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Abstract

This paper explores the geopolitical dimensions of the relationship between history and theory in International Relations in the context of the ‘return of geopolitics’ through an engagement with the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The core argument of the paper is that history has a geopolitics. International order is a significant node in the relationship between conceptions of geographical and historical unity because of its political claim to and production of global space. The upshot of this is that International Relations are not simply an object of historical investigation but produce the conditions by which historical time is understood. At the same time, Koselleck’s critique of the philosophy of history is implicated in a classical geopolitical imaginary found in the work of Halford Mackinder and Carl Schmitt. The diagnosis of globalisation Koselleck shares with Schmitt and Mackinder informs his view of the mutability of transcendental spatial ideas that enable historical understanding. This geopolitical orientation conceives of globalisation as unification of ‘man’ and ‘nature’ in a manner that resonates with contemporary diagnoses of the reunification of human and natural histories in the context of the climate change. In this way Koselleck’s geopolitics of history both challenges and reinforces the relationship between a global international order and the philosophy of history. Koselleck’s work is thus indicative of wider difficulties in rethinking the relationship between history and theory in International Relations in the context of the return of geopolitics. Finally, this work suggests that advancing the critique of the philosophy of history requires challenging the claim of international order to global space.

Keywords

Geopolitics philosophy of history international order globalisation international theory Reinhart Koselleck

Introduction

The ‘return of geopolitics’ (Guzzini, 2012; Mansbach and Ferguson, 2021; Nickel, 2024) today refers to a range of contemporary phenomena related primarily to two dynamics: Great power competition and a rapidly changing climate. This ‘return’ seems to confound any clear distinction between theory and history. Both phenomena seem to be at once signs of unprecedented change and the return of perennial problems. Renewed great power conflict challenges long-standing US and Western hegemony yet also seems to reassert the inevitability of war and interstate competition. The earth’s climate is changing at an unprecedented pace yet these changes raise very old questions about the relationship between human beings and their environment. The return of geopolitics thus provokes the question of the relationship between theory and history because it seems to indicate both recurrence or stasis (conventionally the conditions of possibility of theory) and change (the conventional objects of historical investigation). Both shifting interstate rivalries and climate change, moreover, involve changing conceptions of earthly space. This article explores the consequences of these transformations for the relationship between history and theory in International Relations.

The paper explores this question through the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s reflections on the relationship between space and history. The core argument of the paper is that history has a geopolitics. By this I mean that concepts of historical time are structured by ideas about political space that are themselves subject to historical change. The upshot of this is that International Relations are not simply an object of historical investigation but produce the spatial conditions by which historical time is understood. Koselleck shows how the notion of history in the collective singular emerged in the period between 1750 and 1850 in concert with conceptions of global spatial unity. International order is a significant node in the relationship between conceptions of geographical and historical unity today because of its political claim to and production of global space.¹ At the same time, I will show, Koselleck’s critique of universal history relies on a geopolitical imaginary rooted in global spatial unity that is found in earlier geopolitical thought. Koselleck’s reflections on space and history thus both challenge and reinforce the link between international order and the philosophy of history and are therefore indicative of a wider predicament facing critiques of universal history in International Relations today.

The article develops these ideas in four sections. The following section outlines the way the return of geopolitics provokes the question of the relationship between international order and the philosophy of history. The second section surveys two main approaches to the relationship between history and theory in International Relations. In the first, history is cast as the opposite of a neorealist structuralism, while the second approach considers history and theory as interrelated elements in the production of political authority. This second approach problematises the way historical approaches to International Relations rely on a conception of history as singular and unitary. The third section draws on Koselleck’s work to develop the idea that history has a geopolitics, that is, that what Koselleck calls ‘transcendental ideas’ about space structure understandings of historical time. These ideas are the static background against which historical change is mapped yet are themselves subject to historical transformation. This transformation is hastened, Koselleck argues, by the economic, political and technological developments associated with globalisation. The fourth section shows how Koselleck’s account of the geopolitics of history echoes the relationship between global space and the philosophy of history expressed in 19th- and early-20th-century geopolitical thought. The final section draws conclusions from this analysis about the relationship between International Relations, geopolitics, and the philosophy of history.

The return of geopolitics and the philosophy of history

On the one hand, the return of geopolitics is synonymous with what Jennifer Welsh (2016: 1) calls the ‘the return of history’ to international politics. Invasion and annexation, changing patterns of migration, and the intensification of global inequalities serve as a rejoinder to post-Cold War liberal dreams of the end of history (Welsh, 2016). The recurrence of geopolitical conflict, in this sense, represents ongoing contestation over the nature and future of international order, a sign that the current configuration of world politics is by no means the last and neither natural nor necessary. The re-emergence of geopolitical phenomena, in this sense, means that the future form and trajectory of international order are far from settled (Behera, 2021). On the other hand, geopolitical rivalry (Ripsman, 2021), the intensification of economic nationalism (Sinha, 2021), the rise of right-wing internationalism (Abrahamsen et al., 2020), and other similar grouped under the concept of ‘deglobalisation’ (Kornprobst and Paul, 2021) seem to signal the absence of historical change in favour of the recurrence of the timeless realities of international politics. The ostensible return of a kind of politics that had, for several decades, been consigned to the past is seen as a rejoinder to ideas about prospects for progressive historical change and the transformation of world order (Mead, 2014). The return of geopolitics seems in this sense to vindicate realist claims about the inevitability of violent conflict between states and the enduring anarchical quality of the international system.

Climate change also exhibits this duality. The transformation of earth’s climate, on the one hand, signals change on an unprecedented scale and scope. Environmental destruction caused by the activity of (some) humans marks the rapid and dramatic transformation of earth systems that were long considered immutable conditions of the human habitat. Climate change, in this sense, points to the way even the seemingly most stable constants of the world are subject to the ravages of time. The consequences of these changes challenge some of the most basic assumptions of the social sciences and necessitate a transformation of our understanding of human beings and their relationship to the earth. Climate change is said to require the transformation of world politics, whether away from a fossil fuel–based world order (Wainwright and Mann, 2018), away from a capitalist world economy (Moore, 2015), or away from a human history and politics considered in isolation from the natural world (Chakrabarty, 2021). The epoch of anthropogenic climate change, in this respect, heralds ‘the rewriting of earth as political space’ – a transformation of the fundamental spatial categories of international politics (Lövbrand et al., 2020). While humans’ relationship with the earth is transforming in unprecedented ways, the question of how that relationship is or should be organised is very old. While climate change has prompted renewed interest in the relationship between human communities and the natural world, this relationship has been the subject of reflection for centuries. Even a cursory engagement with political geography and classical geopolitics reveals a long-standing concern with the political consequences of the relationship between human political orders (whether empires, civilisations or states) and their environment (Glacken, 1967; Della Dora, 2021).

