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Spykman and Geopolitics

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On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((ASID,volume 20))

Abstract

Nicholas John Spykman, Dutch-American journalist, sociologist, political scientist and geopolitician, was chief among the diffusers of geopolitics from Europe to America..[1] His attempt to link geopolitics on the one hand to liberal-idealistic values of individual freedom, national independence, national liberation and anti-imperialism, and on the other hand to political-realist assumptions of the permanence and inevitability of struggles for power, have had a significant influence on the ideological bases of American foreign policy since 1941, of a durability not widely recognized. Though he did some work of a “normal science” type and in state-level geopolitics, he is best known, as a theoretical geopolitician, for his part in the system-level grand-theoretical debate over Mackinder’s Heartland doctrine, to which he counter-posed his own Rimland idea, which remains theoretically signifi-cant.

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References

  1. Nicholas John Spykman, born in Amsterdam October 13, 1893, “earned a bachelor’s degree (1921), master’s degree (1921), and a doctorate (1923) from the University of California. He had been a young journalist in the Near East from 1913 to 1916, in the Middle East from 1916 to 1919, and in the Far East from 1919 to 1920. He was an instructor in political science and sociology at the University of California from 1923 to 1925 before going to Yale in 1925. In 1935 he became chairman of Yale’s Department of International Relations and Director of the Yale Institute of International Studies, positions he held until 1940.” He died on June 26, 1943. (Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought, Louisiana State University Press, 1980, p. 92 ).

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Authors
  1. David Wilkinson
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, 90024, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ciro E. Zoppo (Professor of International Relations) (Professor of International Relations)

  2. University of Paris-Sud, Paris, France

    Charles Zorgbibe (Dean of the Faculty of Law and Vice President) (Dean of the Faculty of Law and Vice President)

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© 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague

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Wilkinson, D. (1985). Spykman and Geopolitics. In: Zoppo, C.E., Zorgbibe, C. (eds) On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear. NATO ASI Series, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6230-9_4

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