The Geopolitics Reader Book

The book is a collection of papers and texts written during the XX Century, in which the authors tried to postulate their ideas, thesis and comments regarding the geo-political situation of their days or on geo-politics itself. The first edition covers the XX Century until the aftermath of the golf crisis in the 90s. It is divided into 5 Parts: 3 spanning chronologically through imperial Europe's ending years at the beginning of the XX Century and until the second world war (Imperial geo-politics); the cold war and the geo-politics of the post cold-war World (New world order geo-politics or contemporary geopolitics, albeit just covering until the end of the cetury); the 2 last parts focusing on different paths on the understanding of contemporary geo-politics: The Environmental geopolitics and the anti-geopolitics.

The first part presents the reader with the prospects of ideas coming from some politics and academics fro the first half of the XX Century. Their thoughts permeated into their political leaders, influencing their geographical view of the world and justifying the European expansionism well into the second world war. Academics like Mackinder (Britsh) and Haushofer (German) developed theories of power, that will finally be used by the politicians of their countries to justify their wars and their sovereignty over other less developed states and peoples. Here the position of the US towards the expansionism policies of the European empires and the insights of Hitler and his early Thoughts on eastern Europe are presented in order to help the reader understand the views of the world, that by 1940 the major powers of the world held and ultimately lead to the world wars.

The second part concentrates on the geo-politics of the cold war, both from the USA and from the USSR, the two main superpowers, that converted the world into a field of different chips, in which each had to chose a side, either willingly or how we saw for many unfortunate events, by means of force. The Truman doctrine and the long telegram of Kennan came in the aftermath of WW2 and made America the land that had to fought for the liberty, democracy and self-determination of the weaker states against the treacherous and despicable USSR totalitarianism and communism. The soviets in turn, written by the hand of Andrei Zhandov saw the capitalist big powers including US and GB as imperialist and anti-democratic, viewing the Truman doctrine as their attempt to impose their views on the world by any mean necessary. The next articles in this chapter focus on the different ideology developments made from the US or the USSR during the cold war against each other and some comments from each side on these views, culminating with Gorbachev and his decision of ending the military control over the other communist states, ushering the end of the cold war and allowing many oppressed states to political and economical independence from the USSR.

The third part compiles different views on the next set of ideas that authors took to describe the world and the new political currents on a world without the ideological war and the dichotomy of the US and the USSR. On one side there is a belief that the "US ideology" of "freedom and democracy" won this war and that this would be at last implemented everywhere, marking the "end of the history" or of geopolitics in the broader sense of the fight for the right "model". The US on the other hand had to find new threads from the other corners of the world in order to justify its military spending and structure, this lead finally to the new view of terrorist states and of "rogue nations", those that the US had to fight in order to achieve peace and tranquillity for its people, this new view of the world culminated, or better said initiated with the invasion of Iraq and the gulf crisis, this vision of course we know is how US operates today and was only reinforced by 9/11, tho the book does not come so far in time. Other authors believe there will be a rise in the power and theories of geo-economics, being this the new driving force to the world's international relations and conflicts as the use of military power and force would have lost its role.

The two final parts of the book concentrates on relative new writings, in which alternative views of geo-politics are presented, those in which the environment and the societies from below will determine the coming world's international relations and source of conflict. From the environmental point of view the nature and the environment is presented as an amalgamation of resources. This resources could be scare, prompting different communities or states into violence or migration, destabilising economies and igniting racial and political conflict. In this environmental thread some authors believe that the Environment has to be taken into the cannon of topics to deal with in order to preserve national security. From the "Anti-politics" point of view, these new politics could be conceived as an ethical, political and cultural force within civil society that challenges the notion that the interest of the state's political class are identical to the community interest. Then on these ideas presenting different views of world politics, presented from different individuals in order to criticise or challenge, US and leading power's policies, as it was the anti-war movement in the US and new understandings of the "orient" as the opposing cultures of the "west".

Many texts presented in this book are very interesting, but generally there is a lack of cohesion uniting these texts, specially in the last 3 parts. The introductions to each section and the conclusion attempts to create this logical cohesion between the texts and to comment on the personal opinion of the author regarding each topic; but at the end, the different articles could be read in parts, in different orders or not at all, and many ideas from the editor of the book would still reach the reader.

Something very frustrating is the clear subjectivity that appears to be endemic of geo-political thinking and of its proponents, as many have said, these "science" is more an empirical science, being performed and changed with the pace of time by politics and statesman(and women), and in their views it is clear how the protection of power of the "first" world is clearly defined by the European and american self-image of civilised, advanced and correct. One proof of these being the separation of the world politic currents in two headed by the US or the USSR, without deepening in the thousand ethical, economical and historical paths that so many nations take besides their interest in communism or capitalism. Most of these theories and postulates where proposed and implemented by the very same white and European race, erasing the validity and importance on many more other cultures, ways and motives perusing different political agendas.

"The geopolitical imagination has been frequently coupled to assertions of cultural superiority and ideological rectitude in the form of various articulations of moral certainty. The dangers of ethnocentrism, when coupled with geopolitical reasoning, are greatest precisely where they assert strategic certainty in ways that prevent analysis of social, political ad economical interactions that would lead sometimes to place the problem on the "us". -Simon Dalby 1996 in his "Reading of Robert Kaplans "coming anarchy".