GEOPOLITICS IN TRANSITION

In their intellectual quest for new conceptual tools for the interpretation of international relations, many American scholars found inspiration in other disciplines, including, importantly, political geography and geopolitics. However, it is notable that American political geographers, or thinkers who applied geographic concepts to international relations, were very keen to distance themselves from the German school of Geopolitik, that in the American public imaginary was associated with the Nazi new world order of conquest and oppression.Footnote ¹⁵ At the same time, it is clear that the exchange of geopolitical ideas between the two countries went back at least half a century, and was crucial to the development of geopolitical concepts.

The interest in geopolitical ideas in the United States emerged at the turn of the century, when Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Mahan explained the history and politics of the United States in geopolitical terms.Footnote ¹⁶ Turner's frontier theory and Mahan's sea-power vision became the cornerstones of later geopolitical thinking in America and Germany alike. Friedrich Ratzel's famous notion of Lebensraum, the living space of the German people, was elaborated to counterbalance what Mahan described as American naval supremacy.Footnote ¹⁷ Ratzel's interpretation of politics in organic terms was introduced to an American readership by one of his students, Ellen Churchill Semple, who influenced greatly the younger generation of geographers, including Isaiah Bowman.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, the relation between the physical environment and political power was also discussed by the British thinker Halford Mackinder, whose 1904 speech to the Royal Geographical Society warned his British audience of the risks that a land-based empire in Russia could pose.Footnote ¹⁹ He claimed that for the first time it was possible to reveal the “geographical causations of universal history”.Footnote ²⁰ His theory revolved around the historical notion of the “Heartland”, or geographical “pivot”, a wide land mass stretching from the Balkans through Russia to the Arctic Sea. This was the geographic basis of the land power, which was opposed by a technologically savvy and industrially advanced sea power. His geopolitical thought sought to help Britain formulate a new geopolitical strategy in an interconnected closed system where competing imperial powers struggled to attain political and military supremacy.

It was only over twenty years later that his idea of the “Heartland” achieved greater international academic acclaim. In the United States of the 1940s, Mackinder's ideas set the terms for geopolitical debate. Gerry Kearns claims that Mackinder's legacy was evident in three formulations of geopolitical theory: Nazi geopolitics of the 1930s, American Cold War containment policy and American unipolarism of the early 2000s.Footnote ²¹ However, I argue that in the 1940s many American geopolitical thinkers found in Mackinder a provocative source of inspiration and used his thesis as the foundation for a new world order. Lattimore and Spykman were both influenced by Mackinder's concept of the political space which oriented natural geography towards a concrete political end. Nevertheless, they rejected its fundamental spatial assumptions and attempted to elaborate more sophisticated and dynamic accounts of global geopolitics.

During the same period Mackinder also influenced, to his indignation, the German geographer Karl Haushofer who launched Geopolitik as a science and a national policy.Footnote ²² Haushofer's geopolitics built on Mackinder's theory, yet also recognized the importance of Bowman's geographical survey The New World, first published in 1921 and revised in 1928.Footnote ²³ Presented as a scientific study of the geographic conditions of various political units, the book promoted a new understanding of the relation between the natural and the human. As Smith suggests, in contrast to Bowman's claims the book was not a neutral analysis: its implicit aim was to carve up a new geopolitical space for the United States, as a leader of a new economic and political system which recognized the limits of the state in an interconnected world.Footnote ²⁴ Bowman wrote the book after participating in the “Inquiry”, the American study group which informed the delegation to the Paris Conference in 1919. His book became an American best-seller, and copies were still distributed to US military libraries in the Second World War.Footnote ²⁵ In the interwar years Bowman actively promoted the study of geography in the United States, and underpinned American political and moral exceptionalism in geopolitical terms, highlighting its unique mission as a global leader. By the mid-1940s he had established a new geography department at Johns Hopkins that wanted to be an “American Cambridge”, was among the founders of the Council for Foreign Relations, and was the motor behind the International Geographical Union. He was a close adviser for President F. D. Roosevelt, and exerted significant influence on the State Department.Footnote ²⁶ As much as Bowman wanted to distance his scholarship from the Geopolitik school, for many he was the “American Haushofer”, an important link in the intellectual chain that connected Germany and the United States.Footnote ²⁷

Haushofer saw Bowman's magnum opus as a challenge: his reply was a geopolitical world vision based on German geopolitical interests. For him Geopolitik was a “science” based on the concepts of Lebensraum, land/sea dichotomy, autarky and the idea of pan-regionalism. In America his ideas were often presented, somewhat simplistically, as a “pseudoscientific” foundation for Hitler's foreign policy.Footnote ²⁸ However, the geographer Robert Strausz-Hupé thought that the study of geopolitics in America was still intellectually worthwhile. In his book Geopolitics he surveyed German scholarship in order to offer his American readership a new way of studying international relations, a “radical break” from the European legal tradition of nineteenth-century diplomacy.Footnote ²⁹ As he showed, the development of geopolitical thought was a result of the intense, yet often reluctant, relationship between German and American thinkers. For many Americans the Second World War brought this fruitful exchange to a crisis.

