Political Geography 19 (2000) 957969 www.elsevier.

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Ratzel, the French School and the birth of Alternative Geopolitics

Geoffrey Parker
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

Abstract Modern French political geography began as a response to Ratzels Politische Geographie and then became an attempt to place ratzelian ideas into the context of French geographical thought. What then emerged was a political geography which was set rmly in opposition to German geopolitics. There were some geographers who felt that a more effective response could be made by developing an indigenous French geopolitics. This can be seen as being the origin of the alternative geopolitics which was favoured by some American geographers during and after World War II and which subsequently became an important underlying theme in the new geopolitics which arose in the 1970s. The concept of an alternative geopolitics has owed a great deal to the French school of geography and has it roots in the original response of Vidal de la Blache to Ratzel. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Ratzel; Vidal de la Blache; Ancel; Geopolitics; Alternative geopolitics

From the beginnings of modern political geography in France, Friedrich Ratzel was a looming presence across the Rhine. As was the case elsewhere in Europe and America, his work was a signicant benchmark in geographical study. Ratzels Anthropogeographie was reviewed in the rst volume of Annales de Geographie (189293) and, following the publication of Politische Geographie in 1897, this book was also reviewed in Annales, the reviewer on this occasion being none other than Vidal de la Blache himself (Vidal de la Blache, 1898). Vidal was already a major force in French geography and this review was in its way as seminal as was Politische Geographie since it sought to establish the ground rules for the application of the vidalian methodology to the new eld of political geography. In his review, Vidal clearly recognised the signicance of the ideas of Ratzel as being what Korinman was later to call an epistemological moment (Korinman, 1983:12842). The real signicance of Ratzels work, wrote Vidal, lay in the grouping and coordination of phenomena so as to give the new political geography its own core of ideas
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(Vidal de la Blache, ibid:98). Ratzel undertook this grouping, wrote Vidal, with a view to distinguishing laws, and in so doing he had aimed to establish a rm foundation for the new political geography. While accepting the importance of this, Vidal took issue both with a number of aspects of the ratzelian approach and with the treatment of political geography as a separate sub-discipline. He refused to accept that the state was, in ratzelian terminology, a living organism, and was prepared only to concede that states resembled living things. Likewise he considered it as premature to attempt to formulate laws at that stage and conned himself to accepting only the existence of certain methodological principles (ibid:111). More fundamentally, he was convinced that it was not possible for political geography to exist in some kind of annexe adjacent to, but separate from, the rest of geography. According to Vidal It (political geography) is far too deeply rooted in general geography for such an approach to be at all viable (ibid:1034). Running through this 1898 review of Politische Geographie is the clear sense that Vidal was uneasy with political geography. He felt it to be menaced by political ideas about the state which emanated from outside and which were foreign to geography. Thus from the outset he saw the danger that political geography would become vulnerable to political pressures and absorb preconceived and fundamentally ungeographical notions about the nature of the state. Geographers must not be bound by some pre-existing model of the state in the ratzelian territorial sense, he warned. They should come to these questions with an open mind and bring geographical thinking to bear on them. This meant that they had to be prepared to examine all types of states including imperfect, embryonic or rudimentary forms of the state. While he identied such forms in what he referred to as local government, the higher forms, in Vidals estimation, included the nation and the city-state (ibid:107). The phenomena of political geography are not xed entities %. Cities and states represent forms which have already evolved to arrive at the point where we now observe them and which may still continue to evolve. We must therefore see them as being changing phenomena (les faits en mouvement) (ibid:108). Such changes may be brought about by many factors, he concluded, but most signicantly they were likely to be brought about by advances in the methods of transport and communication. This vidalian idea of the evolution of state types represented something which was in many ways an even more radical concept at the end of the nineteenth century than was geopolitical evolution in the the ratzelian sense. Vidal clearly envisaged the possibility of the development of different types of political entities which were, in the evolutionary terminology of the period, conceived of as being, in many cases, quite different geopolitical species from the contemporary territorial states. This thinking was the product of a political geography which was seen as being inextricably bound up with geography as a whole and therefore subject to the same basic principles as was general geography. Since the state was conceived of as being part of a wider holistic system, thus arises the necessity not to study the state as an isolated compartment, some sort of a slice of the earths surface. By its origins, its direction, its stages of development and the provisional nature of its existence it

