Historical aspects of geopolitical processes in the modern world

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Ternopil National Pedagogical University named after Volodymyr Hnatyuk

Historical aspects of geopolitical processes in the modern world

Taranova N.B.

Zastavetska L.B.

Zastavetskyi T.B.

Introduction

geopolitical narrative power international

The Humanity in its effort to understand the world, in recent decades has been increasingly concerned with geopolitics. Geopolitics is an extremely important tool of theoretical analysis that aims to interpret and predict the processes and ways in which a political entity seeks to gain or increase its power in the international environment. In other words, it constitutes the «geography of power», reducing the science of Geography and the concept of «space» to important parameters in the process of interpreting the entanglement of international relations. In geopolitical narratives, the concepts of space and geography are of particular value as space is perceived as a source of wealth as well as a distance from a starting point to a destination. In this sense, geopolitics is a dynamic approach combined with technological development.

Presenting main material

In the 1970s, in the phase of the Cold War recession, geopolitics would re-emerge as a theory and factor shaping foreign policy and international relations to the point where new schools of thought were created. This time period was not accidental. The vague way in which geopolitics began to be used from that period onwards, since it was used for a wide variety of subjects, was also not accidental. This period is the beginning of great international changes that were also characterized by ambiguity, which allowed the use of geopolitics on many issues in an instinctive way, with the result that geopolitics is used in modern debates because it was considered appropriate, which, of course, which did not apply in all cases « ... considered in [1, p. 9-22] ... »

It is believed that from the 1970s onwards that geopolitics began to become «fashionable» due to the global changes that took place. We must not, however, overlook the fact that in the past humanity considered that it could change and affect any change that took place in the natural and geographical environment. The twenty years 1950-1970, however, contributed to the change of this perception. This period was characterized by industrial development in the field of energy production, which presupposed the development of the use of internal combustion engines. However, this development has led to the degradation of the environment and the realization that man does not control the environment but is part of it and should take care of it and not burden it. So from the control that man thought he had on the planet, we went to the period when man began to worry about it. This change also brought about the return of the geographical way of thinking about man and the environment. This was done because man understood that in order to preserve the environment he would have to act in the light of the constraints it imposes. Awareness of environmental problems increased further after the end of the Cold War. At that time, humanity realized that all these innovations and discoveries that at first seemed to be savior, such as nuclear energy, ended up being catastrophic for the planet. The great environmental concern, therefore, brings back to the forefront all the sciences that have as their central point of concern the planet and consequently the geopolitical.

The geopolitical reality of the third and final phase of the Cold War, the 1980s, will intensify the geopolitical debate. Moreover, the end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, ushered in an era of liquidity and insecurity. In the context of a continuing trend of globalization, borders are being dismantled and nationalisms are being strengthened, while the development and transfer of technology is contributing to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This post-modern reality raises new concerns about the form and nature of the risks and threats faced by state entities, which are gradually taking on a global character as they cease to be directly related to the territorial factor. The threats and dangers of the last decades concern the states, mainly, for the consequences that may have on the economic, social and environmental balance and which impose collaborations or interventions in the level of international politics, or at least this is often claimed by powerful states, such as. The United States, whenever it undertakes interventions and action in national territories outside its borders in order to avert a danger or threat.

However, the geopolitical narratives that will be interpreted in the context of the post-bipolar world (none of which will be characterized as dominant) will not be able to escape the geopolitical narratives of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which were strongly ethnocentric. or quite ideological. They constitute, as a whole, holistic interpretations of international politics that emphasize the geographical meaning of «space» while at the same time linking the analysis of international politics with the practice of foreign policy.

Later geopolitical theorists would challenge the political innocence of classical geopolitical thought which, instead of being objective and timeless, is linked to specific historical and cultural conditions. The new scientific approach that will emerge is called critical geopolitics and aims to demonstrate the superficial and often militaristic ways in which geopolitics «reads» maps in order to interpret and understand the world « ... considered in [2, p. 85-113] ... »

For critical geopolitics, the theoretical search for the role of geography in shaping the foreign policy of states and international relations is based on three axes:

there is a policy behind all forms of geographical knowledge.

there are specific geographical assumptions on which all political practices are based.

in order for the first two relationships to be revealed, a challenge to what is taken for granted, stable and permanent, is required.

