Territory, State and Nation: The Geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellén

Rudolf Kjellén, regularly referred to as “the father of geopolitics,” developed in the first decade of the twentieth century an analytical model for calculating the capabilities of great-power states and promoting their interests in the international arena. It was an ambitious intellectual project that sought to bring politics into the sphere of social science. Bringing together experts on Kjellén from across the disciplines, Territory, State and Nation explores the century-long international impact, analytical model, and historical theories of a figure immensely influential in his time who is curiously little-known today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800730731

Book preview

Introduction

RAGNAR BJÖRK AND THOMAS LUNDÉN

This is an anthology about the man who coined the concept of ‘geopolitics’, the political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922). It deals with his ideas about state power and its relations to domestic resources in nature, infrastructure, culture and population. The volume also deals with his relevance for modern-day international affairs as well as the problematic aftermath of his sometimes controversial and enigmatic thoughts. With the renaissance of geopolitics as an object of study in geography, political science, international relations and other disciplines – as well as the fundamental role it plays in the realms of strategy and diplomacy – Kjellén has to some extent already been analysed by scholars, but the existing literature on him remains remarkably limited.

While occasionally referred to in Sweden and abroad (especially in South America), Kjellén was for a long time either forgotten, neglected or misinterpreted. A fair judgement of his political thinking and values was given by political scientist Nils Elvander in a paper (1956) on Kjellén’s inclination towards radical conservatism, and in Elvander’s dissertation (1961) on the conservative ideological debate in Sweden in Kjellén’s time. Both of these are in Swedish. However, neither of them aimed to cover his ‘life and letters’ or his scholarly thinking. An abbreviated copy of Kjellén’s first article mentioning geopolitics in 1899¹ was published in the geographic periodical Ymer (1976/77). A biography based on a collection of Kjellén’s letters has been edited and commented upon by his daughter (Kjellén-Björkquist 1970), also in Swedish.

Although Kjellén was included by Elvander in the 1968 edition of IESS (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences), the first elaborate account of his scholarly ideas was Sven Holdar’s article ‘The Ideal State and the Power of Geography’ (1992), which has been the foundation for further references in political geography and political science in the English-language literature.

The idea to produce a comprehensive anthology sprang up a few years later. In 1996, Japan scholar Bert Edström took the initiative to arrange a symposium about Kjellén at Stockholm University.² Historian Ragnar Björk was involved in producing an anthology based on the symposium, but for several reasons the idea could not be implemented at the time. Several years later it was taken up again, with geographer Thomas Lundén also involved, and the book Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen was published in Swedish (Edström, Björk and Lundén 2014). It was launched at a symposium at Skytteanum, the Political Science department of Uppsala University, where Kjellén had held the very prestigious Skyttean Professorship in Rhetoric and Political Science from 1916 to his death in 1922. Some of the original contributions were updated, while other new ones were added.

The book in Swedish had a slightly different scope to the present one. While Kjellén is mostly known abroad for books and articles translated into German (and from German into other languages), his extensive publishing as a public intellectual – comprising pamphlets, newspaper articles, lectures and reviews in Swedish – cover another and often more biased side of Kjellén’s production. One chapter in Edström, Björk and Lundén (2014), by geographer Claes Göran Alvstam (Alvstam 2014), describes his activities as a (physical) geographer, a role that was forced upon him, but that was, as it turned out, much in line with his interest in nature and cycling as an avid ‘outdoorsman’.³ This role also brought him into contact with canonic German geographers of the time such as Carl Ritter and, above all, Friedrich Ratzel. One of Kjellén’s favourite great powers was the ascendant Japan; and his distinction between Lesefrüchte (learning by reading) and the facts on the ground (studied by visiting an actual location) has been analysed by Bert Edström (Edström 2014). By contrast, the British Empire was initially seen by Kjellén as a doomed power that would be overcome by the United States, Japan and Germany. But this was a question about which he had already changed his mind before the Great War. Kjellén’s very strong disavowal of the British in the war against the Boers in South Africa (which he made with little reference to African peoples) is described by Gundel Söderholm and Jan Gunnar Rosenblad (Rosenblad and Söderholm 2014; Söderholm and Rosenblad 2014) in two chapters in the Swedish anthology Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen. All the other contributions are, in revised form, included in the present anthology, together with some new essays.

Kjellén as an Activist

In the present anthology, the focus is on Kjellén’s scholarly achievements, on geopolitics, and on his analysis of the great powers. It concentrates on his scholarly production; thus, his role as a ‘radical activist’ in parliament and in Swedish domestic debates, is only mentioned in relation to his geopolitical scholarship. He always wavered between an exclusive Swedish nationalism unconcerned with irredenta (primarily Swedish speakers in Finland) and a globalist perspective. This volume, however, only briefly mentions his combination of activism and conservatism; his sceptical attitude, at the time, towards a democratic and parliamentary polity; gender equality; his alleged xenophobia and antisemitism; and his evolution on some of these questions.