Bowman, Lattimore, Mackinder, Strausz-Hupé and Weigert were part of a group of scholars sharing a keen interest in geopolitics. As a review article published in 1942 suggested, they shared the theory of geopolitics that saw states as “dynamic phenomena”.Footnote ³⁰ This focus on change, mutability and instability in the interaction between politics and geography helped their geopolitical theories avoid the pitfalls of natural determinism. Geopolitics helped them conceptualize the main characteristic of states as, paradoxically, their instability, which resulted from the constant need to respond to natural, political and social challenges. Without recognizing their own ideological bias towards American exceptionalism, these geopoliticians argued that theirs was a new—“scientific”—version of Geopolitik in sharp contrast to Hitler's expansionist ideology.Footnote ³¹ The exchange of ideas between the German and American geopolitical schools culminated in the 1940s when American political geographers used geopolitical concepts like the land/sea dichotomy and the frontier to envisage a new global order, often unfolded in anti-imperial terms, in which the United States would have an active leading part.Footnote ³² The group's two collections of essays, entitled Compass of the World, manifest well the Americans’ intention to distinguish between the “science” of political geography (which they professed to practice) and the ideologically biased German Geopolitik. Yet this distinction should be taken with a grain of salt, since many—but not all—American geopoliticians were motivated by a no less strong ideological drive to recast the United States as a leading actor in world affairs.Footnote ³³

Despite not being directly associated with this American geopolitical circle, Spykman had a great influence on its members. In his review of Spykman's The Geography of the Peace, Weigert praised the author as a brilliant and original geopolitical thinker, while criticizing his basic assumptions, which he claimed amounted to a “disillusioned submission to the old balance of powers game”.Footnote ³⁴ Rejecting Spykman's claim that Russia's power concentrated in its western areas, and that China's power lay in its coastal regions, Weigert considered his proposals reactionary and “outright dangerous”. By contrast to Spykman's proposals, Weigert echoed Lattimore's geopolitical interpretation and suggested that “a new age is dawning in Asia”, an age of local political development which would put an end to imperialism in the region. Weigert concluded his review by acknowledging Spykman's influence on American geopolitics, whilst in the same breath accusing his last work of despair and nihilism. Weigert's review emphasized explicitly the conceptual similarities between Lattimore and Spykman, who used the geopolitical lens to look at international order, yet at the same time pointed to the fundamental difference of their political and normative commitments.

Lattimore used geopolitical ideas to articulate his analytical perspective on world politics and considered it a neutral, scientific tool of political analysis. At first sight, it seems that his geopolitical theory, centered on the land mass, was an interpretation of Mackinder's Heartland. However, Lattimore had a different understanding of the relations between politics and geography, or, in other words, of the meaning of geopolitics as a social science. Geopolitics indicated an approach to analyzing political activity: “it is a ‘realist’ understanding of a territory and the political powers that control it. It is a unique perspective, a way of studying a political unit, a region or a state, and its position in the world”.Footnote ³⁵ Lattimore gave a naive, perhaps crude, interpretation of geopolitics which was mainly aimed at distancing his own attempts at spatial theory from the ideological endeavors of the German geopoliticians. He claimed that the empirical reality, which could be observed by the senses and studied through intensive fieldwork, set the ground for political theorization, and not vice versa. He argued that international relations had to be studied by rational analysis of the various aspects of human reality encountered in the field. Geographic, anthropological, linguistic and historical knowledge had to be taken into account when analyzing political relations. However, as will be shown, Lattimore's historical narratives were motivated by a normative claim about the obsolescence of “empire”, which he hoped to replace by “democracy”. Both categories were defined in relation to space and political power: empires were ruled by repressive, external domination, while political power in democracies was internal, popular and participatory. His own work highlights that although geopolitics was often based on empirical knowledge of the world, it was never a value-free perspective.

Spykman's view of geopolitics was more similar to Mackinder’s, arguing that geopolitics provided the conceptual framework to take into consideration geographic factors when formulating a state's foreign policy in peacetime or war.Footnote ³⁶ He recognized that geopolitics was necessarily oriented towards a political goal, and not just a neutral analytical perspective. Spykman's geopolitical thought evolved from the preliminary argument that “geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent”.Footnote ³⁷ Ó Tuathail has criticized this claim, arguing that natural conditions were in fact less permanent than Spykman wanted: geological shifts and climate change might impact a territory's geographical conditions even in a short time span.Footnote ³⁸ Yet Spykman was not a geographical determinist. His fundamental claim was that a state's specific geopolitical conditions and position in the world system conditioned its relationships with other political powers, but, importantly, these geopolitical attributes were changing rather than fixed. By contrast to Lattimore, he did not see geopolitics as a recipe for anti-imperial democratic global change, but as a necessary knowledge to strengthen American foreign policy in the existing imperial world order.