Therefore, critical geopolitics will attempt through the process of «deconstruction» to reveal the contradictions and contradictions that were well hidden behind a superficial meaning of statements, texts, and speeches of the past.

Geography and conflict. At their core, international relations revolve around the dilemmas that arise regarding the lack of international power and the problems, possibilities and prospects of authoritarian construction of the international space beyond and beyond state sovereignty. That is, it concerns the form and character of the regulatory structures that determine the degree of «regulation» or «anarchy» in transnational relations «...known from [3] ...». The crucial issue for international relations is related to questions about the causes of war and peace. Hegemony, controversial transnational differences and different or conflicting interests between states are studied by scholars and politicians in order to eliminate or maintain the existing social and state diversity «...known from [3] ...». Therefore, the realization of the goals and aspirations of a collective subject of international relations (nation-state) influenced by the constraints imposed by the environment and the international environment (interests of Great Powers, actions of other collective subjects, opposite or hostile) and war, as a last resort for each state to preserve its autonomy and independence.

The existence of contradictions and hostile moves are explained by specific features of the international environment, and in particular, the inequality in the development and power of the collective subjects of the international environment, the competing interests among them and the hegemonic pursuits of some of them or the promotion of ideas and policies that oppose state security as an institution of expression and autonomy of the collective entity in the international system, as well as the remnants of historical memory that create conflict reflexes and security dilemmas. These characteristics are the independent variables of the phenomenon of conflict (or causes of war) which, in a broad sense, includes all forms and types of confrontation of two or more collective entities, starting from the mildest forms of a conflict (e.g. exchange of verbal threats) and reaches the point of using widespread, intensified and incessantly repeated violence. This wide range of conflict situations includes the international crisis, which represents a change in the form or intensity of the ruptured interaction between two or more dominant collective entities, due to the threat they feel to vital (survival or strategic) or their secondary interests and values, from the actions or general attitude of the other entities. This situation implies an increased possibility of military action (hostilities) between them, which ultimately poses a challenge to the stability and maintenance of the existing structure of the international system, in which the crisis erupts. The concept of power, in this case, is the crucial parameter as from the inequality observed in this magnitude, between the collective subjects of international relations, depends the action - the transformation of intention into action. Power, however, is linked to the different and interconnected levels of generality of geopolitical potential. Consequently, the difference in the potential of two or more collective subjects, in addition to being the sole cause of conflict / war, affects how a threat is addressed. Especially in the case of the crisis, in which the strength and the will of a collective entity to preserve its values and promote its interests, under conditions of immediate threat, time pressure and high risk of military action, with the possibility of destabilizing the international system visible, power and through it, the geopolitical potential, directly and decisively affect the way of crisis management. Geography, as directly related to the concept of geopolitical potential, and consequently power, is a particularly important parameter as an independent variable for the decision-making process and the general evolution of the crisis phenomenon. More specifically, geography appears both as a characteristic of the actors (extent, depth, unity of space, soil morphology, length of borders and number of bordering states) and as a variable of the interaction between them (geographical distance). The concepts of geographical area, depth, geographical shape and dispersion (unity or fragmentation), the morphology of space and the distance between those involved, are factors associated with the manifestation of the geopolitical potential of a collective entity at a regular / operational level., the most specialized and directly related concept of geopolitical potential to geographical data, which are comparatively taken into account. The geopolitical (geostrategic or geoeconomic) value of a crisis, at the broader political and strategic level, depends on the importance of the region in which the crisis erupts and the type of interests affected for each of those involved in this crisis (the importance of this from a geopolitical point of view) as well as the conditions of economic and technological development, which largely determine the needs of those involved in the. The size of the geopolitical value depends on the number of people involved (since it is more likely that, in a crisis that breaks out and develops in an area of increased geostrategic or geo-economic interest, values and interests of an increasing number of states are at stake) and the size and form of intervention. of the great powers in an international crisis. Finally, the magnitude of the geopolitical value of a crisis partly explains its implications, both for those involved and for the system within which it erupts. A crisis of greater geopolitical value - involving more than one regional subsystem, the dominant system or the global system - is more likely to lead to greater structural change.

