ABSTRACT
Borders are not a new idea, as China, as well as Greece and Egypt demonstrate, but it is only recently that they have spread across the world. There are no border problems; there are only problems with regard to relations between states and peoples around borders. But situations around borders remain, in the vast majority of Third World states, much more ‘fluid’ than in Europe. What counts in geostrategy is the interaction between the lines and the organisation of the two adjacent national spaces, the distance and time between a border and the opposing ‘strategic places’. Viewed from the issues raised by borders, geopolitics is an overall method of geographical analysis of concrete socio-political situations viewed as localised and the usual representations which describe them. It determines the geographical coordinates of a situation and socio-political process and deciphers the cartographic discourses and images which ‘accompany’ them. The difficulty in conceiving of the internal and the external synchronically is no doubt due to the strangeness of distant places, their heterogeneous and discontinuous character. The external interactions described or imagined constitute the most important factor in so-called ‘international’ relations of proximity. These should be considered, not as a mechanical product but as a systemic combination.