A part of Kjellén’s activism in the years leading up to the First World War was his juxtaposition of ‘the ideas of 1789’ and ‘the ideas of 1914’. In his account, the former had exhausted their emancipatory power and relevance, and now a more sombre attitude towards the present, emphasizing duty and national unity, was due. This also reflected his philosophy of history, in which the pendulum swings between expansion and concentration, and between liberalism and a conservatism whose most urgent concern was protecting gains and buckling up for hard times.

Kjellén’s Interpretation of Geopolitics

Kjellén’s interpretation of geopolitics will be analysed in many of the contributions in this volume. Among its key aspects are the following:

• For Kjellén, geopolitics is both a (sub-)discipline of political science and, on occasion, a strategy used by political actors. While he typically focused on the object, he at times argued for a specific foreign policy.

• While geopolitics can be studied semantically and pursued at all levels of territorial regulation and domination, Kjellén concentrates on the nation-state and, to some extent, on groups of states, while downplaying subordinate categories such as provinces and municipalities. But in an important sense he differed from conventional geopolitical studies of later years in not treating these nation-states as unchanging units. He rather included internal aspects such as resources, demographics and so on in evaluating the great powers and their abilities to act in the international arena.

• States are seen as driven by their natural and cultural endowments and their geopolitical situation. Individual statesmen and their impact on politics are given little attention by Kjellén.

• Kjellén frequently refers to the state as an organism with stages of birth, growth and death. To the extent this is more than a metaphor, it regards the nation-state’s involvement in struggle against other nation-states, and the need to exert willpower in this struggle. While Kjellén concentrates on the ‘expansivist’ and even antagonistic pursuit of geopolitics, the concept of geopolitics is not in itself tied to expansion and conflict.

Geopolitics is only one of Kjellén’s categories of the exertion of power, and it is part of an array of different factors that influence each other in an ever-changing mix of influences. These include natural resources, technology, demography, economics and governance. Regarding the last, great powers may have very different polities and still be competent and powerful. Democracy (exemplified by ‘England’, like many of his contemporaries, he refers to Great Britain as ‘England’ and the Netherlands as ‘Holland’) is only one among several types of authority. Others are the centralized state (as seen in France), federalism (as in the United States) and ‘caesarianism’ (as witnessed by Czarist Russia). His concentration on geopolitics is motivated by what he sees as a lack of spatial consciousness among political scientists and insufficient awareness of political science among geographers of his era (with the remarkable exception of his primary inspiration, Friedrich Ratzel).

A Biased and Skewed Reputation

As mentioned, despite the renaissance of geopolitics as an object of study and as an approach to diplomacy and strategy in international affairs, Kjellén has been peculiarly absent from most studies of the topic. German scholarship was for a long time obsessed with the disastrous use of the concepts of Lebensraum and Geopolitik by the Haushofer school (until 1935 admiringly referring to Kjellén), only recently modified by the insight that other, and even darker, interests guided the Nazi regime. In Anglo-Saxon and French scholarship – based on the few accounts available in English, and with some remarkable exceptions – Kjellén has been either neglected or misunderstood. This is also true of Ratzel. Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan are very often named as the forerunners of a territorial strategic analysis. But these geographers with a military background mainly looked at territorial and naval space as a means to dominance,⁴ while Ratzel analysed the content of territorial resources and related it to the state and its power. Kjellén organized Ratzel’s rather eclectic findings into a more systematic inventory.

Outline of the Book

This anthology is arranged in sequence from ‘life’ to ‘letters’ to ‘concepts’, and finally to ‘reception’. The ‘letters’ chapters are loosely related to the development of Kjellén’s scholarly production, from his first article on geopolitics to his last edition of The Great Powers and its legacy. The first chapter, ‘Rudolf Kjellén: Academic, Publicist, Politician’ by Björk, Edström and Lundén, sketches his life line from a rather insignificant position at a small urban university college in Gothenburg to a prestigious position at Sweden’s oldest university in Uppsala. He was the inventor of the concept of geopolitics, which is the theme of the present volume, but in his hopes for Sweden’s future he also used the word folkhem, ‘the people’s home’, which was later used and partly implemented by his adversaries, the Social Democrats. His neologism ‘nationell socialism’ went on to have a very different legacy. Kjellén actually meant the goal of and an expression of the political striving for a folkhem, but the term would go on to be used by others with discriminatory and totalitarian connotations. The chapter also examines the character of Kjellén’s scientific approach and his personality as a scholar.

