重新审视地缘政治学:社会科学方法论的视角

Rethinking Geopolitics:From the Perspective of Social Science Methodology

作者在总结社会科学方法论的基础上重新审视现有的地缘政治学理论,并提出构建科学的地缘政治理论的基本框架。地缘政治学理论众多,因而需要引入结构/过程、物质/观念这两组二分法考察和梳理各流派的理论和范式。科学的地缘政治研究不应该拘泥于范式和主义之争,而是基于问题导向,借鉴各类范式中的变量和逻辑。地缘政治是一个复杂的系统,非线性特性、时间效应和情境性则决定无法建立一个宏大的理论,更好的选择是在时空情境下建立实证的中层理论。实证的地缘政治理论需要以社会科学方法论为基础,在地缘政治研究中确立变量选择、理论设计和案例比较分析的基本方法。作者借助科学方法论,以一种"因素+机制"的框架,兼顾结构和过程层面的变量,通过分析17世纪后半叶英国、法国和荷兰的兴衰来展示上述分析框架的解释力:在西欧主要强国中,只有英国在结构和过程层面都获得成功,即兼具了较强的国家能力和高效的制度,而法国和荷兰则分别因为过于专制和国家能力不足而导致失败。

This paper summarizes the research on geopolitics through two groups of dichotomies(structure/process and material/social) to grasp comprehensive meanings of geopolitics.Scientific geopolitical research should not rigidly adhere to the boundaries of paradigms or doctrines.Instead,it should adopt a positivist approach using an analytical framework which combines factors and mechanisms to unify the geopolitics theories.Geopolitics is a sophisticated system,which should consider the non-linear characteristics,time effect and historical context.Therefore,this article presents variable selection,research design and basic methods of causal explanation of case studies of the geopolitics.Then,we employ this framework to analyze the geopolitical causal mechanisms of the rise and fall of the Western European countries,namely England,France and Holland in the second half of the 17 th century to illustrate how the geopolitics at structure and process levels affects the destiny of the Great Powers.