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| THE EVOLUTION OF THE METHODOLOGY IN GEOPOLITICS: FROM NATURALISM TO STRUCTURALISM |
| LU Jun-yuan |
| Jiangnan Social University, Suzhou 215124, China |
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Abstract This paper indicates that the explanation model has been evolved from naturalism, space-power linkage and structuralism. The geopolitical theories constructed under a naturalistic model have obvious characteristics of methodology:modeling after natural science, they tried to explain laws of human society by using natural laws and looked them as deterministic factors for national fate. It failed to discover the social law s of human beings. The second model is named as space-power linkage in this paper that widely exists in the geopolitical theories held by Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford J. Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, etc. They constructed the doctrines of geopolitics and emphasized that a certain space played a determinative role in the process of getting strategic power for a nation. The model of space-power linkage exceeded the naturalistic model and pushed the related geopolitics to become a theory of international relations. However, geopolitics under the model of space-power linkage outstandingly bears the single dimension idea that geographical spaces determine national power. It set geographic space as an absolute factor of determining world politics according to the nature of geographical space and the differences of location. Then it easily slid into ‘the environmental determinism’. The geopolitical theories with characteristics of structuralism appeared in 1960's. It is a holistic approach of world geopolitical structure and has gained a better effect of explanation than other explanation models before.
This paper argues that a new structural theory of geopolitics with the subject of political actors should be constructed in order to improve the explanation function of geopolitics for international politics and relations.
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Received: 17 January 2007
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2007, Vol. 22 
