ABSTRACT

THE CASE FOR POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY When geography was established as a discipline at university at the end of the nineteenth century, political geography was quickly recognized as a specific domain. German modernization of the university through the nineteenth century had created an academia of specialized knowledge in which geography’s intellectual credentials were initially seen as problematic (Taylor 1985b). Pressure to become specialized even led to proposals to focus solely on physical aspects of the discipline, but the geography that eventually emerged from the German universities was holistic, including a human geography based on studying societal change in its physical setting. Friedrich Ratzel, the major proponent of this approach, first demarcated the territory of human geography in his Anthropogeographie, and towards the end of his career, after the publication of various other works, came his Politische Geographie in 1897. This long text (more than 800 pages in the extended second edition of 1903, published just before his death) effectively brings political geography to life as a sub-discipline of human geography (Ratzel 1903). During his years as a student in the life sciences, Ratzel was deeply affected by the

enthusiastic reception of Darwin’s teachings in the German academic world. As he occupied a newly established chair in geography, he developed a perspective that was informed by the lessons he drew from Darwin, a sense that geography had to be a human geography embedded in human history, and his experience in the FrancoGerman war of 1870-1 and as a travelling journalist in the more exotic parts of Europe and the Americas. By the time he wrote Politische Geographie, he was still strongly marked by the evolutionary perspective, but he was certainly not an all-out environmental determinist. At this juncture, Germany’s unification in the second Reich was still fresh and Germany’s international position had again become a major issue, not least in Germany itself. The forces that pushed for great power status were growing stronger. Ratzel was among the supporters of this movement (Büttmann 1977).