The evolution of Mackinder’s thought under the circumstances of World War Two

In July 1943, while the Second World War was still roughly unrolling and its outcome was not clearly certain, Sir Halford J. Mackinder published an article on Foreign Affairs entitled The Round World and the Winning of the Peace. The main purpose of it was to detect whether the strategical concept of “Heartland”, already expressed in the earlier thought of the geopolitical author in the article The Geographical Pivot of History (1904) and in the essay Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), had lost its significance under the conditions of modern warfare, especially in relation to the rise of airpower.     

Mackinder begins his dissertation by rebuilding the entire idea of Heartland in order to underline its intrinsic and everlasting relevance. He begins recalling his childhood memories on what had meant for the English public opinion the French defeat at Sedan, in 1870, against the Prussian army. Though being a young boy at that time, Mackinder remembers England’s deep concern for what had been a total victory of the new Prussian/German warfare machine against that Power, France, which only some sixty years before had been stopped with difficulties and sacrifices at Trafalgar and Waterloo. Still, in 1870 the importance of that Prussian victory was not yet clear enough: Britain would understand it only when her supremacy over the seas would be at stake. At that time, the only danger Britain saw to her overseas empire was in the Asiatic position of imperial Russia. Indeed, British sea power on one hand and Russian land power on the other held the centre of the international stage.

However, things changed when, at the turn of the twentieth century, the newly born German empire began to build a high seas fleet: this sudden event could truly challenge Britain’s supremacy on the oceans. It also meant that the German nation, already owning the greatest organised land and occupying the central strategical position in Europe, was about to add to herself a sea power strong enough to neutralize the British one. Moreover, in those years the United States of America too were arising as to become one of the world’s Great Powers. In other words, Germany and the United States were quickly coming up alongside of Britain and Russia in the imperial scenery.

At this point, Mackinder considers the events whence the idea of the Heartland came out. These were two: 1) The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and 2) the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5). In fact, the contrast presented by the British wars against the Boers fought in South Africa and the war fought by Russia in Manchuria across the land breadth of Asia naturally suggested a parallel contrast between western Europe rounding, thanks to Vasco da Gama, the Cape of Good Hope whilst sailing towards the Indies, and eastern Europe riding with Yermak the Cossack over the Urals into Siberia. This comparison, in turn, led to a review of the long succession raids made by the nomadic Turanian folks of Central Asia through classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, upon the settled inhabitants of the Marginal Crescent of the Eurasian subcontinents: Europe, the Middle East, the Indies and China proper (see the Geographical Pivot of History for an exhaustive summary). Consequently, Mackinder stated, in 1904, as follows:

“Within the present decade [1900-1910] we are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history. If we are fortunate, that formula should have a practical value setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics”.

Indeed, the word “Heartland” occurs for the first time in Mackinder’s thought in 1904, although at the time the meaning of the term was more descriptive rather than technical. The author preferred to expose his geopolitical theories using other expressions such as those of “Pivot Area” or “Pivot State” to describe what would have become later the Heartland. As somebody may remember, in his Geographical Pivot of History Mackinder had introduced the issue of the strategical relevance of the world’s pivotal area in the following terms:

“The oversetting of balance of power in favour of the pivot State, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Eurasia would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. In conclusion, it may be well expressly to point out that the substitution of some new control of the inland area for that of Russia would not tend to reduce the geographical significance of the pivot position. Were the Chinese, for instance, organised by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great Continent [Eurasia]” (Emphasis added).

As we can see, it is all a matter of world hegemony, because that Power who controls the Heartland would be able to rule the rest of the world especially when adjoining sea power radiating from the Marginal Crescent to the inner land power of the Heartland itself.       

Later, in the year 1919, at the end of the First World War, Mackinder reformulates his theories in the well-known essay Democratic Ideals and Reality. At that time, the “pivot” label was no longer adequate to the international situation as it had emerged from the events of that first common global crisis and war. The entire idea of “Pivot Region” hence changed in a more subtle and complicated fashion, not merely describing a geographical reality, into the concepts of “Ideals”, “Realities” and, above all, “Heartland”. Nevertheless, what we need to highlight most is that the 1904 thesis, though changing the main idea of the subject evoked, was still perfectly valid, in Mackinder’s eyes, for the world’s international situation of 1919. Pivot area and Heartland were the terms used to describe an everlasting reality: that of the supreme hegemony of the Power that would have controlled the area at issue.