LAND, SEA AND AIR

The land/sea dichotomy was a recurring theme in geopolitical writings on world order in the 1940s, and by consequence the foundation of the international thought of Spykman and Lattimore. In the first half of the twentieth century, Bowman, Mackinder, Mahan and Haushofer gave a political interpretation of these geographical concepts. Symbolically, the land and the sea represent two out of the four classic natural elements of which the world is made: earth, water, air and fire. However, as the German jurist Carl Schmitt noted, political thinkers usually referred to land and sea as conflicting “powers”, not only as natural elements.Footnote ³⁹ They acquired a historical significance as methods for ordering and controlling the natural and human world, and subsequently gained a mythical meaning as the fundamental principles of entire civilizations. For Lattimore, the land/sea dichotomy described two inherently opposed transport technologies and two different means of bringing about political and economic order to a territory. These also implied two historical and political perspectives on a given territory: the oceanic and the continental gazes. As will be shown, Lattimore used this dichotomy to discuss the role of geography and political power in the transformation from imperial to democratic order. By contrast, Spykman saw land/sea as two strategies for national defense, applicable to different geopolitical situations indicated by the state's “place in the world”. As we shall see below, he used this dichotomy to reflect upon his two main geopolitical concepts, the Heartland and the Rimland. Both thinkers argued that the land/sea formula was destabilized—but not cancelled—by the increasing relevance of the “air” element to political and cultural control over men and nature.

Lattimore took as his starting point the assumption that the European and American imperial powers came across the sea to Asia and looked at the vast territory from boats and ports in the littoral zone: “our thinking about Asia stemmed from the great age of navigation at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the old caravan routes were surpassed by new sea routes”.Footnote ⁴⁰ By contrast, he recognized the rise of local Asian powers that established their political centre in the land masses, looking outwards from the continental core towards the coasts. For Lattimore, the former form was repressive and exploitative; the latter was constructive and collaborative.Footnote ⁴¹ The oceanic gaze, typical of the European empires, does not penetrate the local territory, and has no grasp of its unique cultural and political characteristics. According to Lattimore's conception of knowledge, a superficial outlook cannot offer detailed information on Asia and its people. A political system based on ignorance cannot, therefore, be anything other than repressive. Yet a territorial gaze allows a better understanding of local habits and structures. Nonetheless, it is important to note that a territorially based system of control was not, in itself, a guarantee against imperial repression and domination. The advantage it offered was merely a potential political interaction, which could lead to the creation of political space which measured itself with the local populations’ recognized political agency.

One of the questions that arise from Lattimore's analysis of the land/sea dichotomy relates to the implications of these concepts for a general understanding of history. Did Lattimore see the land/sea dichotomy as an empirical description of historical change, or as a normative criterion to understand power relations in the world? Rowe claims that his view of history was structured by technological determinism because its focus on the land/sea binary implied a vision of historical time as consisting of alternating epochs of maritime and territorial modes of transport technology. He accuses Lattimore of overemphasizing the importance of these technologies in forming systems of political control, and of describing the shift from one era to another as unavoidable.Footnote ⁴² However, it is not so obvious that Lattimore regarded this dichotomy as a “general law”. Rather, he employed these concepts as a part of his anti-imperial discourse, offering a new key to local development that was independent of the European powers’ sea-based intervention. Lattimore's interpretation of land and sea powers was not meant as a normative conceptualization of history, but as a political proposal to review power relations in the world, and especially in Asia, in order to give an opportunity to local land powers to oppose European imperialism. Therefore the “land mass” has an important prescriptive function, aimed at highlighting fundamental limitations in thinking about world politics from an external vantage point. Lattimore uses the outsider position to argue that superficial knowledge and indirect political involvement have led to the no-longer-desirable imperial domination. The growing international influence of the United States could put it in a position to reverse this trend, and encourage local, direct systems of government.

Lattimore's geopolitics was part of his anti-imperial political project. For him a new interpretation of the political space would be necessary to bring about a postcolonial world order based on freedom and democracy. He repositioned Mackinder's notion of Heartland towards the East, undermining the importance of Europe, and argued against the British geographer that the Heartland did not imply conquest or imperial struggle.Footnote ⁴³ His geopolitics sought to bring to attention areas of the globe which the Americans and Europeans saw as politically passive, and to give political agency to their populations.Footnote ⁴⁴ If, as Kearns argues, “geopolitical vision is never innocent; it is always a wish posing as an analysis”, then Lattimore's wish was to highlight the international potential of local political power in Asia.Footnote ⁴⁵ This approach was not shared by other American geopolitical thinkers at the time—notably Bowman and Spykman—whose fundamental assumption was that the United States should seek to project its political values and interests on other parts of the world. Lattimore's new Heartland was a political project aimed at reshaping the political space of Asia as a large and pluralistic region of democracy, freedom and popular participation. Since Lattimore published his writings in the United States, it is clear that he hoped to convince his readership to take a central role in this political transformation, without, nonetheless, imposing particular interests and values on the nascent democratic region. Lattimore promoted an interventionist position aimed not at empowering the United States internationally, but at aiding the colonial regions to become “democratic”.

The complex interaction between elements of the land and of the sea was central to Spykman's geopolitical thought. Yet he envisaged a constant struggle between maritime and continental powers to achieve peaceful temporary equilibrium. He further complicated his thesis by adding two new concepts to the world map: Rimland and encirclement.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Rimland is the littoral areas of Europe and Asia, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. This is the world's area of greatest economic, political and demographic development. He located in the Rimland the conceptual and geographical meeting point of the sea and land powers, a “frontier zone” of political struggle and innovation. Modifying Mackinder's dictum on the Heartland, the political power which controlled the Rimland would dominate the entire world. Spykman argued that the Rimland was an independent political zone separated by lack of communication and transport technologies from Mackinder's Heartland, and conceptually contrasted to it. Yet he overlooked the impact of technological advances, including air power, on Rimland–Heartland relations. Interestingly, all of the “great powers” that Spykman identified, including the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany and Japan, were positioned outside the Rimland, but projected their power onto it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Geopolitical conditions made of the Rimland a “buffer zone”, a frontier area between the sea powers and the land powers, rather than an area of independent power. This point seems to be the main difference between the Rimland and Lattimore's frontier zone. In other words, whereas for Lattimore the frontier population was endowed with political agency, the Rimland population was instrumental to the great powers’ geopolitical balance of power and lacked its own decision-making power. Evidently, Spykman perpetuated an imperial view of world order, in which hegemonic power acquired direct or indirect control of areas of strategic interest, largely in disregard of local communities.

