In April 1904 Sir Halford John Mackinder, Reader in
Geography in the University of Oxford and Director of the London School of
Economics and Political Science, one of the fathers of geopolitics
and geostrategy, published a
valuable and original article in the Geographic Journal of the Royal
Geographical Society, introducing the famous theory of the so called
“geographical pivot of history”.
This theory, which would later
profoundly influence the geographer’s further theory of the “Heartland”,
consisted in a brief analysis over the world’s pivotal area and in how the
supremacy over this broad landmass could influence the creation of a hegemonic
world empire.
Mackinder begins his argumentation
with a lengthy historical dissertation on the geographical discoveries that
commenced in the XV-XVI centuries to show how they had affected on the
political quest for world hegemony. At his time (1904) - Mackinder considers -
the entire world has been completely discovered and conquered, and no land was
left that could be owned because undiscovered. Even the inner regions of Asia
were ending the long path for their discovery that had begun with Yermak the
Cossack by land and Vasco da Gama by sea. Africa too had been almost wholly
explored and partitioned by European colonialist powers. Indeed, the
post-Columbian age managed to transform the world into a closed political
system of worldwide scope, thus leading all international actors to confront
each other: international relations could finally become organic and systemic. During
the time the author writes, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a
correlation linked together all larger geographical and historical
generalizations. It was already possible to consider the world’s events as a
whole in terms of geographic width: history and geography blend already. This
is clearly unveiled when considering how strong and competitive the different
geopolitical forces were in international politics. Within this perspective,
the aim of Mackinder’s study was that of describing the physical features of
the world that had been - and still were - most coercive of human action and
presenting the chief phases of history as originally linked to them. This, in
other words, meant nothing more than exhibiting human history as part of the
life of the world organism, and we may certainly underline how intensively
Ratzel’s geographical determinism echoes in this statement.
After debating the pros and cons of the alleged European superiority in
the history of civilization, Mackinder states that the birth of nations is the
result of the pressure of a common tribulation. In other words, using examples
like the Hun invasion of Europe or the birth of France, the author believes
that nations are wrought under a common need to resist against outer forces. At
this point, Mackinder introduces one of the most brilliant ideas that his
entire paper would explicate based upon a new interpretation of European
history: Europe’s entire destiny and development - he says
- rely on its relationships with Asia. In
other terms, Europe and European history are subordinate to Asia and Asiatic
history because European civilization is
the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasions. This
revolutionary - yet almost obvious - idea is one of the milestones on which
Mackinder’s thought rests and is essential to understand all further
implications of his theory.
Now, Europe presents a
remarkable contrast that splits it up into two distinctive parts: Russia
occupies half the continent, joining the European peninsula with the Asiatic
landmass, and the Western powers the remaining territorial appendices. This
partition shows a physical contrast between the unbroken lowland in the East
and the land variety in the West, and some may consider the existence of a
possible correlation between natural environment – its flatness or diversity –
and political organization – more representative and centrifugal regime on one
hand or more despotic and centripetal on the other. As far as Eastern Europe is
concerned, a separation line exists that cuts Eastern Europe into two separated
areas: the forest and marsh region in the north, from the Baltic region to the
Urals, and the steppe region, from Western Ukraine to Western Turkestan. Beyond
this line, while we move westwards, lays peninsular Europe, which commences
including three distinguishing natural environments next to its eastern
borders: the Hungarian great plain - or Puszta
- ; the Carpathian Mountains; the German woods. The above-mentioned separation
between forest/marsh and steppe regions slowly diminished during the XIX
century because of Russian cultivations, but it had been formerly very coercive
for humankind to inhabit.
The arrival in the European
peninsula of the Turanian people (V-XVI centuries) - an historical phenomenon
that started manifesting with the Hunnish invasion and continued with that of
the Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols and Kalmyks -
gave birth to the secular struggle between nomadic Asians and settled Europeans.
Through the vast gateway between the Urals and the Caspian Sea, thousands of
these horsemen originally coming from Mongolia and Turkestan flooded into the
fertile and rainy European lands, giving shape to the idea of a common European
fellowship united against the Asiatic invaders. Indeed, these continuative
nomadic invasions and raids influenced the birth of Western European nations,
settling them in their current lands, creating a common European identity, and
uniting the European kinsmen after centuries of brotherly struggles against
each other. To give examples, the birth of France reflects the expulsion of the
Huns from the lands of Gaul, and Austria - formerly Ostmark, or eastern frontier - was in fact a marchland founded by
Charlemagne against the oriental invasions. Even the birth of Muscovy before
and Russia later is a close consequence of the humbling Mongol yoke, in which
Mackinder sees the reason of Russia’s lesser development compared to the rest
of Europe and of its peculiar political despotism.
