of the position that national boundaries are
the outcome of changes in political conscious-
ness and are thus culturally contingent and
not fixed features of the global political land-
scape. Perhaps the most visible element in the
intellectual cross-fertilization between new
understandings of culture and political geogra-
phy has been the expropriation of precisely
the most militaristic and nationalistic strain in
political geography: geopolitics (Ó Tuathail,
1996; Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992).
The term geopoliticswas invented by the
Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjelln in
1899 to refer to the harnessing of geographi-
cal knowledge to further the aims of specific
national states. If Kjelln was concerned to dis-
pute the claim of Norwegian nationalists
(Norway was part of Sweden until 1905) that
the mountain spine down Scandinavia consti-
tuted a natural boundary between two dis-
tinctive peoples by arguing that seas and rivers
were much more significant, the term ‘geo-
politics’ came to be applied by German thinkers
in the 1920s and 1930s, most notoriously Karl
Haushofer, to formal models of great power
enmities based on their relative global loca-
tion and need to establish territorial spheres
of influence to feed their urge to expand.
Through this formalization, Friedrich Ratzel’s
idea of states as organic entities came to
inform German foreign policy after the Nazi
accession to governmental power in Germany
in 1933. After World War II the association
with the Nazis gave the word ‘geopolitics’ a
negative connotation. Though used informally
to refer to the geographical structure of inter-
national relations in the 1950s and 1960s, it
has only been since the 1970s that the word
has re-entered political geography as a key
concept.
Classically concerned with the direct
impact of physical geography and the relative
location of states on international conflict,
imperial expansion and interstate war, geo-
politics can be seen, in a radically alternative
conception, as the deeply social and cultural
process by which leaders and ordinary citi-
zens in some of the world’s most powerful
states make geopolitical sense of the world.
Instead of the leadingly deterministic question
‘How does the soil or geographic location of
a state affect its foreign policy?’, a more cul-
turalist question emerged: ‘How does thegeopolitical culture of a state spatialize world
politics and fill it with certain defining dramas
and dangers, friends and enemies?’ In this
latter question the notion of ‘geopolitics’ as a
fixed and given fact of nature is challenged by
an understanding of it as a tradition of
discourse and debate about territorial nation-
state identity and its relationship to the wider
world. ‘Geopolitics’ becomes ‘geopolitical
culture’. This latter understanding of geopoli-
tics reinterprets seemingly naturalist geopoliti-
cal arguments – that, for example, the United
States acts the way it does because it is sur-
rounded by two large oceans and separated
from the other power centers of the world –
as geopolitical traditions of argumentation and
discourse (on Russian geopolitical culture see
Smith, 1999). From within its perspective, the
geopolitical culture of the United States is dis-
tinguished by competing traditions of univer-
salism (the United States represents the
aspirations of humankind) and isolationism
(the United States is a distinct and virtuous
sphere and should minimize its dealing with
the corruption beyond its borders), both of
which cast themselves in abstract philosophic
not geographic terms, and are also mediated
by a functional geographic illiteracy about the
world beyond America’s shores (Agnew,
1984). Such a critical geopolitics draws atten-
tion to how geographical claims and argu-
ments are used to direct and justify various
foreign policy actions and inform environ-
mental and economic development practices.
This approach is not without considerable
internal contention. If one tendency involves the
relative commitment to postmodernist under-
standings of geopolitics as a type of discourse,
another concerns the degree to which states
should retain the centrality of focus. Some schol-
ars remain relatively more committed to mod-
ernist theoretical approaches, involving claims
about technological and economic processes as
‘behind’ discursive shifts, whereas others reject
the possibility of such ontologies, preferring to
focus largely on the discursive constitution of
ontological claims (for example, Agnew and
Corbridge, 1995, versus Ó Tuathail, 1996).Again,
whereas some inhabit a world still largely made
up of and by states, others are sceptical of such
a singular division of the world, preferring to
think in terms of the relative ‘balance’ between
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