1 Geopolitics and the Crisis of European Politics: an Analysis of the geopolitical discourse in some political reviews in the 20ies and 30ies. (paper presented at the International Conference of Critical geopolitics, August 2011 Frankfurt) The aim of my current research is to consider the formation of the “geopolitical imagination” at the beginning of the 20th century. With the expression “geopolitical imagination” I refer to John Agnew and his definition of a constellation of geographical assumptions, representations and criteria of definition that frame a specific historical perception of space – at this regards the interaction between a historical and a space perception of an individual or collective identity is shown. My investigation starts from the following assumption: at the beginning of the 20ieth century a “spatial turn” was emerging in Europe in cultural and political discourses. The term “Spatial turn” was recently defined by some authors, historians and geographers (Schloegel, Osterhammel, ...) in two ways: as a methodological concept used to indicate a emerging new and deeper interest on the meaning and relevance of spatial categories and as a description of a new geopolitical condition, characterised by globalisation, informationalisation and risk society. In this meaning “spatial turn” has been referred to a postmodern society. Contrary to these interpretations I insist that the period between the 19 th and the first half of the 20ieth century can be also seen as a “spatial turn”. In that time the European states had been coping with upsetting social and political processes that gave birth to a new perception of the space. These new phenomena were: the beginning of the economic processes of globalisation, the technological progress that accelerated the ordinary life's time and reduced the space between states and continents (Osterhammel), the huge migration of ethic groups inside Europe, the end of the primacy of Europe with regards to its colonies and to the worldly balance of power, the emerging need for an internationalisation of politics. These facts had a tremendous impact on the geopolitical imagination at various levels: not only on the academic discourse, but also on the political strategies and decisions and on the popular one – which is shown in the representations given by reviews and newpapers of the identity and interest of a specific “nation” and of the European continent. In this perspective the analysis of the transformations of the “geopolitical imagination” 2 between the end of the 19th century and the first haf of the 20th century could shed light on the crisis and new interpretations of some fundamental categories, that were used by academics and politicians in order to re-orient and to give order to the political and social phenomena: concepts like nation, state, people (as Volk), and also Empire, Reich were therfore transformed in this process. At this regards geopolitics – as a new discipline and above all as an emerging discourse used by non-academics – played a pivotal role with regards to the re-orientation of the geopolitical imagination because it seemed to offer scholarly explanations for a political and social crisis that Europe was experiencing. My research focuses on the period when the political geography and then the geopolitical discipline emerges and enjoys a huge success, i.e. from the end of the 19 th century to the Second World War. In particular during the years between the two World Wars, the theories elaborated at the end of the 19th century by political geographers (like Ratzel in Germany) had been rediscovered by academics and opinion-makers. They were assumed to be fundamental in order to figure out an alternative European – and worldly – balance of power and hierarchy, and respectively to create new concepts both of the European space and identity. The theories and models elaborated in Germany by the political geographers became a wide-spread knowledge, a popular discourse during the inter-war years and created certain assumptions and themes that significantly influenced the political debate in Europe and the representations of the European space. Geopolitics was therefore not tremendously influential as such, i.e. as an “academic/scholarly discipline”. It was rather the diffusion of the geopolitical images and concepts across the cultural fields and in particular the correlation between geopolitics -as a dicipline - and other disciplines and discourses that creted a new kind of “geopolitical imagination”. What is at stake in this research is precisely the impact of geopolitics on the larger public opinion, on other academic disciplines and on politics. This kind of analysis seems to be crucial for the study of a “discipline” that enjoyed its huge success outside the academic field and was defined by one of its founders (Ratzel) as the scientific basis for the fusion of natural sciences and human sciences, and more precisely as the only science that could give a synthetic and general perspective on social and political phenomena. 