GEOPOLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE CAUCASIAN-CASPIAN REGION

Abstract

Geopolitics, the major theoretical propositions of which were formulated in detail in the 19th-20th centuries by its founding fathers (Ratzel, Kjellen, Mackinder, Mahan, Spykeman, Haush-offer, Schmitt, and others), is based on the fundamental dualism of Tellurocracy (Land) and Thalassocracy (Sea) as two opposing ontological and epistemological concepts.

“Land,” “Tellurocracy,” or “Supremacy on the Land” as a paradigmatic matrix of a wide variety of civilizations is associated with stable spaces and their quality orientations and descriptions realized in the domination of the whole over parts, conservatism, hierarchy, and strict legal norms which rule large human communities: clans, tribes, peoples, states, and empires. “Sea,” “Thalassocracy,” or “Supremacy on the Sea” is a civilizational type based on the domination of parts over the whole, individualism, liberalism, relative ethnic and legal norms, and the priority of nomadism and seafaring over the settled way of life. “Marine cultures” develop and change their external features easily while pre-serving the inner identity of their basic principles.1 The larger part of human history has been unfolding under conditions of small-scale confrontation between the state-territorial units of both orientations. Whereby this dualism was concentrated along seacoasts and at river mouths and basins (Rome vs. Carthage, Sparta vs. Athens, etc.). By the beginning of the Christian era, political forms and improved technical transportation means created a stable geopolitical picture of the world, which Halford Mackinder depicted on his map.

Land” became associated with the inland expanses of Northeast Eurasia (which coincided, on the whole, with the territory occupied consecutively by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the “Third Rome”), while “Sea” was identified with the coastal zones of the Eurasian continent and the New World colonized by the European maritime powers during the Age of Geographic Discoveries (the Anglo-Saxon world, “New Carthage”). The war of position that filled the 18th and 19th centuries with its geopolitical content was waged by Thalassocratic Britain against continental powers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia). This interminable geopolitical dualism reached its peak during the Cold War of 1946-1991. Thalassocracy was associated with the United States and NATO (Atlanticism), while Tellurocracy with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO)countries (Eurasianism).2 

Classical geopolitics distinguishes the third, intermediary, zone, the so-called “coastal zone,” or “Rimland” with no ontological nature of its own. For this reason, it cannot be described as a “third center.” It can be described as a space which can potentially join Thalassocracy or Tellurocracy or become a scene of their confrontation.