Mackinder goes on in this vein, laying out for the reader a Eurasia bounded by ice to the north and tropical ocean to the south, which has four marginal regions at its extremities, all of them positioned under the shadow of the vast and pivotal expanse of Central Asia and its Mongol-Turkic hordes. These four marginal regions, as he informs us, correspond not coincidentally to the four great numerical religions: for faith, too, in Mackinder’s judgment, is a function of geography. There are the “monsoon lands,” one in the east facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe itself, watered by the Atlantic to the west, the hub of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four outliers is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa,” and “except in the oases … thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is). Devoid of forest, dominated by desert, and thus wide open to nomadic invasions and to subsequent upheavals and revolutions, the Middle East is, in addition—because of its propinquity to gulfs, seas, and oceans—particularly vulnerable to sea power (even as it benefits by it). Strictly speaking, the Greater Middle East, in Mackinder’s wholly geographic viewpoint, is the ultimate unstable transition zone, the sprawling way station between the Mediterranean world and Indian and Chinese civilizations, registering all the monumental shifts in power politics. This is an altogether consistent precursor to Hodgson’s depiction of the Greater Middle East as the Oikoumene of the world of antiquity, which gave birth to three of the great confessional religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and continued its pivotal role in geopolitics into modern times.
And yet for Mackinder, writing in an age before Big Oil and pipelines and ballistic missiles, the globe’s geographical pivot, nevertheless, lies slightly afield. For he brushes aside the Middle East and plows onward with his thesis.
The Columbian epoch, he writes, featured the discovery of the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope, thus bypassing the Middle East. Whereas in the Middle Ages, Europe was “caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west … icy or forested wastes to north and north-east,” and “horsemen and camelmen” to the east and southeast, she now suddenly had access via the Indian Ocean to the entire rimland of southern Asia, to say nothing of her strategic discoveries in the New World.
But while the peoples of Western Europe “covered the ocean with their fleets,” Russia was expanding equally impressively on land, “emerging from her northern forests” to police the steppe with her Cossacks against the Mongol nomads. So just as Portuguese, Dutch, and English mariners triumphantly rounded the Cape, Russia was sweeping into Siberia and sending peasants to sow the southwestern steppe with wheat fields, outflanking the Islamic Iranian world. Toynbee and others would make this point decades later, but Mackinder was among the first.13 It was an old story this, Europe versus Russia: a liberal sea power—as were Athens and Venice—against a reactionary land power—as was Sparta and Prussia. For the sea, in addition to the cosmopolitan influences it bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the sort of inviolate border security necessary for liberalism and democracy to take root. (The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)
Mackinder notes that in the nineteenth century steam and the Suez Canal increased the mobility of sea power around the southern rimland of Eurasia, even as the development of railways began to act as “feeders for ocean-going commerce.” But as he also notes, railways were now beginning to do the same for land power as they already had for sea power, and nowhere so much as in the heartland of Eurasia, which was previously hampered by the lack of stone and timber necessary for road making.
At last, he reaches his main point:
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?