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is part of a wider group (of phenomena) the life of which interpenetrates its own (ibid:109). Two decades later, in the wake of World War I, the study of political geography in France took a great leap forward. A number of French geographers had been actively involved as advisers at the peace conference and the new political map which emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles incorporated some, at least, of the results of their thinking on major issues (Parker, 1987:14). Lucien Gallois used the pages of Annales to urge French geographers to give more of their attention to the study of states and of the new political organisations which are being established (Gallois, 1919:248). From then on political geography assumed a central role in the understanding of the signicance of the immense changes which had taken place to the political map of Europe and of their implications for France in particular. Vidal de la Blache had died prematurely shortly before the end of the war, and it was left to a new generation of geographers to take up the challenge. Until then French political geography had consisted to a large extent of a kind of extended response to Ratzel and this had entailed both a critical examination of ratzelian thought and an attempt to apply vidalian principles to those areas judged to be of real importance. By implication, this also necessitated the search for alternatives to ratzelian ideas when this was considered necessary. Most signicant among those who now sought such alternatives were Albert Demangeon, Jacques Ancel and Yves-Marie Goblet. While all three paid respect to the great contribution made by Ratzel, all were geographers in la tradition vidalienne, and the underlying theme of their work was the conviction that the study of the state could not take place in isolation from the rest of the phenomena of human geography. On the contrary, it had to be considered as being essentially part of these phenomena and responsive to overall changes within them. These geographers saw the relationship of political geography to the totality of geography as being most clearly demonstrated in the nation, and the relationship was revealed at its most subtle and sensitive in that carefully balanced structure, the nation-state. In vidalian geography the nation was regarded as being a product of the genre de vie of a people which had developed in a particular geographical environment. The cultural characteristics of such a nation resulted from the creative interplay of the general and the local, civilisation and milieu. At its most satisfactory the state constituted the political expression of this cultural individuality. However, it was fully recognised by the French geographers that the state system at any particular time and place all too rarely accorded absolutely with the genre de vie of its inhabitants. All too often the reality was that states lacked the responsiveness to genres de vie which constituted, from the geographical perspective, the necessary condition of their legitimacy. They were the products of wars and dynastic alliances which had been forged over long periods of time and they based their legitimacy on claims to legality deriving from the sanction of successive treaties. The extent to which they could be said to be deeply rooted in general geography was very much open to question. The old treaties, wrote Goblet, had been considered as being as immutable, as intangible, as tablets dictated on some Sinai (Goblet, 1934:4). Such purely juridicial texts were supposedly eternal, he went on, and could be transfor-

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med or abolished only by force (ibid:259). As a result, all too often in modern times it had been statism, claiming the right to act in response to raisons detat and riding roughshod over the rights and desires of peoples, rather than nationalism based on those elements which have really been a basis for unity, which has become the norm. This produced a political map which was frequently discordant with the other phenomena of human geography. The result of this has been the creation of articial geopolitical structures established and maintained by force. Such structures, although giving the appearance of possessing power and permanence, were in reality fragile and transitory. They were worm-eaten empires sustained by outmoded treaties and awaiting inevitable dissolution (ibid:8). Two decades after the death of Vidal, Ancel reiterated Vidals assertion that the elements of political geography must always be regarded as being changing phenom` ena rather than xed entities. However, in La Geographie des Frontieres he reached the conclusion that articial state structures are not so much part of an evolutionary process as positive impediments to it. In this way what he termed the Anschluss rhenane by Prussia had resulted in that Musspreussen (forced Prussianisation) which had shattered the unity of Rhineland civilisation and stultied its further growth (Ancel, 1938:113). Referring to the Anschluss with Austria, he observed that it was now the turn of that country to be subjected to a similar fate. Yet, despite this, Ancel concluded his book on a general note of optimism. The walls of these Jerichos, he wrote, will fall at the sound of the trumpets awakening the imprisoned and sleeping nations (ibid:188). For Ancel, the desirable outcome was that exibility and responsiveness should replace the iron and inexible rule. He saw frontiers less as being some category of natural phenomena as rather political isobars indicating the pressures of power at any given time and of necessity changing as the balance of power itself changed . It is impossible to envisage in civilised Europe, he concluded, the idea of the frontier which is a watertight bulkhead (ibid:184). Likewise Demangeon pointed to the existence of deeper geographical realities beneath the articial barriers. In his book on the Rhine, written jointly with the historian Lucien Febvre, he identied the great axes of movement as being the real underlying geographical framework constituting the transcendent geopolitical reality (Demangeon & Febvre, 1935:291). He opposed the negative idea of the river as bloody and sterile frontier with the positive one of the rich and luminous routeway. Demangeon recognised that, given the international situation in his time, this was little more than a vision and he was far from being optimistic that its translation into reality would be accomplished either swiftly or easily. As the international storm clouds gathered and the sky darkened in the late 1930s, it was the Rhine as watertight bulkhead and bloody and sterile frontier which had become the menacing reality. Nevertheless, despite the divisive power of the riparian states, Demangeon retained the belief that the force of unity which had always emanated from the Rhine would eventually prevail. A mechanism for moving towards the desired unity was proposed by Yves-Marie Goblet in 1934. Goblet considered that it was Sir William Petty, the seventeenth century English polymath, rather than Ratzel, who was the real founder of modern political geography. He regarded Pettys Political Anatomy of Ireland as having been