In the 1940s, the cartographic imagery of the world underwent significant change: new projections aimed at representing the world from different, previously ignored, geographic viewpoints led to important political consequences.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Spykman, cartographic imagery plays a central role in understanding the political world through the concept of “encirclement”: if the Old World is placed at the centre of the map, as in the traditional Mercator projection, it is “encircled” by the American coasts. If, on the other hand, the map is centered on the New World, following the Miller projection, as he suggested, the Old World's Eurasian coasts could “encircle” it. In his eyes, the active position of the embracing power is better than the passive “encircled”: the new cartographic projection served to alert the Americans to their possible “encirclement” by hostile powers. For Spykman the geopolitical position of the United States—facing three oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic, and spreading its influence over its two “extensions” (Canada and Latin America)—endowed it with a special global leadership role. Thus the United States was “the most important political unit in the ‘New World’”, and should create the postwar world order according to its own notion of “balance of power”.Footnote ⁴⁹ If Spykman's geopolitics was aimed at promoting American interventionist foreign policy, then the notion of encirclement pushed the intervention even further. It highlighted the relevance of the Monroe Doctrine as a “total hemispheric defence” that underlines the United States’ role as maritime and territorial power leading a region covering more than half the globe.Footnote ⁵⁰

The traditional geopolitical discourse of the land/sea dichotomy was destabilized in the 1940s by the diffusion of air power for military warfare and civil transport.Footnote ⁵¹ The growing popularity of and interest in air power gave new impetus to a reconsideration of earlier geopolitical theories. Many thought the “traditional” land/sea dichotomy would be broken by air power, which would revolutionize the geopolitical perspective of the world.Footnote ⁵² Even Mackinder sought to adjust his Heartland theory to a new conceptual view of the earth that emerged from the human experience of flight.Footnote ⁵³ Interestingly, while Lattimore and Spykman recognized the revolutionary potential of air power, they did not think that flight could have a decisive impact on their theories of world order. Rather than revolutionizing the geopolitical conception of the world, air power reinforced existing spatial categories and conceptions. In the 1940s, air travel was celebrated for its technological achievements, and the new bird’s-eye view of the earth it offered.Footnote ⁵⁴ Wendell Willkie, the ex-presidential candidate, published in 1942 his best seller One World, an account of his airplane tour around the world and his vision of the world as “one”, an indivisible unit whose inhabitants shared a common humanity which would overcome any political divide.Footnote ⁵⁵ For Lattimore, the aerial representations of the earth highlighted its natural unity, but obfuscated the nuances of human social existence, giving an illusion of geographic spaces empty of political attributes. The world's territories became pawns in a strategic game, rather than proactive, autonomous political units. The limits of the aerial viewpoint highlighted the political importance of what happened on the ground.Footnote ⁵⁶

The emergence of air power is discussed in Lattimore's essay in A Compass of the World in 1946.Footnote ⁵⁷ Air power created a new map of the world, in which lines of longitude and latitude were more significant than national territorial borders. The new air technology rendered the Arctic an increasingly important area when flight over the polar region replaced the risky air routes over the Pacific Ocean. Yet for Lattimore the importance of air power lay not in the technological achievement, but in its political implications. Air technology was a revolution in potentia rather than in practice, until it impacted the world's political structure as a whole. Thus, if only a few Western powers had access to air technology, the imperial world order would not be abolished. A real turning point could be the acquisition of air power by the Asian region, where it could open up landlocked countries to other regions of the world, and facilitate their development as independent political powers. Therefore Lattimore saw air power not as a defining element of a new “air age”, but as a transitory technology which would shift the world's geopolitical balance from empire to democracy. Technology was to be reinforced by shared consciousness of the political limits of imperial control.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus not only was Lattimore not a technological determinist, he was also well aware of the crucial role of politics in defining the meaning of technological innovation.

The problem was one of perception as much as of technological might. Air technology, and the spatial imaginary of the aerial gaze, exacerbated for Lattimore the pathologies of imperialism, already present in the “gunboat” era. Imperialism implied not only specific political practices, but an all-encompassing world order which created a common imagination exemplified in colonial mental maps. Europe, and for that matter the United States as well, observed Asia from boats and airplanes as one massive territory, inhibited by hostile, yet indistinguishable, tribes and “races”. This infinite land was “empty” of politics because, from the shore, or from the air, the foreign rulers could not identify the continent's complex political structures. They presumed that its population lacked interest in establishing a system of political control, or in participating in politics in the same manner that an educated European or American citizen would. Lattimore advanced an epistemic critique of Willkie's account, an account which emphasized shared and universal human values. He highlighted the importance, to formulating political thought, of direct, detailed knowledge of the different modes of social organization and political interaction in local Asian societies. This form of knowledge was available only to those who travel and explore the Asian landmasses.

