There have been various schools of thought in the history of geographical thought, and geographical determinism is one such school of thought that deals with the interaction between man and nature. Geographical determinism began with the major initial source of geographical explanation that based its theoretical positions on the notion that human activity was dependent on the physical environment in which it was set.
Geographical determinism was a dominant school of thought until the Second World War and presented the point of view that human action is determined by the physical environment. Geographical determinism asserts that human history, culture, society and lifestyles, development, etc are shaped by their physical environment. Geographical determinism understands human social action as a response to the natural environment.
The Greek and the Roman philosophers were the first to base the physical features, personality traits and culture and society of humans as influenced by natural conditions. The Greek philosophers Xenophon and Thucydides attributed Athens’ characteristic features to the natural conditions and geographical position of the region, as the reason for its ascendance.
Rome was described in a similar way by Strabo. Even Aristotle held climatic differences as the reason for the distinction between Europeans and Asians.
The Aristotelian distinction became a general line of thought for European essentialism in the period, which held the line that the harsher environmental conditions in most of Europe produced courageous people according to Aristotle while the people of Asia were said to lack in courage. Ancient Greece, Aristotle opined, occupied the middle position in terms of the benevolence of environmental conditions had people endowed with the finest qualities.
This line of thinking in geographical determinism continued with Strabo through to Montesquieu who attributed courage to colder climates and cunning to warmer climates. While these are philosophical generalizations, an attempt at classifying geographical features was made by the medieval Arab geographers in their classification of the inhabited world into seven kisbwars or climatic zones. In their attempts at geographical determinism, they attempted to highlight the distinctive physical and societal characteristics of kingdoms falling within these kisbwars.
This mode of thinking of environmental causation was characterized even by Immanuel Kant, who attempted to explain personality traits of people from different regions in terms of environmental features. This continued in an arcane manner until the evolution of geography as a natural science in the 19thCentury, when the German geographer Carl Ritter introduced an anthropocentric form of geographical determinism in the early 19th Century. However, there were certain notable thinkers of geographical determinism even before or concurrent to this. The following are some of the leading thinkers in terms of geographical determinism, starting with Carl Ritter.
Carl Ritter (1779-1859)
Fig: Carl Ritter
Famous Book | Die Erdkunde, or Earth Science, 1817
Famous Quote |“I am ready to argue that geography is next to the divine philosophy”
Work | As a pioneering geographer, what was of supreme interest to Carl Ritter was the human population of a specific area as determined by environmental features. Ritter believed that the Earth was part of God’s plan and included theology in his writings, although he took an anthropocentric view in considering humankind the ultimate purpose of creation.
Ritter believed that the central purpose of geography as a science was to understand the interaction between humankind and nature, else it would fail in its task. He believed in the cultural development of geographical areas such that the greatest possible harmony between nature and culture is achieved. In this task, instead of the traditional study of nations, Ritter undertook the study of regions and their environmental features, forming in total an Earth organism interacting historically with the human organism. Ritter thus held that humankind and the characteristic features of human beings are elements forming part of the total Earth organism and all parts within are thus interconnected. He placed his argument prior to Darwin in the setting of human history.
Ritter’s major work Die Erdkunde, or Earth Science (German for Geography), first published in 1817, which was intended as the total geography of the Earth organism, however, remained incomplete. He could only cover Asia and Africa before his death in 1859. The full translation of the title is The Science of the Earth in Relation to Nature and the History of Mankind.
Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859)
Fig: Alexander Humboldt
Famous Book | Kosmos, 1845-1862
Famous Quote | “In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.”
Work | Alexander Von Humboldt is a German naturalist and explorer who was a contemporary of Carl Ritter. The Humboldt Current which is located off the Western Coast of South America is named after the explorer. Born into a Prussian Aristocratic family, a young Humboldt left his life of privilege to explore Latin America for five years, and since then became a traveller and explorer, travelling and exploring the remotest corners of the world.
Humboldt was a celebrity scientist in his lifetime, and was sought after for his depth of natural knowledge and explorer’s worldliness, with an in depth hands on knowledge of physical geography. Like Ritter, Humboldt described Earth as a living organism, and that nature was living whole bound together in a net-like intricate fabric. Humboldt with his theory of interconnectedness and closely following Ritter, his formulation of Earth as a living organism revolutionized the way westerners saw nature in his age.