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the seminal work in this regard and he contended that Ratzel had (unknowingly) adopted many of Pettys ideas (Goblet, 1934:16). Goblet conceded that Ratzel had formulated provisional laws and discovered certain methodological principles and that nothing was further from Ratzels truly scientic work than the Geopolitik spagyrique practised in Germany. Like Ancel, Goblet saw change and uidity as being the principal characteristic of the world map arising from the phenomena of dissolution and evolution which underlie it. In line with his contemporaries, Goblet also considered that the nation constituted the most desirable geopolitical form to be aspired to. Formerly territorial and human factors (had been) treated simply as pawns in a game of chess but now it had come to be realised that the pawns concerned might have interests and feelings of their own (ibid:243). While he welcomed, as much as did Ancel, the awakening of the imprisoned and sleeeping nations from their bondage, Goblet realised the fundamental error of elevating them to the status of completely sovereign and independent political entities, in other words, of regarding them simply as being miniaturised versions of those worm-eaten empires which had preceded them and out of the fragmentation of which they had come into being. Such a development, he contended, constituted nothing more than a reversion to what he referred to as the barbarous theory of economic nationalism (ibid:244). He condemned the establishment of those states which had divided what should be united, thus replacing one false and articial territoriality by a similar one on a smaller scale. Such a development went completely against the interdependence of geographical and geopolitical phenomena and thus against the overall unity of human geography itself. The mechanism favoured by Goblet for reconciling the reality of the existence of nations with the principle of interdependence entailed extending the realm of the geopolitical more widely so as to include those major centres of industry and commerce which he dubbed international emporiums. These were to be regarded as being geopolitical phenomena in their own right, essentially different from, and independent of, the nation-states. They constituted the coordinates of a potential network of lines of communication linking together the various component parts of geographical space. Goblet demonstrated that since such formations had existed in the past, and in certain forms continued to exist, they therefore lay rmly in the realms of the possible. They constituted realities rather than gments of the hopeful and optimistic imagination and, using the terminology of geopolitics, they could thus be considered to lie within the sphere of Realpolitik rather than of Idealpolitik. He cited the Hanseatic League as an example and demonstrated how this open organisation had been destroyed by the rise of the territorial states around the Baltic and North Seas (ibid:4665). The essential corollary of the restoration of the imprisoned and sleeping nations, maintained Goblet, was the restoration also of the Free City with commerce as its vocation, subject to no hindrance, in other words modem Hanseatic towns. Such emporiums have existed in all periods and in all parts of the world but they were destroyed by states extensive enough to be able to claim that, in themselves, they constituted distinct economic organisms % powerful enough to suppress the liberty of the great merchants. These states had then gone on to