Lattimore thus differed significantly from those who announced the coming of the air age. In denouncing the potential of air power to carry on the obsolete practices of empire, Lattimore implicitly criticized the widespread American conception of air power. Influential figures like Clare Boothe Luce, a pioneering air traveler, Republican politician and wife of publisher Henry Luce, construed air power as a means to extend American influence around the world without resorting to actual imperial conquest. Air power could complement sea power to guarantee American interests worldwide, since there were “no more distant places”.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Van Vleck notes, this was not a new approach: since the 1920s air power had been seen as a way to facilitate imperial control of the colonial periphery. Some wartime commentators went as far as calling America an “aerial empire”. “Empire of the air” slowly became a catchphrase in the popular imagination for America's global role; this was the precise idea that Lattimore hoped to eradicate.

Spykman was even more doubtful of the political importance of air power as an independent, politically relevant technology. He thought air power was ineffective in connecting the Rimland to the land mass. He accepted that warfare had become “truly tri-dimensional” but did not think that air power could be more than an auxiliary of land and sea powers. Air technology could be politically revolutionary if it could overcome the natural barriers which previously hampered transportation and communication and condemned some regions to political isolation.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1944 he refuted the claims promoted by Lattimore and geographer Vilhjalmur Stefansson that air power could, under certain conditions, radically change world politics. He did not think that warfare and political control could be based on air power alone.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless it is surprising that Spykman ignored the potential capacity of air power to easily connect the Rimland and the Heartland, which he considered technologically and politically detached. A closer Rimland–Heartland relationship would have rendered sea-based political control irrelevant and undermined the independence of the littoral zones, challenging much of Spykman's strategy.Footnote ⁶² In 1944, technical limitations, like the need for fueling stations and landing bases, encouraged Spykman to overlook the destabilizing potential of air power in the framework of his tripolar strategy.

Air power brings to the fore the disagreement between Lattimore and Spykman on the issue of empire. Since the war emphasized the decline of the European empires, a new world order would have to take into account the transition towards decolonization in Asia and Africa. Lattimore's geopolitics emerged as a critique of empire, proposing a more collaborative scheme of interstate relations to eschew the mentality of imperial power politics. By contrast, Spykman sought to replace the European empires with American power, and argued that America's military bases in the Pacific were essential to prevent the ascendancy of Russia and China, the two new rising powers of the 1940s. Lattimore discarded Spykman's ideas as an old-fashioned approach,

For Lattimore the new land-based world order meant that the imperial age of the “gunboat” was over and consequently the coastal frontier would be replaced by the land frontier between Russia and China. Spykman, on the other hand, argued that the coastal areas, in his words the “Rimland”, would maintain prime importance as a frontier area, and remain a central part of sea- and land-based strategic defense. This difference had an important impact on their global strategy. For Lattimore, once imperialism was eclipsed, “the things that will happen along [the Russia–China] land frontier, far beyond the reach of any American gunboat or battleship, or airplane carrier or air base specified by the most ambitious American Centuryite, are of greater significance than anything that will happen in the Pacific Ocean”.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, for Spykman, a geopolitical vision which focused on either land supremacy or sea domination was unbalanced because the real focal point of international politics was in the area of their encounter. The Rimland became the hub for imperial interaction, and the focal point of American foreign policy.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF SCALE

Geography and technology influenced the conception of space in yet another way: by making political thinkers reconsider the notion of “power” through the geopolitical concept of “scale”. Considerations of “scale”, in particular regarding the desirable size of states, were part of international thought from the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nonetheless, wartime thinkers argued that a reflection on “scale” was necessary because technological innovations changed the relations between time and space, potentially influencing the “balance of power” in the world. For Spykman, “all civilized life rests in the last instance on power”, which he defined as the “the ability to move men”. Politics was concerned with increasing the state's power, and not with “justice, fairness and tolerance”. He recognized that political power could be a means to an ethical end, but simultaneously tried to divorce the notion of political international “power” from “morality”, which was for him a “world of dreams”.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet for Spykman “power” should not be discussed in moral but in geopolitical terms. Both he and Lattimore agreed that “the ability to move man” could be exercised better in large-scale political spaces, arguing that small states could not resist the pressure from their stronger neighbors and would have to integrate into the larger polity, voluntarily or not:Footnote ⁶⁷

Warning against a repetition of the unsuccessful postwar settlement of 1919, Lattimore and Spykman argued that small states were politically undesirable. They undermined the principle of national self-determination for the sake of international peaceful political equilibrium. Their attitude shows that by the time the United States engaged in global war the Wilsonian ethos of national self-determination was not the main concern in the eyes of the American public and policymakers.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the air age, Spykman argued, only large states could be powerful enough to sustain air-, sea- and land-based warfare.Footnote ⁷⁰ Smaller states without the demographic, geopolitical and natural resources to wage tri-dimensional war could only exist as “buffer states” under the protection of larger states, in a system based on the principle of “balance of power”: “The existence of a buffer state is an indication of a system of approximately balanced forces.”Footnote ⁷¹ In 1941 he discussed the international implications of his interpretation of power: the international sphere was characterized by a struggle for power, and each state aimed to protect its independence and the integrity of its territory.Footnote ⁷² The struggle for power was for him a continuous historical phenomenon resulting from the impossibility of attaining absolute “order” or “anarchy” in the intrinsically dynamic and changeable international sphere.Footnote ⁷³ The authority of a political power was circumscribed by a physical territory, but could also be “projected” beyond the state's borders to pursue its foreign-policy goals of political independence and territorial integrity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Spykman found a solution in geopolitics: collective security could be effective only if the members of the international society were all approximately of equal strength. “Map makers of the postwar world should try to avoid as much as possible great inequality in power potential”.Footnote ⁷⁵