Kjellén would be remembered by posterity as an exceptional figure, both in his political opinions and in his academic writing. As demonstrated by Ragnar Björk in Chapter 2, ‘Rudolf Kjellén: The Swedish Intellectual and Political Context’, in Kjellén’s time the three spheres of scholarship, politics, and public debate were all dominated by a rather learned and cautious mindset, so although he had much in common with his colleagues in his ‘professorial conservatism’, his much more radical, maverick approach in all areas gradually alienated him from his peers. Also, with his vision of a ‘people’s home’ with a collective structure and a nationalist footing, he was increasingly out of touch with the rising interest in social engineering techniques, which would be realized by others in the interwar years. On the whole, he was more of a ‘continental’ type of scholar – had he lived in Germany, he might have been a Kathedersozialist.

Kjellén’s first publication after studies at Uppsala University was his 1899 article on Sweden’s international boundaries, in which he defined the concept of ‘geopolitics’. In Chapter 3, ‘Sweden’s Borders: Kjellén’s Contribution to Social Science by Defining and Applying Geopolitics’, Alvstam and Lundén review his cross-disciplinary scrutiny of borders, starting from a traditional historical analysis of their legal underpinnings, but ending in a geopolitical evaluation of the strength of the line separating Sweden from its neighbours, with a number of comparisons to other borders across the world.

Kjellén’s breakthrough as a scholar came with the first edition of Stormakterna [The Great Powers] in 1905. Ragnar Björk’s contribution, Chapter 4 on ‘Kjellén’s Great Power Studies: The Editions’, follows Kjellén through three editions of the book, allowing the reader to understand how his analysis and methodologies changed over time, comparing documents simultaneously in an almost ‘online’ fashion. In the following chapter, ‘Kjellén’s Great Power Studies: Examining Germany, USA, Russia, Japan’ (Chapter 5), Björk shows how Kjellén in a Landeskunde manner digs into the essence of ‘great powers’, meaning both the concept itself and its instantiation in the actual powers, which after the turn of the century numbered eight. Kjellén’s analyses of four great powers are analysed here in detail. Across editions, Kjellén unsentimentally allows the rise of the United States and Japan to affect and correct his provisional analysis of the relevant features of a great power – as, later, global war would as well.

Kjellén’s second ‘hit’, at least in the German-speaking world, was Staten som lifsform [The state as a form of life], published in Swedish in 1916 and in German the year after. This was an attempt to claim geopolitics for an activated and redefined political science. In the preface he declares his goal as a scholar: to produce a unified theory of the state as a political system. But in spite of this, his way of thinking was still very much inspired by Ratzel, as underlined in Thomas Lundén’s review in Chapter 6. Nonetheless, Lundén shows that, contrary to Ratzel, Kjellén puts his examples within a theoretical framework and widens the scope of his analysis by including new features of an active state and its relation to the nation (as an ‘imagined community’) and its members. His view of the state as an organism, one with willpower, is a metaphor for its ever-shifting power and extension, its life and death under changing governance.

The Great War was seen by Kjellén as a possible, perhaps probable, outcome of the contradicting interests of the great powers. In Chapter 7, ‘Kjellén and the First World War’ by Gunnar Falkemark, three questions are in focus: What caused the outbreak of the war? Which values were at stake in the trial of different states’ strength? How can the outcome be explained? According to Kjellén, the different sides of the war represented different values. Countries like ‘England’ and France were inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution: freedom, equality and fraternity. But these values had exhausted their progressive potential. Germany represented order, justice and duty, ideas that better served the harsher needs of the present. Thus, Germany’s time had come. Kjellén’s sympathies were totally with Germany, and its defeat was a shock to him. He sees the American intervention in the war as decisive. He does not credit the outcome to the resource strength of the United States, but rather to American idealism and their belief in democracy.

One example of extreme vulnerability in the balance of power in the first decades of the twentieth century is given by Carl Marklund in Chapter 8, ‘The Small Game in the Shadow of the Great Game: Kjellénian Biopolitics between Constructivism and Realism’, in which he analyses Kjellén’s thoughts on the peripheral ‘in-between’ state (i.e. Sweden) in terms of its relations with the great powers, and its chances for gaining a foothold in regional commerce and culture. Kjellén’s conclusion in 1912 was that nearby Russia, especially its Baltic provinces, were the most susceptible to, as it were, a ‘soft’ Swedish influence.