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entrench their power by surrounding themselves with economic Great Walls of China (ibid:251). Implicit in the work of Goblet and the others was the evidence of the existence of another Great Wall running straight though the middle of political geography itself. This divided those geographers who largely accepted the continued existence of the territorial state as the basic constituent feature of the political map from those who advocated moving towards a different type of state founded on alternative principles (Parker, 1996:21213). These latter proposed more fundamental changes to the political map than were ever seriously contemplated during the 1930s when getting the states to accept certain rules of behaviour was the most which was envisaged as practicable. They could thus be called radical geographers well before the term came into general use. The fundamental proposition of such geographers as these was that the territorial state created by its very existence an environment of closed geographical space, and it stood in contrast to the non-territorial state, the successful functioning of which necessitated and depended upon the existence of open geographical space. The closure of geographical space had in the past been invariably associated with confrontation and conict and the replacement of this by an environment of cooperation and peace could only be assured by the existence of mechanisms guaranteeing the maintenance of openness. Political geography, asserted Goblet, is above all a task of peace and its achievement lay now in the sphere of the experimental sciences. What Goblet termed experimental political geography entailed the widening of the realm of the geopolitical and the examination of alternative forms of organisation. This approach was rmly embedded in the vidalian principle of examining all types of states so as to assess their respective roles and relevance. The experiment was based upon what Goblet termed reconstruction and synthesis and this entailed the application of a diversity of geopolitical phenomena to real world situations (Goblet, ibid:245). An example of this was the resurrection of the city as a geopolitical phenomenon and the testing out of its effectiveness in present day conditions. For Goblet this necessitated that the city-state and the territorial (nation) state, which had acted in totally different ways in their relationship to geopolitical space and had followed one another chronologically in modern times, should now be assembled chorologically. Each of these categories of state possessed certain inherent weaknesses, and it was these weaknesses which had made them inadequate in the past as the unique or dominant forms of spatial political organisation (Parker, 1997:33 4). Together, in some kind of spatial synthesis, Goblet contended that they could more effectively contribute to the creation of a more balanced and stable system. The concept of commercial centres outside states and nations again presents itself as one of the ways in which the world will be able to be organised for the achievement of the ideal of peace. (Goblet, 1934:2567). He considered that such a process of geopolitical engineering lay well within the realms of the possible. Since the proposed engineering was being applied to real and existing phenomena he regarded it as being realistic and as such it was by denition to be regarded as being a scientic project. As has been observed, Goblets approach, whilst deriving much from Pettys Polit-

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ical Anatomy, was nevertheless rmly within la tradition vidalienne. Throughout he contrasted La geographie politique scientique with Geopolitik spagyrique. While the object of the former was to engage in assembling geographical facts and coming to objective conclusions about their relationships, the latter he regarded as being no more than a kind of political alchemy based on a mystic conception of the state as a territorial entity and seeking to justify territorial aggrandisement in metaphysical terms (ibid:1122). While Geopolitik was loosely assumed to have been derived from the ideas of Ratzel a gure much better known than was Rudolf Kjellen, the real inventor of the term Geopolitik the French geographers were quick to deny the connection between the two. It is sad to see all this happening in the land of Ritter and Ratzel, observed Goblet. Nothing could be further (than Geopolitik) from the science founded by Ratzel (ibid:16). Implicit in all such thinking was the dichotomy between an irrational and politically contaminated geopolitics and a rational and academically pure political geography. Nevertheless, there was one French geographer who put forward the view that, in presenting an alternative to the German version, the term geopolitics could be used legitimately in a generic sense. Jacques Ancel believed that geopolitics could quite properly be considered as being something different from political geography and that it was necessary to use the terminology in order to indicate this. We must not let the German pseudo-science monopolise this term he contended and announced that he intended to repossess it. He went on to dene geopolitics quite simply as being the study of external political geography. Its approach was a dynamic one, something which he contrasted with French political geography which he criticised for having been far too internal, static (Ancel, 1936:5). Such political geography lacked the real credentials either to formulate a critique of Geopolitik or to be the basis for a viable alternative to it. Ancel made it clear that the principal concern of la geopolitique as he conceived it was with international relations rather than the internal geography of states. His analysis and critique of the concept Hitlerien was therefore to be done from inside rather than outside and it could be properly refuted only from a geopolitical perspective. He was well aware that this would be an unpopular approach with his colleagues and not one which they were likely to follow readily. The attempt to transfer geopolitics across the Rhine, and in so doing to gallicise it, was fraught with such problems that it proved to be too much for one single protagonist. Ancel needed allies and it is signicant that he looked for them outside geography. He had considerable contacts in the wider international eld and these included a long association with the Carnegie Foundation (Dotation Carnegie), the European Centre of which was located in Paris. In this context he paid tribute to the work of the Dotations journal, LEsprit International, to which he was a frequent contributor, and expressed the opinion that it was thanks to its perspicacity and vigilance that the teaching of la geopolitique has seen the light of day in France (Ancel, 1933:6). It was Ancel himself who was principally instrumental in introducing the geopolitical perspective into LEsprit International, an inuential journal at the time, and in acquainting its readership with the work of such important geographers as De Martonne, Sorre, Sion and Goblet. It is clear from his contributions to