In Mackinder’s view, the centrality of an expanded Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century would replace that of the Mongol hordes, which some might argue had the greatest effect on world history during the second millennium. Just as the Mongols banged at—and often broke down—the gates of the marginal regions of Eurasia (Finland, Poland, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, India, and China), so, too, now would Russia, sustained by the cohesiveness of its landmass, won by the recent development of its railways. For as Mackinder writes, “the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human.” Forget the czars and in 1904 the commissars-yet-to-be, they are but trivia compared to the deeper, tectonic forces of geography and technology. This is not to say that Mackinder was helped by current events. For within two weeks of his famous lecture, the Japanese navy attacked Port Arthur at the southern entrance to Manchuria in the first battle of the Russo-Japanese War. The war ended a year later with the Battle of Tsushima Strait, where the Japanese won a great victory at sea. In other words, while Mackinder was proclaiming the importance of land power, it was sea power that defeated the most sprawling land power on earth in this early conflict of the twentieth century.14
Still, Mackinder’s seeming determinism prepared us well for the rise of the Soviet Union and its enormous zone of influence in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as for the two world wars in the first half, which were, as the historian Paul Kennedy points out, struggles for Mackinder’s “rimlands,” running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond.15 From the Russian Revolution right up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, railways in Central Asia and Siberia expanded by 45,000 miles, proving Mackinder’s point.16 Cold War containment strategy, moreover, would depend heavily on rimland bases across the Greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection of power into the rimlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America’s tension with Russia over the political fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus—the geographical pivot itself—have given yet more legitimacy to Mackinder’s thesis. In his last paragraph, Mackinder raises the specter of Chinese conquests of Russian territory, which would make, he says, China the dominant geopolitical power. If one looks at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claiming parts of Siberia from Russia, even as Russia’s political control of its eastern reaches shows strains, one can envision Mackinder being right once more.
Mackinder has been attacked as an arch-determinist and an imperialist. Both charges are to a degree unfair. An educator all his life, he was not by nature extreme or ideological. Mackinder was only an imperialist because Great Britain at the time ran a worldwide empire, and he was an enlightened British patriot, who saw the prospect of human development—and especially democracy—more likely under British influence than under Russian or German. He was subject to the same prejudices of those of his day. He was a determinist only to the extent that geography was his subject, and geography can by its very nature be deterministic. Mackinder especially tried to defend British imperialism in the aftermath of the debilitating Boer War (1899–1902).17 But a principal theme of his Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction is that human agency can overcome the dictates of geography. “In the long run, however,” writes biographer W. H. Parker, paraphrasing Mackinder, “those who are working in harmony with environmental influences will triumph over those who strive against them.”18 This is the very essence of Raymond Aron’s “probabilistic determinism,” to which most of us can subscribe.19 In fact, Aron defends Mackinder, believing at heart he is a social scientist rather than a natural scientist, as Mackinder, in Aron’s view, believes geography can be conquered through technological innovation.20 To erase any doubt as to where Mackinder in the end came dow
n on the matter, at the beginning of Democratic Ideals and Reality, he writes:
Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to think that those forms of organization should survive which adapted themselves best to their natural environment. To-day we realize, as we emerge from our fiery trial [of World War I], that human victory consists in our rising superior to such mere fatalism.21
Mackinder was opposed to complacency in all its forms. Again, here is a telling example from the beginning of Democratic Ideals and Reality:
The temptation of the moment [in 1919] is to believe that unceasing peace will ensue merely because tired men are determined that there shall be no more war. But international tension will accumulate again, though slowly at first; there was a generation of peace after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats round the Congress table at Vienna in 1814 foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the world? Is it possible for us so to grade the stream bed of future history as that there shall be no more cataracts? This, and no smaller, is the task before us if we would have posterity think less meanly of our wisdom than we think of that of the diplomats of Vienna.22
No, Mackinder was no mere fatalist. He believed that geography and the environment could be overcome, but only if we treat those subjects with the greatest knowledge and respect.
To be sure, Machiavelli’s The Prince has endured partly because it is an instructional guide for those who do not accept fate and require the utmost cunning to vanquish more powerful forces. So, too, with Mackinder’s theories. He sets out a daunting vision that appears overwhelming because of the power of his argument and prose, and so there is the sensation of being bludgeoned into a predetermined reality when in reality he is actually challenging us to rise above it. He was the best kind of hesitant determinist, understanding just how much effort is required of us to avoid tragedy.
