JEOPOLİTİK STRATEJİ - Deneme Sınavı - 14

The term human security holds a political connotation and reference to human beings which should be taken into consideration as subjects of a political framework. In other words, the term human security itself stresses that human beings have become a geopolitical concern and that the community of states has taken measures to address this concern by offering strong protections for the individuals in cases where their survival is threatened just because the states have been recognized as sovereign entities in world politics. The answer is A.

In an anarchic environment, states will have to rely on their own resources to survive, often referred to in the IR literature as self-help. The answer is B.

The theory of interdependence suggests that international cooperation is a must and a wise move for the overall betterment of all states and of the international system due to the inevitable engagement between states in political, military and economic realms. The answer is A.

Russia has been using energy as a tool of political leverage in its foreign policy after solidifying its geopolitical and military might. The answer is D.

Thomas Friedman recalls that the globalization system requires a firm and activist American foreign policy. The answer is A.

Classical geopolitics refers to the period from the beginning of the 20th century, when the transition from political geography had actualized until the end of the Second World War. The main geopolitical approaches of this period are, Friedrich Ratzsel’s “lebensraum” or “living-space”, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “sea power theory”, Halford Mackinder’s “heartland theory”, Rudolph Kjellen and Karl Haushofer’s perspectives and Nicholas Spykman’s “Rimland theory”.

The former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan are the Central Asian countries. The answer is A.

Classical geopolitics refers to the period from the beginning of the 20th century, when the transition from political geography had actualized until the end of the Second World War. The main geopolitical approaches of this period are, Friedrich Ratzsel’s “lebensraum” or “living-space”, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “sea power theory”, Halford Mackinder’s “heartland theory”, Rudolph Kjellen and Karl Haushofer’s perspectives and Nicholas Spykman’s “Rimland theory”.

Social Darwinism: The theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Social Darwinism was popular in late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify racism and thus is no longer acceptable.

Mackinder’s Law Who controls Eastern Europe controls Heartland, who controls the Heartland rules the World.

n 1904 Halford Mackinder published his article “The Geographical Pivot of History” (Mackinder, 1904) which represents the birth of political geography. He introduced a number of key elements and concepts within his theory, one of which is the “heartland”. Mackinder’s writings were mainly concerned with the grand strategy of the British empire and at this juncture geography was the pivot for a clear understanding of world politics. Writing in early 20th century, Mackinder was aware that with the end of the 19th century the imperialist expansionism of Europe had reached its boundaries and thus was trying to reveal the pivot region for world dominance. He described Eurasia, which is inaccessible by sea power, as the geographical pivot of world politics. This pivot region in this sense is the key to dominate world politics and thus the main root that the imperial grand strategy should be directed. Including Siberian forests in the north and the steppes in the south and bordered by Turkestan deserts, this pivotal region was ruled by the Russian Empire at that time, but the other potential dominant could be Germany allied with Russia or China. In 1919 Mackinder re-examined his argument and concluded that his thesis was still valid and applicable. In his new book “Democratic Ideals and Realities” he replaced the term pivot with heartland and expanded its boundaries as to encompass also Eastern and Central Europe. In this work, he also postulated that “Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the world” (Mackinder, 1942: 106).

Starting from the 17th century, Russia began to encroach upon Central Asia. The answer is B.

Another prominent figure of this period is Rudolf Kjellen who coined the term geopolitics. He not only coined the term, but also defined its essence with his emphasis on the physical character, size and relative location of the territory of the state as central to its power position in the international system (Holdar, 1992: 319). According to Kjellen, geopolitics is one of the main disciplines to understand and analyze the state. Other disciplines were ekopolitik for the analysis of the economic structure of the state, demopolitik (etno) which is for population analyses, Sociopolitiks for analyzing the state-society relations and finally kratopolitiks for governmental constitutional politics.

The Dutch Disease is a term coined by the Economist in 1977 to describe the problems of the Dutch economy related to its one-product economy

Dual Containment Policy refers to an official U.S. policy during the 1980s and 1990s that aimed at surrounding Iran and Iraq, the two most strategic adversaries of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East. The answer is C.

Frozen conflict means a condition in which active fighting has ended or subsided but there is no peace agreement beyond a tenuous cease-fire.

Mackinder, a geographer in the United Kingdom, is considered to be the first important geopolitical thinker. His heartland theory assumes that the particular power that controls the Eurasian landmass would eventually control the global politics and master the universe. In his characterization, land powers are more likely to lay claim to regional and global hegemony than maritime powers.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group was established in 1992 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) to encourage a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno- Karabakh. The answer is A.

Near Abroad Policy was the policy developed by Russia to watch over the situation of the ethnic Russians living in the newly independent states in the 1990s. The answer is A.

Geopolitics in its early stages was closely associated with Germany’s foreign policy practices, a latecomer in the struggle for building colonial empires across the globe (Dodds, 2007). Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer are the most notable German geopolitical thinkers and their thoughts on geopolitics profoundly shaped foreign policies of Nazi Germany during the interwar years and Second World War. The impact of their thought on Nazi Germany’s policies was so decisive and pernicious that geopolitics had been for a long time associated with Hitler’s Germany and considered to be an intellectual exercise serving Hitler’s goals to institute German hegemony across the globe. Rather than geopolitics being recognized as a respectable field of academic study, even the word of geopolitics was avoided in writings on international relations. Hitler’s policies gave a bad reputation to geopolitics. It took some time to recognize geopolitics as a distinct academic discipline.

To Ratzel and Houshofer, states are like living organisms that require lebensraum, viz. living spaces, to survive in the anarchical international environment.