Whilst describing once again the breadth of the Heartland, Mackinder delimits its borders by saying that it includes the northern part and the interior of Eurasia, and that it extends from the Arctic coast down to the central deserts, with its western limits given by the broad isthmus that separates the Baltic Sea from the Black Sea. The British geographer does not hide the fact that the very concept of this area cannot admit of precise geographical definition on map, but he adds that it includes three clear physical-geographical features:

1) There is in this region by far the widest lowland plain on the globe.

2) Navigable rivers flow across this broad plain, some of which go northwards to the Arctic Sea and are inaccessible from the oceans because of the glaciation of this sea, and others move into inland waters such as the Caspian Sea, with no exit to the ocean.

3) There is a grassland area that until the half of the nineteenth century presented the ideal conditions for the development of high mobility by nomadic camel-men and horsemen.

The Pivotal Region (1904) and the Heartland (1919)

In 1943, when Mackinder presents the article The Round World and the Winning of the Peace, he can now affirm in safety that the territory of the Soviet Union corresponds to that of the Heartland. He believes however that this statement is true save for one direction: the area around the Siberian river Lena, which he calls Lenaland: in his opinion, this vast region is not included in Heartland Russia. Heartland Russia lies instead west of the river Yenisei.

The idea of the Heartland as fully englobed within the Soviet Union raises the strategic concern for the succeeding Warsaw Pact alliance of States, that permitted the USSR, an almost wholly Heartland Power, to assume the characteristics of a sea power, by adjoining portions of the lands laying on the Marginal Crescent, and confirming Mackinder’s statement on the ruler of eastern Europe as ruler of the Heartland and consequently of the World Island.

To fully understand the strategical values of the Russian, or best Soviet, Heartland, Mackinder confronts the area with France. France, he says, has a sufficient space both for defence in depth and for strategical retreat, and except for her north-eastern borders she is safely enclosed by natural frontiers: the seas, the Alps, the Pyrenees. Similarly, Russia repeats the pattern of France but on a greater scale: in its rear lies the vast plain of the Heartland, useful for defence in depth and strategic retreat; away back this plain recedes eastwards into the natural bulwarks of the inaccessible Arctic shores, the Lenaland wilderness behind the Yenisei, and the fringe of mountains from the Altai to the Hindu Kush, backed by Gobi, Tibetan and Iranian deserts. Indeed, these cited natural barriers possess such a breadth and substance that by far exceed in defensive value the coasts and mountains that engirt France. It is true, notes Mackinder, that today icebreakers can be able to transform the Arctic Sea into a navigable seaway, but it is also true that, despite this, it is unlikely to consider as realistically feasible a complete land invasion from there.

Two years before the end of the Second World War, Mackinder foretold that if the USSR would have conquered Germany it would have become the world’s greatest land power, as well as the power in the strategically strongest defensive position by wholly controlling the Heartland, which is the greatest natural fortress on earth; the citadel of land power on the greater mainland of the world, Eurasia. What the author foresaw would become even more realistic after the split of Germany into the two German republics and after the creation of the Warsaw Pact alliance system.

At this point, Mackinder introduces the idea of creating after the war, in case of victory of the Allies,

a new world order based upon a cooperation of western sea powers with the Soviet land power in order to encircle Germany and to compel her to fight continually on two fronts. For the purposes of future peace, the geographer stated that the Germans must realize that every further war fought by Germany would be against two unshakable fronts: land power to the east in the Heartland, and sea power to the west in the Northern Atlantic basin. In terms of western alliance, Mackinder divided the roles of the sea power democracies within the frame of a very sharp strategical concept. He believed that within the westerner fellowship of sea powers the United States and Canada would represent the area useful for strategic retreat or depth defence, Britain a kind of moated forward stronghold - like a Malta on greater scale -, and France the defensible bridgehead on the Continent. We will come back to these concepts later. As the great strategist he was, Mackinder reckoned that “sea power must in the final resort be amphibious if it is to balance land power”, and this statement reveals the very important strategic role that France may have. He also believed that the three (four with Canada) western Powers should cooperate with Russia to avoid a new German awakening in the future.

However, at this time of history Mackinder cannot be unaware of the relevance of airpower as disturbance factor for his land power/ sea power theoretic scheme. Although fully understanding the potential changes in geostrategic issues given by the fast and ubiquitous mobility of airpower, he is still certain that despite aircraft warfare the relevance of the Heartland and of the other elements of his theory stay unchanged.