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this journal that he considered geopolitics to be the most appropriate vehicle for introducing the geographical perspective into the wider international eld. Ancel was virtually alone among the French geographers of this period in according a degree of academic respectability to geopolitics. The others continued to emphasise the gulf which existed between it and la geographie politique, considering geopolitics not only to be inherently unscientic but also impregnated with those ideas foreign to geography which had from the beginning so troubled Vidal de la Blache. If during the rst two decades of the twentieth century French political geography had been largely an extended response to Ratzel, during the next two decades, the inter-war period, it developed in many ways into a kind of anti-geopolitics, the main task of which was refutation. While fully sharing the objective of the refutation of Geopolitik, Ancel was clearly of the opinion that political geography as then practised was inadequate for the task which he considered to be of the greatest importance: the formulation of a viable alternative to the German version. Within a year of the publication of Ancels La Geographie des Frontieres World War II had broken out and the last hopes that peace could be maintained were shattered once and for all. By the summer of 1940 France had fallen and this brought to an abrupt end the whole intense discourse within French political geography. During the occupation there was no political geography in France and the pages of the slimmed-down and censored Annales were lled with more bland and less controversial items. German Geopolitik had, for the time being, smothered the infant French geopolitique and Haushofers concept of frontiers as echte Grenze, natural and genuine boundaries, appeared to have triumphed over Ancels concept of the frontier as peripherie toujours provisoire and isobare politique. However, just as the French geographical scene was being decimated by war and defeat, across the Atlantic a new American geopolitics was beginning to take shape. As in France, this was initially conceived of as a response to Geopolitik and the American response was along much the same lines as that of the French geographers (Bowman, 1942). However, after an examination of the works of Karl Haushofer and Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, certain American geographers reached the general conclusion that its study was a legitimate one and advocated that it be fully understood and responded to. In adopting this approach, they were clearly following in the footsteps of Ancel rather than Demangeon or Goblet, although they did not appear to make much distinction between them. This approach was demonstrated by Hans Weigert in Harpers Magazine, when he observed that the French geographers had been closer than we are to the arising dangers from without and were therefore ahead of their Anglo-Saxon colleagues in understanding and responding to Geopolitik. Signicantly referring to the French political geographers as geopoliticians he asserted that they have for years criticised the way of German geopolitical thinking by the accusation that, to it, space and earth meant everything; the human being almost nothing. They tried to ght against the fatalistic conception which makes man more or less an object of geographical factors (Weigert, 1941:11). Thus the emergence in America of the idea that there could be a different geopolitics from that practiced in Germany owed something to the understanding that certain French geopoliticians had been of the same opinion. Following the fall of France and the

