Narration

This narrative is an edited version of an essay by Alexander B. Murphy, Department of Geography, University of Oregon. For the complete article, see the Journal of Geography, May-August 2000, Vol. 99, No. 3/4.

A useful starting point is the political pattern of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in western/central European. The continent was dominated by two distinct types of countries. One type was the incipient national states such as England, France, Spain, and Portugal, and the other type was the empires in central and Eastern Europe. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) held that the Prince of any realm could determine the religion of that realm, as part of an arrangement that governed how territorial units in the Holy Roman Empire would relate to one another. This gave birth to a notion of sovereignty based in law. This legal principle became the foundation on which all units were to relate to one another, and the strong de facto sovereign arrangements of the west ensured that sovereignty was understood to be all encompassing.

The sovereignty principle is significant because it provided a theoretical foundation for carving territory into largely autonomous governmental units. This meant that the exercise of power was no longer seen in human hierarchical terms, but instead was to be exercised at a single scale -- that of the state. However, as long as authority was vested in absolutist rulers and institutions, the system was subject to warfare and collapse.

The other key ingredient to the future of the European state system was the doctrine of nationalism -- the idea that each ethno-cultural community (nation) had the right to control its own affairs, and that the exercise of power ultimately rested with the members of that community. These nations were said to possess an immortal sprit that was more important that individuals. Nationalists believed that all progress and creative energy comes from the national spirit and the nation can demand supreme loyalty of its members and that the ideal form of government is one in which nations govern the territory they occupy -- the nation-state.

The actual pattern of peoples in Europe forced intellectuals to argue that nations could develop in a variety of ways. Some were diverse peoples, knit together in centralized states (the English, the French, and the Spanish); some were the product of nineteenth-century movements to unify diverse peoples based on some sense of cultural continuity (the Germans and the Italians); some were the product of early twentieth-century movements to free a group from dominance by another self-defined nation (the Irish and the Norwegians); and some were the product of movements to achieve self-determination from empires (the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Croatians). In the United States, the concept of nationalism calls for the blending together of very diverse people into a new nation.

The nation-state ideal has become a pervasive notion undergirding the modern state system, but students should understand the gap between the nation-state ideal and the multicultural reality that exists behind it. The vast majority of the countries of the world are not nation-states in the original meaning of that term. Today we learn about Russians fighting Chechens, Palestinians seeking their own state, Basque separatists demanding greater autonomy from Madrid, Tamils and Singhalese fighting one another in Sri Lanka, and many more conflicts among peoples.

Web Sites

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Heartland and Rimland
This site offers concise and basic introductory notes to the Heartland and Rimland Theories.

In Defense of Classical Geopolitics
This paper from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, assesses geopolitics and discusses theories including the Organic State Model, MacKinder's Heartland, Spykman's Rimland, and Cohen's Gateway States Theory. The paper is illustrated with graphics.