At the end of an essay delving into ‘majority decision’ (published by Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques,129 1976), Mr Pierre Favre, an assistant lecturer at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, suggests replacing the purely aggregative approach to the issue with an organic one: ‘The aggregative approach may well seem to be the strongest when it comes to accounting for majority decisions, since it considers the majority to be what it obviously is: an entirely countable reality stemming from the addition of perfectly individualised suffrages. However, the limits of such an approach have turned out to be as incontestable as the fact that they have actually resulted from the very essence of aggregative logic, having surfaced from the very recesses of its own developments. K. J. Arrow’s generalisation on the topic of Condorcet’s paradoxes conveys a demonstration of the validity of a properly sociological approach. According to Arrow’s demonstration, the whole, meaning the summation of the specific traits that characterise every individual, comprises (or is always liable to comprise) logical contradictions that turn it into an object lacking any genuine existence of its own. According to sociologists, the whole always exists and is ever endowed with its own coherence, without ever been reduceable to the sum of all the individuals that constitute society’.
Concerning the origins and development of the marginalist school, see the second part of the study conducted by Mr Michel Novey into ‘economic theories’ (‘Histoire des theories économiques’,130 published in a special issue of Nouvelle école,131 number 19, July–August 1972).
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Geopolitics
In Beijing, back in 1975, the following statement was published by the People’s Daily: ‘The USSR has but one ambition; one sinister ambition: to dominate Europe and the entire world’.
In April 1975, the Etudes Soviétiques132 magazine published the following headline: ‘Maoist leaders are always driven by their greedy and egotistical interests’.
Then, in January 1976, Les Cahiers de la Chine133 stated: ‘Europe, a region of rivalry where imperialistic powers have been competing since the dawn of time, currently embodies the focal point of Soviet-American rivalry. By placing Europe “at the centre” of its global strategy, the USSR has proclaimed that its destiny depends “on the manner in which the European situation will evolve”. Now that it has taken control of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union is presently attempting to annex the western part of the continent. Devoured by its ambitions, Soviet social-imperialism represents the most dangerous hotbed of war. Nowadays, it is above all in the USSR that the threat of a new world war originates’.
For almost fifteen years now, the Chinese-Soviet polemic has been raging. Not a single week goes by without having the Soviets denounce the Maoist ‘betrayal’ or the Chinese fulminate against the ‘new tsars’ and describe ‘social imperialism’ as the ‘main global danger’.
Hence some remarkable consequences.
According to Mr Franz-Josef Strauss, the head of the West German CSU party and the USSR’s eternal adversary, Mr Qiao Guanhua — who was, at the time, the Minister for Foreign Affairs — has declared that he only knew the Baltic city of Kaliningrad under its original name: Koenigsberg. As for Mao,134 he once told Mr Léo Tindemans:135 ‘Europe must find the ability to defend itself by its own means’.
In France, the pro-Chinese group Humanité Rouge136 (ex-PCMLF) organised campaigns against the demoralisation of our army, expressing its support for the use of nuclear energy and demanding the reunification of the German nation.
All these facts are interconnected and follow a logic of their own.
The ‘Second-World’ of Western Europe
On 12th May, 1975, Mr Deng Xiaoping, aged seventy-four, who was, at the time, deputy Prime Minister and the vice-president of the Chinese Communist Party, came to visit Mr Giscard-d’Estaing in Paris. Meanwhile, Beijing had announced the nomination of an ambassador to the common market, confirming the fact that today’s China is counting on tomorrow’s Europe, a Europe that it wishes to be powerful, well-armed, economically self-sufficient and politically unified.
Beyond the ideological and border-related dispute between the two sides, a genuine global rivalry has been developing between Moscow and Beijing.
The Chinese believe themselves threatened by the Russians. They realise, however, that the Kremlin needs to be at peace on its western flank so as to intervene in the Far East. Why else would the Soviets have wanted the Assembly of Nations to acknowledge their domination over Eastern Europe in Helsinki (during the conference on security and cooperation in Europe), when the latter is already an established fact?
Mr Raymond Aron has written: ‘The Helsinki conference is a comedy that would never have taken place if the US, or any of the main western countries, were still governed by a real statesman’.
