russian policymakers, with Islam or ethnicity as the catalyst.

With Stalin's demise, in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev dumped the defensive doctrine of "capitalist encirclement" and pushed out into the world. Khrushchev asked who was encircling whom? The U.S. response was to up the ante of the Truman doctrine with the Eisenhower version, taking the Middle East into the U.S. sphere of containment, and to confront the Soviet extension in Cuba.

The Third World

This new Soviet stance, involving competitive coexistence, ran counter to Mao Zedong's interpretation of Marxist-Leninist scripture. When a doctrinal rift between the U.S.S.R and China opened up in 1963, the Chinese drew a new geopolitical map of the world. Suddenly, world politics could be seen as a three-way struggle for the earth between revolutionary China, revisionist Russia and the American imperialists. Around these three, other nations were arranged in two intermediate zones. On the one hand there was industrialized Europe and Japan, and on the other the peasant nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Chinese focussed on this latter region-the world's countryside-and in so doing the driving force of history became peasant violence against the colonial and neo-colonial forces in the Third World.

To avoid the risk of a direct clash with the U.S.A, and to pick up a following among the more sedate unaligned nations, like India, the Soviets declined the Chinese challenge for leadership of the militant tendency. Doctrinal rectitude was dumped in favor of playing the Great Russian world power. Even so, the strain of the nuclear arms race and the overseas extension of power, especially Russia's old-fashioned imperialist venture in Afghanistan, was too much for an economically inefficient society.

In China, the death of Mao in 1976 and the elevation of Deng Xiaoping brought an end to overseas military adventure and a distinctly hedonistic departure in domestic affairs. With this came the return of a traditional, Sinocentric, geographic view of the world, with distance from Beijing, or increasingly Shanghai, rather than political distance from the epicenter of the authentic revolutionary force, being more significant in determining importance.

The New World Order

It was not the militant anticommunism of the Reagan doctrine, with its talk of rolling back the limits of Soviet expansionism by supporting insurgents wherever they sought to overthrow governments friendly to the U.S.S.R, which caused the collapse of the Soviet empire. It was the reformist ideas of Mikhail Gorbachev, along with the strain of hegemony on the people and resources of Russia, combined with the vast overextension of its military and political reach given the state of its economy, that brought about the disintegration of the U.S.S.R in 1991.

With the fall of the Soviets and the growing zest of an increasing number of Chinese for economic change, a George Bush foreign policy adviser, Francis Fukuyama, saw an end to hegemonic struggle and the emergence of a new world order in sight. In his book, The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, 1992) Fukuyama said that the victory of liberal democracy and market forces signaled the end of history, in the sense that the day of large-scale ideological battles between nations was over. At the time, the actual circumstances of Bush's "new order" looked a lot more like the vision of an oil company executive than anything a political philosopher could have dreamed up. President Clinton's world vision does not seem to be very much different, except for a greater emphasis on encouraging the extension of democratic practice in government.

But indeed, by the middle of the 1990s, there was an impression that war had become a tribal business once more. Reduced great-power presence and a plentiful supply of weapons made it easy to start up conflicts between regional factions. Deadly violence continued to increase. Now stripped of masks of political ideology, contestants bore age-old banners of ethnic, religious and social differences.

Amidst all of this, what made the leaders of Russia as well as the U.S. and Europe most nervous was the prominence of Islamic fundamentalism as a political force to be reckoned with, especially since its potency is greatest close to the major oil reserves of the world. One noted U.S. international relations scholar, Samuel Huntingdon, responded to these new circumstances with a new geopolitical image. The new bipolarity of north vs. south, or the west against the rest, could be portrayed more richly as a clash of civilizations, he believes. While the 19th century was characterized by conflict between nations and the 20th between ideologies, the 21st will witness the clash of civilizations or religions, according to Huntingdon. Today's relevant geopolitical map is like a broken up jig-saw puzzle, with the pieces for North America, Australasia and Western Europe pushed together as "Western" and opposed to Latin American, African, Islamic, Orthodox, Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu and Japanese clusters.

Whether or not the incompatibilities between these culture regions will be the significant source of strife in the future, much of today's violence is contained within their bounds. One thing is for sure, we are becoming increasingly less separate. Advances in information technology and the fuller development of globally linked economies mean that political and economic changes from around the world penetrate more deeply into all our lives daily. Impulses generated from a variety of inspirations in widely separated places are transmitted through a mesh of links become so dense as to approach the quality of a force field. The space in which ideas and information are broadcast has been tightly compressed. Nevertheless, when it comes to translating words into action, geographic space still offers a deterrence to aggression and a defense against political domination.

In their desire to be abstract, general and historical, what the new geopolitical images fail to single out for special attention is the awakening of imperial ambitions in China and the responses of Japan, Southeast Asia, Russia and the U.S. to this phenomenon. China is the largest single player in today's political geography, a fact that ought to galvanize thinking on the prospects for world stability in the 21st century.

Patrick O'Sullivan (Ph.D. London School of Economics) specializes in the study of geopolitics, nationalism and warfare, with emphasis on Europe, Britain and Ireland. A professor of geography, he also is past chair of FSU's geography department. He is author of The Geography of War (Croom Helm, 1983); Geopolitics (Croom Helm, 1986); and most recently Terrain and Tactics (Greenwood 1991). He may be reached at 850-644-8381 or at kmcclell@mailer.fsu.edu.

"I am strongly in favor of common sense, honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." H.L. Mencken