Geopolitics’ ‘return’ today at once represents disorienting and unprecedented change and the persistence of some long-standing political problems in a way that does not map on to the sharp distinction between history and theory expressed in debates between neorealists and their historically minded critics. Rather, it points to the need to investigate how this tension is resolved by relating continuity and change through unitary conceptions of historical time. Bergeson and Suter (2018: 1) respond to this dilemma, for example, by arguing that history is characterised by a perennial cycle between geopolitics and globalisation and thus that the current return ‘is but the latest cyclical turn of a much larger and much longer world historical process’. On this model, the particularities of contemporary geopolitics reflect recurring patterns visible only on a longer time scale. MacKay and LaRoche, on the other hand, argue that

multiple over-lapping crises, including a pandemic, a changing climate, a revival of right-wing populism, and increasingly violent extremism . . . demand not just historical contextualization, but also theorization, perhaps in ways yet to be determined, that allows us to grapple with comparatively radical patterns of often unprecedented change. (MacKay and LaRoche, 2021: 22)

For them, theorisation of the relationship between continuity and change is needed precisely to recognise novelty when it appears.

Both sets of authors differ in their understanding of the meaning of geopolitics’ return, but they agree that that meaning is discernible in relation to a philosophy of history that connects present-day events to a reading of the historical development of humanity as a whole. In this sense philosophies of history are examples of what Hom ( 2020: 91) calls the ‘synoptic theme’, a ‘timing device’ that orders time to explain ‘how disparate experiences might become components of a coherent whole’. Synoptic timing practices like the philosophy of history organise otherwise disparate pieces of historical data ‘into meaningful series leading as if by necessity from a beginning to a conclusion’ (Hom, 2020: 91). As we will see in the next section, theories of International Relations tend to express a unitary philosophy of history in which the international system is understood either as an expression of an eternal pattern of interstate competition or as the culmination of a globalising historical development driven by and originating in Europe. The connection between international order and the philosophy of history is thus a key problem for responding to the ‘return of geopolitics’ in ways that do not reinforce either of these options and thereby open up alternative responses to present-day geopolitical challenges.

History and theory in International Relations

International Relations scholars understand the relationship between history and theory in two primary ways. In the first way, the relationship between history and theory is played out as a clash of opposing approaches to International Relations, the former which is attuned to particularity and contingency and the latter a structuralism that posits an unchanging essence to international order. The second approach considers history and theory as mutually implicated in the production of modern political authority. This approach reveals that history and theory in International Relations are co-implicated in the production of a unitary conception of historical time, that is, a philosophy of history, of the kind that is the subject of Koselleck’s critical historiography.

There is a relative uniformity in accounts of the relationship between history and theory since the decades of the ‘second debate’ when these two terms were crystallised in opposition (Bull, 1995; Waltz, 1979). Despite a widely noted resurgence in historical approaches to International Relations over the last several decades (MacKay and LaRoche, 2017), the terms of this question remain pitched as an opposition between theory as a ‘timeless’ neorealism that expresses the ahistoricism of American social science and a historicism that insists on the mutability, contingency, and particularity of international orders.² As Davenport (2016, 263) puts it, in current debates ‘the relationship between history and the international remains wholly external, a question of how historical method is to be applied to the subject matter of international history’. This half-century old opposition in which ‘history’ and ‘theory’ are framed as discrete bodies of literature contending over International Relations remains a common framing of the relationship between history and theory in International Relations (Zarakol, 2023).

This picture is complicated, however, by the multiple, often conflicting understandings of both history and theory at play in the discipline (Berenskötter, 2017; Buzan and Lawson, 2016; MacKay and LaRoche, 2017; Reus-Smit, 2016). While there is little consensus on the meaning of these terms, others argue that history and theory can only be understood in relation to one another. As Reus-Smit explains, ‘history is theory-dependent’ because the historical record can only be accessed through concepts and ‘theory is history-dependent’ because these concepts are themselves historical phenomena subject to change (Reus-Smit, 2016: 422–423). One consequence of the entwinement of history and theory is that mobilising history against neorealist structural theory is unlikely to bear much fruit, given the way powerful narrative frames tend to trump historical evidence (Kessler and Leira, 2024b: 428–249). Rather than discrete and opposed approaches, history and theory on this view, are understood as co-productive of international order. The co-constitution of history and theory raises problems and questions that can only be answered via historiographical reflection on the practice of writing history rather than historical investigation per se (Kessler and Leira, 2024b: 423).

Recent work in political theory, historiography and International Relations, for example, demonstrates the entanglements between claims to sovereign authority and the distinction between past and present produced by historians. There is now a considerable body of scholarship that shows the way that modern political sovereignty relies on founding moments that divide the pre-sovereign (and premodern) past from the present presence of sovereign authority (Derrida, 2002: 228–310; Walker, 2010). In writing history, regardless of what historians say about the past, what they are doing is producing a boundary between past and present necessary for state claims to sovereignty and the reproduction of international order. ‘Historicisation and contexualisation’, as Davenport explains, ‘is based upon the break with the past, the sovereign boundary between past and present, that produces the fragmented global political space of the international and its unchanging “texture”’ (Davenport, 2016: 264). As a result, ‘To appeal to history against neorealism is to appeal to exactly the political subject that is constituted through the boundaries that neorealism insists on’ (Davenport, 2016: 268). Historicism and structuralism, on these accounts, have more affinities than are acknowledged in debates between historical and neorealist approaches.

These studies point to the way historical periodization and the distinction between past and present enable modern political aspirations to freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and responsibility through a unitary conception of historical time (Bartelson, 2016; Davis, 2008; Fasolt, 2004; Hutchings, 2013; Lundborg, 2016; Vaughan-Williams, 2005). Periodizing categories – past and present, medieval and modern, religious and secular, traditional and historical – link the practice of history to an international order defined in opposition to its past, whether a less-enlightened European past, or a past represented by non-Europeans deemed less far along the road to progress. This link between a past considered dead and gone and a present international order within which humanity can progress towards freedom is evident in a revealing passage from Ken Booth. In considering the racist, sexist, and colonial legacies of the discipline, Booth writes that ‘humanity’s regressive past is IR’s ultimate other’ (Booth, 2017: 28). The distinction between an absent past and a present present enables claims to an international order as a continual exit from a less-enlightened past. In this sense, as Çapan observes, ‘the historical turn in IR continues to operate within unitary, historical time and therefore continues to reproduce spatiotemporal hierarchies’ (Çapan, 2024: 2) that position Europe as the progenitor of world order and driver of a unitary history. History and theory are thus not properly cast as opposites given the way the practice of history enables claims to sovereignty and both rely on a unitary understanding of historical time.