Determinism implies static thinking, the tendency to be overwhelmed by sweeping forces and trends, and thus to be unaffected by the ironies of history as they actually unfold. But Mackinder was the opposite. Like a man possessed, he kept revising his 1904 “Pivot” thesis, adding depth and insights to it, taking into account recent events and how they affected it. The real brilliance of “The Geographical Pivot of History” lay in its anticipation of a global system at a time when Edwardian-era minds were still employed in exertions over a European continental system.23 That continental system had its roots in the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna almost a hundred years earlier, and was in its dying days though few, save for Mackinder and some others, intuited it. The cataclysm of World War I, which erupted a decade after the publication of “The Geographical Pivot of History,” pitted Germany-Prussia and czarist Russia against each other on the eastern front, and German land power against British-French maritime power on the western front, thus upholding in a vague manner Mackinder’s struggle-for-the-Heartland idea, while at the same time adding complications and adjustments to it. Democratic Ideals and Reality was his book-length update to “The Geographical Pivot of History,” appearing the same year as the Versailles Peace Conference. He warned the peacemakers “that the issue between sea power and land power had not been finally resolved and that the duel between Teuton and Slav was yet to be fought out,” despite a war that had cost millions of lives.24 “The Geographical Pivot of History” was a theory only; Democratic Ideals and Reality, rather, a revised and expanded thesis that was also a far-sighted warning.
The writing in Democratic Ideals seethes with description, erudition, and illuminating tangents about both contemporary and antique landscapes, as Mackinder presents the world from both a seaman’s and a landsman’s perspective. Nile valley civilization, he tells us, thinking like a seaman, was protected on the east and west by deserts, and never suffered from Mediterranean piracy only because of the marshlands of the Delta to the north: this helped provide Egyptian kingdoms with extraordinary levels of stability. To the north of Egypt in the eastern Mediterranean lay the island of Crete, the largest and most fruitful of the Greek islands, and therefore “the first base of sea power” in the Western world, for “the man-power of the sea must be nourished by land fertility somewhere.” From Crete, mariners may have settled the Aegean “ ‘sea-chamber’ ” that formed the very basis of Greek civilization: Greek sea power flourished until challenged by Persian land power, Mackinder goes on. But the Persian effort failed. It was the half-Greek Macedonians to the north, “in the root of the Greek Peninsula itself,” who finally conquered the whole Aegean. For Macedonia, being more remote from the sea than Greece, bred a race of “landmen and mountaineers,” who were more obedient to their rulers even as they were excellent warriors, and yet still close enough to the sea to have a sense of the wider world. It was this Macedonian conquest, making the Aegean a “closed sea”—thus depriving the Greeks and the Phoenicians of their bases—that allowed Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, the luxury to attempt the land conquest of the Greater Near East. Mackinder then illuminates the geographical origins of Roman and later empires, even as he admits that geography is not always an explanation for history: for example, the Saracens from the Sahara in the southern Mediterranean conquered Spain in the northern Mediterranean, while the Romans in the northern Mediterranean conquered Carthage in the southern Mediterranean, in both cases because of the will of men in the form of exceptional sea power.