In Chapter 9, ‘Discourse, Identity and Territoriality’, Ola Tunander analyses Kjellén’s thinking about a European federation of states. Kjellén’s version of geopolitics, with its understanding of the state in organic terms, was an attempt to treat the state as an independent object of study with its own dynamics and internal logic, political power and will, and a unity of land and people. This stood in sharp contrast to the Anglo-Saxon conception of geopolitics, which had a technological and geostrategic focus. Kjellén turned to the German cosmopolitan tradition with its multicultural unity and its drive towards a European league of states, meaning a union that would respect the freedom and independence of states while placing leadership in the hands of a central power. His description of this union is practically identical to what would later become NATO – but for Kjellén it was Germany, not the United States, that was expected to accept this leadership role.

The subject of Chapter 10, ‘Rudolf Kjellén’s Intellectual Impact in Latin America’ by Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano, was mediated by domestic geographers and political scientists, often of German origin, and especially in Brazil. In Latin America, Kjellén is usually referred to in connection with Ratzel; but there have been more recent comparisons to Gramsci, who read descriptions of Kjellén’s thought in Italian geographical journals.

Kjellén died in 1922. In Chapter 11, ‘Kjellén’s Legacy: A Story of Divergent Interpretations’, Thomas Lundén explores this legacy, with a focus on the European and American use and misuse of his ideas. Kjellén’s last German edition of The Great Powers, was reprinted and ‘revised’ by Karl Haushofer, who continued appropriating his work until around 1934, after which Kjellén (and to an extent Haushofer as well) disappeared from the Nazi German discourse. With a few exceptions and for entirely different reasons, Kjellén also disappeared from Swedish social science. After the Second World War, occasional articles have dealt seriously with Kjellén’s scholarship, whereas most references in the English language refer to him at best as the inventor of the concept of geopolitics, ignoring his global vision and his criticism of capitalism and laissez-faire liberal democracy, which partly resembles the critique in recent work on ‘critical geopolitics’ of ‘neo-liberalism’.

Kjellén – an Actor in Multiple Domains

Kjellén was active within several different spheres: as a scholar, as a public figure and commentator on contemporary issues, and as a practising politician with a mandate in parliament. This anthology focuses on his academic writing related to geopolitics and great power relations, but his other activities have to be considered in order to understand his worldview. He was a political scientist, but his scholarly activities and his teaching assignments spanned a number of different disciplines. Besides widening his own discipline towards a much broader definition of political science in a way that had not been done before, advocating it to be the social science, he worked on problems within history, geography (even including physical geography; see Alvstam 2014), social anthropology, international relations and comparative historical sociology. The diverse contributors to this book mirror this interdisciplinarity.

In the Swedish context, Kjellén is not recognized as a pioneer, but he stands out internationally as one of the forerunners of geopolitical studies. After his death, books on geopolitics almost ceased to be published in Sweden, but on the European continent the topic remained of interest, and his reputation as a trailblazing scholar of international politics and as the father of geopolitics was not questioned – even if it was often misunderstood. Geopolitics has lately witnessed a revival both as a concept and as an activity; it is often associated with cynical and aggressive power plays, a diplomacy of threats and bullying, and periodic pressure to redraw national borders. This book is an attempt to elucidate the scholarly contributions of its progenitor, contributions that qualify him as a pioneer in his fields of study and a figure of ongoing international interest.

Acknowledgements

The editors gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Stockholm, in the preparation of this collection.

Ragnar Björk is a retired associate professor of history from Uppsala University and is now affiliated with Södertörn University. His research is mainly concerned with ‘research on research’, with the history of historiography and the social sciences, the history of science, including the Nobel Prize, and also modern political history. He graduated at Uppsala in 1983 with a dissertation on explanatory techniques – including narration and colligation – among historians, and was awarded the Geijer Prize for best historical dissertation. Since then, he has conducted a number of research projects on those same themes. Some of his latest publications are: ‘Re-embedding the Historian: German-Language Refugee Scholars in Scandinavia, 1933–1945’, Storia della Storiografia / History of Historiography 69(1) (2016); ‘Voluntarismens väg: Och något om Rudolf Kjellén som producent av helhetskunskap om samhället’, in Erik Nydahl and Jonas Harvard (eds), Den nya staten: Ideologi och samhällsförändring kring sekelskiftet 1900 (Nordic Academic Press, 2016); Thorsten Halling, Ragnar Björk, Heiner Fangerau and Nils Hansson, ‘Leopoldina: Ein Netzwerk für künftige Nobelpreisträger für Physiologie oder Medizin?’, Sudhoffs Archiv 102 (2018), X.