In what follows I examine this co-constitution of theory and history through the relationship between international theory and the philosophy of history. Martin Wight connects the two in his classic article ‘Why is there no international theory?’ On the one hand, Wight suggests international theory remains undeveloped because of the way the international is considered a realm of recurring violence and disorder. Without the regularity of political life within states, international life lends itself to history rather than theory. Yet Wight also connects history and theory in International Relations with the enigmatic claim at the conclusion of the essay that ‘there is no international theory except the kind of rumination about human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philosophy of history’ (Butterfield and Wight, 2019: 76). Wight here suggests that international theory is inextricable from a philosophical, or synoptic in Hom’s terms, account of historical time. While MacKay and LaRoche identify a range of philosophies of history in International Relations and advocate closer attention to their diversity (MacKay and LaRoche, 2021), the variety of philosophies of history they identify concern the nature and meaning of a unitary history, even if that history is ‘multilinear’ (MacKay and LaRoche, 2021: 212). It is this notion of history in the ‘collective singular’ (Koselleck 2004: 33) that is the target of Koselleck’s historiographical reflections.

The role of philosophy of history in International Relations is especially pertinent today given its links to racial, civilisational and cultural hierarchies. Modern European philosophy of history affirms what Barry Hindess (2007: 327) calls ‘the temporalizing of difference’, in which, as Inayatullah and Blaney explain, spatial difference is converted into ‘premodern’ temporal backwardness (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004). In response, much like Koselleck aimed to pluralise the unitary notion of history that had become sedimented by the 20th century, scholars today point to the need to think ‘heterotemporality’ or ‘multiple temporal orderings’ (Hutchings, 2013: 175). A range of approaches attempt to correct the hierarchies implicit in existing international histories by ‘extending the analytical scale of history through space’ (Çapan, Dos Reis and Grasten, 2021: 522). International, Global and World history approaches all aim to overcome the methodological nationalism and eurocentrism of previous histories by expanding the spatial scope of historical analysis. This is especially apparent in the context of the ‘Eurocentric Big Bang Theory’ of today’s world order, the globalisation of international society (Hobson, 2012), where historians have attempted to correct a diffusionist, Eurocentric account of the globalisation of international order by appeal to a global spatial scope (Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017; cf. Burles, 2023).

Yet the totalising spatial extent of the international system has historical links to the development of unitary history. The 17th- and 18th-century European philosophies of history were mapped onto geopolitical imaginaries of global spatial order. One effect of the medieval/modern periodization characteristic of enlightenment historiography is what Franz Fillafer calls the ‘spatializing of the unity of world history’ (Fillafer, 2017: 4). Enlightenment historians responded to the challenge that European encounters with non-European polities posed to the idea of universal history with what he calls the notion of ‘world-historical process’, that is, the idea that we live in an ‘increasingly connected world’ (Fillafer, 2017: 3). Enlightenment historians introduced the idea that ‘the different regions of the globe became increasingly interconnected through conquest, commerce, and culture, and that Europe acted as a fulcrum for this process . . . [and] came to serve as an agent of . . . the re-establishment of a world-historical entity’ (Fillafer, 2017: 15). Historical narratives of the globalisation of international order, Julia Costa Lopez (2021) explains, rely on the medieval/modern periodisation to distinguish between an ‘isolated’ Medieval Europe (increasingly put in question by historians of the global Middle Ages) and a globalising international system (p. 412). By imagining history as a process of ever greater global interconnection, enlightenment historians were able to preserve the notion of a singular history of which Europe was the driving force. This work points to the co-emergence of global spatial consciousness and history in the collective singular identified by Koselleck.

Scholars have begun to explore the spatial dimensions of historical narratives in International Relations. Çapan, for example, uses Wallerstein’s concept of TimeSpace to theorise the way International Relations knowledge is organised by hierarchies determined by spatiotemporal distinctions between past and present and west and non-west (Çapan, 2022). Watanabe explores how different periodisations accompany different spatial scales in Japanese historiography. ‘A history’, as Watanabe puts it, ‘requires a space of analysis’ (Watanabe et al., 2024: 18). For histories of International Relations, this space of analysis is global space. This research suggests that the link between global space and a unitary history persists in the present through the global spatial extent of international order. International Relations thus remains implicated in a universalising philosophy of history of the kind Koselleck and many International Relations scholars have sought to pluralise (Çapan, 2017). In what follows I draw on Koselleck’s account of the role of space in conceptualising historical time to examine the role of international order in producing a relationship between global space and unitary history.

Geopolitics and conceptual history

There are now a range of studies that employ conceptual history to shed light on changing dynamics in international politics (Berenskötter, 2016; Ish-Shalom, 2021; Kessler and Leira, 2024a, 2024b). At the same time, using Koselleck’s work in the context of International Relations presents its own set of difficulties. Kessler points to conceptual history’s historical links to ‘a very specific critique of modern sciences and instrumental rationality’, with roots in 1920s and 1930s right-Hegelian efforts to ‘to “cleanse” German vocabulary from any impact of Liberalism and the Enlightenment’ (Kessler, 2021, 554). A second problem is the significance of the global scope of International Relations, in comparison with the way Koselleck’s Sattelzeit concept focuses on the conditions of socio-political transformation in Europe. ‘To simply apply Koselleck’s framework’ to International Relations thus ‘risks the danger to secretly presuppose a very European history based on the emergence of the modern nation state’ (Kessler, 2021: 556). While the significance of this background to Koselleck’s ideas may be an ‘open and still-to-be-discussed question’ (Kessler, 2021: 554), my analysis responds to these limitations by drawing on Koselleck to develop a critique of the relationship between International Relations and unitary conceptions of history and by identifying some of the limits of Koselleck’s critique of universal history with respect to the global spatial scope of international order. Together, these dimensions of Koselleck’s work shed light on a core element of the relationship between history and theory in International Relations: the connection between the philosophy of history and global political space.

