Suchergebnisse

Geopolitics has in recent years been framed as a flat discourse whose cartographic obsessions prevent it from appreciating both the vertical dimension in which statecraft and armed conflict operate as well as the earth's geologic agency. This assessment, I argue, is based on an incomplete reading of the geopolitical tradition. A journey through the history of geopolitics reveals that whilst thinkers like Alfred Mahan, Halford Mackinder and Carl Schmitt displayed a tendency for flat earth thinking, it was the German political geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) who developed a rich tapestry of terms to theorise the power and politics of geology and the underground. The advent of large scale conventional and later nuclear bombing in the 1940s prompted geopoliticians on both sides of the Atlantic to become increasingly interested in the 3-dimensionality of the struggle for space. This paper suggests the need for a dialogue between the intellectual history of geopolitics and the growing literatures on geopower and vertical geopolitics.

European integration studies has recently seen the first signs of a belated critical turn. While new approaches have started to challenge the way the European Union is conventionally studied, they are yet to investigate in detail the relationship between the academic field and its primary object of study. This article draws on work in critical geopolitics to explore one of the interfaces of academic knowledge on European integration and the world of policy: the Jean Monnet Programme. In highlighting the scheme's role in the EU's Eastern geopolitics, it argues that European integration studies resembles other forms of area studies, such as cold war era Sovietology. This comparison elucidates both the field's long-standing resilience to critical theory and its inability to anticipate the recent crisis of the European project.

This article stages an encounter between contemporary vitalist thought and the work of the controversial zoologist turned political geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). The remarkable degree of congruence between Ratzel's ideas and contemporary more-than-human geography, I argue, opens up crucial questions about vitalism as a political project. A discussion of Ratzel's concept and personal experience of war brings into sharp focus a number of problems in the academic language used by vitalism to blur the boundary between nature and society. The article concludes by suggesting that vitalism should pay closer attention to its own place in the history of modern biopolitical thought.

Recent research has located the camp as the paradigmatic space that emerges when geopolitics and biopolitics intersect. In doing so, it has neglected another space that is indispensable for an understanding of the nexus of these two modalities of power: the nuclear bunker. This paper explores the West German government's now abandoned nuclear bunker in the Ahr valley. Constructed on the site of a subterranean World War 2 concentration camp, the bunker hosted a number of NATO exercises, which simulated nuclear war on German soil. Through an analysis of the site's military–strategic context and its technical and security features, the paper relates it to its predecessor—the camp—and uncovers a number of spatial overlaps and inversions between the two. Whilst similarly situated within a context of legal exceptionality, logistics, and total war, the concentrated and confined living space of the nuclear bunker turned the camp's logic of extermination inside out. The nuclear bunker was a concrete crypt in which sovereign power and total war sought to find eternal peace.

This article investigates Fallex 66, the first of a string of NATO war games that the West German government played in its command bunker between 1966 and 1989. During this exercise, the Bonn Republic simulated nuclear strikes on its 'own' targets and the resupply of NATO forces after a nuclear war on German territory. While in line with West German deterrence at the time, Fallex was read in East Berlin as an excessive game of playful self‐annihilation in ways that invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. This article explores Fallex 66 not simply as an enactment of Cold War deterrence, but a Freudian 'fort–da' game, a traumatic re‐enactment that was tellingly set in the subterranean space of a German bunker. West Germany's compulsion to self‐abandon, I suggest, has important implications for how we understand the nature of geopolitical games.

In recent years, the Anglo-American media landscape has pondered over an old problem: that of German hegemony in Europe. At the heart of this debate lies the question of geopolitics. Is Germany, deliberately or by accident, a regional hegemon, and do its political elites seek to reorganize Berlin's neighbours into a pan-European architecture that prioritizes Germany's national interest? This question is not as straightforward as it may sound, not least because geopolitical thought was long a taboo in Germany, due to its influence on the formulation of National Socialist ideology in the 1920s. This article thus seeks to answer this question by focusing not on the often sanitized statements of political leaders but on the ideas of think-tankers, journalists, political advisers and public intellectuals, many of whom have had a significant influence on the formulation of German foreign policy. The article argues that, while geopolitical ideas were long confined to the right-wing margins of the political spectrum, they are now much more prevalent in the political mainstream. As Germany's relations with the United States and Russia have gradually soured, this new German geopolitics has once again become preoccupied by the notion of Germany as a central power.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked – the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptualization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.

This set of interventions therefore re-examines the practices, institutions and knowledges involved in the political geographies of area. There has been important previous work that has pursued such questions across a range of sites and epochs, including early twentieth-century Britain ( Dickinson & Howarth, 1933), Cold War America (Farish, 2005), post-1991 Europe (Toal, 2003) and globalizing North America in the late 1990s (Lewis & Wigen, 1997). At the heart of our discussion though, are the ways in which the study of areas remains imbricated with questions of geography and geopolitics.