ABSTRACT
Political geography has the obvious attraction of presenting a broad view of affairs, and its generalizations can at least give rise to stimulating debate. The most vital result of the 1914-18 war was the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy and the exclusion of Turkey from all save one corner of Europe. Contrary to expectations, German militarism was not subdued for ever nor was Russia permanently relegated to an interior-continental enclosure from which it could hardly be expected to go forth into the world power arena. Self-determination as a principle of political geography after the 1914-18 war gave Europe a number of boundaries that seemed highly unnatural. The trouble was that geopolitics rapidly became a Weltanschauung, obliged to be practical, to point the way to the future, to plan and devise. Originating in Sweden with Kjellen (1864-1920), geopolitics attracted little attention until the 1914-18 war, when Kjellen's main work Staten som Lifsfortn appeared in 1916.