Koselleck is a useful figure for exploring the relationship between theory and history in International Relations today for several reasons. First is the contemporary resonance of the concept of the Sattelzeit, the period between 1750–1850 in which Koselleck argues key concepts in European political thought underwent rapid and fundamental change. Recent work in conceptual history suggests that the present is experiencing shifts in conceptual meanings at a similar scale (Kessler and Leira, 2024a: 428, 431). These include the very basic conceptual categories through which we understand space and time and their relationship to political life (Kessler and Leira, 2024b: 423). States’ collective failure to act decisively on climate change suggest, as Kessler and Leira put it, that ‘our current way of allocating political authority is more a part of the problem than part of the solution’ (Kessler and Leira, 2024a, 435). Koselleck’s insistence that conceptual history extend its reach to foundational spatial and temporal categories, and that such categories are inevitably political, make him a particularly useful resource at a time when these categories are under considerable strain.

Second, Koselleck attunes us to the significance of space for historical knowledge. Recent work considers the significance of space in Koselleck’s oeuvre, a topic Koselleck addresses explicitly. Though space is not the primary focus of a scholar of history and historiography like Koselleck, it plays a significant role in his understanding of historical time and recent studies have explored its role in Koselleck’s work. Olsen identifies three ways space features in Koselleck’s oeuvre, including space as a ‘geographical condition and geopolitical contest’ that will be the focus of this article (Olsen, 2023: 142). Moreover, it is Koselleck’s (2018) essay ‘Space and History’ that contains his most explicit reflections on the consequences of globalisation and related transformations of the natural environment for the practice of history.

Third, Koselleck makes ample use of geological metaphors and addresses changing environmental conditions in a way that lends itself to contemporary debates on the consequences of climate change for the human sciences. Scholars have begun to use Koselleck as a resource for thinking historical time in the context of climate change. Isberg, for example, suggests that Koselleck’s notion of ‘sediments of time’ is a prescient metaphor for thinking multiple temporalities entangled in climate change (Isberg, 2020). Jordheim argues that Koselleck’s later work is indicative of a ‘re-entanglement’ of human and natural historical times (Jordheim, 2022). Koselleck’s limited but very suggestive set of remarks on the relationship between geological and geographical space and varieties of historical time are indeed suited for an era of dramatic climatic transformation.

Fourth, Koselleck’s work in part reflects a tradition of geopolitical thought that informs his diagnosis of globalisation and related geographical change. While Koselleck is a critic of geopolitical thought, he also corresponded extensively and occasionally visited with Carl Schmitt (Olsen, 2023). The extent of Schmitt’s influence on Koselleck is the subject of a significant debate in which it is not my intention to intervene decisively here (Pankakoski, 2010, 2013, 2021). What I do point to, however, is the way Koselleck retains at least one key dimension of Schmitt’s work that is shared with other geopolitical thinkers like Mackinder. This is the idea of globalisation as a kind of spatial closure that will result in the transformation of the relationship between space and political order on earth. It is this geopolitical diagnosis that informs Koselleck’s reflections on the implications for history of the transformation of the spatial ‘givens’ that structure understandings of historical time.

Finally, Koselleck’s work is useful for illustrating the consequences of the above for claims about the unification or interconnection of the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ in international order today. Claims about a merger between natural and human history, his work shows, are aligned with diagnosis of globalisation and its accompanying philosophy of history in classical geopolitics. In other words, in the philosophy of history of classical geopolitics, it is precisely at the moment of creation of a globalised world that the boundary between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ breaks down. Diagnoses of a convergence of the two are thus symptomatic of an understanding of the relationship between ‘man’, earth and globalisation present in classical European geopolitics. This represents a predicament for present-day attempts to rethink the relationship between history and theory in International Relations, as even claims about the end of unitary history occasioned by globalisation implicitly express a philosophy of history enabled by a global geopolitics.

Koselleck and the geopolitics of history

The continued echoes of the philosophy of history in International Relations are especially notable in relation to Koselleck’s work, which is dedicated to the problematisation and historicization of the unity of history. Koselleck outlines the process, beginning in the 18th century, of what he calls the ‘singularization of history’ (Koselleck, 2004: 40) in which the multiplicity of Historie is united in the unity of Geschichte. Kant’s universal history, for example, is an exemplar of this transition to a view of history as a ‘universal relation of events’ and a ‘collective singular’ (Koselleck 2004: 33).³ Koselleck’s project is to break this unity by conceiving of historical temporalities as multiple, nonlinear, and overlapping. This involves a critique of the long-standing spatial ideas that serve as the static background of conceptions of historical time. Crucially, Koselleck links the development of Geschichte, history in the collective singular, to a global spatial imaginary. Koselleck’s account of the relationship between space and history helps clarify this link.

Koselleck uses the geological metaphor of ‘sediments’ to refer to the overlapping temporal layers that make up the experience of history (Koselleck, 2018: 3). Three kinds of historical time, Koselleck argues, are reciprocally and irreducibly related in a manner that aligns with neither linear nor cyclical conceptions of historical time. The first is singularity, experiences that are surprising and irreversible, events that disrupt the regular flow of familiar, predictable temporal sequence. The second are structures of repetition against which this singularity can be noticed and identified. These recurring temporal experiences are regular patterns of events that are familiar and predictable. The third type of historical time is expressed in what Koselleck calls ‘transcendental ideas’ (Koselleck, 2018: 8). These are recurring temporal concepts that last far longer and change more slowly than others. Transcendental in this context refers not to ‘otherworldliness’ but to the fact that these ideas ‘reach beyond and undergird multiple generations’ (Koselleck, 2018: 8–9). Beyond structures of temporal regularity are more fundamental, longer-lasting ideas and structures that organise historical experience. These transcendental ideas, Koselleck explains, are religious, metaphysical, or scientific truths ‘that are based on foundational statements that have been modified over the course of millennia but that remain accessible, even if all people do not share them’ (Koselleck, 2018: 8). As such, they are often treated as natural, unchanging conditions of historical experience.

Koselleck (2018: 27) suggests that space is one such transcendental idea that grounds historical knowledge. ‘Space’, he writes, ‘is just as much a condition of possible history as time’. Spatial ideas, such as those found in Geography and Geology, represent constants against which historical change can be measured. Koselleck (2018: 32) explains his view that ‘there are numerous social, economic, or political determinants that in every case both enable and limit the space for potential action. These determinants also include extrahistorical geographical pregivens’. Ideas about spatial order provide the framework within and against which historical transformation is identified and understood. At the same time, Koselleck insists, these ‘extrahistorical’ pregiven spatial ideas themselves have a history and are subject to change, however slow or infrequent. ‘“Space” too has a history’, he writes, explaining that ‘space is both something that should be metahistorically presupposed for every possible history and something that is historicizable’ (Koselleck, 2018: 27). What ‘makes history so exciting’, according to Koselleck, is that these transcendental ideas, though they are often seen as the natural preconditions of history, are themselves subject to change and transformation, however slow or infrequent (Koselleck, 2018: 6).