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heightened awareness of the dangers now beginning to confront America, geopolitics ` became suddenly a la mode and Tagoff wrote wryly in the New Yorker of the brave new geopolitics then spreading across the New World (Weigert, 1942:133). Like Ancel before him, Weigert clearly saw political geography as being inadequate to the task lying ahead and like his French predecessor he identied geopolitics with the dynamic rather than the static approach. Echoing Ancels condemnation of French political geography as internal, static, Weigert advocated sweeping away yesterdays geography and so letting us see the world in the image of dynamic maps, instead of the static maps of times past (Weigert, 1942:131). Identifying the main problem of German geopolitics as being its obsessive concern with ideas and theories, Weigert went on to call for what he referred to as a humanised geopolitics which should make the wellbeing of humanity its central concern. He was followed by others who saw the answer to the problem in the introduction of alternative perspectives. Notable among them was Edmund Walsh, Jesuit priest and self-proclaimed geopolitician, who expressed the opinion that geopolitics should develop what he called a spiritual dimension. Dening geopolitics as being a combined study of human geography and applied political science he maintained than that it was possible to view it in many different ways. He pointed out that the geopolitical perspective had in fact been widely applied although it had been rarely acknowledged as such and he commented that there had been and still were in America many geopoliticians without portfolio. He went on to express the then astonishing view that geopolitics could ennoble as well as corrupt and concluded that It can choose between two alternatives the value of power and the power of values (Walsh, 1943:13). The main problem with the German variety, he contended, was that it was about power and, as a result of this, was entirely materialistic in its approach. Just as Ratzel had, according to Goblet, unknowingly followed the ideas of Petty, so Americans such as Weigert and Walsh appear to have based their ideas, rather less unknowingly, on those of Ancel in respect of the legitimacy of geopolitics. However, despite such powerful advocacy, in the years following World War II the Nazi legacy proved to be too strong and there were few who were prepared to follow Walshs line and concede anything good, let alone spiritual, in geopolitics (Parker, 1998:412). It had been far too tarnished by its association with the Third Reich for what had originally been Ancels intention of reclaiming it to be widely acceptable in the immediate post war years. Indeed, in Ancels last book, Slaves et Germains, published posthumously in 1947 but completed in the wake of the fall of Poland at the beginning of World War II, there is no further mention of the reclamation of geopolitics. Geopolitik (sic) was described as having had the sole task of providing so-called scientic arguments to justify renewed German expansion. In his nal work there is nothing further on an alternative geopolitics as such to counter la politique hitlerienne (Ancel, 1947:211). Ancel, however, returned to such essentially alternative concepts as grouping and community to counter the threat of the rise of Pan-Germanism (Parker, 1998:53). Five years later, in the rst major French contribution to political geography after World War II, Jean Gottmann launched a criticism of Ancel for his attempt to rehabilitate geopolitics. Gottmann considered this to have been a bad attempt at

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compromise between French and German methods. It had been too inuenced by Geopolitik and had done little to clarify the subject or to develop on it (Gottmann, 1952:56). Yet Gottman then went on to base his ideas on many of the same basic principles advocated by Ancel. Writing of the closure of the inhabited world and the compartmentalisation of space as the basic facts of the political map, he pointed to the basic dichotomy of systems of movement and systems of resistance to movement (ibid:214). His contrast of the uid and the static elements echoes Ancels contrast of the dynamic and the static which he equated with geopolitics and political geography. In the post-war years Gottmann found it impossible to accept the existence of a legitimate terminological distinction between the two. In emphasising the vital role of the crossroads (carrefour), Gottmann was also using Goblets idea of the international emporium as the necessary counterweight to the detrimental effects of the closure of space. In his nal work, published in 1956, but consisting basically of ideas which had been formulated during the 1930s, Goblet again completely dismissed geopolitics although he added mysteriously, and without further elaboration, that certain geopoliticians have done some fairly good work in human geography(Goblet, 1956:14). It is interesting that the main substance of Goblets nal condemnation was less its political involvement than its attempt to reduce what Goblet considered to be the most complex and subtle part of geography to crude and simplistic laws. What had been realised by certain American geographers of the 1940s was that the distinction between political geography and geopolitics was at best blurred and at worse false. There had indeed been many geopoliticians without portfolio who had yet sought to maintain their credentials as political geographers. They had taken refuge in the supposed purity of political geography and in so doing had often succeeded in making it rather less pure than it had been. As Walsh pointed out, much of what went under the name of political geography at that time in America was in fact virtually covert geopolitics. Many such geographers had come to regard geopolitics as providing the best methodology for examining and interpretating the world scene not only from a geographical, but also from an American, perspective. Among them was George Renner who advocated not so much an alternative as an unreformed geopolitics. He appears to have seen virtually no distinction at all between political geography and geopolitics and even at one stage pronounced that geopolitics may be regarded as a shortened designation for political geography (Renner, 1948:3). He considered that any distinctions which did exist were in the last analysis, a minor matter of interest primarily to the philosopher(ibid:15). In the autumn of 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, Walsh had interviewed Karl Haushofer and came away with a positive view of the work of the German geopolitician. It was the Nazi philosophy, and not geopolitics, which, in his view, stood condemned. In any case, during the nal years of the war, the German geopoliticians had become more distanced from the Nazi leadership and Karls son, Albrecht, had been executed in the last days of the war as a result of his alleged links with those who had planned to kill Hitler at Rastenberg in July 1944 (Parker, 1998:367). This all reinforced Walshs view that the real intellectual and moral distinction cut right through the middle of both political geography and geopolitics.

