Abstract

What is «geopolitics»? Why is it so important to explain international politics? Could geopolitics continue to be a useful paradigm to understanding the challenges of the present and to forecasting the making of the future world order? These are some of the questions touched on in the essays proposed in this issue of «Filosofia Politica» about geopolitics. Man doesn't live in the world but within its representations. Geopolitics constitutes a suitable tool for the construction of these representations. Moreover, geography has always had its essential political dimension that goes beyond the definition of boundaries and region. In other words, geopolitics confers order and structure to political space. The essays which are here presented concern the invention and evolution of geopolitics: Otto Hinze's approach to Ratzel's geopolitics as an instrument for studying the state (A. Colombo); the theory of sea and land power to protect Great Britain and the United States from the Russian threat (M. Chiaruzzi); the hope of German geopolitics to conquer the world (P. Chiantera-Stutte); the rediscovery of Toynbee's geopolitics of civilizations built upon cultural identity (L.G. Castellin); the analysis of the new success of geopolitics after 1989 as an answer to the increasing importance of the human factor in the construction of space (P. Golub). The aim of these essays is the attempt to comprehend 'classical' and 'new' geopolitics, in order to demonstrate that perhaps «geopolitics is what states make of it».