Koselleck connects the hastening transformation of these transcendental ideas to the spatial closure represented by political and economic globalisation. For Koselleck, the present geopolitical condition, in particular its global character, requires historical attention to the geographical pregivens of history. The particular qualities of the global historical condition mean that these transcendental ideas are uniquely subject to change and as a result must become the object of historical conceptual analysis. Political and economic globalisation, he argues, provoke the question of relation between human beings and their geographical environment that requires investigating the historical variability of what were previously considered natural or unchanging spatial conditions of historical transformation. ‘Like it or not’, Koselleck (2018: 29) insists, ‘the climate has entered the realm of possible human control’. Even the ‘natural’ features of the physical environment that are the concern of classical geopolitics, Koselleck argues, are, because of globalisation, being further incorporated into human activity and subject to human influence. ‘Geopolitics’, he writes, ‘deals with . . . extrahistorical or geographical pregivens that must be incorporated into the canon of historical research questions. This applies today more than ever before in light of the ecological crisis’ (Koselleck, 2018: 32). Technological development and ecological crisis combine to dissolve the boundary between human and natural space that organise concepts of historical experience. In short, history has geopolitics.

Koselleck’s focus in particular is on the geopolitics of his main critical target: Geschichte. Given that, as Koselleck (2018: 30) puts it, ‘the emergence of geopolitics [occurred] . . . together with an empirically verifiable global interdependency of all economic and political units of action’, the geopolitics of Geschichte is geopolitics of global space. It was an awareness of ‘planetary finitude’ and the earth as ‘an intersubjective closed space of action’ that ‘drew attention to Menschheit [Man] as referent’ (Koselleck 2004: 182–183). The unified figures of Man and History are enabled by a geopolitical imaginary of global space. On Koselleck’s account, Geschichte is the effect of a particular geopolitics. The globalisation of international political and economic order produces the global spatial unity that synchronises a multiplicity of times into a single philosophy of history. This suggests that the international system, as a political order of global spatial extent, produces a relationship between global space and a universal philosophy of history.

Koselleck’s description of the way spatial ideas order historical understanding combined with his sense that space itself is subject to historical transformation make his work a compelling resource for thinking through the changing relationship between human beings and the natural world in the context of climate change. This introduces key elements to the charting of change and continuity that is a central feature of conceptual history. Sometimes the history of concepts is about charting change against a background of continuity and other times it is about identifying continuity underneath a foreground of change. These two dimensions align with the ‘singularity’ and ‘structural’ experiences of time identified by Koselleck. The third temporal dimension, however, addresses the possibility of changes in what is ‘continuous’—the ‘natural’, seemingly unchanging conditions of possibility of history and their transformation. Earth’s physical features, like ‘land and sea, the coasts and the rivers, the mountains and the plains . . . climate and climate change’ are considered ‘the pregivens of possible histories’ (Koselleck, 2018: 29) yet are increasingly subject to historical transformation through human interaction. Even the most basic concepts that enable understanding and analysis of history are themselves subject to temporal change. The antidote to this geopolitics of universal history, according to Koselleck, is the historicization of the spatial assumptions of geopolitical thought. Ideas about space provide a framework in relation to which historical time can be oriented and measured, but also that these spatial ideas are themselves subject to change. Thus, the extrahistorical geographical conditions of history themselves need to be brought within the purview of historical understanding. History has a geopolitics, but that geopolitics is itself subject to historical change.

Koselleck argues that changing spatial conditions brought about by globalisation require reuniting natural and human histories. This feature of Koselleck’s work is present in earlier geopolitical thought. As I show below, Koselleck’s diagnosis of the transformation of the spatial pregivens of universal history due to globalisation expresses a philosophy of history found in classical geopolitics that expresses civilisational hierarchies identified by critiques of universal history in IR today. His account of the relationship between space and history, especially with respect to globalisation, echoes the philosophy of history and the theories of globalisation of Mackinder and Schmitt. In the next section we will see how global space provides the framework for a philosophy of history that posits globalisation as an overcoming of the boundary between ‘man’ and ‘nature’. This echo of classical geopolitics neither invalidates Koselleck’s diagnosis nor undermines its usefulness. Rather, it suggests that the geopolitical framing of the relationship between history and theory is indicative of a broader predicament related to the way geopolitics of global space undergirds the philosophy of history.

Geopolitics & globalisation

This section explores in brief the way some 19th- and early-20th-century geopolitical thinkers conceived of the philosophy of history in relation to global space. My aim in doing so is to show how Koselleck’s argument about the significance of space for history and his argument that globalisation accelerates the transformation of the ‘spatial pregivens’ of historical time echo key elements of the work of German geopolitical theorist Friedrich Ratzel, his protégé American Geographer Ellen Semple, English Geographer Halford Mackinder, and German jurist Carl Schmitt. Work in this ‘classical’ geopolitical tradition conceives of the state and state conflict through organic analogies inspired by 18th-century theories of biological evolution. These are linked to territorial expansion in relation to the concepts of Grossraum and Lebensraum that informed Nazi foreign policy as well as the deployment of geopolitical knowledge by great powers during the wave of European colonisation beginning in 1870 (Toal, 1996: 16–43). The philosophy of history articulated in the work of these thinkers express a view of history as inextricable from global space, in addition to hierarchies of race and civilisation that, despite much critique, remain animating features of International Relations.

Classical geopolitical thinkers like Ratzel, Semple and Mackinder are frequently characterised as proponents of a crude environmental determinism, including by Koselleck. ‘The theoretical mistakes (not to mention nonsense) of so-called geopoliticians’, he writes, ‘resulted from turning these determinants of possible action into naturalistic or ontologically fixed laws that were supposedly capable of guiding or mastering history’ (Koselleck, 2018: 32–33). For Koselleck, a conception of a changing geographical environment separates his own analysis from his geopolitical predecessors. ‘The poorly formulated questions and the quasi- ontological premises of geopolitics’, he explains, ‘nonetheless aimed at the natural pregivens of human possibilities for action, and it remains necessary to incorporate these pregivens into every analysis of historical or political conditions’ (Koselleck, 2018: 33). Historicising the geographical dimensions of geopolitical thought, Koselleck argues, can rectify what he sees as its geographical determinism.

