ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND THE EVENTS IN BOSNIA AND CROATIA, MUST READ THIS ARTICLE: GEOPOLITICS _BY_MICHAEL_L. In the days following the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, then U.S. President George Bush was in such a morose _frame_ of mind that reporters in the White House press corps found it striking. When the subject came up, Bush stated that he was ``not an emotional man.'' ``I will not dance on the Wall,'' he declared. The source of Bush's foul mood was twofold. First, the fall of the Wall and the foreseeable reunification of Germany marked the end of the Yalta system. The geopolitically _base_d division of Germany and Europe between the superpowers was, after 45 years, coming to an end. Second, the East-West conflict between the communist Soviet empire and the West, since the end of the Second World War, had masked the geopolitical basis of the Yalta system to a great extent. The opposition between communist claims to dominion and the ``western community of values'' had been in the foreground. The political class in Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow already perceived at the end of 1989 that it would no longer be politically possible to hold back revolutionary changes in Germany and eastern Europe. At the Malta summit meeting in December 1989 and in other talks between the governments of the four victorious powers of World War II, an understanding was reached to establish the principles for a new geopolitical arrangement in Europe from the ashes of the ``East-West conflict.'' Now, geopolitics showed itself openly and undisguised. The sight was not a pretty one. In the ``serious'' press of Great Britain, France, and the United States, government-inspired articles appeared, which warned that a ``new pan-Germanism'' ,Le Monde, or even a ``Fourth Reich'', London Times, threatened the European balance of power. German economic power purportedly threatened to dominate Europe just as the Panzer divisions had in the past. With their anti-German ravings, the leaks from the London Foreign Office sounded like the self-incriminating letters of the terrorist Red Army Faction. A unified Germany, it was said, might turn against the West and aspire to a ``new Rapallo'' accord with a post-communist Russia in order to achieve hegemony on the Eurasian continent. But geopolitical foresight should stop this from happening. AXIOMS OF GEOPOLITICAL SYSTEM Just what is geopolitics? Historically speaking and in international relations, geopolitics consistently assigns priority to the ``_object_ive factors'' of space and human masses over the ``subjective'' factors of cultural and technical development. The standard founders of geopolitics _base_d on this axiom are:        1.  Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), whose book 'Political Geography' of 1897, gave the overall theoretical foundation of geopolitics;        2.  Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, an American, whose book 'The Influence of Sea Power upon History', published in 1890, defined the role of the ``ocean space'' and ``sea power'' as the central concepts of geopolitics;        3.  Sir Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947), the real founder of operational geopolitics, who presented the contrast between the Eurasian continental ``Heartland'': Russia, East Europe, South-East Europe, and Central Europe, to the consltrued, Anglo-American sea power's ``Insular Crescent'' as the central geopolitical conflict ;        4.  Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), for whom the rise and fall of nations and peoples are expressed in the expansion or contraction of the space ruled over by them. Haushofer exerted a strong influence over German National Socialism and the Soviet Russian brand of geopolitics. Geopolitics postulates that geographical, climatic, and demographic factors determine the course of history. Mackinder says ,in ``The Geographical Pivot of History,'' written in 1904,: ``We may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history.'' He concludes, ``The actual balance of political power at any given time, is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.... And the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human.'' Geopolitics takes off from the malthusian premise that geography, the available land surface, is unchangeable, whereas the mass of people is dynamic. Because of the _object_ive limitation of geographical space, peoples and nations must struggle for power and dominion against each other. The possession of the limited soil and its resources must be seized, or defended, among competing peoples or nations by political or military struggle. In the words of Ratzel, ``For man and his history the size of the land surface is unchangeable. The number of people grows, but the soil on which they must live and work remains always the same.'' The land is ``the only material cohesiveness in each people.... In the progress of history this bond does not tend to become looser through the progressive liberation of intellectual forces, but rather it grows with the number of people. From this also comes historically the growth of the tendency of the people to become more tightly bonded with the soil, so to speak to take root in it.... Ample space confers the protection of distance to the life forms which spread out over it.... Therefore we see in the competition of stronger and weaker peoples, that the weaker ones are more quickly consigned to narrower spaces.'' These ideological axioms of geopolitics come out of the physiocrats of the eighteenth century, who defined economic wealth exclusively as the inorganic and organic bounty of the soil. Consequently the axioms of geopolitics are _base_d on the