In the author’s words:
“For a thousand years a series
of horse-riding peoples emerged from Asia through the broad interval between
the Ural mountains and the Caspian Sea, rode through the open spaces of
Southern Russia, and struck home into Hungary in the very heart of the European
peninsula, shaping by the necessity of opposing them the history of each of the
great peoples around – the Russians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and
the Byzantines Greeks”.
Parallel to the mighty threat
of the Asiatic horsemen, another rival mobility power emerged through the river
ways and sea ways and waged war against Europe: that of the Vikings in the
north and of the Saracens in the south. Whilst the nomadic Asians forced the
European frontier in the east, the Norsemen and the Saracens began raiding the
continent’s coasts and towns from all other directions – west, north, south.
The European settled peoples, while laying gripped between these two pressures,
tried to answer with a major cohesion and unity amongst them: both pressures
turned to be stimulating, in a way or in another, leading some countries to
unite, like France or England, and others to divide, like Italy. At this point
Mackinder introduces also a brief note of racial anthropology, bringing back
the existence of brachycephalic skulls in eastern and central Europe up into
France as a direct consequence of the Asiatic invasions, in contrast with the majority
of dolichocephalic skulls in the north, west and south. Nonetheless, the full
meaning of the Asiatic influence upon Europe is understandable only after the
Mongol invasions (XIII-XV century), indeed the most devastating of all.
After considering the
influence and relevance of the Asiatic nomadic invasions in moulding the
European history, civilization and identity, Mackinder focuses on some of
Eurasia’s main characteristics from a geographic, demographic and geopolitical
point of view.
First, the author detects that
the concentration of the world’s population can be found along the relatively
small margins of the Eurasian continent, which are closely related to rainfalls:
Europe, China and India. If we consider the Sahara desert as the natural,
impenetrable, southern border of Europe, rather than the Mediterranean Sea, we
can observe that Eurasia was severed for many centuries from central and
southern Africa; at the same time, the oceans separated it from the Americas
and the Australasian archipelago. This meant that Eurasia represented for many
time a closed system focused on the interaction of the populations of its
crowded but limited outskirts with the relatively underpopulated but huge inner
core. Truly, the continuous landmass of Eurasia, excluding the deserted Sahara and
Arabian Peninsula, represents half of all the land on the globe. The core of
Eurasia, though mottled with desert patches - that from Syria reach Manchuria
passing through Persia - is on the whole a steppe-land that supplies a
wide-spread pasture, and there are not a few river-fed oases in it, but it is
entirely unpenetrated by waterways from the ocean. In fact, this land is a
perfectly appropriate area for the maintenance of sparse horse-riding nomads. Steppes
spread continuously from the Hungarian Puszta
until the Little Gobi of Manchuria and except in their westernmost
extremity, they are untraversed by rivers draining to an accessible ocean. Moreover,
each of the Eurasian steppes - whether the Magyar, the Ukrainian, the
Turkestanian or the Mongol - present different sea-level locations and specific
characteristics. Now, from each of these steppes, originating from the
easternmost ones, different Mongolic hordes repeatedly stroke the peripheral
rich regions of Eurasia, creating often some tributary or vassal states, if not
some real dominating dynasties in Europe, the Middle East and China. Eventually,
Russia, Persia, India - despite the natural Himalayan barrier - and China were
rather made tributary or received Mongol dynasties. The Seljuk Turks, for
instance, overthrowing the Saracen dominion of the Middle East from Baghdad and
Damascus - and helping the beginning of the crusades and the unification of the
Christian nations of Europe - could spread their power over the so-called “Five
Seas”: the Caspian, the Black, the Mediterranean, the Red and the Persian.
Still, how can we conceive
Eurasia and in which geographical terms can we describe it? Mackinder describes
Eurasia as a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, with
an extension of 21 millions square miles (three times North America), whose
centre and north have no available waterways to the oceans but, except in the
subarctic forest, are favourable to the mobility of horsemen and camelmen.
Here, for the first time, the British geographer introduces some key words of
his lifetime studies. To east, south and west of the Eurasian HEARTLAND are marginal regions, ranged
in a vast CRESCENT accessible to
shipmen: these rim regions that
represent the Crescent are four, according to their physical conformation.
(Each of them, curiously, embrace a different majoritarian religion or creed:
Buddhism; Brahmanism; Islamism; Christianity). The macro regions are:
1) The
Indian Subcontinent;
2) Eastern China and Indochina;
3) The European Peninsula;
4) The Nearer East.
