چکیده:
Alexander Supan (1847-1920), an Austrian geographer, was a major contributor to German
geopolitics with his work “Guidelines of General Political Geography” (Leitlinien der allgemeinen
politischen Geographie). The quantitative aspect of his work consists of two innovations: (1) the
maritimity quotient quantifying the relation of maritime borders to land borders and (2) the pressure
quotient quantifying the relation of external pressure to internal pressure in terms of power. In this
paper I use adaptations of these formulas to deliver results for several countries that have relevance
for Northeast Asia, explore the relationship to naval expenditure and, in the light of those results,
discuss the implications and prospects for the two Koreas.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Maritimity and the Prospect of a Korean Blue Water Navy Karl Hwang*-Ph. D Student of Political Science, Hamburg University, Germany Received: 09/08/2008 Accepted: 17/2/2009 _____________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Alexander Supan (1847-1920), an Austrian geographer, was a major contributor to German geopolitics with his work “Guidelines of General Political Geography” (Leitlinien der allgemeinen politischen Geographie).
: Geopolitics, Maritimity, Pressure quotient, Naval spending, Korea * E-mail: conducator@gmail.
Austrian geographer and pioneer geopolitician Alexander Supan developed maritimity as a unique concept to calculate connectedness to the sea of any given country based on the relation of maritime borders to land borders.
An article by Hans Hiss in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik [Journal of Geopolitics] on globalization has lost none of its actuality given current globalization and sea trade.
Maritimity Quotient Naval Spending Predicted Value + / - United States 57% 38% 15% 150% Russia 27% 31% 9% 226% China 40% 17% 12% 44% Japan 100% 23% 24% -5% North Korea 60% 4% 16% -74% South Korea 91% 11% 22% -51% Predicted Value is a trend value based on what one would expect on the basis of maritimity.
Principal Surface Combatants Destroyers Cruisers Aircraft Carriers United States - Pacific 3rd Fleet 24 13 6 Russia - Pacific Fleet 7 1 - Japan 44 - - China 29 - - South Korea 7 - - North Korea - - - Table 3, the data coming from The Military Balance 2008 (Hackett), shows that the South Korean naval strength is far from optimal and is in fact inadequate to protect its trade routes if things ever get rough.