3 From the point of view of the history of political thought, I aim at looking at the interactions between the intellectual and academic discourses, politics and commons sense. In order to develop this kind of approach, it is useful to look at the use and transformation that concepts and visual supports undergo during their transition between disciplines and fields of discourse, in particular from a specialised academic/scholarly to a “popular” discourse, i.e. from the geographical sciences to political journals and reviews. In the following part I will explain my research method and at the same time I will narrate my research experience, referring to my approach on the Mitteleuropa concept. As I began to study the emergence of the idea of Mitteleuropa during the beginning of the 20th century from the perspective of an historian of political thought, I had the possibility to follow on the one hand a historiographical and political approach and, on the other hand, a geographical one. Indeed the separation of these two disciplinary fields made it difficult to understand precisely the object of my research and the context in which it was formed the idea of Mitteleuropa. In other words: what makes Mitteleuropa so successful between the two World Wars is on the one side its particular definition as both a geographical and a historical/political concept, and, on the other, its success and popularity outside the academic fields. One has to deal not with an a academic theory but with a constellation of definitions and visions that are spread in the academic, political and popular culture. For this reason it is necessary to contextualise Mitteleuropa independently from “our” contemporary disciplinary fields and take it as an discourse that was emerging at different levels – academic, popular, strategic ex. Here I am using both O'Tuathail's partition between different kinds of geopolitical discourses (popular, structural, formal. practical), as also Bourdieu's difference between “fields” - intellectual, academic, scientific ex. - and discourses (common sense, academic ex.). We have therefore to look at the complex and multi-layered connotation of the idea of Mitteleuropa, as some historians like Osterhammel and Schloegel tried to do. In this way we can shed light on the conditions of its success and on the impact that the project of “Mitteleuropa” had on political strategies and on popular and academic culture. In particular my goal is to outline on the one hand the context – seen as a cultural and political one – of the emergence of the “Mitteleuropa” idea and, on the other hand, its effects/impact on the popular and academic discourses and, finally, on the 4 development of a specific geopolitical imagination. In the geopolitical perspective the term Mitteleuropa was used to designate a geographical space and at the same time a cultural and political idea. The Mitteleuropa concept was therefore ‘placed’ at the crossroads between a political, a cultural and a purely geographical definition. It became a very particular geographical expression. It did not correspond to a ‘reality’ existing per se on maps: it was not a chain of mountains; nor was it a politically determined State or nation. It could be described rather as a projected ‘empire’ or confederation legitimized through some ‘natural’ and ethnical-cultural features. Mitteleuropa is therefore both a description of a geographical unit – that was never politically acknowledged as such – and of a cultural constellation – seen as “unity in diversity” or under the hegemony of the German ethnic group. The political concept of Mitteleuropa is different / opposed to that of the nation state. It refers rather to the political form of the Empire or more precisely “Reich”. Although the contemporary historiography points out the formation of the nation states as the fundamental political process in modern Europe, Empires were successful forms of political organisations till the End of the First World War. Nevertheless Mitteleuropa was not a projection of a nostalgic idea of the old Empires that failed after the First World War – as Magris seems to believe. At least not at the beginning of the 20th century. Therefore it is interesting to insert the “project Mitteleuropa” in the kind of visions that are projected outside the nation-states and are juxtaposed to it. In this regard Ratzel's considerations about the necessity to overcome the nation-state and to “widen the geographical horizons” (“Erweiterung des geographischen Horizontes” Ratzel, Gesetz des räumlichen Wachstums, S. 98) is relevant to study the “career” of the Mitteleuropa-idea. Ratzel, the founder of poitical geography, reformulates the project of Mitteleuropa – and of a united Europe - and gives it a new scientific and altogether political legitimacy, that is not based on old aristocratic traditions, but on the necessities given by new technological and political developments. New technologies (like the train, the new scientific developments) make it possible to unite spaces and to study them; the new progresses in natural sciences (darwinism for ex.) make it possible to look at and make sense of the whole history of nature and mankind, with no reference to God; new political giants – Europe and Russia – are huge spaces politically organised that could menace Europe. In this regard Europe – and 5 Mitteleuropa – as a unity can gain for Ratzel a meaning as a possible way out of the European crisis – and as a possible redefinition of the political aims of the new German state. “Mitteleuropa” is just one of the symbols – and altogether of the outcomes - of that “revolution in mind” that had to take place in the education of the German generations following Ratzel: very often had Ratzel made a plea for a revolution in the mentality of German citizens and politicians, that could radically increase the German and the European power. A few decades later, in a different and crucial period, after the First World War, “Thinking at continents” (Haushofer), i.e. the geopolitical education of ordinary people and of scientists and politicians, will be seen as a priority not only for the rebirth of a greater Germany, but for the survival of the Continent Europe between other continents. At that time the literature about political geography and geopolitics re-emerges and enjoys a popular and academic success that it never had before. Geopolitics becomes a discipline, that is acknowledged in universities and schools: its professionalisation starts and its status as a discipline consolidates it as the “bridge” between a practical/political knowledge and a theoretical/academic one (Haushofer). Although this