Review Article 323

Debunking myths and creating new ones: two recent myths in political geography

W. S. LOGAN

Hunter, J . M. Perspective on Ratzel‘s Political Geography. University of America Press, Lanham Maryland, 1983; xxxii + 54.4 pp. (ISBN 0-8191-3448-lpbk) USS19.75.

Kliot, N. and Waterman, S. Pluralism and Political Geography: People, Territory and State. Croom Helm, London and Canberra, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983, x + 323 pp. (ISBN 0-312-61766-6), $32.95.

James Hunter has had a life-long interest in Friedrich Ratzel. the German scholar held by many to be the father of modern Political Geography but criticised by others as the founder of Geopolitik. Hunter sets out in this long book to salvage Ratzel’s reputation and especially to dispose of the common ‘misinterpretation’ that Ratzel advocated the view that the political state could be compared in its structure and behaviour with a corporeal organism. This is a challenging task but unfortunately it does not succeed despite the detail of Hunter’s book. While accepting Hunter’s point that English-speaking geographers have relied too heavily on second-hand views and poor translations of Ratzel’s work, one searches vainly through the book to find a clear statement that Ratzel did not, in fact, see the state as an organism growing and declining in a corporeal sense; one remains unconvinced that he was only using the biological concept in a ‘panpsychic philosophical sense’ and was not simply corning under the influence of Darwin, Spencer and others with their emphasis on evolutionary explanation.

Much of the trouble with Hunter’s book and the reason why it probably will not put to rest the so-called myths attached to Ratzel’s contribution lies in its longwindedness and ponderous language- the result, one is tempted to suggest, of working so closely with Ratzel’s German texts! Take the following passage for example:

Thus, in Ratzelian thought the world is composed of an incognizable number of organisms. Each and every one of them is an organic union considered as a functioning whole. At the same time, however, there exist organic unities both beyond a particular level as well as within it. The whole is interrelated and interconnected by multiform extensions of its organismic parts to an unlimited number of other equal, smaller or larger organismic wholes. Without going into detail it can be said that Ratzel reflects this basic thought in many ways and in numerous instances (p.12).

With ‘basic thoughts’ expressed in this manner Hunter deserves to be ineffectual and Freidrich Ratzel misinterpreted.

Kliot and Waterman’s work presents an opposite problem: it is a highly readable set of papers,

Urban Studies Unit, Humanities Department, Footscray Institute of Technology, Ballarat Road Footscray. P.O. Box 64, Footscray, Victoria 3001. Australian Geographical Studies 22, October 1984.

324 Australian Geographical Studies

but its very readability helps to cover up the perhaps suspect editorial assumptions underlying the book and help to promote new myths in Political Geography.

The book originated in a seminar in January 1982 at Haifa University attended by thirty geographers from seven countries. Because of its location and timing (in view of the deteriorating events in the Lebanon), the seminar focused inevitably on Israel’s political geographical situation although the central conceptual theme insofar as the published result is concerned is ‘pluralism’. The difficulty lies in Kliot’s and Westerman’s use of the term pluralism to describe those societies which comprise a number of racial, ethnic, religious or other groups, and their omission of the key element recognised in truly pluralist political structures by political scientists such as Dahl, etc. that the groups all have access to power and that there is, therefore, a shifting balance of power within the society as a whole. While the term can be correctly applied to Israel in the first sense-indeed what society is not ‘pluralist’ in that relatively meaningless sense? -it cannot be so readily used to describe Israel’s power structure insofar as the Palestinians are concerned.

One hopes that this misapplication and devaluation of the concept is not ideologically inspired. In fact, there are many suggestions that Kliot and Waterman are guilty of sloppy thinking rather than political mischievousness and propagandising. Their astounding claim (p. 3) that the West Bank Arabs are ‘striving to integrate within Israeli society’ is counterbalanced by their insistence on refemng to the West Bank as ‘Israeli-occupied’. They also note the segregation barriers between various religious groups, as do the contributions by Arnon Soffer and Yosseph Shilhav, while they include a paper by Gwyn Rowley dealing with the colonisation of the West Bank under the 1978 Drobles Plan.

Other useful case studies of contemporary world trouble spots-perhaps the major attraction of political geography to young geography students - include Frederick W. Boal’s and David N. Livingstone’s paper on the Shankhill-Fall Divide in Belfast, David B. Knight’s discussion of Quebec separatism, and the two papers on American foreign policy and internal political dilemmas by Saul B. Cohen and Richard L. Morrill respectively. Part One of the book sets a theoretical context for current political geography (although not particularly for the case study sections that follow in the book). These theoretical papers by Peter J. Taylor, Saul B. Cohen, Ronald J. Johnston and Ray Hudson were presumably given at Haifa but have been revised so that they effectively debate with each other. The conclusion reached seems to be that at least two irreconcilable approaches in Political Geography are emerging, but the hope prevails that efforts towards reaching mutual understanding will be maintained. In all, this is a particularly relevant book which, providing teachers make a discussion point of the latent myth-making, will prove a valuable text for students taking Political Geography in universities and colleges.

COMPUTER MAPS The maps on the cover of this issue and the preceding issue were drawn on the computer by Simon Wild who was then a Research Scholar in the Department of Prehistory, Faculty of Arts, The Australian National University, Canberra. He is now a Research Scholar in the Department of Human Geography at the same institution.