Thomas Lundén is emeritus professor of human geography at Södertörn University. His latest book is Pommern: ett gränsfall i tid och rum [Pomerania: A border case in time and space] (Lund University, 2016), and his earlier scholarship includes articles in political and social geography, border interaction and the history of geopolitics and Baltic relations, for example: ‘Geopolitics and Religion: A Mutual and Conflictual Relationship. Spatial Regulation of Creed in the Baltic Sea Region’, International Review of Sociology / Revue Internationale de Sociologie 25(2) (July 2015); ‘Border Twin Cities in the Baltic Area: Anomalies or Nexuses of Mutual Benefit?’, in John Garrard and Ekaterina Mikhailova (eds), Twin Cities: Urban Communities, Borders and Relationships over Time (Routledge, 2019); and ‘Turning towards the Inland Sea? Swedish Soft Diplomacy towards the Baltic Soviet Republics before Independence’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2021, DOI: 10.1080/03468755.2021.1896576.

Notes

1. For a review of this article, see Alvstam and Lundén, ‘Sweden’s Borders’, this volume.

2. Kjellén had published the book Den stora Orienten [The big Orient] in 1911 after a trip to Japan that took him around the world.

3. About his field research within geography, see Alvstam 2014.

4. The Mahan expert John H. Maurer has, in a recent article, pointed at other (often neglected) faces of Mahan’s scholarship, very much in line with Kjellén’s realist views on international relations. See Maurer 2017.

References

Alvstam, Claes-Göran. 2014. ‘Kjellén som geograf’ [Kjellén as a geographer], in Edström, Björk and Lundén (eds), Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen. [Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitics and Conservatism]. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg, 55–81.

Edström, Bert. 2014. ‘Resan till drömlandet – Japan’ [Journey to the dreamland – Japan], in B. Edström, R. Björk and T. Lundén (eds), Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen. [Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitics and Conservatism]. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg, 122–45.

Edström, Bert, Ragnar Björk and Thomas Lundén (eds). 2014. Rudolf Kjellén Geopolitiken och konservatismen. [Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitics and Conservatism]. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg.

Elvander, Nils. 1956. ‘Rudolf Kjellén och nationalsocialismen’ [Rudolf Kjellén and National Socialism], Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 59: 15–41.

———. 1961. ‘Harald Hjärne och konservatismen: Konservativ idédebatt i Sverige 1865–1922’[Harald Hjärne and Conservatism: Conservative debate of ideas in Sweden 1865–1922]. Skrifter utgivna av Statsvetenskapliga föreningen i Uppsala 42. Uppsala.

Holdar, Sven. 1992. ‘The Ideal State and the Power of Geography’, Political Geography Quarterly 11(3): 307–23.

Kjellén, Rudolf. (1976/77) 1899. ‘Studier öfver Sveriges politiska gränser’[Studies on the political borders of Sweden], Ymer 19: 283–331, in abridged form in Ymer Årsbok 1976/77, 69–80, with a comment by Thomas Lundén.

———. 1911. Den stora Orienten: resestudier i österväg [The Great Orient: Travel studies heading Eastwards]. Gothenburg: Åhlen & Åkerlund.

Kjellén-Björkquist, Ruth. 1970. Rudolf Kjellén: En människa i tiden kring sekelskiftet I–II [Rudolf Kjellén: An individual in the time of the turn of the century. I–II]. Stockholm: Verbum.

Maurer, John H. 2017. ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan, Geopolitics and Grand Strategy’, in Kurt Almqvist, Alexander Linklater and Andrew Mackenzie (eds), The Return of Geopolitics. Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 111–22.

Rosenblad, Jan Gunnar, and Gundel Söderholm. 2014. ‘Nationalisten och boerbeundraren’ [The nationalist and Boer admirer], in B. Edström, R. Björk and T. Lundén (eds), Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen. [Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitics and Conservatism]. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg, 244–77.

Söderholm, Gundel, and Jan Gunnar Rosenblad. 2014. ‘Han tvivlade på det brittiska imperiet’ [He mistrusted the British Empire], in B. Edström, R. Björk and T. Lundén (eds), Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitiken och konservatismen [Rudolf Kjellén: Geopolitics and Conservatism]. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg, 100–121.

CHAPTER 1

Rudolf Kjellén

Academic, Publicist, Politician

RAGNAR BJÖRK, BERT EDSTRÖM AND THOMAS LUNDÉN

Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) had a remarkable career. With his concept of geopolitics, and his approach to understanding the workings of the great powers, he had an academic impact that was greater outside his native Sweden than on his native soil. This chapter attempts a characterization of his work, partly by following the different steps he took over the course of his life.

