These my brand-new reflections on geopolitics present it as a philosophical field, emphasizing the influence of geography on political strategies and the impact of geopolitical actions on collective identities and human conditions. It integrates classical philosophical thoughts on power and State acts, aiming to deepen the understanding of nations’ strategic behaviours and ethical considerations. This reflective approach seeks to enhance insights into global interactions and the shaping of geopolitical landscapes.

Geopolitics and Philosophy

Part III

There is no History without a State; there is no State without self-consciousness; there is no self-consciousness without History. Geopolitics describes self-consciousness as awareness of what one is by virtue of what one has been. In other terms, it is the consciousness of one’s community identity deriving from factors such as belonging to a territory, a certain ethnicity, religion, but above all from the historical depth of its origin. This awareness is what allows the community to remain united and to deduce objectives and possible future trajectories. In philosophy, self-consciousness is a central theme, both in the individual and collective sense. It is a dynamic concept that starts from the intuition of one’s identity, passes through opposition with multiplicity and its loss, and then returns to itself as a completed identity, aware of itself and that the world before it is its own production. If knowledge is power, and therefore every Philo-Sophia is intimately a Krato-Sophia, self-consciousness is the first representation of this power. This is expressed in the solidity of one’s identity and the awareness of being able to determine the object before oneself.
To understand how much strength there is in the knowledge of self-consciousness, one need only observe the weakness of those who believe they can do without it. A prime example is the European Union. A subject that is in truth an object, since it has not emerged from the people but was constructed above them. Based on interest, not identity. An object without self-consciousness because it is populated by a multitude of unlinked self-consciousnesses. Laws and regulations, a common market, and elections are of no use. If there is no identity that comes from below, aware of itself, the object will always remain an object, namely a pure abstraction. An artifact. Its irrelevance on the global stage is the clearest demonstration of what has just been asserted. The European Union is a sin of pride that violates the ontological grammar that wants the concept to adhere to the object. A concept that thinks the object as if it were a subject is an abstraction that can never be realized. The presumption lies in believing that one can determine subjects (different from oneself) rather than objects.

The idea that the subject produces the object; that self-consciousness is founded on the identity of opposites; that in short, reality is an extension of the subject itself and that self-consciousness can be reached when it is understood that externality does not exist as such but simply as my production; this conception, fascinating and powerful, however, conceals within its folds a huge risk. On one hand, it explains the creative force of man, the evolution of collective (as well as individual) consciousness, and the ability of a community to impose itself on others coveting glory; on the other, it predisposes to the error of extending one’s subjectivity (individual and collective) beyond its proper limits. Philosophy has the great merit of explaining how will rises above necessity. At the same time, however, once this process is completed, it exchanges the potency of the will for the will to omnipotence, reversing the relationship between necessity and will and thus contradicting the initial premises. As if, once completed, that subjectivity could divest itself of what it was to freely decide what will be. As if its path had not the simple objective of being completed, but of freeing itself from the necessity that brought it to be what it is. Thus, as if it were an unfortunate fate, as soon as self-consciousness is achieved, given the sense of power it confers, one is instantly driven to surpass the boundaries of one’s being. A sin of pride detectable whenever a community confuses cause and effect in observing itself and the world. When it places its creations (moral laws, ideologies) as primary causes, engines of historical becoming, and not mere effects deriving from much more substantial (and necessary) elements. A flaw to which man is unable to escape, leading to interpretations such as those according to which the ideological and institutional framework of a country is what determines its international posture, and not merely a costume that a community wears as a tool to justify and pursue its ambitions, which precede and determine the attire to be worn. On this, geopolitics has made progress, adjusting the aim of philosophy and reminding ourselves that, however intoxicated one may be in handling the tools of reason, omnipotence remains a limit beyond which one cannot escape.
In conclusion, having observed the interconnection of the two disciplines and how much one can offer the other, we hope that philosophy, discovering how useful it is (despite itself) in understanding the present, will finally overcome the taboos of the past and return to dealing with what is proper to it.