Evidently both Spykman and Lattimore proclaimed a regional world order, yet Spykman's was more in line with American priorities at the time, and resonated to a certain extent with the regional plan proposed by the Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs Nelson Rockefeller at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944. At the Georgetown conference, two American visions for world order emerged: a system of regional blocs promoted by Rockefeller, and a universal institutional vision advanced by the Brookings Institution's Leo Pasvolsky.Footnote ⁷⁶ Eventually, Pasvolsky's proposal prevailed, and the United Nations Organization was founded on universal, not regional, principles. Yet the debate between Rockefeller and Pasvolsky reflects a wider American debate on postwar order to which Spykman contributed. While Rockefeller's global vision was based on regional alliances and cooperation pacts, Spykman's unabashedly focused on extending American power in its geopolitical region, which would for him overlap with the whole western hemisphere.Footnote ⁷⁷ Spykman used frontiers to parcel the world into states and regions of equal powers, because “the frontier determines the power potential of the territory it surrounds”. How could this be done? How could “power” be evaluated and measured in order to parcel territories equally? America's Strategy presents quantitative research in politics, based on empirical data and statistics, to evaluate the power potentials of a given territory, and thus formulate political strategy on the basis of calculable parameters like geography, climate, resources and demography. However, since these factors were not static or equally distributed, an artificial territorial division would be desirable but impractical. A solution could only be found if the political scientist and the geographer joined forces to formulate “legal provisions for sanctions that harmonize with the distribution of power”.Footnote ⁷⁸ His conclusion, giving the final word in international affairs to politicians, rejected interwar legalistic internationalism which grounded collective security in international institutions such as the League of Nations, where legal solutions were prioritized over political ones.Footnote ⁷⁹ Spykman called for a return to a political world order overtly based on the existing regional balance of power.

The “balance of power” is, according to Richard Little, an ambiguous metaphor transformed into a myth which describes, or distorts, international politics.Footnote ⁸⁰ Little suggests that it helps us to think of the notion of “power” through the concept of “balance”. The mental image that accompanies the traditional version of the metaphor of the “balance of power” is the weighing scale. Yet Spykman offered an alternative image grounded in geopolitics. He used this metaphor to create an imaginary space of politics that is defined not by the image of a scale, but by a geopolitical map which translated “power” into territorial terms. An international redistribution of power could be achieved, at least theoretically, by parceling the world's territory into units of equal power. “Balance of power” operated through geopolitical methods like boundary-making, alliances, spheres of influence, compensation and war. The territorial metaphor of equilibrium, outlined on a new cartographic projection of the world, highlighted the close relations between the political and the geographic dimensions of the state. Spykman unfolded political relations in terms of territoriality and spatial control; by using metaphorical and visual instruments he was able to put forward a new conception of tripolarity as the basis for international politics.

THE FRONTIER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The spatial concept of the “frontier” played a pivotal role in the political imagination of Spykman and Lattimore. Bearing a geographic, symbolic and political meaning, it became the political space created by the territorial division and encounter of two different political and social entities. Importantly, each of the thinkers used the geopolitical frontier to justify a different political goal: for Lattimore anti-imperialism and for Spykman American interventionism. The frontier theory remains Lattimore's most recognized contribution to historical and anthropological scholarship, although its strategic or political importance is now lost.Footnote ⁸¹ The frontier, an area rather than a line, gives order to the entire political system.Footnote ⁸² The frontier is not a demarcating outline of the political unit, but a physical, conceptual and political zone of struggle and interaction, of both local and international importance. Since Lattimore thought that socio-political ideas and norms penetrated the territory from its frontiers towards the centre, the frontier population became the political vanguard for the entire political unit.Footnote ⁸³ In the American imagination, the “frontier” was mostly tied with the thesis advanced by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893.Footnote ⁸⁴ This thesis was fundamentally important for creating the myth of American democracy: for Turner the “moving frontier line” was the practical and political reason for the development of the American conception of liberty, as distinct from European political traditions. Free from binding social and economic relations, the frontier land was free to be taken by the American pioneers. Turner's influential writings paved the way for a long-term American interest in the frontier as geopolitical myth: even Lattimore's friend, Vice President Henry Wallace, published his version of the “frontier thesis”.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet for Lattimore Turner's frontier was a symbol of expansion and conquest: after all, the American continent was not an empty space, and it should not be forgotten that its native peoples lost their lives and territory in the encounter with the pioneers.Footnote ⁸⁶ Conceptually, whereas for Turner at the end of the westbound expansion process the geographic frontier disappeared into the Pacific Ocean and lost its geopolitical importance, for Lattimore the frontier would remain a defining political factor because it depended not only on geography, but also on the society and the state which construed it. Lattimore argued that Turner's thesis was limited by its focus on the frontier as the zone of geographic encounter between the European immigrant and the American wilderness. Instead, he suggested a more holistic, structural view taking into account the institutional and cultural factors which characterized and motivated the social exchange in the frontier zone. For him, each society required and perpetuated the concept of “frontier”, and the necessary “other” on its opposite side, to define its own identity.