Kjellén was a vicar’s son from Torsö, an island in Lake Vänern in south central Sweden, and he soon showed signs of intellectual promise. After his senior high school examination (Abitur) at the early age of 16, he pursued academic studies at Uppsala University. After a Bachelor of Arts in 1883 he studied political science under Oscar Alin (1846–1900), with whom Kjellén would later collaborate. In 1890 he presented his doctoral thesis ‘Studier rörande ministeransvarigheten’ [Studies concerning ministerial responsibility], a comparative study encompassing several European states, and he was appointed ‘docent’ (earning lecture right) in the same year. In 1891 he was employed as a teacher of political science at the newly founded Gothenburg University College,¹ and the following year his assignment also included geography. This enlargement of his responsibilities was to have fundamental importance for his scholarly activity. In 1901 he was appointed professor of political science at the college (Alvstam 2014; see also Alvstam and Lundén, ‘Sweden’s Borders’, this volume).

In addition to his increased teaching, Kjellén’s research combined speculative theory and empirical knowledge, which likewise forced him to broaden his perspective. At his desk in front of increasingly overloaded bookshelves he pondered over the forces that govern world politics. He carefully followed the specialist literature published on the continent, particularly in Germany. His findings and conclusions were reported in the 1905 book Stormakterna [The Great Powers] (see Björk’s two chapters on ‘Kjellén’s Great Power Studies’, this volume), which gave him a reputation as an analyst of international politics. His international visibility was assured the next year when the editors of the sixth edition of Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon (Meyer 1905), a twenty-volume encyclopedia that sold 240,000 sets, took notice of this professor at a local Swedish university. They did so in spite of his relative youth and the fact that he did not have the same gravitas as the learned men who held venerable seats at Uppsala and Lund. Kjellén was described in the Lexikon as a legal scholar, geographer and author of a number of publications on the history of law and of geography; his numerous contributions to the conservative press were also reported. At least eight works by him had by then been published in German. Kjellén had thus, a few years into the twentieth century, won a place and a voice as somewhat of a European intellectual.

In Sweden, Kjellén became associated with a group of prominent professors who were active as politicians, promoting a so-called ‘professorial conservatism’ (Björk 2014: 278–312 and Björk, ‘Rudolf Kjellén: The Swedish Intellectual and Political Context’, this volume). He was, on the one hand, the academic who dispassionately analysed the foundations of world politics, and on the other, the fiery orator and eloquent writer who decried the decay of the present with a sharpened pencil. As a scholar he studied older Swedish legal history, ministerial responsibility, the impeachment institute, and the constitution of 1809, but he also approached the great questions of the day such as the break-up of the Swedish–Norwegian Union as well as the then-acute problem of emigration. He was a controversial debater with radically conservative opinions who also made bold statements of progressive activism. In Gothenburg he was member of an informal group of scholars and activists, the Young Right, which was more politically engaged than the establishment conservatives of the Uppsala–Stockholm circles. Considering Kjellén’s restless activity, it is not surprising that he decided to engage in practical politics. He was a member of the Second Chamber of the Riksdag (parliament) in 1905–8 and of the First Chamber in 1911–17, but his contribution to the work of the Riksdag was more as a source of inspiration and as a speaker than as a direct implementer of policies. In her biography based on a collection of his letters, his daughter testified to his disappointment that his ‘scientifically based’ ideas were not taken seriously in the Riksdag (Kjellén-Björkquist 1970 I: 55). In 1916 he was called upon to take up the prestigious position of Skyttean Professor of Rhetoric and Government at Uppsala University. Established in 1622, it is probably the oldest chair of political science in the world. His elevation was fully in line with the views of his many admirers. Not only was he the most internationally renowned Swedish political scientist, but as a gifted orator he was one of the very few who could properly occupy a chair that was defined in terms of both political science and rhetoric.

Kjellén was a type of political scientist rarely seen after his death in 1922. His successor as the Skyttean professor, Axel Brusewitz (1881–1950) specialized in problems of constitutional history, especially contemporary problems, and constitutional legal analyses of political institutions. He embraced a methodology with a rather narrow time range, reading the sources scrupulously. He did not hesitate to abolish geopolitics as part of the political science curriculum as pursued at Uppsala University (Lewin 1985: 188). Breaking the ‘Kjellénian experiment’ was imperative for him, as he regarded Kjellén’s theory of the state as ‘nothing less than a threat to political science as a science’ (Brusewitz 1945: 23).

