Sublimated Expansionism? Living Space Ideas in Nordic Small-State Geopolitics

Abstract

AbstractIn intellectual histories of geography as well as in international relations, geopolitics is usually the business of great powers, understood as the expansion of hard power through territorial control. However, the existence of a ‘Geopolitik of the weak’ has also been theorised, premised on the ability of smaller states – such as the Nordic countries – to secure their survival through a wider range of policy instruments. In this chapter, we analyse key themes in the work of two Nordic geographical thinkers deeply concerned with the place and status of their home countries in the era of high modernity – Rudolf Kjellén and Gudmund Hatt. Relying upon their scholarly works as well as relevant public debates circa 1905–1945, we trace the ‘small-state geopoliticking’ of Hatt and Kjellén, identifying three key characteristics of their style of small-state geopolitics: (1) determinism is qualified by voluntarism; (2) space is complemented by future; and (3) external expansion is sublimated into internal progress. In its reconceptualisation of living space as primarily concerned with existential survival as premised upon future progress, rather than outward-oriented territorial expansion, small-state geopolitics emerges as a highly situated, somewhat quaint but nonetheless significant element in Nordic theorising of geography.