ABSTRACT
The term ‘geopolitics’ has been popular at times of dramatic global political change and then has tended to recede from use. The term was first used by the Swede Rudolf Kjellen in 1899. It became associated with the formal model of geographical influences on global conflict proposed by the British geographer Halford Mackinder in the early twentieth century in his efforts to promote the field of geography as an aid to the practice of British statecraft. During the 1920s and 1930s Mackinder’s model of a Eurasian ‘heartland’ rising to global dominance if not held in check by cohesive reaction from the (British-dominated) ‘outer or insular crescent’, was adopted by certain German geographers who used it to justify Nazi expansionist designs on Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the term suffered from guilt by association. After the Second World War the term ‘geopolitics’ fell into disuse because of its Nazi connotations and its reliance on ideas of environmental determinism from which professional geographers were in retreat.