Kjellén as a Scholar

Kjellén was a versatile researcher. His many-sided interests made him, as his disciple Georg Andrén described it, ‘an observer of the new tendencies within governmental life’ (Andrén 1932). Kjellén’s conclusion was that the fevered developments in the areas of foreign, colonial, economic and social politics demanded ‘a new political science’, one that was to be the social science. The state was the centre of his interests, but it had to be seen in the context of all the expressions of a living society. As described by Kjellén in the book that he considered his best, Staten som lifsform [The State as a form of life] (for a survey of it, see Lundén, ‘Geopolitics, Political Geography’, this volume), the conventional understanding within academia was essentially that ‘the state [is], primarily and principally, a legal entity; what constitutes its status is the constitution and nothing more; knowledge regarding the state will consequently be a pure and exclusive knowledge of the constitution’ (Kjellén 1916). He cites the German legal scholar Conrad Bornhak, who stated in his Allgemeine Staatslehre that the state ‘shall not be construed by reason but grasped empirically’ (Bornhak 1896). His mission, then, was to change the direction of political science, to broaden it to include the realities of political life. Based on his observations, Kjellén formulated a historical theory that described a movement from autocracy via constitutionalism to democracy and back to autocracy (Kjellén 1916: 155ff).²

One aspect, among others, of Kjellén’s empirical principle, is to observe states operating on the international scene. Kjellén then adds another idea: politics ‘is not only an aggregate of legal letters and historical facts and statistical measure, but above all a life’ (Kjellén 1905: vii). States, ‘as we follow them in history and in reality have to move within them, are sensual-reasonable creatures’ (Kjellén 1916: 27). Kjellén saw them as ‘supra-individual lives, as real as private individuals, only incommensurably greater and more powerful’ (Kjellén 1916: 30). They have personalities and can be regarded as ‘great lives, supra-individual personalities, full of life’s instincts for better and for worse, proud, honour-loving and selfish, but no one like the other’ (Kjellén 1915b: 7).

Based on observations from international politics, Kjellén interprets and notes: ‘These states speak and act, sit together at congresses or fight on the battlefields, lure and flee each other, help and upset each other, like other living creatures in communality’ (Kjellén 1915b: 30f). Kjellén obviously interprets these activities as outcomes of the states’ property of being ‘individuals’.

Looking at the political game played by states, Kjellén, in a sense, looked also at its performative and journalistic dimensions, not only formal diplomacy. He writes in Staten som lifsform that the game played between countries offers ‘opportunities for collating with reality’. One might add that it is apparently not so much ‘reality’ reflected here, because his focus is really on ‘expressions in the press’, in newspapers and periodicals. So, what he is actually studying is not the nature of the states but, as he himself says, ‘the general contemporary perception of the nature of the performing parties’ (Kjellén 1916: 17–19, 27).

Ideas of competition between states, or of powers as living organisms fighting for their survival, are implicitly tied to warfare. In Kjellén’s eyes, competition between territorial states is a tool for natural selection. Although not a militarist or a military man, in the sense of being familiar with weaponry and the battlefield, he could idealize the hardship that warfare would entail, as a means of toughening and teaching populations and individuals (Kjellén 1915a: 32, 42, 49, 51). The barbarism of the First World War, however, led Kjellén to still his penchant for activist foreign policy towards the end of his life, and he began to emphasize the suffering and destruction that followed in the aftermath of war (Elvander 1961: 266).

Three Key Concepts

Rudolf Kjellén was an unusual academic. Searching at random in his publications, whether journalistic, essayistic or scientific, one can easily spot what his contemporaries, including his opponents, characterized as shimmering metaphors and suggestive associations.³ He was a linguistic innovator with a talent for identifying important contemporary phenomena. Conceptual neologisms were part of Kjellén’s ingenuity. Three of them became common and are still used today: geopolitics, folkhem (people’s home) and ‘national socialism’. However, the legacies of these concepts would turn out to be extremely different from one another.

Geopolitik – Geopolitics

Kjellén introduced geopolitics as a concept and as an area of research in the essay ‘Studier öfver Sveriges politiska gränser’ [Studies on Sweden’s political borders] in the geographical journal Ymer (Kjellén 1899: 283; see Alvstam and Lundén, ‘Sweden’s Borders’, this volume).⁴ This approach came out of his scholarly activity as a political scientist cum geographer. The idea of geopolitics was close at hand. At the time, the frequency of geographic explorations since the mid-nineteenth century – attempts to reach the poles or venture into the ‘heart of darkness’ – was approaching its zenith. Ship and railway builders, politicians, military personnel, and imperialists alike were looking at maps and thinking in terms of territory. Kjellén’s use of the concept, as a method for getting at key conditions and resources on the ground, gave the concept of geopolitics a lasting and often acute relevance in diplomacy and international politics. It is today an established approach within the study of foreign policy, strategy, and international relations. In many ways this speaks to Kjellén’s international reputation – even though in some circles, including academic ones and particularly within ‘critical geopolitics’, the term is mainly understood as an ideology of territorial expansion.