The condemnation of geopolitics. With the defeat of Germany in World War II (which cost the lives of 55,000,000 people, mostly civilians), geopolitics went into obscurity. The notion of its close connection to Nazism led to its almost complete rejection by Western European and North American intellectuals. The prevailing perception in Western universities was that «few ideologies are as eccentric and as romantically foggy and as mentally sketchy» as classical geopolitics. Classical geopolitical ideas retained some influence only in some Latin American countries, while in Eurasia they remained almost entirely marginal, with the sole exception of Russia in the 1990s. Mankind's great condemnation and hatred of geopolitics was evident in the fact that Karl Haushofer, director of the Institute of Geopolitics at the University of Munich at the same time as Nazism was on the rise in Germany, was considered the moral perpetrator of war crimes. by the Nazis. It is a fact that many of those who attended Haushofer's lectures and teachings were executives and officers of the National Socialist Party, including Hitler himself. However, in 1941 Haushofer had disagreed with Hitler who wanted to declare war on the Soviet Union, and this disagreement led to his isolation from the Nazis. Nevertheless, he continued to support the existence of a wider German living space. In 1946, while he had already been charged with war crimes, he committed suicide with his Jewish wife «...known from [4] ...»

Haushofer saw geopolitics as a synthesis of science and art. He also considered it to consist of history, economics, politics, biology, and spatial and territorial references. More specifically, he considered the state to be a territorial organism and a superindividual living substance. As such, as a supra-atomic substance, that is, it obeys biological laws. The conditions for the success of such a state are spatial and only spatial in nature. In 1945, while accusations were leveled against him, Haushofer wrote his last book. The Apologie der Deutschen Geopolitik, which was essentially an apology. In this book he made a distinction between man and scientist. As a scientist he defended the view that geopolitics was no different from the other sciences and that his view, after 1918, that Germany needed more living space was objective. As a man, however, he admitted that he had weaknesses and that he was drawn to his country's war tactics.