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Both could be ennobling or corrupting and what really mattered, maintained Walsh, was the nature of the ends being served. This was something which had also been implicit in the ideas of Ancel, but the French geographer had made the distinction more of an academic than a moral one: between open and closed geopolitical structures; between those who were engaged in the segmentation and division of the world and those who sought to reassemble it. It was the attempt to achieve the productive cohabitation of the two which had been the essence of the ongoing project in French political geography which the war brought to an abrupt end. The ground on which this whole debate within French, and subsequently American, political geography took place during the rst half of the 20th century had been staked out at the end of the 19th century by Vidal de la Blache in his response to Ratzel. This response had emphasised three fundamental ideas. First, the necessity for all types of states to be studied; second, the importance of the link between city and state and, third, the concept of the evolution of states. The reason given by Vidal for linking city and state in this way was both that the city was an essential part of state formation and also that it was, in Vidals phrase, the agent for emancipation from the tyranny of the local milieu. It is this idea of emancipation from which is at the root of the idea of alternative to. Evolution and emancipation are two processes which run concurrently. They entail the idea of development from one type of formation to another and freedom from the tyranny of any particular set of ideas. They both contain the possibility of the acceptance of radical change. It matters less whether such an alternative is considered to be within the realms of political geography or geopolitics as whether the alternative represents a radically different approach to the nature of the world political order and the problems of geopolitical organisation. A generation after World War II, in the wake of les evenements which shook France and Europe in 1968, Yves Lacoste embarked on the Herodote project for moving geography from the periphery back into the centre of the debate about how the world should now move forward in the social, political and international elds. For this purpose he reinvented the term geopolitics and employed the phrase une geographie alternative to indicate its position in relation to what had preceded it (Herodote, 1 1976) . Thirty years after Ancels death geopolitics had at last been successfully reclaimed. The new geopolitics was an alternative, said Lacoste, to la geographie dominante which had camouaged the state with the nation. The Herodote project sought to address the concerns of the dominated rather than those of the dominators and aimed to do this by means of the investigation of alternative geopolitical scenarios to those of the past. Far from being above the battle it was thus manifestly a part of it. It was, in Lacostes phrase, both alternative et combattante. Some twenty years after the debut of the Herodote project, in the mid 1990s, the political geographer Claude Raffestin reviewed its effects with particular reference to the extent to which it had employed and transformed geopolitics. In the wider context of the history of geopolitics Raffestin maintained that, after all, la geopolitique herodotienne had not proved to be all that different from Geopolitik. The conclusion which he reached from this was that geopolitics could not really

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change; ultimately it was always bound up in some way or another with power and from this with conict. The idea that there could be dautres geopolitiques, which were radically different in method and objective, was dismissed by Raffestin as being nothing more than an illusion (Raffestin, 1995:304). This conclusion reached by Raffestin in the mid 1990s was totally at variance with that which had been reached by Ancel just sixty years earlier in the mid 1930s. Ancel had then considered it as being essential that the science of Kjellen, which he dened as being the study of the relations among states viewed spatially, should be repossessed. Its approach was a dynamic geographical one and he was convinced that it was only through such dynamism that geopolitical phenomena could be observed and analysed in the vidalien manner as des faits en mouvement. For Ancel it provided a methodology by the use of which Geopolitik could be effectively countered and international problems could be addressed objectively and scientically. Not only did the use of geopolitics signify a dynamic and international approach but, as he emphasised in LEsprit International, one which was most appropriate to the application of the geographical perspective in international relations. To the question whether there was a geopolitics which was essentially different from political geography, and needed to be studied as such, Ancel gave a decidedly afrmative answer to which Walsh later added the caveat but it depends how you use it. The examination of the alternatives open to humanity has always been the central theme of the work of the possibilist school of French geographers. Possibilism was thus linked to evolutionary terminology to produce the calculus of probability which permitted a reconciliation of science and creativity (Berdoulay, 1978:856). It was this possibilist spirit which underlay the work of the French political geographers in the years before World War II. The essence of the alternative for them was the replacement of walls by bridges and, in geopolitical terms, the replacement of territorial segmentation by networks of communication. Ancel repossessed the term geopolitics in order to indicate a dynamic external geography which recognised that in the ux of evolution and dissolution new geopolitical species are born and new ways of moving forward become possible. He perceived clearly the nature of the radical alternative, and proposed that it should be placed inside rather than outside geopolitics. Above all this approach was about breaking the mind set which regarded the territorial state as being a given and which reduced political geography to a matter of solving its problems and making it more effective. ` In his 1933 article in LEsprit International entitled La frontiere Adriatique Ancel used Ritters words to describe Italy as a terrestrial bridge extending from North to South and from the Occident to the Orient (Ancel, 1933:233). Ancel described graphically the route followed by the Orient Express, at the time the most important train connecting Western Europe to the Balkans and the Near East, as it crossed from northern Italy into Yugoslavia. He wrote of the famous train rounding the Gulf of Trieste and, after Trieste, cutting through the rst karst slopes which gave the traveller the impression of crossing the boundaries of one world before entering another (ibid:236). Ancel was here using the Orient Express to illustrate his main theme which was that the Adriatic had been a line of contact and communication long before it became a watertight bulkhead between hostile states. Ritter, said Ancel, had pointed