Geopolitics as defined by Kjellén is an amalgamation of geography and politics. It is ‘the theory of the state as a geographical organism and phenomenon in space’ (Kjellén 1916: 39). This concept is one of the five categories he uses for his analysis of the state: riket (geopolitik) [politics of the realm], rikshushållet (ekopolitik) [political economy], folket (demopolitik) [demographic politics], folk-samhället (sociopolitik) [social policy] and statsregementet (kratopolitik) [legal and constitutional politics]. Correspondingly, he used five domains in analysing countries: geographical, ethnic, economic, social and legal. A country was assessed in each of these domains with a combination of material and abstract indicators. The significant impact of geopolitics in this assessment led Kjellén’s followers to treat it as the most important category, but he opposed this approach. According to him, geopolitics does not have an exceptional position; his entire analytical apparatus has to be used in analysing a state (Kjellén 1918a). Kjellén makes demographic and political-economic politics a part of geopolitics in a wider sense. But the concept of geopolitics specifically proved to be powerful enough to live on apart from other concepts he proposed.

Kjellén is also guided by a philosophy of history: actors on the international scene have to take into account that history is determined by an oscillation between expansion and contraction, between liberalism and regulation. But within these overarching cycles, the foreign policies of states are to a large extent determined by their geography and topography, including space (the character of a territory), location (where on the globe it can be found), and borders and other boundaries. To these factors are added natural resources, demographic distribution, and so on.

For Kjellén, certain states are forced by geopolitical realities to pursue expansion (Kjellén 1916: 122f). A great power is defined as having an expansive orientation and actively pursuing political power; its essence comprises the ambition to grow and change the status quo (Kjellén 1914: 157–58). Kjellén presents illuminating examples in Staten som lifsform:

Vigorous states that are spatially confined have a categorical political imperative to broaden their space through colonization, political union or conquests of different kinds. This has been the case with England and in more recent times with Japan and Germany: as can be seen, there is no gratuitous conquest, but natural and necessary growth for the sake of the self-preservation instinct. (Kjellén 1916: 67)

Later in his discussion Kjellén invokes Mitteleuropa, whether in the smaller form of Germany–Austria–Hungary or, even better, a larger one including the Levant. ‘Here we see a complex of states, or a block of states, satisfying spatial demands’ (Kjellén 1916: 67). His geopolitical approach seemed to legitimize great-power expansionism, and earned him several adherents, not least in countries like Germany and Japan, whose expansion could be taken as an implementation of the idea of Lebensraum (the United States, though, had no such organic need for imperialist expansion). Lebensraum, or ‘life space’, was a concept that Kjellén can be said to have anticipated in his discussion of autarky but it was never fully developed. Ratzel, often seen as the originator of the concept, used it only in the biological sense of a habitat in his Politische Geographie (Ratzel 1897), which influenced Kjellén’s approach to academic geography.⁵ For Kjellén, ‘autarky’ is a state’s economic self-sufficiency, and is one of the most important concepts in his theory of geopolitics. Achieving autarky, preferably within existing borders, is the ultimate goal of a great power, making itself independent of all other states.⁶

Folkhemmet – the People’s Home

Perhaps the most interesting political-ideological concept associated with Kjellén is folkhem, or ‘the people’s home’, which he used in a 1912 exchange with the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925), and the same year in an article that would later be published in one of his essay collections. Kjellén writes: ‘One thing is sure: only on its own ground can Sweden be founded as the happy people’s home that it is destined to become’ (Kjellén 1915a: 56).⁷ Folkhemmet was not a concept invented by him, but he adopted it in order to capture the idea of a national community (see Björck 2000).

Kjellén died in 1922. Six years later, the leader of the Social Democratic Party and later prime minister of Sweden, Per Albin Hansson (1885–1946) used ‘folkhemmet’ in a famous speech in the Riksdag. Here, the word hem, ‘home’, can be interpreted as implying both a dwelling and a family, in a way that helped to give Sweden a lasting association with safety and community. The concept was further popularized and promoted by Hansson without his mentioning its origins in nineteenth-century Germany. Today it is often still ascribed to Kjellén, even by Social Democrats.

Ultimately it is not possible to determine exactly how this concept was transferred from one person to another. It would be hard for Social Democratic leaders to admit that Hansson was influenced by a Conservative such as Kjellén in matters of domestic politics. The word had been used before, both in Sweden and Germany. The copy of Kjellén’s book found in the Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek [Swedish labour movement’s archive and library] bears a dedication from the author to Erik Hedén (1875–1925), who was a Social Democrat, editor of the party newspaper, and strongly anti-German during the Great War. It is thus clear that this concept spread among the Social Democrats, not only