“印太”的全球思想史

The “Indo-Pacific”: A Global Intellectual History

“印太”作为一个地缘政治和国际战略术语,在全球范围内广为流传,然而国际学界对“印太”这一海洋政治概念的认识仍显贫瘠。本文致力于考证“印太”的思想史渊源,阐明“印太”概念诞生时的理论架构,并梳理其在时间与空间流动之际的创造性接收与再阐释。“印太”视域可以追溯至德国地缘政治学家卡尔·豪斯霍弗的空间政治思想。豪氏将马达加斯加至波利尼西亚的广大区域指定为一片有机的整体,冠以“印度太平洋”之名,与欧亚“大陆板块”相互平行,与“欧美”海洋势力相互对立。“印太”是豪斯霍弗将生态气候标识映射到欧亚“海缘政治”断层线的一种权宜设想。这一理论创新源起于连锁交错的语境。“印太”基于海洋学、民族学、历史语言学等学科的整合、会通与再创造,继承了普鲁士启蒙思潮的地理关怀,也反映了德国思想界为制衡欧美竞争对手,思索亚洲政治潜力的转向。因此,豪斯霍弗的“印太”构想呈现出一种反殖民主义愿景。豪氏希望“印太”海洋带突破德国的地缘困境,也期待中国、印度政治觉醒、民族自决、文化互通,反制殖民主义国家。豪斯霍弗复杂的“印太”思想经历了多层传播、接收、蜕变。尽管在印度、中国影响力有限,豪氏在日本却因介入了“泛亚细亚主义”的思想语境,产生了关键性共鸣,形成了巨大影响。详考“印太”的思想史,是以全球思想史方法考察地缘政治学的案例研究,也是通过发掘过去观念反哺当今政治语言的贡献,更是反思殖民主义政治遗产的契机。

The “Indo-Pacific” has gained global purchase as a geopolitical concept and international strategy. However, scholars have yet to uncover the idea in its proper context of political oceanography. This paper presents an intellectual genealogy of the “Indo-Pacific” to illustrate the texture and structure of the theory at its inception, and to account for its creative receptions and reinterpretations across fluid temporal and spatial contexts. The “Indo-Pacific” vision is traced to the spatial political thought of the German geopolitical thinker Karl Haushofer, who designated the vast oceanic region between Madagascar and the Polynesian islands as an organic, integral “Indo-Pacific”, a parallel space to the Eurasian “Kontinentalblock” and a counter-space to “Eur-Amerika”. In this way, Haushofer projected climatological and oceanographical demarcations onto the fault lines of political necessity and normativity. The theory itself has its origins in a set of interlocked contexts. Concerned with the question of geography in the Prussian Enlightenment and with Germany’s interwar EuroAmerican rivals, Haushofer legitimises the “Indo-Pacific” by a synthesis of oceanographical, ethnographical, and historico-philological evidence, and by a spatial turn to India and China. As a result, Haushofer’s “Indo-Pacific” is also, ironically, an anticolonial vision. The goal is not only to extricate Germany from its geopolitical plight with a maritime belt, but also to stir India and China into political resurrection, self-determination, and cultural integration, in order to subvert colonial domination. Since then, Haushofer’s “Indo-Pacific” has undergone transmutations through multiple layers of reimaginations. Notwithstanding his limited impact in India and China, Haushofer’s translated texts provoked and resonated with pan-Asianist debates in Japan. A survey of the global intellectual history of the “Indo-Pacific” is a case-study of a historical approach to geopolitical thought, a contribution to the excavation of past ideas for the enrichment of present political languages, and an occasion to reflect on the political legacy of colonialism in our own time.