ABSTRACT
Political geography grew out of the scientific geography of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This view drew heavily on evolutionary biology, the leading natural science of the day, through the linking device of the organismic analogy – i.e. the idea that human societies were like natural organisms, evolving and becoming more perfect in relation to the physical environment. These were powerful, socio-biological ideas, apparently backed by the very latest in scientific thought and, more importantly, ideologically functional to the expanding Euro-American powers in the second imperialism of 1870–1914 (Dorpalen 1942, Peet 1985). Anthropogeographic ideas found their most powerful expression in the emerging schools of political geography in Anglo-America and geopolitics in Germany. The prominent British geographer Mackinder (1931, p. 326) was no stranger to organismic thinking, believing, for example, that a common blood flowed through the veins of generations of people living in the same natural region; however his widely known sayings were more narrowly geostrategic – for example his generalization that whoever controls the heartland of central Asia controls the world (Mackinder 1904). In Germany, Haushofer combined Mackinder's heartland idea with Ratzel's organismic notion of Lebensraum (a state's ‘living space’) in a world model of pan-regions dominated by Germany, Japan, and Anglo-America. Haushofer's ideas were influential in Nazi Germany and derivations (heartland-rimland) survived as explanations of US–Soviet rivalry in the Cold War (Taylor 1985, pp. 40–3).