process has been described after the Second World War as a typical outcome of German radical nationalism, geopolitics develops at the same time in whole Europe. Germany is therefore only a particular and extreme example of a European development. Geopolitics is not only successful: it reveals a new way of looking at political order, i.e. at political and historical fundamental categories that have oriented the political and cultural life. Long before the great historian Meinecke wrote his book on the “reasons of State” (1924) and reasserted the state paradigm in historical sciences, Ratzel made a plea to overcome a static idea of state and to read politics as a dynamic pattern of relations. At the same time a colleague of Ratzel, Karl Lamprecht had elaborated a new interpretation of history, based on the observation of groups and not individuals, and at the same time had supported a “cultural imperialism” - what we could call today a kind of soft imperialism. Ratzel and Lamprecht worked together in Lipsia at the end of the 19th century in order to give birth to a new revolution in historiographical and geographical paradigms: their holistic vision of human and natural phenomena and relations tried to combine the recent doctrine of social darwinism with German romantic organic theory and with neo-positivistic axioms. 6 Their project was re-emerging after 1914. Why? Not because of the success of nationalist or voelkisch movements – even less because of the rise of nationalsocialism. Geopolitics was not developed as a science in order to legitimate a political order a project – this is shown also in retrospective by the weakness of the main exponent of geopolitics under Natonalsocialism, Karl Haushofer's, position as “regime intellectual”. The importance of geopolitics has been exaggerated – when we look at it as a “discipline”. But if we look at the diffusion of “geopolitical” maps, terms, concepts, its role in the elaboration of a specific “geopolitical imagination” in the first half of the 20th century its role cannot be exaggerated. This paradox can be better explained if we separate “geopolitics as a discipline” supported by Haushofer and the group around “Zeitschrift fuer Geopolitik” and geopolitics as a set of assumptions, images, visual representations, concepts and theories, that penetrates in many disciplinary fields and discourses. I will call this phenomenon the general “impact” of geopolitics: geopolitical concepts and images are spread and transposed from one “scientific” context to another for ex. from the disciplinary to the context of political reviews. When they are used in another context they undergo two transformations: firstly they are “taken for granted”, i.e. seen as scientific data given once for all and therefore not able to be discussed; secondly they acquire different meanings and, by doing so, they modify the meanings of pre-existing political concepts in the political lexicon. What the neo-conservative publishers of “Die Tat” did in the 1920ies , when they used geopolitical categories, was to point out the clash between the “old” - and obsolete – concepts of nations, states, citizenship, parliamentary democracy, and the new – and “fit” ideas of Lebensraum, Grossraum, Volk, Panregion etc. In this way “geopolitics” could carry a revolutionary meaning: could subvert some traditional ideas on which the nation state and the European balance of power was grounded – the “revolution in minds” could begin! Let's take an example. The popular review “Die Tat” was in the 1920ies a place where many exponents of different political positions could discuss on the future European order. Grabowski, a strong supporter of the Weimar democracy, and Zeher, an intellectual belonging to new conservative groups, advocated both a stronger orientation of the etlies' education in order to know the characters of the space. Following them, the space determines not only the political strategies, but also the political identity and interests of a state (Grabowski A., Politisches Verständnis durch Karten“, „Die Tat“, 1928, 20, 1, S. 65-71 7 and Zeher, Ist eine Deutsche Außerpolitik überhaupt möglich? in „Zeitschrift für Geopoltik“, 7,1, 1930, 1-28). The knowledge of the space makes the difference between a “good” and a “bad” politics. Not only: the authors of the main articles in “Die Tat” and in “Zeitschrift fuer Politik” cast doubt on the idea of the nation-state. If the space – and the fight in order to conquer it – are the main factors to understand politics and to pursue a good political strategy, the concept of the “nation-state” has to be understood in a different way. For Zeher this is a old term and therefore it has to be replaced by the idea of Reich: the Reich is a dynamic and expanding political unit that on the one hand refers to a “organic entity”, and on the other is capable to live and expand – with no respect to any limitations and restrictions imposed by the international state balance accepted after the Westphalian peace ( Zehrer H., Der Umbau des deutschen Staates, Die Tat, 1933, 25, 2, S. 7). In this way not only Zeher justifies an imperial politics using the traditional political power language: he creates a new language and coins new categories that will be spread in many reviews of that time. He is not the first and the only author to do so: but this is precisely my point. In other words, what happens a the beginning og the 20th century is that specific ideas and concepts – like Reich, Volk – and perspectives – organic, holistic – that were scattered in the previous literature come to build a new “geopolitical imagination” that changes the perception of space, politics and history. Geopolitics plays a key role in this process: it gives a legitimacy to the “new” language and allows the transformations/crisis of “old” ideas, like nation-state, democracy, citizenship and so on.