A román geopolitikai gondolkodás rövid története

Romania is a geopolitically very important state thanks to its position at the meeting point of the Balkans, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. It was not accidental, that the geopolitical way of thinking appeared in the Romanian scientific and political life pretty early, in the early years of twentieth century. After the first world war, Romania received a lot of new territories, thus it became a much bigger and stronger state, but in the same time a multiethnic state with a lot of minority communities. Thus the main goal of the so-called “Romanian Geopolitical School” was the creation of a new geographical and national identity for the country. The Romanian geopolitics of the inter-war period was a so-called “geopolitics of the nation-state” with strong foreign influences, especially from the classical german school of geopolitics, but with strong regard for the Romanian reality. After the second world war, in the communist Romania, the geopolitics was sidelined and condemned as “fascist pseudo-science”. By some Romanian geographers it was still studied under other names, as part of the official “socialist economic geography”. The official rebirth of this science in Romania was brought by the collapse of communism. The contemporary Romanian geopolitics reflects to the changed reality of the country and the world, its main interest being the place of Romania as part of the Western alliance system; the relations with Russia; the realations with “the other Romanian state”, the Republic of Moldova; the inner geopolitics of the state (the big regional differences being a big problem in Romania). In my article I want to summarize the history of the Romanian geopolitics, concentrating mainly on the geopolitics as a science, rather than the official (military or civilian) geopolitics of the state