#41 The Primary Geopolitical Framework

The origins of the war in 1914 cannot be understood without a deeper understanding of racism. The idea that the Europeans stood as a standard-bearer of the world’s peoples, that they were a ‘superior’ race above all others of the world’s peoples, was a widespread belief across all ruling classes at the time.

Race: the Central Ideological Tool of Colonisation

By 1890, ‘race’ was the central ideological tool of colonisation and was understood as a scientific entity, even to the extent that it was taught in universities. It was understood implicitly and sometimes stated explicitly, that white men were thought of as the 'master race'. Although this concept has been associated with Nazi Germany; all colonising powers thought in terms of race and considered themselves as the ‘master race’. Long before the Nazi era, each colonising nation in Europe considered their people the masters of the universe.

The ‘master race’ was defined as a people or nation whose members considered themselves genetically superior to all others, therefore they thought they were justified in conquering and ruling those they considered ‘lesser races’. The theory presented a hierarchal model of history, attributing civilisation only to ‘white races'.

"Present Distribution of the European Races", map from American eugenicist Madison Grant's 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. This scan is from a reprint printed in the journal of the American Geographical Society. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 pseudo-scientific book by American lawyer, self-styled anthropologist, and proponent of eugenics, Madison Grant (1865-1937). Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human beings. The theory and the book were praised by Nazis and were well received by Adolf Hitler, and used as theoretical justification for the Holocaust and other racist crimes.

Stereotypical behaviour was attributed to different classifications of race that were constructed. For example, as Matthew Kneale discusses in his novel English Passengers, where he refers to a racial analysis from 1857:

“The dominating characteristics of the Black type being barbarism, he has no comprehension of ideas, or enterprise or time.... running naked through the wilderness.... do not underestimate the savage.... he is possessed of a brutish cunning.... bereft of rudimentary skills, holding a place midway between humankind and the animal kingdom", and much more.

"The Celtic type will endure through his station be a humble one. The dominating characteristic of the Celt may be idleness and deceit.... generally possessed of a most useful instinct of obedience. His role will be as a servitor to the Saxon.

"The Norman type may by his cunning survive a little longer.... his ability to dazzle his Saxon better with the empty spectacle of tradition.”

- English Passengers by Mathew Kneale, Penguin (2000), pages 406/7.

It was around this time that Robert Knox published The Races of Man, which exalted the Saxons of England: a precursor to Hitler’s notion of a ‘master race’, or ‘White Supremacy' in the USA.

Hannah Arendt aptly summarises the role of race throughout the 19th century in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Racism has been the powerful ideology of imperialist policies since the turn of our century [20th] ... Not until the end of the 19th century were dignity and importance accorded race thinking as though it had been one of the major spiritual contributions of the western world.

-       The Origins of Totalitarianism, Meridian Books 1958, pages 159-160

Arendt goes on to discuss what she terms "full-fledged ideologies", i.e. systems based that are based on a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract a majority of people and that claim to possess the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Only two ideologies she concludes do this: 'the ideology that interprets history as the economic struggle of classes and the other that interprets history as the natural fight of the races'. Arendt then goes on:

“the fact that racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialist politics is so obvious that it seems as if many students prefer to avoid the beaten track of truism....”

- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Meridian Books 1958, pages 159-160

It is in this context that we must understand eugenics, the natural corollary of race theory. Eugenics was the science exploited to sterilise 'lesser' peoples to purify the ‘Saxon race’ as it was constructed. Most major American and British political and artistic figures in this period enthusiastically supported eugenics and sterilisation: figures such as Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Bernard Russell, Maynard Keynes, and many more. Leading universities believed that passionate ‘oversexed girls’ should be sterilised. Eugenics crossed oceans. It was irrevocably connected to race in general and the idea of a ‘master race’.

