Географія реваншизму на початку третього тисячоліття

Abstract

Політична географія досліджує процеси, що розгортаються у просторі Земної кулі. Передумовою появи територіально-політичних конфліктів є зовнішньополітичний реваншизм. У статті проаналізовано географічний сенс поняття «реваншизм». Прослідковано особливості його використання у вітчизняній та зарубіжній літературі. Встановлено поширення реваншистських ідей в світі. Прослідковано просторові наслідки втілення реваншистських задумів суб’єктами міжнародних відносин.

The concept of "revanchism" comes from the French word revanche, which means "revenge, retribution." For the first time, this term was used in France in the 1870s due to the intension of some political circles to return Alsace- Lorraine, which went to Germany in 1871 because of the Franco-Prussian War. The idea of retribution for the defeat and the return of lost territories became a geopolitical imperative of some French nationalist political groups on the eve of the 20th century. Russia is undermining the international law and order with its aggression against Ukraine, what allows current and future countries-revisionists to benefit from this situation for their personal use. Aggressive war fell out of the discourse of modern Political Geography, as if this phenomenon refers to the historical past and is not related to the present. Today, in the English-language literature on Human Geography, representatives of the school of radical geography use the term «revanchism» in the context of the description of power relations in urban space. In particular, modern authors write about revanchism as a practice of authoritarian control over urban spaces. However, the article proves that revanchism is not a category of Political Geography from the past but refers to modern processes on the political map of the world. The situation is different in Central European geography, where the study of problems regarding the territorial and political consequences of the collapse of empires and the formation of national states is still relevant. M. Dnistryanskyi (2021), L. Kotyk (2022) write about revanchism in Ukrainian Political Geography. A concept close to revanchism is revisionism. It is about the policy of revising the line of passage of internationally recognized state borders. The rationale is often the ideology of irredentism. M. Dnistryanskyi (Dnistryanskyi, 2021) writes about various manifestations of Russian revanchism on the ideological basis of neo-Eurasianism and rightly points out that there was no place in the geopolitical integrity of many sovereign states, including Ukraine, in neo-Eurasian geopolitical structures. In the modern literature on Human Geography, we do not find works that would reveal the problem of the spread of revanchism in the modern world. This article is devoted to this problem. For Ukraine, the problem of geopolitical revanchism is relevant in connection with the Russian-Ukrainian war, which has been ongoing since 2014. This is, in fact, Russia's imperialist war against our country. As of 2023, Russia considers itself the heir of the Russian Empire and the USSR, while the former Soviet republics are considered by the Russian ruling class to be non-sovereign or limitedly sovereign territorial and political entities. This view of the Russian ruling elites is based on the desire for revenge for the territorial losses and humiliation of the 20th century, which were caused by the collapse of the USSR. The novelty of the study is clearly visible in the context: 1) improvement of the conceptual and terminological apparatus of modern political geography and the geography of conflicts, because the concept of "revenge" from the point of view of content has a distinct spatial connotation and refers to the re-acquisition by the subject of international relations of political control over a certain clearly defined space; 2) establishing the countries of the world that in 2023 implement the policy of revanchism, or aspire to it; 3) for the first time to establish the spatial patterns of the spread of revanchist states. In our opinion, revanchism is being openly or veiledly implemented by a number of countries of the world today, this violates the territorial and political structure of the world, which was formed after the end of the Cold War. In this context, a political-geographical analysis of this phenomenon and socio-geographical process is important. If we talk about political geography, the basic functions of the scientific direction include descriptive, explanatory, managerial and prognostic. The descriptive function refers to the explanation of the spatial manifestations of revanchism. The explanatory function concerns the genesis and consequences of revanchism. The administrative function concerns the prevention of revanchism and the settlement of territorial and political conflicts caused by it. The prognostic function concerns the projection of the consequences of the implementation of the revenge policy, in particular in the reformatting of the existing territorial and political structure of the world.