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to the existence of certain undisputed geographical realities. These are the geographical conditions which constitute the basic facts of existence and Ancel went on to pose the question: what is the part which humanity chooses to play? The facts of existence contain within them the possiblity of unication as well as division; of contact as well as separation. As Walsh pointed out, the choice always exists between two alternatives and, through this, for the possibility of that alternative geopolitics identied by geographers from Ancel to Walsh and on to Lacoste. This choice is in turn founded on the vidalian principle which insists that all possibilities must be explored and that nothing must be excluded. In Vidals words, the phenomena of political geography must never be regarded as being xed entities. Rather they must be seen as being changing phenomena and as such open to the possibility of those alternatives which are as present in political geography and geopolitics as in all other realms of human geography. The search for these, and their application to the contemporary world, remains the ongoing project of the alternative geopolitics. References
` Ancel, J. (1933). La frontiere Adriatique. In Lesprit International, 26. Paris: Librairie Hachette. Ancel, J. (1936). Geopolitique. Paris: Delagrave. ` Ancel, J. (1938). Geographie des Frontieres. Paris: Librairie Gallimard. Ancel, J. (1947). Slaves et Germains. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Berdoulay, V. (1978). The VidalDurkheim debate. In D. Ley, & M. S. Samuels, Humanistic geography problems and prospects. London: Croom Helm. Bowman, I. (1942). Geography versus geopolitics. Geographical Review, 32, 646658. ` Demangeon, A., & Febvre, L. (1935). Le Rhin. Problemes dhistoire et deconomie. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. ` Gallois, L. (1919). La paix de Versailles. Les nouvelles frontieres de lAllemagne. Annales de Geographie, 28, 154. Goblet, Y.-M. (1934). Le Crepuscule des Traites. Paris: Berger-Levrault. Goblet, Y.-M. (1956). Political geography and the world map. London: George Philip. Gottmann, J. (1952). La Politique des etats et leur geographie. Paris: Librairie Armand Cohn. Korinman, M. (1983). Friedrich Ratzel et la politische geographie. Herodote 28. Parker, G. (1987). Albert Demangeon. In T. W. Freeman, Geographers biobibliographical studies, 11. London and New York: Mansell. Parker, G. (1996). La geographie politique de Yves-Marie Goblet. In P. Claval, & A.-L. Sanguin, Geogra` phie francaise a lepoque classique. Paris: LHarmattan. Parker, G. (1997). Vers une nouvelle hanse: metropoles et nations dans la geographie politique de lEur ope. In P. Claval, & A.-L. Sanguin, Metropolisation et politique. Paris: LHarmattan. Parker, G. (1998). Geopolitics past, present and future. London and Washington: Pinter. Raffestin, C. (1995). Geopolitique et histoire. Lausanne: Editions Payot. Renner, G. T. (1948). Political geography and its point of view. In G. H. Pearcy, & R. H. Field, World Political Geography. New York: Thomas Crowell. ` Vidal De La Blache, P. (1898). La geographie politique a propos des ecrits de Mr. Frederic Ratzel. Annales de Geographie, 7, 97101. Walsh, E. A. (1943). Geopolitics and international morals. In H. W. Weigert, & V. Stefansson, Compass of the world: a symposium on political geography. London: George Harrap. Weigert, H. W. (1941). German geopolitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weigert, H. W. (1942). Generals and geographers: the twilight of geopolitics. New York: Oxford University Press.