And yet, as Mackinder suggests, however dramatic the accomplishments of individuals, geographical forces, acting upon human cultures, tend ultimately to win through. For example, there is the case of Petersburg, which Peter the Great made the capital of Russia in “the teeth of a hostile geography,” even as culture and highly motivated individuals made its survival technically possible. So in the short run Peter triumphed, and for two centuries “the Russian Empire was ruled from this ‘folly.’ ” But in the end land-bound Moscow—and geography—again won out. Human volition has its limits.25
Mackinder’s departure point for the post–World War I era is his salient perception from the “Pivot” that we are confronted for the first time in history with a “closed system,” in which “political ownership of all the dry land” has been “pegged out.” In this new global geography, the dry-land area forms a “vast cape,” or “World-Promontory,” as he puts it, stretching from the British Isles and Iberia south all the way around the bulge of West Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Indian Ocean up to the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia. Thus, Eurasia and Africa together form the “World-Island,” something that as the decades march on will be increasingly a cohesive unit:26
There is one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe; there is one continent—the World-Island—covering two-twelfths of the globe; and there are many smaller islands, whereof North America and South America are, for effective purposes, two, which together cover the remaining one-twelfth.27
Furthermore, one could say that 75 percent of the human population lives in Eurasia (to speak nothing of Africa), which contains most of the world’s wealth, 60 percent of its gross domestic product, and three-quarters of its energy resources.28
The implicit assumption in Mackinder’s thesis is that Eurasia will dominate geopolitical calculations, even as Europe will be less and less of an entity separate from the rest of Eurasia and Africa. “The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe.” From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with the exception of Portuguese Mozambique, German East Africa, and the Dutch East Indies, British sea power encompassed this “World-Promontory.” Mackinder compares the Roman control of the Mediterranean, with its legions along the Rhine frontier, with British domination of the Indian Ocean (the Promontory’s chief sea), while the British army stakes out the northwest frontier of India against an encroaching czarist Russia.29
The implications of Mackinder’s “closed system,” in which it is possible to conceive of the entire breadth of Eurasia and Africa as one organic unit, and the further closing of th
at system throughout the course of the twentieth century and beyond, forms the core point of my own study, from which others will emerge. But it is equally crucial to acknowledge that even a closed system, in which, for example, the Indian Ocean is a vascular center of the world economy, with tankers in the future collecting oil and natural gas from Somalia for deposit in China, is still divided from within by geography. Geography, in fact, becomes all the more important in a closed system, because of that system’s propensity to make the effect, say, of a harsh terrain in Afghanistan register politically from one end of the World-Island to the other.
For now, let us return to explore exactly what Mackinder meant by the Heartland, which so much affects the destiny of the World-Island.
Mackinder both begins and sums up his thinking with this oft-quoted grand and simplistic dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.30
The first thing to realize here is that Mackinder, rather than being wholly deterministic, is just as much reacting to events that are the upshot of human agency as he is predicting them. Between his publication of “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904 and of Democratic Ideals and Reality in 1919 came the carnage of World War I, and in the war’s aftermath came the Paris Peace Conference, which was taking place as Mackinder’s book was going to press. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires as a result of the war, the diplomats at Versailles had as one of their central purposes the rearrangement of the map of Eastern Europe. And thus Mackinder in his book takes up a cause that he ignored in “The Geographical Pivot of History” fifteen years previously: the “vital necessity that there should be a tier of independent states between Germany and Russia.” For as he puts it, “We were opposed to the half-German Russian Czardom because Russia was the dominating, threatening force both in East Europe and the Heartland for half a century. We were opposed to the wholly German Kaiserdom, because Germany took the lead in East Europe from the Czardom, and would then have crushed the revolting Slavs, and dominated East Europe and the Heartland.” Thus, Eastern Europe in Mackinder’s view of 1919 becomes the key to the Heartland, from which derives the land power of Germany and especially that of Russia. For Russia is “knocking at the landward gates of the Indies,” making it opposed to British sea power, which, in turn, is “knocking at the sea gates of China” around the Cape of Good Hope and later through the Suez Canal. By proposing a bulwark of independent Eastern European states from Estonia south to Bulgaria—“Great Bohemia,” “Great Serbia,” “Great Rumania,” and so on—Mackinder is, in effect, providing nuance to his and James Fairgrieve’s idea of a “crush zone,” which Fairgrieve had specifically identified in his writings in 1915, meaning that area liable to be overrun by either land power originating from the Heartland or by sea power originating from Western Europe.31 For if these newly sovereign states can survive, then there is a chance for the emergence of a Central Europe, in both a spiritual and geopolitical sense, after all. Mackinder went further, proposing a series of states to the east, as it were, of Eastern Europe: White Russia (Belarus), Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Daghestan, in order to thwart the designs of Bolshevik Russia, which he called “Jacobin Czardom.” In fact, with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 there would emerge a line of newly independent states strikingly similar to what Mackinder had proposed.32
The Revenge of Geography Page 9