The first two are
characterized by the monsoons, and may be considered monsoon lands; together
with the third region, they host 2/3 of the world population. The fourth area,
though thinly populated, includes the abovementioned “Five Seas” region, or the
eastern Mediterranean Sea, the southern Black Sea, the southern Caspian Sea,
the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Its geostrategic relevance lays on the fact
that it partakes of the characteristics both of the marginal belt and of the
central core of Eurasia; its weakness/strength descends from its sea-gulfs and
oceanic rivers that lay it open to sea power influence and projection.
In considering the evolution
of sea power and land power, it is historically detectable that the isthmus of
Suez, before being severed, divided sea power into two parts: western
(Mediterranean and Atlantic) and eastern (Indo-Pacific), without a continuity
line. At the same time the wasteland of Persia, vertically extending from
Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, separated, due to nomad-power, India and
China from the Mediterranean world. Since the beginning of historical ages, for
instance when the civilized ancient oases of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt were
weak, the steppe-peoples could threat the open tablelands of Persia and Asia
Minor as forward posts whence to strike through the Punjab into India, through Syria
into Egypt, through the Straits into the Balkans and Europe. The natural rival
of horse mobility, typical of the Turanian peoples of inner Eurasia, is represented
by the shipmen power of the Marginal Crescent dwellers: let us think, for
instance, at the Saracens and their sea power - or, best to say, their blend of
sea power and camel/horse land power -, that could forge a vast empire also
thanks to their central strategic position between the western and eastern
oceans and within the geographical Eurasian southern hub. Indeed the main
difference between the Saracens and the Turk/Turanian people was that the
former blended both sea power and land power whereas the latter possessed only
land power.
Mackinder does not ignore of
course the relevance of river-ways for the rise of civilizations. In fact, he
states that the beginning of all greater civilizations relied on two main geographical
elements: either the navigation of river-ways connected with the oceans (e.g.
China/Yangtze; India/Ganges; Babylonia/Euphrates; Egypt/Nile), or the thalassic
power given by navigation (e.g. the Greeks; the Romans; the Vikings; the Saracens).
Advancing through the
centuries until the age of oceanic discoveries, Mackinder believes that the
main result of the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope and the prosecution towards
the Eastern Indies was that of connecting
the western and eastern coastal navigation around Eurasia. This primary event
managed to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central position of the
steppe-nomads by pressing upon them in the rear, thus delineating neatly the contraposition
between LAND POWER and SEA POWER that will be the basis of all subsequent
rivalry of powers for hegemony over Eurasia. Moreover, the discovery of the
Americas, or Western Indies, reversed the relation of Europe and Asia: whereas
in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an inaccessible desert to south -
the Sahara -, an unknown ocean to the west - the Atlantic -, and icy or woody
wastes to north and northeast, and in the east and southeast threatened all the
time by nomadic horsemen, now it emerged upon the world, wrapping its influence
around the Eurasian land power which had always menaced its own existence. Before
1492, England and the British Isles were nothing more than the outmost
outskirts of Eurasia, located at the end of the world; afterwards, they assume
a central position, becoming in fact the very centre of the world, laying just in-between
the oceanic connections of the Old world with the New. After 1492, as new lands
and continents were being discovered, the Americas, Australasia, Trans-Saharan
Africa and Japan became a ring of OUTER
and INSULAR bases for sea power and trade inaccessible to the land power of
central Eurasia.
However, during the Tudor age,
while Western Europe began its expansion over the seas, at the same time
Russian power started carrying from the principality of Muscovy a tireless expansion
through Siberia thanks to Cossack explorers and settlers: such momentum would
have imposed the Russian rule to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and Alaska
within less than three centuries.
Somewhat Mackinder notices in
the seaward western and the landward eastern expansion of Europe the prosecution
of the ancient opposition between Romans and Greeks, exemplified in the
political - and religious - separation into two parts of the Roman Empire. As Teutonic
folks were overall civilized and Christianised by the Romans, so were the Slavic
ones mostly by the Greeks. Being so things, the Romano-Teutonic European stock
embarked upon the ocean enforcing sea power whilst the Greco-Slavic rode over
the steppes, focusing on land power, and conquering the Turanian lands.