While physical geography is certainly a prominent explanatory factor in the writings of these figures, recent literature presents a more complex picture that considers the way they consider geopolitics in terms of a two-way relationship between ‘man’ and his environment (Ashworth, 2018; Hughes and Heley, 2015; Keighren, 2006; Klinke, 2023: 105; Stogiannos, 2019). Ratzel, for example, claims that ‘the human will knows no unsurmountable [sic] obstacle within the bounds of the habitable earth’ (Ratzel, 1902: 69) and Semple prefers the terms geographic ‘factors’ and ‘influences’ rather than ‘determinant[s]’ given the ‘eternal flux of Nature’ (Semple, 1911: vii–viii). The reciprocal quality of ‘man’s’ relationship with his environment also characterises the philosophy of history expressed in their work, which is linked to human interaction with and transformation of earthly space. It is in this sense that Koselleck’s diagnosis of the changing spatial pregivens of universal history participates in the universalising philosophy of history found in classical geopolitics. As he himself points out, the idea of space as subject to history arises with the development of natural history in the 18th century (Koselleck, 2018: 4). Later geopolitical thought, in this vein, considers earthly space not only an unchanging frame for historical development but as itself subject to historical transformation. Koselleck’s work exhibits four key dimensions in particular of this earlier philosophy of history linked to the notion of a dynamic relation between human history and earthly space. First is the way space and geography form the basis of the philosophy of history. Universal history is plotted on the map of global space, which is conceived as ground and condition of historical development. Second is the admission that despite the way earthly space provides the frame and direction of historical development, this space itself is subject to historical change. Third is the notion that globalisation is hastening this process of spatial transformation. And finally, in various ways all four of these thinkers consider globalisation as a process of transformation in which the distinction between ‘man’ and nature is overcome. The way Koselleck reproduces the philosophy of history of classical geopolitical thinkers demonstrates the way a global international system works as a limit to Koselleck’s critique of Geschichte.

While the 18th century is known for what Tang (2008: 1) calls the ‘historicization of human existence’, including the development of historical consciousness in the collective singular, it is also a period in which spatial ideas undergo their own renaissance. As Tang explains, ‘the discovery of historical time around 1800 was accompanied by the discovery of geographic space, and the historicization of society and knowledge went hand in hand with what can be called the geographicization thereof’ (Tang, 2008: 3). Koselleck (2018: 25) argues that these two dimensions remained separate, writing that ‘since the eighteenth century space and time have been correlated with each other in general ways, but the same does not apply to history’ due to an ‘opposition between scientific and historical categories of space and time’. Yet, 19th-century geopolitical thought is an exception in this respect. The geopolitical thinkers examined here conceive of philosophy of history in holistic terms that include its geographic dimensions. As Tang argues, the 19th century is characterised by a view of ‘the dynamic unity of man and the earth’ (Tang, 2008: 5). These philosophies of history theorise a relationship between global space and the historical development of ‘man’ and place this development in the context of a larger scale natural history of life on earth. As Ratzel puts it, ‘a philosophy of the history of the human race . . . must begin with the heavens and then descend to the earth, filled with the conviction that all existence is fundamentally one’ (Ratzel, 1902: 64). Their accounts of the movement of this dynamic unity express a conception of universal history mapped onto global space that still animate discourses of international politics.

Both historical and geographical ideas refigure what MacKay and LaRoche call ‘the core of modern philosophy of history . . . [the] transformation of humanity’s relationship with nature’ (MacKay and LaRoche, 2017: 209). Modern philosophy of history is premised on the separation of ‘man’ and nature and a subsequent relationship between the two that develops through historical time. In the case of the geopolitical thinkers examined here, it is globalisation that transforms this historical dialectic and overcomes the distinction between the human and natural worlds. Global space provides the framework for universal history and it is the complete political appropriation of this global space that signals its end. This end is interpreted by geopolitical thought as the crossing of the boundary between and the unification of ‘man’ and nature. In this sense the by now standard diagnosis of the humans’ geological agency as a kind of ‘return’ to nature is aligned with the geopolitical orientation that guides Koselleck’s diagnosis of the transformation of the spatial givens that structure ideas about history.

The status of earthly space as both a fixed framework for historical development and the subject of historical transformation is expressed in Ratzel’s account of the starting point of his Anthropogeographie: planetary space. Ratzel, like Mackinder, considered geology a significant, if slow-moving influence on human societies, and sought to develop a geographical science that could link historical and geological time-scales. His vision of the planet included both the flat geometrical space of the globe and the complex forces and movements that animated earth’s biosphere and geology (Klinke, 2023: 97–99). On the one hand, for Ratzel, the globe acts as a static, unchanging conception of earthly space that exists as a background against which stasis and change can be measured. Ratzel (2018: 72) identifies this ‘tension between the movement of life, which never rests, and the space of earth, which does not change’. Though the surface of the earth is constantly transforming, for the purposes of science one must ‘presume a surface area whose essentially stable expanse is a constant parameter underlying life in its ever-changing nature’ (Ratzel, 2018: 62). The spherical globe is the invariable boundary within which the incessant movements and transformations of life and space take place. On the other hand, Ratzel recognises in the geological and geographical science of his day evidence of the earth’s constant transformation. Historical development is driven by geographical conditions, but these conditions themselves are in constant flux: ‘Since there is a constant passing of movable masses of water, and of still more mobile masses of air, over the rigid earth, the connection of one region with its neighbouring regions . . . does not remain constant’ (Ratzel, 1902: 62), what Ratzel calls ‘the historical effects of inorganic motion’ (Ratzel, 2018: 62). Thus, for Ratzel, history is dependent on geographical conditions, but these themselves are not fixed or static but the subject of near constant transformation, two claims that characterise Koselleck’s account of the geopolitics of history.

Semple evinces a similar belief that geographical space lurks at the root of history (Semple, 1911: 10). ‘All historical development’, she writes, ‘takes place on the earth’s surface, and therefore is more or less moulded by its geographic setting’ (Semple, 1911: 1). Geography regards history as ‘a succession of geographic factors embodied in events’ (Semple, 1911: 11). Semple’s view of the relationship between geography and history, however, is more than a crude reduction of historical time to geographical determinants. Rather, Semple argues for understanding geography and history in relation to one another as part of an irreducible unity:

What is today a fact of geography becomes to-morrow a factor of history. The two sciences cannot be held apart without doing violence to both, without dismembering what is a natural, vital whole. All historical problems ought to be studied geographically and all geographic problems must be studied historically. Every map has its date. (Semple, 1911: 11)

This idea is very much in line both with the idea of the unification of natural and human history that, as Koselleck (2018: 4) points out, arises with the development of natural history in the 18th century and with claims about the re-entanglement of natural and human history today.

