REFLECTIONS ON THE STATE OF GEOGRAPHY - A WARDING OF THE HAUER-MEDAL

This paper was read on the occasion of the author being awarded the Ha uer-Medal and aimed at pointing out the changes in the positions geogr aphy has held in the course of this century. At the beginning of the 2 0th century geography was a frontier discipline and showed all those f eatures commonly ascribed to scientific fields at the research frontie r: interdisciplinarity as well as high esteem both on the part of the general public and of academia. When the era of discoveries ended geog raphy became an ''ordinary discipline'', public opinion ascribing it m ainly an educational purpose and some function in securing stability i n the state's systems. Moreover, geography is the very last of the imp ortant traditional sciences to undergo the process of a dividing up in to subdisciplines and their becoming independent of each other in this century. Because of its three-dimensional information system, with a regional, a material and a temporal axis, and the required interdiscip linary character, its representatives must of necessity ''branch out'' into various directions, so that the overall extension of the discipl ine keeps growing and its structure becomes ever more dispersed while the number of nodes within the internal networks decreases and contact s are less intensive. This extension can be compared with the process of chaotic urbanization, with the effect of a sort of ''material bligh t'' in the core areas of the scientific structure. Consequently gains and losses of ground are juxtaposed. Systematic extension, however, is only affected successfully wherever new normative problems are firmly tied to institutions or the field is able to participate in internati onal large-scale programs (Global Change, MAB). New chances for geogra phy lie in an innovative approach to extensive problems also dealt wit h in the framework of EU research programs. In a period of a globaliza tion of economy and migration, geography must return to the research f rontier of new global perspectives.