As for Alexander Solzhenitsyn,137 he has made the following declaration: ‘In Helsinki, President Ford chose to betray Eastern Europe and to acknowledge once and for all the latter’s enslavement’.
In Beijing’s view, this détente is ‘a bridge that has been established between the East and the West in order to ease the passage of Russian tanks’. From this perspective, the existence of a powerful and anti-Soviet Europe (an anti-communist one, if necessary), meaning a Europe that is capable of exerting an attraction force upon certain ‘satellite’ countries, embodies the best means for China to guarantee its own security.
Lying between the Americano-Soviet ‘First World’ and the Third World, Western European nations and Japan represent what the Chinese refer to as the ‘Second World’. On a map, the latter’s position is symmetrical to Beijing’s: it is located somewhere between the USA and the USSR. The question at hand is thus that of finding out whether European nations shall remain subservient to the ‘superpowers’, meaning to the US-Soviet condominium that was imposed at Yalta, or strive to weaken this condominium by transforming themselves into an independent power.
On the level of ideological affinities, China should, under normal circumstances, feel closer to the USSR than to France or Iran. In practice, however, this is not the case at all. For such a situation is of a typically geopolitical nature. Indeed, ideology aside, Europe is as much in need of China as China is in need of Europe. They are ‘objective’ allies: ‘My foe’s enemies are my friends’.
This is what Mr Deng Xiaoping expressed through a Chinese proverb:
‘It matters not whether a cat is white or black; what does matter is that it catches mice’.
Even since Lin Biao138 was driven out, China’s entire foreign policy has become more geopolitical than ever before, having been pondered long and hard by Beijing.
What is geopolitics, then? It is the branch of political science that analyses the active role played by the geographical environment with regard to determining the political and historical events that affect the population of a given territory. It has sometimes been referred to as ‘dynamic geography’. It thus differs from political geography in the sense that it does not merely deal with the natural situation of states and peoples, but also (or mainly) with the manner in which this natural situation impacts both their shaping and their destiny.
Geopolitics has its own precursors, of course. Mr Pierre Célerier139 mentions Vauban140 and Montesquieu above all others (in Géopolitique et géostratégie,141 PUF, 1969). It is, however, to a Swede, Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), that we owe the initial coining of the word.
A member of the Swedish parliament and a professor of political science at the university of Uppsala, Kjellén published a work entitled Staten som Lifsform (The State as a Life-form, 1916). In it, he defines geopolitics, along with political economy, demo-politics, socio-politics and krato-politics, as one of the five privileged domains of a new government-analysis system. In his book, the state is depicted as an organism with its own social biology, and not as a mere mechanism characterised by some kind of social physique (as from the liberal or Marxist perspective).
Kjellén himself
was influenced by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), a man who had, at the end of the 19th century, attempted to bridge the gap between political and social sciences and natural sciences.
In his Political Geography (1897), Ratzel had interpreted a major part of the geographical and ‘anthropo-geographical’ data in the light of natural selection and evolution.
For both these men, the state, defined as an organism, possesses all of the latter’s biological characteristics. What this means, in particular, is that the state is ‘more than the sum of its citizens’, just as an organism is ‘more than the sum of its organs’. It is this ‘more’ that justifies the reason of state. This theory is in agreement with a whole German philosophical current (including Fichte, Hegel, Friedrich von Schlegel and others).
Rudolf Kjellén’s work would then be expanded upon in the works of British geopoliticians Mackinder (1861–1947) and Percy M. Roxby, as well as those of German Robert Sieger (1864–1926) and American Isaiah Bowman. It was subsequently enriched through various contributions in the geographical domain (Krebs and Vogel), the field of political science (Dix and Wütschke), the cartographical sphere (Peucker and the Viennese school) and the biological area (Unold and Schallmayer).
In France, by contrast, it is hardly echoed at all, if one does not count geographers Jean Brunhes and Camille Vallaux and some disciples of Vidal de la Blache142 (1845–1918), namely André Siegfried, André Demaison and Gauthier (among others).