The political space of the frontier is better illustrated, for Lattimore, by the vast Asian land frontier, stretching from Turkey to Korea. Unlike the American frontier, this was a geographic space of cultural interaction and a hub of national movements. James Scott's reading of Lattimore emphasizes the contention between the agricultural plane and the pastoral hills populations, and the fundamental importance of the relations between the human and the natural in creating the political sphere. Lattimore saw the nomadic social order, which escaped the control of the territorial state, as a complex, developed social system, unlike most interpreters, who conceived the transition from agriculture to nomadism as social deterioration. The populations of the frontier zone, like the Mongols, Uzbeks and—in Scott's research—the Zomia highlanders, created a pluralistic, unstable and amorphous political space that was characterized by “low-stateness”. Lattimore and Scott alike saw this unique political reality as a counterbalance to the Western conception of the state as a territorially fixed entity. It allowed a more flexible and versatile interpretation of the territorial space of political action and participation.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Lattimore this entailed an interpretation of liberty based on a versatile, nomadic political space, which Scott later elaborated into a complex theory of nomadic anarchism. Lattimore, unlike Scott, did not necessarily consider the peoples of the inner Asian hills as promoters of an anarchical interpretation of politics, but he did think that the flexible nomadic system was endowed with greater freedom than the fixed territorial state. Thus the nomadic populations of the frontier zone could decide whether to “descend” to the agricultural planes and participate in the territorial political community, or maintain their pastoral liberty. The hill peoples were not anarchic but promoters of a different kind of order, characterized by pluralism and instability.

Spykman offered a different interpretation of the “frontier” in world order. In a speech given at the joint session of the Association of American Geographers and the American Political Science Association on 31 December 1941, he argued that the Americans would be given the task of formulating a postwar “new world order” based on the “usual components” of world politics: boundaries, territorial security and international organization. In this speech, delivered weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Spykman outlined his spatial vision of postwar order, and the role of the United States in it. He rebuffed as outdated the legalistic universalistic notions of “order”, which sought to construct a universal juridical framework applicable worldwide. Political power would continue to reside in territorial states whose dynamic struggle for power would outlive the war. By consequence, war and conflict could not be avoided, only limited.

In these circumstances, his geopolitical theory evolved from what he considered to be the state's most important feature: its territoriality. The state's territoriality gives prime importance to the “imaginary line” of the “boundary”, which is “not only a line of demarcation between legal systems but also a point of contact for territorial power structures. From the long-term point of view, the location of that line may indicate the power relations of the contending forces”.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus, for Spykman the frontier theory was an opportunity to discuss power relations: frontiers are used to delimit a state's power potential.Footnote ⁸⁹ The cultural, ethnic or economic importance of the frontier areas is completely absent from this account that regards frontiers as one of the instruments available to the sovereign state to control flows of people and goods into and from its territory.

The Rimland was also an extended frontier zone, the dividing area between the sea powers and the land powers, a geopolitical mega-frontier that complemented the importance of the political frontiers between states. In order to achieve a powerful position in the world, the United States would have to “project” its political influence on the Rimland. Spykman embraced the Monroe Doctrine, which defined American foreign policy within the western hemisphere, its sphere of interests. The impact of contending powers could be limited, and the United States could potentially become a leading international, not regional, power.Footnote ⁹⁰ This idea was supported also by the interpretation of the Rimland as a frontier zone between the United States and its rivals, especially Soviet Russia, the British Empire and Japan. For Spykman, the extension of the American frontier beyond the oceans, to Asia and Europe, created a new foreign policy based on active intervention, serving his political goal of ending American isolationism.

In contrast to Lattimore's frontier, which constructed a zone of interaction, Spykman's strategic and divisive frontier created new impetus for potentially imperial intervention in the name of regional defence. The revival and extension of the Monroe Doctrine, which became increasingly popular in American political thought at the time, was not shared in by Lattimore. For him, this was the emblem of the negative and destructive aspects of the imperial order: the paradoxical combination of self-interested intervention in the colonial world and an international policy of isolationism embodied the worst of American foreign policy. As we will now see, this pattern in foreign policy was exactly what his vision of world order hoped to eradicate.

TRIPOLARITY

It is a truism to note that the position of the United States in the western hemisphere conditions American foreign policy, and more generally the American outlook on world politics. Yet for Spykman, unlike for many of his contemporaries, this geopolitical factor had a specific ideological implication: it revised and reinterpreted the American Monroe Doctrine, directing policymakers away from isolationism towards a politics of intervention in world affairs. Isolationism had been a common (but contested) political position in the United States since the First World War.Footnote ⁹¹ Both Spykman and Lattimore sought to reverse this trend, each for his own reason. Their solution was to outline a tripolar world order, in which the New World was seen as one power region in the world, the “western hemisphere”, while the Old World constituted two power regions: Europe and Asia. In each region there can be only one great power which sets the terms of the political game. Interestingly, Lattimore shared Spykman's commitment to the tripolar thesis with the United States and the USSR as two power poles, but there was no agreement on the third component: a democratic Asia for Lattimore, or British-led Europe for Spykman. If the struggle between “democracy” and “empire” was already hinted at in the prewar world, the war exacerbated the divisive tendencies. The growing American skepticism of Britain and France's ability to uphold their empire after the war were interpreted very differently by Lattimore and Spykman: the former enthusiastically announced the end of the imperial order, while the latter invited the United States to take the place of the European empires in defence of Western civilization.Footnote ⁹² Thus they offered two very different conclusions to the geopolitical approach to postwar world order.

