Foundations of Geopolitics

From the editors
The history and fate of geopolitics as a science is paradoxical. On the one hand, the concept itself seems to have become commonplace, actively used in contemporary politics. Geopolitical journals and institutions are proliferating. The texts of the founders of the discipline are published and republished, conferences and symposia are held, and geopolitical committees and commissions are established.
Nevertheless, geopolitics has so far failed to make it into the category of the conventional conventional conventional sciences. The first geopolitical works of the German Ratzel, the Swede Chellen, and especially of the Englishman Mackinder were all greeted with hostility by the scientific community. Classical scholarship, inheriting the hypercritical spirit of early positivism, believed that geopolitics pretended to overgeneralise and was therefore only a form of “quackery”.
In a way, the sad fate of geopolitics as a science was also linked to the political side of the issue. It has been argued that the war crimes of the Third Reich - expansion, wars, deportations, etc. - were largely theoretically prepared by German geopoliticians, who allegedly provided Hitler’s regime with a pseudoscientific basis. (This referred primarily to Karl Haushofer, a German geopolitical scientist who was at one time quite close to the Führer.)