Spaces on the Temporal Move: Weimar Geopolitik and the Vision of an Indian Science of the State, 1924-45

Sabastian, Luna (2020) Spaces on the Temporal Move: Weimar Geopolitik and the Vision of an Indian Science of the State, 1924-45. In: Conceptions of Space in Intellectual History. Routledge, London, pp. 105-27. ISBN 9780367405496

Abstract

The termination of the Great War hailed a universally modern moment and a new ‘global’ condition. Early to recognize this was the Bavarian scholar and general Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), who built his Geopolitik school on temporal expectation. Defying its reduction to Hitler and Nazism, Haushofer’s Geopolitik aimed to gain revolutionary momentum from anti-colonial nationalisms in the East. In Haushofer’s vision, geopolitical spaces themselves acquired motion as the long-dormant East rose with a globally resounding ‘energism’. Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (‘Journal for Geopolitics’) made India a particular model for Germans seeking to ‘catch up’ on world affairs. The world signified exposure, but, if harnessed correctly, rejuvenation for the nation. In his attempt to de-orientalise the German mind to prepare it for geopolitical momentum, Haushofer drew on the vision of a dynamic East offered by the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949). This flipped the temporality of colonialism. Geopolitical temporality offered the promise of a history that would not manifest itself in time, but in space. In 1933, for Haushofer, the centre of emancipatory dynamism shifted to the fascist countries as champions of a just spatial order against the ‘status quo’ of British or US hegemony.

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