The Politics of ‘Geopolitik’ in post-Cold War Germany.

The purpose of this paper is to map the limits of the geopolitical imaginary in post-Cold War Germany. The research for this paper is a first cut into a broader investigation into the reasons for the absence of a geopolitical renaissance, despite a strong German tradition of Geopolitik. While the early 1990s saw a number of publications on new opportunities for German geopolitical interests, these publications never seemed to have had a significant impact on the politically relevant discourse. The present paper will provide a brief analysis of these publications and the representations of geo-political space found in them. As such, they are taken to outline the expanded space of geopolitical imagination in post-Cold War Germany. In a second move, the paper will trace the actual contours of the German government’s emerging post-cold war discourse, 1989-1994. The paper will pay particular attention to this discourse’s geographic spatialization and the government’s attempts to continuously anchor Germany’ in the West, thus foregoing any reconsideration of German foreign policy’s Weltbild. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]