In this formulation, no single component of the natural world including human beings could be considered in isolation. In this interconnected natural web, one missing link could create a domino effect for all. A lifetime abolitionist, Humboldt considered colonialism as disastrous for the environment after his stint in Venezuela, where he criticized the anthropogenic interventions of the Spanish on the environment. In his sense, abundantly relevant for contemporary times, all anthropogenic activity must align itself with the Earth organism, making a singular case for geographical determinism. In his most famous publication Kosmos, Humboldt describes this harmony of the universe in terms of the universal laws of nature and the history of science.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Fig: Charles Darwin
Famous Book | The Origin of Species, 1859
Famous Quote | “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
Work | Charles Darwin is an English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the most influential ideas in human history. His theory though, when it first came out, greatly offended the Victorian society of his age, and he was sometimes the object of ridicule for saying that humans and monkeys had a common ancestry. His theories at the time went against the fundamentals of religion and its theory of creationism, and thus was a revolution for science.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was published two decades after his travels across the world as explorer and scientist as The Origin of Species (1859). This work revolutionized the biological and geographical sciences out of which grew a new understanding of the natural world as based on common organic descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, natural selection, variation, and inheritance. Darwin explained how the mechanics of order works in the natural world, making humanity come to a clearer understanding of the workings of the natural world.
Darwin endorsed the associative organization of the natural world while rejecting the teleological and theological aspects of earlier geographical thought to come to an understanding of Earth as a living organism with component parts. Crucial in Darwin’s hypothesis was the struggle for existence and adaptation to environmental conditions that every organism must adhere to, else it would be eliminated. With this, Darwin essentially linked the man-environment equation into a natural law of science. Darwin demonstrated how humanity cannot possibly escape its natural endowments. Darwin in fact did most to establish geographical determinism as an important school in geography.
William Morris Davis (1850-1934)
Fig: William Morris Davis
Famous Book | Geographical Essays, 1909
Famous Quote | “It is the relationship between the physical environment and the environed organism, between physiography and ontography (to coin a term), that constitutes the essential principles of geography today.”
Work | William Morris Davis is an American geographer, geologist and meteorologist noted for his studies of landforms. William Morris Davis in fact founded the geographical sub-field of geomorphology. Prior to Davis, dominant thought in landform formation was based on abstract notions such as the Biblical flood. Davis formed a theory of landform formation and erosion, which he called the geographical cycle, more popularly known as the geomorphic cycle. His theory established and comprehensively explains how landforms such as mountains are created, then evolve and mature, and then become old and erode (M. Rosenberg, 2017).
Although in contemporary times, his theories have been greatly modified, Davis revolutionized how humanity understands the process of creation in the geomorphological world. Davis was instrumental in helping humanity gain knowledge and understanding of the man-environment dichotomy in terms of an ontological understanding of geography.
Other than his study of landforms and geomorphology, Davis was also interested in systems of human occupancy, and his essay Regional Geography published in 1899 was part of a detailed regional treatment of the United States. Published in H. R. Mill’s Physical Divisions of the United States, the book and Davis’ essay made extensive observations of human occupation on landforms and detailed a scientific plan for anthropogenic activity dealing with landforms in the United States.
Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904)
Fig: Friedrich Ratzel
Famous Book | Anthropo-geographie, 1882
Famous Quote | “A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law.”
Work | Friedrich Ratzel was a German geographer and anthropologist who followed on Darwin’s theory of natural selection to make the argument that all human beings are creatures of their environment. Ratzel established his thesis of geographical determinism in his work Anthropo-geographie, in which he indulged in a discussion on the impact of the physical environment on human behaviour. In his anthropological understanding Ratzel opined that the nature of human interaction with the environment varies between cultures. The diffusion of these cultural traits required a historical analysis across cultures of the links between history and geography.
Geographical Determinism in Modern Geography
Friedrich Ratzel revived geographical determinism in the late 19th Century, heavily influenced and buoyed by Darwin’s theories. In the early 20th Century, geographical determinism was popularized in the US by Ratzel’s student Ellen Churchill Semple, who proliferated the idea in her publications History and its Geographic Condition in 1903 and in Influences of the Geographic Environment in 1911. Semple in her works engaged in a description of how the physical environment greatly controls human activity.
Semple in turn influenced Ellsworth Huntington and William Morris Davis. In his works The Pulse of Asia and Civilization and Climate, Ellsworth Huntingtondescribes how the climate influences human occupancy and civilization, and how the climate stimulates the development of human accomplishment. His work led to a subset in geography called climatic determinism in the early 20th Century.
However, since the 1920s geographical determinism began its decline, and its claims were often countered. Geographical determinism was also frequently interpreted in terms that were politically racist and facilitated thought on empires and imperialism. This led to the formation of geographic possibilism through the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche who proposed that although the environment establishes limits on culture, it does not completely define culture. Geographical determinism by the 1950s had been replaced by geographical possibilism as the dominant school of thought in geography
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.