Where a country happens to sit on the map is not a minor detail of geography – it’s one of the most persistent forces shaping how that country behaves toward everyone else. Unlike a government or an ideology, geographic position doesn’t change with elections or revolutions. It sits there, generation after generation, quietly pushing a state’s foreign policy in directions its own leaders rarely get to choose.
Geography as the First Fact of Foreign Policy
The geographer Ellen Churchill Semple put the idea in its most compact form: a country’s geographical position determines its foreign policy. That single sentence became something close to a founding principle for an entire school of thought known as geopolitics, developed further by writers such as Robert Strausz-Hupé. Halford Mackinder, addressing the Royal Geographical Society in London, made much the same point on a grander scale, arguing that a huge share of world history can be traced back to the influence of geography alone.
The Swedish scholar Rudolf Kjellén pushed the idea further still. In his account of the state as a kind of living organism, he treated environment as one of the fundamental dimensions of human existence – something that shapes social life either directly or indirectly through the physical conditions surrounding it. On his reading, environment doesn’t just shape a country’s economy; it can shape a nation’s entire destiny, which is part of why otherwise similar countries can end up with such different economic fortunes depending on where they happen to sit.
Two Kinds of Environment
Geographers writing in this tradition generally split “environment” into two categories: physical environment and cultural environment. Physical environment covers the raw, material facts of a country’s geography – its actual terrain and physical structure. Cultural environment is really the physical environment refracted through human institutions: the religious, political, and economic patterns a society builds on top of the physical facts it inherited. No single religion or culture is the automatic byproduct of a particular landscape, but the people living within a given physical environment do tend to build their political and economic life around what that environment makes possible, whether that’s a mountainous region, a river delta, or a stretch of coastline. Modern transportation has loosened this connection considerably – goods and resources move over long distances far more easily than they once did – but it hasn’t erased the underlying influence physical geography still exerts on how a society organizes itself.
What “Physical Environment” Actually Includes
Geopolitical writers generally break a country’s physical environment down into a fairly specific list of components: its mountains, its elevated plains or plateaus, its climate, its lowland plains, its soil, its vegetation, its coastlines, its centers of settlement, its rivers, its smaller streams and tributaries, the broader atmosphere above it, and, in the modern era, the outer space accessible from its territory. Put all of these together for any given country, and you get a physical profile different enough from every other country’s that geographers can meaningfully measure and compare how much of an advantage, or disadvantage, geography has handed each state.
That’s the real payoff of treating geography as a serious factor in international relations: it explains why two countries with similar populations, similar governments, and similar ambitions can still end up pursuing very different foreign policies – because the ground beneath them, quite literally, is not the same ground.
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