This conception of natural and human history is also evident in Semple’s account of globalisation, which she views as a process of ever greater entanglement between ‘man’ and the earth. Globalisation, on her account, is a process of progressive intensification of human relationships with the earth through which ‘civilised’ economies and political orders develop and expand over the globe. Civilisation, according to Semple, is characterised by ‘more complex relations to land’ that accompany settled agriculture and the political form of the state. The distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ peoples on Semple’s account is the density and complexity of their respective relationships to their land, relationships which depend on the initial spatial extent of the group. Nomadic peoples that range over a wide territory, in Semple’s (1911: 59) view, exhibit a weaker connection to the land, while settled states are able to sustain larger populations with less territory by ‘the highly organized utilization of its whole geographic basis’. The modern industrial state, according to Semple (1911: 66), is thus aimed at ‘multiplying the relations between land and people’, a process that sets off growing economic intercourse and territorial expansion on a global scale. The effect of this process is the homogenisation of both the surface of the earth, which becomes like an ‘open plain’ (Semple, 1911: 83) through the terraforming force of the industrial revolution and the reduction of the ethnic variety of the human species through imperialist genocide. Globalisation, she writes, is ‘attended by a marked reduction in ethnic stocks . . . through widespread elimination of the weak, backward, or unfit. These have been wiped out, either by the extermination or the slow process of absorption’ (Semple, 1911: 118). Globalisation on Semple’s account is thus a process of the progressive unification of both the species and the space of the earth.

Globalisation on Semple’s account is thus indicative of historical progress expressed through a dynamic between peoples and land. Rather than a growing detachment from or separation of relations between ‘man’ and the earth, according to Semple globalisation is driven by their intensification. Hence, ‘it is an erroneous idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more from the control of the natural conditions forming at once the foundation and environment of his activities. On the contrary, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature, but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each’ (Semple, 1911: 69–70).

Globalisation, according to Semple, thus counterintuitively multiplies humans’ connections to and dependence on their natural environment. For Ratzel and Semple, global space orients the history of mankind, a history composed of a globalising process that unites ‘man’ and ‘nature’ into an organic whole.

Both thinkers suggest that the accomplishment of a politically globalised world is likely to present challenges to the movement of life that sustains the growth and development of states and of civilisation as a whole. Ratzel (1897: 289) expects that ‘lands to which we are still strangers will gain political importance, til the whole earth has become familiar and capable of being turned to political account’, while Semple (1911: 118) writes that ‘as the world has become more densely populated and means of communication have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly rare. The earth has lost its “corners”. All parts are being drawn into the circle of intercourse’. Semple wonders about the fate of human mobility in a politically globalised world. If terraforming the earth into a vast plain facilitates movement, it also intensifies connections between populations and land which makes migrations of peoples more difficult and prone to conflict. Political globalisation in this sense for Semple raises the question of the fate of the movement of life in a ‘closed’ world. Ratzel, similarly, suggests that as the seas opened up the world to movement and spatial expansion, they brought this openness to an end. Maritime travel ‘brought with it escape from the development that always turns back on itself, travelling in a circle, and the progress that always consumes itself – factors inseparable from life contained within a small area’ (Ratzel, 1902: 89). If Sea voyages opened up the surface of the earth to migration, they also produced an earth that can be ‘turned to political account’. Without ‘open’ spaces in which to expand, the earth itself becomes a ‘small area’ with its attendant problems of self-consuming development. Anxieties about this kind of closure also animate the geopolitical diagnoses of English Geographer Halford Mackinder and German jurist Carl Schmitt.

For Mackinder, too, the historical development of the species takes place through a reciprocal relationship with its geographical conditions. ‘Man alters his environment’, Mackinder explains, ‘and the action of that environment on his posterity is changed in consequence’ (Mackinder, 1887: 157). Physical and human geography, he later claims, form a ‘single dynamic system’ (Mackinder, 1931: 328). This is no less the case with the process of political globalisation, which on Mackinder’s account is one of spatial closure. Writing in 1904, Mackinder calls the previous 400 years the ‘Columbian age’ characterised by the mapping, exploration and colonisation of the globe by European powers. It is the culmination of this process, the complete mapping and occupation of the world that brings this age to a close at the turn of the century. ‘The world, in its remotest borders’, Mackinder notes, ‘has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation’ (Mackinder, 1904: 298). For Mackinder, the mapping and political appropriation of the earth reintroduces a closed political order like the Christian Europe of the pre-Columbian epoch. With the culmination of this epoch, ‘we shall again have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it will be one of worldwide scope’ (Mackinder, 1904: 299). Political globalisation brings about a prior condition (a ‘closed’ political system) at the same time as the scope of that condition becomes total for the first time. ‘Do you realise’, Mackinder asks, ‘that we have now made the circuit of the world, and that every system is now a closed system, and that you can now alter nothing without altering the balance of everything?’ (Mackinder, 1919: 260). The result of the closed unity of global political and economic order is a kind of total interconnection that, far from heralding a universal peace, is a portent of war.

Like Mackinder, Schmitt sees the globalisation of international order as the herald of a new international law and by extension a new conception of and regulation of war. Rather than limited friend/enemy conflicts that states could judge independently (including remaining neutral), war in the era of global international law is a matter of universal conflicts that can only be judged as a matter of justice. This involves a transformation in the subject of war from the state to humanity and the antagonist from the justus hostis, or just enemy, to the unjust enemy. In the spatially limited context of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, war took place between sovereigns who were just enemies and thus could end conflict through peace treaties. Absent the spatial ‘outside’ that permitted the limitation of violence within the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the only way to end a conflict is annihilation of the enemy (Schmitt, 2006). Schmitt’s diagnosis thus builds on the political consequences of the spatial order of the globe theorised by Mackinder. When individual states decided on the justice of war, states not involved in the conflict were able to remain neutral. In a global spatial order, rather than regulation of wartime activity by jus in bello (law in war), offensive war is considered a threat to the global international legal order and thus a universal crime against humanity against which any violence is permitted (Schmitt, 2014: 125–196). Schmitt considers universal international law a return to the universalistic moral-theological just war debates that took place prior to globalisation but with the added danger of the extreme destructive power of modern technology. In this respect he suggests that globalisation overcomes the distinction between ‘man’ and nature. Technological developments like the atomic bomb mean that ‘nature and history – all that melts like glowing fat’ (Schmitt, 2015: 63).

