The essence and laws of geopolitics

Author: Lu Junyuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: What is geopolitics? This seemingly familiar question has never received a convincing answer and has long been a bottleneck restricting rational thinking about geopolitical issues. To move beyond the pitfalls of geopolitical research, it is essential to clarify the essence of geopolitics, an unavoidable issue before us. In an era of international transformation, facing the turbulent realities of global geopolitics, we need not debate whether geopolitics is outdated, but rather philosophical reflection on how to construct a new geopolitics suitable for the characteristics of our time. Geopolitics is the process by which political actors achieve specific rights centered around power, interests, and security through the control and utilization of the geographical environment, and it involves competition and coordination among them, forming spatial relationships. Geopolitics is first and foremost a dynamic process, a competitive-coordination process between actors based on the geographical environment. At the same time, it is a complex relationship centered around competition, expressed in geographical space. The core essence of geopolitics is competition, while coordination is gradually intervening as a new attribute component in the core of geopolitics, and both competition and coordination take place within the geographical environment. Over a century ago, pioneers like Ratzel keenly recognized the fact that national destiny is linked to the geographical environment and established geopolitics as an international relations theory. Their theories were built on a historical analysis of international relations facts and spatial relationships, thus demonstrating strong explanatory power under specific temporal and spatial conditions. Today, we should not merely recite the research conclusions of geopolitical theory sages but should instead draw inspiration from their spirit of exploring geopolitical truth, starting from geopolitical realities to uncover its essence and laws.
A review of existing geopolitical research shows that while there have been abundant achievements, there are significant shortcomings both in the research areas and methodological levels. The study of geopolitical issues itself remains severely chaotic, with major differences in logical starting points, and there has been no convincing examination of the internal logic of geopolitics's emergence and development, leading to confusion and uncertainty about its future prospects. In terms of research methods, there has been no new theory or methodology capable of providing sufficient support for international relations research in a rapidly changing world, resulting in the gradual decline of geopolitics' methodological function in international relations analysis. In light of this, this book explores core issues of geopolitics, such as its essence, laws, forms, and patterns, clarifies and organizes major geopolitical issues, and constructs a geopolitical research methodology with static and dynamic analytical functions for international relations. By studying several core issues of geopolitics, this book provides a correct foundation for observing and understanding geopolitics, clarifies the logical starting points that geopolitical research should adhere to, outlines the internal logic of geopolitics's emergence and development, and constructs a geopolitical analytical methodology for static and dynamic research on international relations.