A brazil geopolitikai iskola
The Brazilian geopolitical school

Summary/Abstract: It was the end of the 19th century that the spatial and geographical aspects of international relations, politics and geography, demography, the connection between the natural environment and state-run society caught the interest of social sciences. The social Darwinist approach of geopolitics and political geography represented by Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen brought ambivalent scientific achievements. The Anglo-Saxon school of geopolitical thinking as well as the geo-strategic approach of the new French, German, and Spanish research were free from the social D arwinist tone. From the second half of the 20th century that tendency has become the main paradigm of the geopolitical scientific investigations all over the world. Political geography as a scientific discipline - via European and North- American transmission - soon appeared on the Latin American continent and got an important part in the governance of the L atin American countries. In the biggest state of the subcontinent, Brazilia in the 1920s and 1930s, the scientific achievement of Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen had effects on geopolitical thinking. From the 1940s onwards the new generation appearing at the Supreme Military Academy already followed the new view of the geo-strategic school. Their research focused on internal and external security of Brazilia hoping for Great Power-status and its rule in the world politics. They also elaborated the permanent and actual national aims as well as the questions concerning development, progress and improvement, an adequate national strategy and the features of the tropical civilization. This paper describes the formation of the Brazilian geopolitical school together with its theoretical sources. It gives a detailed analysis of the scientific achievements of Golbery do Couto e Silva, Carlos de Meira Mattos, Therezinha de Castro (representatives of the "golden age" of the Brazilian geopolitical thinking) as well, and presents the activity of the Supreme Military Academy.

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