How has geopolitics changed the end of WWII Essay

How has geopolitics changed the end of WWII - Essay Example 24, 1960). In 1904 H.J.Mackinder developed his ‘Heartland theory’ presenting the world divided in ‘World Island’ comprising Europe, Asia and Africa, peripheral island groups of Americas, Australia, Japan and the British isles, and the ‘Heartland’ laying at the center of ‘World Island’ from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. Regardless the large scale character of this theory, its belonging to the postulates of geographic determinism is undutiful. Since then, despite many differences mainly in the relative percentage of the geographical factor, a great number of authors from German, British and American schools, more or less, could be associated with geographical determinism. Even Kjellen, besides his political-philosophical concept of nation and state, favored the most restricted meaning of the term of ‘geopolitics’ – â€Å"Geopolitics is the study of the state as a geographic organism or pheno menon in space; that is land, territory, or, most pregnantly, as country [Reich].†(/Kjellen, Der Staat als Lebensform, p.46, 1917/ Kristoff, The origins and evolution of geopolitics, p. 25, 1960). Kjellen’s formulations have been used to a certain degree in Germany, by K. Househofer, who claimed: â€Å"...geopolitics shall and must become the geographic conscience of the state.†(/ Houshofer, K., et al. Bausteine zur Geopolitic, p.27, 1928/ Kristoff, The origins and evolution of geopolitics, p. 21, 1960). Drawn along by Kjellen’s comprehension of autarky as good and necessary (Kristoff, L.K.D., The origins and evolution of geopolitics, p. 26, 1960) and developed by the apologists of geographical determinism, the concept of ‘natural boundary’ and the akin in spirit one - of ‘harmonic state’, were largely used in Nazi Germany as well as in the rest of the world, as a milestone in determination of the