It is, in fact, essentially in Germany, where Kjellén’s book was translated on two occasions (in 1916 in Leipzig, then in Berlin in 1924), that geopolitics would experience its greatest prosperity, all thanks to a person whose name would soon be identified with this novel science: Karl Haushofer.
Political Action
A disciple of Schopenhauer143 and a career military officer, Haushofer always retained a passion for theoretical and philosophical speculation.
Born on 27th August, 1869, in Munich, Haushofer seconds the military staff in Berlin before being sent to Japan in 1907. He then takes advantage of his stay, which lasted for a period of three years, to learn Japanese and familiarise himself with Zen Buddhism, in addition to travelling across the Far East, thus accumulating numerous experiences that would have an impact on his entire life.
In 1913, he is appointed as active officer to assist geographer Drygalski in Munich. A year later, he submits a doctoral thesis on the political and military geography of the Japanese Empire. In it, he suggests that the Kaiser allies himself to Japan so as to break the Anglo-Saxon global hegemony (a proposal that would be declared ‘absurd’). During World War I, he fights on both the Eastern and Western fronts, achieving the rank of division general. In 1918, he heads the 30th Bavarian reserve division (which had, until then, been stationed in the Alsatian area) in its withdrawal operations.
In 1919, he decides to leave the army and to dedicate himself entirely to geopolitics, which he had discovered when reading Kjellén’s work. Having succeeded in obtaining a second doctorate, he is appointed as a member of staff at the University of Munich, where he ceaselessly teaches geopolitics from 1921 to 1929.
This task would, in his eyes, remain inseparable from a certain kind of political action. Just like most other officers, Haushofer was convinced of the fact that the German defeat was related to the rise of Bolshevism and to the ‘back-stabbing’ that the army had been subjected to.
The spectacle stemming from the ephemeral Bavarian Soviet commune in November 1918 seemed to prove him right.
One day, in 1921, he confides in his former aide-de-camp (who had become one of his most assiduous students), saying: ‘Geopolitics is a weapon destined to reawaken Germany and enable it to fulfil its grand destiny. I shall re-educate the nation, so that every young German can desist his parochialism and think in continental terms’.
The name of his interlocutor was Rudolf Hess, who would act as the Führer’s future representative and ‘deputy’ (Stellvertreter). In 1923, following the Munich coup, Hess would find refuge in Haushofer’s household. The latter would then help him cross the border into Austria. Having returned to Germany, Hess is given a light prison sentence and incarcerated in Landsberg, where Hitler proceeds to dictate his Mein Kampf to him. Upon Hess’ release, on the 31st of December 1924, Haushofer offers him an assistant’s position at the Deutsche Akademie. Hess refuses, preferring to dedicate himself to politics.
Based on these relationships, some have attempted to turn Haushofer into an ‘initiate’ and a member of various secret societies (the Thule-Gesellschaft, the Vril Society) that are said to have paved the way for Nazism from an esoteric perspective. This viewpoint was particularly defended by Mr Werner Gerson (in Le nazisme, société secrète,144 Productions de Paris, 1969).
These are dubious claims. Founded by publicist Rudolf von Sebottendorf (Rudolf Glauer),145 a man who would drown to death in 1945 (in Turkey), the Thule Society was initially a mere branch of the Germanenorden (the Order of the Teutons), which had been established in 1912, in Harz. In January 1918, it included 220 members, whose names would be listed by Rudolf von Sebottendorf in the annexes of his work titled Bevor Hitler Kam, published in 1933 (pages 221–263). The list includes Rudolf Hess, engineer Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and many others. Haushofer’s name is, however, not listed at all.
As for the Vril society or the Grand Luminous Lodge, whose inspiration is Rosicrucian, it originated from the virtually unknown works of Frenchman Louis Jacolliot (1837–1890), who acted as the French Consul to Calcutta and penned, among other works, Les traditions indo-européennes146 and L’Olympe brahmanique.147
In actual fact, Karl Haushofer can be politically classified among the authors of the Jungkonservativen current (the Young Conservative Current), alongside Arthur Moeller Van den Bruck, Heinrich von Gleichen, Wilhelm Stapel, Edgar J. Jung, Othmar Spann, Hans von Seeckt, etc.