Innovations in cartography are essential to understand how tripolarity was embedded in Lattimore's and Spykman's assumptions about political space. In the 1940s new world maps, based on innovative projections, became available and helped them articulate their visions in geopolitical terms. Spykman suggested that the idea of political tripolarity could only be understood by looking at a specific kind of map. America's Strategy included color maps by the famous American cartographer Richard Edes Harrison, with detailed explanations of the advantages of the projections used to illustrate political changes in the world. The Miller and Gall projections—rather than the previously dominant Mercator projection—offered a distortion-free perception of the world illustrating the strategic implications of geopolitical changes.Footnote ⁹³ Lattimore also included maps of central Asia in his books as an immediate representation of the political relevance of the “great frontier”. The novelty of their visions was not necessarily rooted in new physical geographic realities. Rather, it was a combination of political ideas on empire, new transport and communication technologies, and innovative cartographic representations that created their tripolar geopolitical spaces. Cosgrove suggests that in the 1940s new cartographic publications manifested the growing importance of spatial representations in shaping the new global role of the United States.Footnote ⁹⁴ Similarly, Spykman and Lattimore thought that their spatial conceptions, emerging from new representations of the observable empiric world, implied normative claim that American isolationism was no longer viable. It is telling that despite their different assumptions on political agency, both argued that interventionism was the only strategy which could carve an adequate postwar space for the United States: as a new kind of imperial power for Spykman, or as an anti-imperial liberator for Lattimore.

Why did Spykman and Lattimore promote a tripolar world order? In the same years the tripolar vision could have seemed a natural outcome of the victorious war alliance. Others, like the French philosopher Raymond Aron and the British writer George Orwell, also envisaged a world divided into three regions.Footnote ⁹⁵ By 1977 the “tripolarity” school of thought, centered on Russia, the United States and China, was recognized and discussed by political scientists as a viable, if complicated, political alternative to bipolarity.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, these ideas of tripolarity lack the conceptual geopolitical background that Lattimore and Spykman offered. For them, tripolar order could reflect the postwar geopolitical reality (which Spykman did not see, as he died in 1943), but could also guarantee a degree of regional diversity which a universal legal solution would undermine. In 1941, Spykman thought the postwar world would not differ substantially from the prewar world: a world of sovereign states struggling to maintain their territorial integrity and political independence. Yet these states would no longer be united in a legal international order governed by a world organization like the League of Nations. They would be politically organized in three great regions of roughly the same geopolitical “power”, each led by one, preferably democratic, hegemonic power.Footnote ⁹⁷ Lattimore's proposal was geopolitically similar but substantially different: he hoped the Asian “Third World” could put an end to Soviet–American antagonism, as well as to imperial domination, by offering a political and economic alternative “middle way”. What they did have in common was a call for American intervention in world affairs, which was nonetheless motivated by conflicting views of the global legitimacy of imperialism.

Lattimore's critique of imperialism pushed him to envisage Asia as a source of democratic political power in the postwar world. He pointed to a free and democratic China as a future regional leader, alongside Russia and the Untied States. “I think China is still perhaps the most important single area. There have been people who have spoken of the years to come after the war as the ‘American Century’. Perhaps it is more likely that the next hundred years will be the Chinese Century.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Although such a statement would not seem out of place today, in the 1940s the major public debate revolved around the idea of an “American Century”, announced by Henry Luce in an influential article in Life, just two years before Lattimore proclaimed the “Chinese Century”.Footnote ⁹⁹ Luce argued, not unlike Spykman, that the American Century ended the United States’ isolation, and marked its entrance into world politics as a leading power. It was the beginning of a new age not only in American history, but in the history of the world as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Lattimore hoped that China's rising to global importance would mark the end of imperialism as the defining category of political space. The Chinese leadership depended not only on factors of power, but also on a moral claim: China would offer a new model for freedom and democracy. The idea of the “Chinese Century” celebrated potentially democratic China as a new partner in a democratic world politics, the leader of the “Third World” against European and American imperial tendencies.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The “Third World”, a term which Lattimore first used in 1948, was not only a vanguard plan for regional democracy, but also an experimental playground for a compromise between the American and the Russian models, especially in economics. The local Asian traditions and cultures would develop an autochthonous version of democracy midway between capitalism and collectivism, to defeat the American–Soviet binary. Thus the “Chinese Century” announced the emergence of a new political age, but also of a new economic system, which differed from imperial traditions by expunging exploitation and inequality. This “Third World” economic system, interestingly, shared some basic assumptions with early theories of the welfare state, since for Lattimore a semi-regulated free-market state would not “protect profits at the expense of human rights”.Footnote ¹⁰²