Geopolitics and the Cold War. The post-World War II period is marked by American anguish and efforts to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Europe and Northeast Asia. The United States, not having the option of carrying cargo (since the European Powers were in a miserable economic and military situation) was the only major power that could stop the Soviet army. Thus, in the context of the Cold War, a constant rivalry between the two superpowers for acquiring allies and bases around the world and their constant military and nuclear equipment, humanity will experience the worst nightmare for forty-five years (until 1990). The first phase of the Cold War resulted in the repulsion of any geopolitical debate. In the United States since the 1940s, many scholars have tried to talk about a peaceful geopolitics. A typical example is the case of Spykman. Nickolas Spykman, a professor at the Yale Institute for International Studies in German geopolitics of war, proposed a geopolitics of peace at the time of the outbreak of World War II, free of distortions. of the term «geopolitics» is not a sufficient cause to blame its method and material. The term is apt to convey a way of analysis and a body of data necessary to reach intelligent decisions on specific aspects of international politics. We have ignored this term in the past, with results to our detriment, so that in 1917 and 1941 the war appeared as the only corrective move. However, scientists in other countries, whether they had won or were defeated in the war, did not agree with the use of geopolitics for other reasons « ... considered in [5, p. 106-115] ... ». They believed that geopolitics should be completely rejected and the rejection was so universal that in the 1950s and 1960s no one mentioned geopolitics, as they considered it synonymous with the devastation of war. For Parker, this universal rejection was due to two main reasons: a) Although the war was over, horrific war crimes were being exposed that shocked humanity. In an attempt to condemn these crimes, geopolitics was rejected because they considered it, even if falsely, to legitimize them, b) that period marked the beginning of the Cold War which immobilized all developments internationally and consequently geopolitical thought. The first phase of the Cold War was the hardest and required the absolute respect of the delicate «balances of terror» between the two superpowers and their respective military alliances, in order to prevent a catastrophic nuclear war. The United States has been a nuclear superpower from the beginning, and the USSR would soon follow suit. Thus, any relevant discussion could lead to real or fictitious escalating differences and contradictions. Geopolitics, therefore, although it almost disappeared as an independent scientific field and as a concept from the West, did not in fact die with Nazism. Instead, he continued to exert influence, often under other names and disguises. Geopolitics continued to exist as a concept, as a set of supposedly «objective» geographical interpretations of international relations. As a concept, geopolitics has survived mainly in the circles of policy makers. After all, the geopolitical views of politicians and diplomats have always influenced foreign policy much more than any Mackinder or Haushofer. The 1960s saw a shift in American politics from the rhetoric of Willson and Kennedy to the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger. Kissinger served as Nixon and his administration's personal adviser and secretary of state. He is, in essence, the man who will bring geopolitics back to the forefront of international politics and diplomacy in the 1970s « ... considered in [6, p. 58, 181-199] ... ». According to Kissinger, geopolitics is equivalent to the broad concept of realistic policy which is pursued for the benefit and service of the national interest defined at the global level. The breadth of this interpretation suggested, on the one hand, a tendency to move away from the negative consequences of the restrictive theory of «living space» and, on the other, the recognition of an impending complexity in international relations. During this period, the Cold War is going through the phase of Recession, which was characterized by mutual acceptance between the superpowers that in the context of international competition they would not use nuclear weapons. The US-Soviet agreements on mutual control of the nuclear arsenal launched a new code of communication between the states on the basis of basic common principles of self-restraint. At the same time, imperialism will move from the phase of decolonization of the world to global politics. Both Kissinger and Mackinder will represent in their theories the island, naval states and their interests. Their interest is focused on the mainland mass of Eurasia and those Forces that could hold the power of this area thus excluding the access of the island forces. For Kissinger, "America is an island off the coast of Eurasia, whose resources and population are much larger than those of the United States. «The dominance of a single power in either of Eurasia's two main spheres - Europe or Asia - remains a good definition of strategic risk for America». Therefore, no power should prevail over others in Eurasia, which would be tantamount to a threat to the planetary interests of the «American island» (as has happened in the past in the case of the British Isles) « ... considered in [6, p. 181-199] ... ».

Conclusions

The ultimate goal of a state's foreign policy is to promote the national interest of a country (in terms of power), as defined by its government at a given historical moment, with the aim of maximizing profits and minimizing losses. The national interest is inextricably linked to the main goals, aspirations and priorities of a state's foreign policy. It concerns first and foremost the vital issues in relation to other states, and the international or global issues related to the country's survival, its defense, its security and its territorial integrity.

Issues related to vital national interests, and in the first place the external sovereignty (independence), survival and security of a country, fall within what is called «high politics», as opposed to «low politics», which concerns economic and other issues of lesser importance between states, which are easier to deal with and more easily lead to a mutually beneficial “positive sum” solution than high-policy issues. Today, with the increasing globalization and the great importance of economic parameters in the international, and also the internal life of states, the distinction between high and low politics is more indistinguishable, as well as the classic distinction of realism between foreign and domestic policy.

Decision-making is central to the political process, in both domestic and foreign policy. The scientific field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) is the study of the foreign policy of states, i.e. how decisions are taken and why specific decisions and initiatives in international life by states in general or by specific states in specific situations that arise. The main instrument of foreign policy is diplomacy.

References

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2. Duke, S. (2017). The return of geopolitics and relations to the East. In Europe as a Stronger Global Actor (p. 85-113). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

3. Hephaestus P. (2000) Diplomacy and Strategy of the great European forces of France, Germany, Great Britain, Quality Publications, Athens.

4. Vergos K. (2004) Geopolitics of Nations and Globalization - For a History of Geography and a Geography of History, Papazisis Publications, Athens.

5. Browning, C.S. (2018). Geostrategies, geopolitics and ontological security in the Eastern neighbourhood: The European Union and the `new Cold War'. Political Geography, Volume 62, p. 106-115.

6. McCook, S., & Peterson, P.D. (2020). The Geopolitics of Plant Pathology: Frederick Wellman, Coffee Leaf Rust, and Cold War Networks of Science. Annual Review of Phytopathology, 58(1), 181-199.

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