The Primary Geopolitical Framework

Throughout the 19th century, and in the 200 preceding years, ‘competitive colonialism’ was considered the natural political order in Europe. The competition was to obtain, hold and rule foreign lands. Britain, as the dominant world power after 1815, had managed to hold the political competitive framework in check throughout the 19th century. But new colonising powers had arisen by the end of the century: the USA, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The USA and Japan were far away from Europe, and except for China, they were not overtly competing with western colonising aspirations. Italy was small and was delighted to be offered Eritrea at the end of the century. Germany, on the other hand, while late on the scene, was widely looking around for colonies She had managed to obtain German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), and German West Africa (today’s Namibia). In the Pacific, she managed to colonise half a dozen islands. Germany was hungry for more colonies.

Geo-politics, the science of understanding world power, was in its infancy at this time. In the 21st century, we are used to think tanks, university departments that deal with international studies, and organisations focused on foreign policy. In the 19th century, foreign policy had largely been an affair driven by private initiatives and fortified after the event by the national Parliament or monarch. One example will suffice. The invasion of China was driven by the British navy in 1842 but had been initiated by private traders who had been pushing their Indian grown opium crop into China. Only when the Chinese government attempted to stop the trade by forcing opium-carrying ships to sink their cargo in the sea did the British navy respond. And when the naval ships attacked the Chinese coast, they were followed by British traders a short way behind.

Colonisation had been a private affair right up to the 1914 war. European empires grew and waned as we I have described in these blogs. There was no planning. World power grew haphazardly and was crudely conceptualised. ‘The Great Game’, played by Britain, the Ottomans and Russia - while a popular concept - was a poorly thought-through theory of global power.

It was not until the 1890s that we find scholars attempting to conceptualise and generalise on the true character of world power. First off was Sir Halford John Mackinder, a British geographer who published his heartland theory, The Geographical Pivot of History in 1904. The American equivalent, Nicholas Spykman, did not publish his work on America, Strategy in World Politics until 1942. Geopolitics became an institutionalized study after 1945, behind secret government-owned organisations, the CIA and more than a dozen similar organisations in the USA; in Britain, MI5 and MI6 played parallel roles. But in 1890 there was little thinking like this.

Mackinder argued that the centre of the world concerned the heartland which he crudely defined as central Europe and Asia. He argued that whoever controlled the ‘heartland’ controlled the world.  More importantly, the British elite who ran foreign policy believed Mackinder’s theory to be true and accurate. From the time of publication in 1904, the British believed that a Russian-German alliance – who owned the heartland of the world - or plans for a ‘Mitteleuropa‘ would threaten British world dominance. Right or wrong, his ideas were closely followed by the ruling British imperial establishment, all the way through to 1945.

Definitions of Geopolitical Studies and Political Economy

Geopolitics is the study of the dynamics of global history. It is a method of study that crosses multiple boundaries in social science and has therefore remained a subject for specialists in think-tanks. As an interdisciplinary study, geopolitics draws from geography, politics, economics, security studies, history, and technology, to name just a few, to understand the dynamics of a particular situation or the world in general. Mackinder was the first European in what was to become a field of study by western societies.

Political Economy is the study of power and economics as if they were a singular entity. Power and money simply go together. It is premised on the idea that all aspects of power have an economic base, and all economic activity has a base in power. They have broken apart as subjects of study in the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, studying power and economics together was the mainstream, and all the great thinkers in these eras worked within a model of political economy. Scottish universities retained political economy as a subject of study for a long period into the 20th century. Broad left-wing thinking retains political economy as central to understand our world.

Geopolitics and political economy were in their infancy at this time. Both disciplines, as we now see them, provided the means of thinking through the future of the world. Planning the future of world power began to take concrete shape within the two contending powers of the time at the end of the 19th century. As the two major powers, Britain and Germany, began to compete for global dominance so their nation’s imperial future began to be considered by a small number of scholars and thinkers. In Britain, a small cabal of rich and politically powerful Englishmen thought about ruling the whole world and thought of Germany as an existential threat to their plans.

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