The Law of Expanding Spaces (Pt. 1)

For the first article on the geopolitics series we have a heavy-hitter!

This is my translation of one of the first essays to be published in the German publication Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (ZfG) by Fritz Hesse (1898-1980), a German diplomat and author. Fritz was the son of Max Hesse, a diplomat for Imperial Germany. He served during the First World War with the ultimate rank of reserve Lieutenant. After the war, he studied geography and law in Berlin and Munich and in 1923 gained his doctorate under the supervision of renowned German geopolitician and great contributor to the German School of Geopolitik and the ZfG, Karl Haushofer.

The following essay is the first one in the first-ever issue of ZfG, in 1924 (Halbjahr 1, 1924). I will break the essay into two parts to make it more digestible. After, I will provide a third part, which will be a short overviewing analysis to situate the essay into the broader context of German political and cultural thought of the time. This will demonstrate the influence of political ideology and nascent German cultural seeds in the young geopolitical current beginning to grow under Haushofer and others at the time.

A note on ZfG: Founded in Heidelberg in 1923 by Kurt Vowinckel, the journal attracted great German geopolitical thinkers and academians of the time such as Karl Haushofer, Erich Obst and others. It was influenced by the work of renowned geologists and antrhopologists of the late 19th century such as Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), whom are often and heavily quoted Hesse’s essay. I will expand more on them in the 3rd part of this series.

Zeitschrift für Geopolitik is an untranslated publication, so all work here is original. Please consider subscribing to support my work of bringing to light similar essays and products that have remained unreachable to English-speaking audiences. Enjoy this peak into the obscure German geopolitics of the previous century!

The Law of Expanding Spaces, by Fritz Hesse, 1924.

The to-be and has-been of history display without any doubt a singular revelation; the positive relation between the growth of human population and with it respectively the sizes of the spaces which they dominate. Though we cannot verify this statistically, all experience speaks to the supposition that the periods of world history known to us for multiplication of populations speak to the hegemony of humanity over land. Thus, as a being inhabiting the earth, man is subject to the general laws of the Lifeform; he must, by reproduction and dissemination, fulfill his natural living space, until perhaps in an infinitely distant time the Earth offers better suitability to other beings. This management of space and its fulfillment, which is determined by the increase of population and thereby the historical soaring movements of populations from smaller regions to larger ones, is described by nothing more than the familiar yet not well-defined term: Law of Expanding Spaces.

Ratzel, who first conceived this idea, was aware that with it he was touching on one of the core problems of man’s relationship with space. Nevertheless, he never treated the matter in all its magnitude and consequences summarily, so we must here seek his views on many scattered spots. The manifold application of this notion, and the manifold interpretations he gave to the Law of Expanding Spaces, are neither free of contradictions nor precise in their content: Every life form should arise, grow and pass away again. – History is the constant expansion of the living space and the consequently bound ever-increasing area of its impact. - The enlarging and shrinking of states is always only a means to an end: the expansion of the human concept of space, the ever-increasing rejuvenation of expansive forces in foreign spaces.- The ascension of the sea powers and of America to world powers, the inclusion of the whole globe in a single unit, and at the same time the constant growth of the individual states through adaptation and conformity; all this has been in agreement with Ratzel’s law. In the end, the Law of Expanding Spaces could almost only appear as a variation of the old knightly idea, which supported that man would one day be the master of all nature.

Ratzel was no supporter of Evolutionary Theory and has repeatedly rejected it. The distinction which separates his view from the others, however he did not elaborate on. Thus, the expansion of his thinking remained stagnant after his death until in the recent present, Kjellén reemphasized the importance of the spatial and earthbound factors in history, thus also breathing new inspiration to geography. He died without his part having come to a definitive confrontation with this problem of the German geographer, so that to this day no scientific expansion of the Law of Expanding Spaces has taken place.

Kjellén's teaching, however, makes it possible to shine new light on such thoughts. He juxtaposed the concept of human will to the eternal laws of the earth and it was through their interaction alone that the interplay of political history was revealed to him. This created the encyclopedic framework within which alone, the assessment of the question regarding the Law of Expanding Spaces can be done correctly. Kjellén supplemented the free will of man, whose spiritual and social form otherwise alone produce the content of history, by adding the spatial element to the equation and thus grounding everything on the body of the earth itself. This geopolitical view necessitates a change in the question posed thus far: If human willpower only worked in space, it now appears independent; separate from temporal moment. Indeed, as a force builder, space is also able to shape human destiny in a predetermined way. Geopolitics is the study of the relationship between political power and space.

For our Law of Expanding Spaces, then, we are no longer asking regarding the nature of the process of spatial and human expansion as the essential element, but about the dynamic effect of the spaces on each other: the When of expansion is a temporal coincidence; the Where and the How -those being the conditions under which it takes place- are the decisive elements. The idea then leads to a comparative consideration of the intrinsic value of the different spaces and the predetermination they impose on the progress of history.

Here one thing becomes clear: the surface of the earth is not in itself a unit, neither is it a force field that is the same everywhere, fused together into one whole. The subdivision of the earth into seas and land, into climatic zones, into permanent and habitable areas, results in such a diversity of living conditions. Geopolitics then becomes a lesson in the diversity of space. So, if we were to speak about the whole of smaller integrated units of living spaces, it could only be done from the point of view of that whole being a deciding force. Certainly, relative homogeneity is given by the presence of uniform conditions, and the natural boundaries are created by the cessation of this occurrence. All this, however, always indicates the aptitude of space for the summarization of the power of human will.

This is the end of Part 1 of the 3—part series of posts on Fritz Hesse’s The Law of Expanding Spaces. Stay tuned for Part 2!

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