The shortest definition of geopolitics can be successfully as follows: it is simply a tool for recognizing and forecasting interstate relations. Actually, that's enough.
We just gotta add that it is not an omnipotent method, the only 1 that excludes all other, or at least a crucial part of it. Geopolitics has always been questioned and contested, and in modern times rumors of its inadequacy to make mentioned findings are both insistent and even louder.
Is that right? There's a full series of charges against her that you can effort to systematize somehow. For example, an argument is raised that, despite its seemingly rationalized character, it is actually an ideological tool, emphasizing, or even singing the function and importance of empires in the past of the world. It is intended to supply arguments for the moral sanctioning of the regulation of state powers over the full conglomerate of smaller entities. It besides strengthens their vassalization.
Let us agree now that geopolitical considerations can be so used, but more so, as their by-product, alternatively than as a causative factor. Others note that any concepts – mainly those from political and physical geography – are overly absolutized, thus geopolitics are forever burdened with the ballast of utmost determinism. But in the course of past – they originate – the centres of force with state characteristics were created in various, sometimes peripheral and by-products places. What they say can be very easy to demonstrate. Many empires grew up, sometimes from very modest beginnings, specified as Moscow (Zaleska), England or Prussia. Are these comments, then, crushing blows aimed at this direction of political analysis? In turn the 3rd panel of courts has very modern grounds. It is noted that the improvement of military techniques has gone so far that the various geographical conditions invoked by geopoliticians are already marginal and even irrelevant. The strategy of rockets, satellites, airplanes so engulfs the modern planet that the top natural obstacles have lost all importance. Let's decision on to counter-argumentation. First of all, a basic, anthropological observation. Man has specified an indelible property that he thinks spatially. The globe is always a deep plane with 3 dimensions. And to defeat them, or overcome them, it is always essential for a while. No substance how long. And wars are besides fighting the opposition of space itself. This is inactive a key origin in strategical planning.
Finally, the aspect resulting from the site's sculpture. First, let us quote the most crucial one. There are lands and seas. Can you imagine that an empire will be born south of the equator? From this perspective, this is absolutely impossible. The confederate hemisphere is in fact on the margins of a large planet history. Sometimes, at most, she is her secondary background. In turn, mountains, marshes, and forests present are easier to overcome, but not quite. It's safe to bomb. There are besides rockets, bypassing the obstacles resulting from the sculpture of the site. Climate and weather are besides easier to subdue. However, we know that ultimately, in order to attain lasting rule, the land of the enemy must submit to the whippings of our army. In conclusion, geopolitics is inactive well placed on certain and established grounds.
Antoni Koniuszewski
photo public domain
Think Poland, No. 47-48 (20-27.11.2022)
