[Geoffry Sloan, Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History. Routledge. New York, 2017. 251 p.]

June 19, 2018

review / Emili J. Blasco

Today we are witnessing a frequent use of the term geopolitics that is often empty of content. After decades of stigmatization of the word, given the contamination it suffered in the first third of the 20th century by elaborations such as Lebensraum, its employment has become more widespread in recent years as China and Russia have begun to take positions in the new post-unipolar world order. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to speak of geopolitics as a mere synonym for international relations, without a specific meaning.

Geoffrey Sloan, a British academic specializing in Halford Mackinder, one of the great names in geopolitics, purpose to remind us of the strict value of the concept, stripping it of trivializations or misunderstandings. Sloan understands geopolitics as a "tripartite construction" of geography, strategy and history, elements that give rise to the degree scroll of his book.

The author situates the dawn of geopolitics in a "first wave" of thinkers distant in time and in their philosophical conceptions, such as Aristotle, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, but it was not until the "second wave", at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, that the discipline adopted this name and defined its contours with Ratzel, Mahan, Mackinder, Haushofer... After a long period of ostracism, because it was considered that some totalitarianisms had fed on the ravings of certain schools, at the beginning of the 21st century the term geopolitics is making a comeback. However, in Sloan's opinion, it is affected by a triple problem: its lack of definition, the lack of scientific bibliography and its confusion with realpolitik.

Today we have begun to speak of geopolitics so habitually that it has come to lose its proper meaning. "The term geopolitics has enjoyed a ghostly afterlife, becoming something used everywhere while being drained of substantive theoretical content, and is used in so many ways that it has become meaningless, if not further specified," warns a quotation by S. R. Gokmen.

As opposed to its generic use, assimilated to that of international politics, Sloan vindicates its original meaning, absolutely attached to geography. "Although the whole policy of a state does not derive from its geography," say the 1938 words of Nicholas Spykman - another classic of geopolitics - that open the book, "the state cannot escape that geography. Size, shape, location, topography and climate set conditions from which there is no escape, no matter how qualified the Foreign Office or how well resourced the General Staff may be".

The temporal break in geopolitical thinking - Sloan notes that no book on geopolitics was published in English between 1945 and 1977 - may explain why many have lost the notion of the strict geographical content of the term today. But even among those who seem to want to give it a specific meaning, there is the confusion of assimilating geopolitics with the realist theory of international relations. According to Sloan, "perhaps the most common mistaken assumption about geopolitical theory is its symbiotic relationship with the realist approach. It holds that all thinking about international relations should begin with the recognition of the primacy of power and that geographic factors are a vital part of the evaluation power". The author warns that an idealistic approach is also possible in geopolitics, since it is neither tied to the administrative state nor exclusively identified with conservative political ideologies.

Sloan proposes a "trinity structure" of geopolitics, in a diagram where the relationship between geography and strategy generates geostrategy, the relationship between geography and history gives rise to historical geography, and the relationship between history and strategy derives in diplomatic history.

The approach of the work is theoretical in its first part, and then gives way to certain historical concretions, mostly in the light of concepts elaborated by Mackinder.