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INTRODUCTION
The study of international relations is concerned, explicitly and implicitly, with the category of space. The geographic space, its perceptions and representations, provide a fundamental and intriguing conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing international relations. Yet as the political scientist Harvey Starr suggested in his 2013 ISA presidential address, international-relations scholars ignore the notion of "space", misinterpret it as deterministic, or dismiss it as irrelevant to their analysis. 1Starr's proposal of taking the concept of "space" more seriously applies also for historians of international thought: in this essay I propose to trace back the role that spatial categories, in particular geopolitics, played in shaping 1940s international thought. I will discuss two geopolitical theories to explore how interpretations of political space informed American ideas of postwar world order.
In the early 1940s American international thinkers used spatial concepts to outline the postwar political map, and envisage the role of the United State in it. Geopolitics, which they understood as the dynamic, ever-changing interaction between political government writ large and natural geography, provided both research questions and interpretative tools. Since the approach to geopolitics that many promoted rejected the static, deterministic and immutable perception of geography, I suggest that the term "dynamic geopolitics" describes well their ideas of reciprocal influence of the human and the natural spheres. Wartime geopoliticians would have shared Starr's view that "geography affects changing perceptions of the possibilities and probabilities provided by the geographic environment". 2Spatial representations and geographical perceptions revolving around a dynamic and complex notion of geopolitics were gaining popularity among scholars of world politics. However, as will be shown, geopolitics failed to make a long-lasting conceptual contribution to political science, or define the research aims of the nascent discipline of international relations (IR). 3
In what follows I return to two key figures in geopolitical thought, Owen Lattimore and Nicholas John Spykman, who contributed to shaping the pluralistic nature of international studies in the United States during the 1940s. Both identified in the war a unique potential for international change based on geopolitical relations. Taking as the starting point of my argument the assumption that implicit spatial representations in political thought derive from concrete experiences of a given society,...