Byron's venetian masque of the French revolution

sovereignty, terror, and the geopolitics of Marino Faliero and the two Foscari

Joshua D. Gonsalves

pp. 47-63

in: Matthew A. Green, Piya Pal-Lapinski (eds), Byron and the politics of freedom and terror, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

The appearance of the anachronistic term "Geopolitics' in my title is intentional. The concept of geopolitics emerges, properly speaking, at the end of the nineteenth century via geographer Friedrich Ratzel's Politische Geographie (1897) and Der Lebensraum (1901) and was popularized by contemporary political scientist-journalist Rudolf Kjellén's term Geopolitik. A theoretical conception of "geo-politics' and the "geopolitical" enters the English language in 1904 and 1902, respectively,¹ is provoked by the so-called Scramble for Africa between imperial powers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and is motivated by the European anxiety that the territorial availability of the world is on the brink of exhaustion. This narrowly conceived notion of geopolitics informs, in turn, the Nazi project to conquer a progressive global depletion of livable space, or what Ratzel called Lebensraum.

Cited authors

Kjellén Rudolf

Ratzel Friedrich