The Law of Expanding Spaces (Pt. 2)

This is a continuation of Part 1 of Hesse’s Law of Expanding Spaces. The density and the complexity of the writing will be addressed at the third part, along with a short analysis and contextualization of the work.

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The simpler and younger the spatial co-existence of man with his condition of life is, the more indeterminate and powerless it tends to be. However, the further this co-existence progresses and the longer the person lives in a certain space, the more intense the mutual support develops: the person becomes rooted in space. Through this rootedness man receives the strength to become master of his homeland and to gain from it a new detachment. Finally, man becomes able through this detachment to invade other people's foreign spaces and impose his will on them. Here he achieves the highest and greatest degree of spatial mastery and at the same time the most extreme form of mobility that seems possible.

Since this process of changing man’s relationship with space, which leads from rootedness to mobility, takes place not only side by side spatially, but also in temporal succession, differences of the earthbound forms from each other may result. Depending on how human mobility evolves, whether fulfilled in rootedness or through expanding and filling empty spaces, the result of the interaction of forces that are animated thus will be different: the forces behind man’s will to expand or explore will be mobile, rooted will be the ones that hold or resist movement.

Mobility depends little on the space of its origin. Differences in mobility are observed in people’s technique of overcoming space, again without absolute differences, except those of sea, land and air. Despite these consequently forceful differences in the means of movement, in variating traffic, and the totality of movement, and after even the furthest distances have been overcome by technology, only one single space will remain: the totality of the trafficable earth.

On the other hand, rootedness means spatial determination in the strongest of terms. Nomadic life, agriculture, industrialization are not only differences of technological and cultural development, but absolute differences of one’s relationship to space: human will subdues, adapts and destroys the surrounding landscape. Such different spatial determinations must therefore also behave differently from one another. In addition, the element of distance, which is overcome by mobility, can have a dynamic effect in this context as well. Thus, in the course of historical progress, spatial separation of the rooting process leads to the special development of power, in contrast to the unifying effect of the movement transcending space.

The geographical conditions for rootedness and mobility are different. Rootedness requires residential areas; mobility requires only living quarters. Those are both limited: the slicing of the solid earth by seas, mountains and deserts divides the whole area into smaller spaces. Thus, rooting can always only grow up to fulfill the partial areas given to it by nature, but can never uniformly fulfill the entire globe, which however mobility is able to completely encompass. For the power that stems from rootedness, the limits therefore lie in the individual borders of the continents.

All forces acting in space are political. The basic forms of human relations to space must be shaped differently in politics. The state-forming forces that are drawn from rootedness are greater and more durable than the one produced by mobility. The natural basis of rooted nations is population and economic surplus, that of mobile ones is willful, mediated between people. Rootedness is productive, unlike movement, which can live only at the expense of others. The forms of growth are also different between the two kinds of relations. Rooted bodies (or entities i.e. nations) slowly grow organically together, their strength is always greater inside than out, their tendency is cultural (Kultur). Mobile forms of communities are capable of growing and disintegrating in leaps and bounds; in everything they are suited to the constructive and unifying spirit of mobility; such structures have a civilizing (Zivilisation) effect: they spread above all technical knowledge and achievements. However, their effect is temporary. Lasting effects that survive the millennia are only rooted in entrenchment.

Also, historically, the interplay of the rise and fall of world empires can be understood from this point of view. World history is given a new meaning by this geopolitical view: historical states of small-scale rooting areas with a great range of motion must gradually be replaced by those with the greatest rooting width but a lesser range of motion as the colonization of the earth progresses. The Law of Expanding Spaces, therefore, leads naturally fulfilled spaces through a long development to the highest validity, while the world-kingdoms that conquer space by mobility and movement must be regarded only as temporary phenomena. This is where history's inexorable compulsion comes into play. Any political power, which ignores the natural prerequisites of duration, can indeed carry its own form of life into foreign landscapes, regardless of whether it is suitable for it in the struggle with foreign conditions of life, but the native form must perish or be transformed into another adapted to the foreign landscape. This struggle in turn gives the foreign space the opportunity to assert itself, and the final process is the rise of the rooted daughter-peoples to self-determination and the disintegration of the old empire which birthed them. The entire history of states founded on power and will thus leads through the interplay of successes and failures, through the steadily progressive fulfillment of their habitations which in turn divides the world into the natural sub-states of the present, with the gradual unification of individual states into the world-federations of the future.

This marks the end of the original essay by Hesse. Part 3 will provide a succinct analysis of the contents, context, and relevance of Hesse’s work to our exploration of German geopolitical theory. Stay tuned!