ABSTRACT
Geopolitics was a form of theorising on the nature and centres of global power given the progressive integration of the planet. It flourished from the 1870s to the 1940s during the struggle for domination; thereafter it has subsided, given effective American supremacy. The core of the doctrine was that power was global and that the players were not sovereign states but power blocs, also known by the German equivalent, the Grossraum. But different theorists have stressed their peculiar concerns: the British Mackinder, the nature of sea power and land power; the Germans, the organic and expanding state and need for living space or Lebensraum; the Americans, the fact of the expanding state and a global alliance structure or power bloc to face down challengers, Russian, German, or Japanese. After 1991, interest has revived in the concept, but more as the diffused nature of global power rather than of competing power blocs, as before 1945.