In 1923, he publishes Geopolitik der Selbstbestimmung (The Geopolitics of Self-Determination), his very first book to be entirely devoted to geopolitics.
It would then be followed by other works, characterised by a personal and often paradoxical style: Geopolitik der Pazifischen Ozeans (1924), Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (1927), Wehrpolitik (1932), Weltpolitik von heute (1934–36), Weltmeere und Weltmächte (1937), Deutsche Kulturpolitik im Indo-Pazifischen Raum (1939), and Kontinentalblock (1941).
Geostrategy
Haushofer believed that the 20th century would be an age of territorial empires, just as the previous one had been a century of maritime ones. He was certain of the decline of the British imperium and thought that only a continental European union could ever manage to safeguard European values. Around 1930, he would thus state the following: ‘Either democracy and pacifism will give birth to a sort of European United States by no later than 1950, or a catastrophe will inevitably befall the Eurasian space, arguably in the shape of a regressive dismemberment afflicting all colonial powers. It is not one’s mastery of the seas that nowadays embodies the objective of high politics, but the possession of vast expanses of land’ (as reported by Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, Zürich).148
On 15th December, 1923, Haushofer founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, a monthly magazine that would be published from 1924 to 1944, under his own management and that of Erich Obst (England, Europa und die Welt, 1927), Otto Maull (Das Wesen der Geopolitik, 1936), Hermann Lautensach, Walther Jantzen, Johannes Kühn, Walther Vogel, Hans Krämer, and others.
This publication, sold at a rather low price, would soon exert considerable influence. In addition to an academic audience, it would also have an impact on numerous officials and officers, who thus discovered the foundations of a new discipline: geostrategy (Wehrgeopolitik).
Indeed, geopolitical data plays a considerable role in defining one’s enemy. Since the two factors involved in any strategy are political necessities (whether definitive or incidental ones) and the available space-time that allows one to attain a desira
ble tactical situation, strategy can be defined as ‘the art of harmonising a specific space-time with each category of implemented means, in an effort to preserve maximal freedom of action and achieve an advantageous tactical situation (whether in terms of power or actions), one that would allow us to fulfil specific political necessities at the lowest possible cost’ (as stated by Eric Muraise149 in ‘Relations de la polémologie, de la géopolitique et de la géostratégie’,150 in Etudes polémologiques, issue 18). In this context, geostrategy is nothing but the instrument that enables one to accomplish the objectives defined by geopolitics, whether offensively or defensively.
A whole school suddenly surfaced around Haushofer, a school that published various periodicals on the subject of global politics and economics (Zeitschrift für Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft, Deutschlands Weg an der Zeitenwende), in addition to a series of brochures (Schriften zur Geopolitik, Geopolitik im Kartenbild). Most of all, however, what Haushofer and his friends did was completely renew the approach to cartography, transforming maps — overloaded with shading, arrows and schemes — into a demonstrative means thanks to which a ‘new dimension’ of history and geography was born.
The Schmitt-Haack Geopolitischer Typen-Atlas (1929) and Franz Braun’s and A. Hillen Ziegfeld’s four-volume historical atlas (Geopolitischer Geschichtatlas, L. Ehrleman, Dresden, 1930) are highly characteristic of this working method.
In the meantime, the relationship between Rudolf Hess and the Haushofer family developed further. Hitler’s secretary enjoyed particularly close ties to Karl Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, who was born in 1903. A musician, author of historical dramas and esoteric poems, the latter was both a secretive and brilliant boy who obtained his doctorate at the age of nineteen. In 1924, he became the secretary of famous geographer Albrecht Penck. By the following year, he had already been appointed as the Secretary General of the Geographical Society of Berlin. To use the words of Mr James Douglas-Hamilton,151 the young man was, politically speaking, a ‘traditionalistic patriot with a nostalgic longing for a constitutional monarchy that he imagined as an idealised, Bismarckian state’. An extremely sentient person who felt closer to his mother than his father, he was also a sceptic. This is what he wrote on 17th March, 1933: ‘Reasonable beings have no place in revolutionary periods. And this is not going to change any time soon’. Then, on the 22nd of June, he declared: ‘I am completely opposed, from all possible viewpoints, to the type of human that is presented to the young generation as being meaningful’.
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