It is true that during the XIX
century the Russian railways had subjugated the Eurasian steppes, linking together
and rationalising these vast landscapes. The Russian army in Manchuria, whose
placement there was possible thanks to railway communications, looked like an
evidence of mobile land power at the same extent than how the British army
deployed in South Africa showed the evidence of mobile sea power. Thanks to the
connection of the Eurasian core due to Russian railways Mackinder already
foresaw and predicted the birth of a Eurasian specific economic area: the
richness of the resources of the Russian Empire and Mongolia - Mackinder writes
- is so big that the creation of a more or less apart economic world is
inevitable and will be inaccessible to oceanic commerce, and therefore
self-sufficient.
After this rather long
premise, Mackinder finally introduces in his study the description of what he
considers the so-called PIVOT REGION of
the world, both in geographical and geopolitical terms:
The pivot region is that inner continental vast landlocked
area of Eurasia inaccessible to ships. Though nowadays covered by railways, this area was
once lay open to the horse-riding nomads. It is landlocked - or best to say
seasonally landlocked - because the only waters that coast it are those of the
northern icy sea adjacent to the Arctic Ocean. Let us then divide the world
into five main parts according to Mackinder’s world representation:
1) Pivot area (or Heartland): it is wholly continental and includes the
major part of Russia (especially central Russia and Siberia), the eastern part
of Caucasia, most of Persia, the whole of Turkestan (from present-day Kazakhstan
to the land of the Uyghurs in Chinese Xinjiang), Afghanistan and
Mongolia.
2) Outer (or insular) crescent: it is wholly oceanic and includes the
Americas, the British Isles, all of Sub-Saharan (or Black) Africa, the whole of
Oceania including the Indonesian archipelago and Australasia, the Japanese
Isles and Alaska.
3) Inner crescent (or marginal
crescent, or Rimland): it is partly continental and partly oceanic and
includes all of Western Europe, the
majority of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, the western part of Caucasia, the Anatolian
peninsula, the northern part of the Near East, the Persian coast, the entire
Indian subcontinent, Tibet, northern, southern and eastern China (but not western),
Indochina, Manchuria and the Kamchatka peninsula.
4) The Desert: it is inaccessible and includes the wastelands of the Sahara
and of the Arabian Peninsula.
5) The Icy Sea: it is inaccessible - at least during the winter - and
coincides with the Arctic Ocean.
Given its position of main
holder of the pivotal area, Mackinder considers Russia (the Russian empire of
yore) the potential hegemonic empire of the world, though penalized for not
blending land power with sea power. The author believes that just like the
Mongol empire in the past, Russia had the power and the possibility to threaten
and pressure all of its rims: Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Persia,
India and China. Considering the world at large, the Russian tsardom occupied
the central strategic position, the
same that the German kaiserdom held in relation to Europe. Due to its position
Russia could struck on all sides and be struck from all sides, save the north.
Now, the main concern that
Mackinder wants to raise is the following: what
if the state that controls the pivotal area, Russia, would expand over the marginal
lands of Eurasia, in other words into the inner crescent/Rimland? If Russia would add its continental resources
with the possibility to use them for fleet edification and sea power building then
the ultimate world empire would be born. In other words, and this is the main
point of Mackinder’s lesson, if the Heartland (pivotal area) unites together
with the Rimland (inner crescent) under the rule of the same power this would
lead to the birth of a hegemonic incontestable world empire.
Concretely speaking, and remembering
that Mackinder speaks as an Englishman for the interests of his own nation, if
in 1904 Germany would have allied with Russia the pivotal area and the inner
crescent would have significantly joined together, and this could have led
France to ally with over-sea powers that belonged to the outer crescent (Great Britain,
the United States, Japan, etc.). Within the frame of a potential German-Russian
entente countries like France, Italy, Egypt, India, Korea would become bridge
heads in which the two block of powers (continental pivotal powers and oceanic
marginal powers) would compete and interact, even in terms of warfare. In such
a scenario, the strategic role of India appeared even more important for Great
Britain: indeed the British military front stretched from the Cape of Good Hope
through India to Japan. Things could become even worse if South America was to
join Germany instead of the US in a hypothetical world war: an outer-outer crescent
would now encircle the outer crescent. The Nearer, Middle and Far East
questions - Mackinder reports - were all related to the unstable equilibrium of
inner and outer powers in those areas of the marginal crescent where local
power is weak.
At conclusion of his study, Mackinder
underlines that the pivotal region will always be strategic, no matter which
power would control it. Was it to be controlled by China, for instance, China
would become a real threat to the world by fusing together the ocean frontage
with the exploitation of the inner resources of the vast Eurasian continent:
what Russia could not yet do.
References:
H. J. Mackinder, the Geographical Pivot of History, the
Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Apr., 1904), pp. 421-437.