Koselleck echoes in this respect the sense found in classical geopolitics that the ‘completion’ of political economic globalisation represents a spatial closure likely to cause profound political transformations. Writing about the historicization of the natural pregivens of history brought about by globalisation, Koselleck (2018: 40) argues that ‘the acceleration of our own era or space-time, lead[s] to the consolidation of the globe into a single unit of experience’ and that ‘recalling the fact that natural pregivens of our lives may have shorter or longer durations takes us back to the teachings of history writing of old, which used to view nature and the human world as a single entity’. Koselleck’s sense, surveyed in the previous section, that globalisation subjects ‘natural’ geographical pregivens to the historical flux usually attributed to the human in this respect is aligned with the connection Schmitt and his predecessors’ draw between political globalisation and the end of history signalled by the crumbling of the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘nature’.

As much as Koselleck finds the ‘totalizing propensities’ of philosophy of history ‘distasteful’ (Zammito, 2021: 402), his diagnosis of the transformation of spatial ideas provoked by globalisation expresses a philosophy of history indicative of a geopolitical orientation expressed by international order’s claim to global spatial scope, one that reinforces hierarchies of race and civilisation that still plague the discipline. This indicates the way a global international system remains the limit of Koselleck’s critique of the philosophy of history. On the one hand, Koselleck’s view is that the geopolitical foundations of the philosophy of history that have remained relatively stable and continuous are increasingly susceptible to change. On the other hand, this view is grounded in a diagnosis of political globalisation and its transformation of earthly space that itself aligns with the geopolitics of Geschichte. The way Koselleck’s reflections on space and history both challenge and reinforce the link between international order and the philosophy of history has a range of consequences for the relationship between history and theory in International Relations today.

Returning to geopolitics

Geopolitics and its ‘return’ pose key questions for scholarship in International Relations today related to the relationship between the philosophy of history and international order. Rather than a question of historical change versus ahistorical structure, the relationship between history and theory today concerns the geopolitical organisation of conceptions of earthly space and historical time. Concepts of historical time, as much as they might aim to escape their earthly bounds, are inextricable from concepts of spatial order, however implicit. For both historicist and theoretical approaches to International Relations, this spatial order is a global international one, a world order understood either to be the culmination of a progressive historical process or the exemplar of an eternal, unchanging structural form. Both approaches are undergirded by a specific geopolitical ordering expressed by the global spatial scope of the international system. The co-dependence, in Reus-Smit’s (2016) terms, of history and theory in International Relations is thus the product of a global geopolitics. Rather than trying to discern the historical meaning or accuracy of the notion of the ‘return of geopolitics’, this return should prompt further study of the way geopolitical space-making produces particular accounts of historical time. Geopolitics is not just a subject of historical analysis; history is also subject to geopolitical ordering.

Koselleck’s insights about the relationship between space and history suggest that the international system plays a particularly important role in linking theory and history at the world scale. The international system, and by extension theories of international order, hold the world together as, in Koselleck’s words, a ‘single unit of experience’. International Relations links theory and history through a specific geopolitical ordering expressed by an international system of global spatial scope. The connection between international order and the philosophy of history is thus a key problem for efforts to apprehend phenomena related to the ‘return of geopolitics’ in ways that do not reinforce a unitary conception of history through theorisations of a progressive teleology or an ahistorical structural form.

Reorienting the relationship between the space of the international and unitary history will require, following Koselleck, the historicization of many of the ‘natural pregivens’, whether geological or geographical, that characterise the geopolitical orientation of contemporary International Relations. Koselleck’s reliance on a philosophy of history found in classical geopolitics, however, points to the limits of historicization as a critique of unitary history. Such a critique must also examine how world-scale spatial frames undergird the production of historical time and is thus also likely to involve contesting the claim to global space that underlies theories of international order. Extricating International Relations from the grip of this philosophy of history must therefore involve both attention to the spatial dimensions of the philosophy of history and the historicization of the ‘transcendental’ spatial ideas that form the basis of our most familiar diagnoses of the present. In this respect, the paper has focused on global space and the accompanying idea of a reintegration of human beings and the natural world. The historiographical reflection called for by recent Koselleck-inspired work in historical IR (Kessler and Leira, 2024b), therefore, ought to consider both the temporal transformation of spatial orders and the role of spatial ordering in the production of historical time.

Thinking heterotemporality or the relationship between one and many times differently, as Koselleck and many contemporary scholars aim to do, thus requires thinking geopolitically. Crucially, however, geopolitics, as we have seen, is not solely a discourse about space, but about the relationship between the ordering of earthly space and historical time. This account of globalisation as a spatial and historical process of expansion and development posits globalisation, like much contemporary discourse on climate change, as a closing of the gap between ‘man’ and nature. The common diagnosis of climate change as a reconvergence of humans and nature is premised on an account of this geopolitical ordering found in classical geopolitics. This is as much the case for Koselleck’s diagnosis of shifting transcendental spatial ideas linked to the overcoming of the separation of ‘man’ from nature through globalisation. Koselleck’s work is thus indicative of a predicament involved in determining the relationship between history and theory in International Relations under contemporary conditions. The widespread diagnosis of the unravelling of the philosophy of history in the context of climate change and increasing awareness of human history’s embeddedness in natural history is enabled by the geopolitics of 19th-century philosophy of history. Even predictions of the transformation of the ‘metahistorical spatial pregivens’ of Geschichte rely on a diagnosis of the historical trajectory of ‘man’ given by those very spatial pregivens. Wight’s view of international theory as the philosophy of history remains prescient, even in the face of powerful critiques of unitary history.

Koselleck nevertheless provides a useful guide to this predicament by alerting us to the geopolitical dimensions of historical time and the historical dimensions of this geopolitics – not an immutable condition but a shifting ordering of the relationship between human beings, the earth and political authority. How the earth is formed as a ‘unit of action’ is, as Koselleck (2018: 40) reminds us, ‘a matter of politics’. In the context of claims about the ‘return of geopolitics’ in international politics today, Koselleck provides a useful reminder that these phenomena are not simply subject to historical apprehension but signal and provoke the transformation of the relationship between earthly space and historical time. Such transformations are bound to have profound consequences for the organisation of political order and authority on earth, including the spatial and temporal unity expressed by the global geopolitics of international order and its accompanying philosophy of history. The fate of this global spatiotemporal unity will shape the future of the relationship between theory and history in International Relations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Regan Burles

Notes

Author biography

Regan Burles is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

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The geopolitics of history

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The return of geopolitics and the philosophy of history

History and theory in International Relations

Geopolitics and conceptual history

Koselleck and the geopolitics of history

Geopolitics & globalisation

Returning to geopolitics

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References