At this point Mackinder introduces an extremely important geographical description, unheard by him before in his previous writings, about the so-called “Global Geographical Girdle”. This girdle can be considered as a new geographical interpretation of the world map according to Mackinder, and it is, we believe, the lawful evolution of the previous interpretative map based on the World-Island-Marginal Crescent-Heartland concepts (see once again The Geographical Pivot of History). Moreover, the idea of a world’s geographical girdle, or belt, can be fully understood only whit the rise of airpower and of the international system succeeding the Second World War, with a new, fundamental role of the United States of America and the Northern Atlantic Ocean. In Mackinder’s words, a girdle revolves around the northern Polar Regions: it begins as the Saharan Desert, and follows with the Arabian, Iranian, Tibetan and Mongolian deserts, and then extends in the wildernesses of the Lena region (“Lenaland”), Alaska and the Laurentian shield of Canada to the sub-arid belt of the Western United States. This girdle of deserts, wastelands and wildernesses is a feature of the first importance in global geography: within it lie two related features of almost equal meaning:

1) The Heartland, which is set in a girdle of broad natural defences: the ice-clad Polar Sea, the forested and rugged Lenaland, and the Central Asiatic mountainous and arid tableland. The Heartland girdle is nonetheless incomplete because of the open gateway that goes from Peninsular Europe into the inner plain through the broad isthmus that separates the Baltic Sea from the Black Sea.

2) The basin of the Midland Ocean (i.e. the North Atlantic) with its four subsidiaries seas: the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Arctic and the Caribbean.

Outside the girdle is the Great Ocean, which includes the Pacific, the Indian and the Southern Atlantic, and the lands that drain to it: the Asiatic Monsoon lands, Oceania, South America, and Africa south of the Sahara.

Mackinder's new geographical world division (1943) 

After giving birth to this completely new subdivision of the world’s map, Mackinder ends his article considering two more elements: the new role of Germany in the international system and the geographical concept of the Midland Ocean. As far as Germany is concerned, this nation should be discouraged in the future from waging new wars by the new threat given by the continuous possibility of a clash on two fronts against the amphibious nations of America, Britain and France on one hand and the land power of the USSR on the other. As for the “Midland Ocean”, this expression represents nothing more than the North Atlantic Ocean itself, of fundamental strategic interest after World War Two. The Midland Ocean includes some dependant seas and river basins and should be controlled by the amphibious powers, each of them with a proper strategic role, of which we had already spoken before:

1) France would be the bridgehead of the North Atlantic sea power fellowship in the Continent.

2) Great Britain would be a kind of moated aerodrome forward stronghold.

3) The United States and Canada would represent the territorial reserve of manpower and the supply of agricultural and industrial outputs.         

Within this post-World War Two frame Mackinder believes that China and India should bear the role of counterbalancing the other Powers, and playing a central part in helping to develop the Southern Hemisphere’s populations.   

The Midland Ocean

In short, what Mackinder truly auspicates for the future global peace is the idea of balancing the world powers, in order to make the peoples of the world free. Doubtlessly, we can affirm that Mackinder’s political and social thought directly descends from the historical British notion of “balance of powers”.     

References:

H. J. Mackinder, The Round World and the Winning of Peace, Foreign Affairs, July 1943.                           

The Geographical Pivot of History in Mackinder’s earlier thought

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.

Kaplan and the “revenge of geography”. A survey on the geopolitical evolution of international relations. Part Two.

If the first part of Kaplan’s book focuses its attention on the theoretic geopolitical models of the past, the second and third parts describe specific present-day international scenarios, exploring them through the pattern pointed out before.

The first chapter of Part 2 is dedicated to the European Union. After proposing some general reflections over the present status of the EU, Kaplan wishes to analyze more accurately the influence of Asian invading hordes throughout European history, along a line of continuity that binds the first Cimmerian invaders of the II millennium B.C. to the final Mongolic ones of the XIII century A.D. Once again, the author underlines the impact of climate and geography for Europe’s development and rise. The landscape of the European continent abounds with mountains, forests, productive fields, jagged shorelines and natural harbors and docks. The multiplicity of European civilization and the variety of the peoples that here dwell hinge upon the natural richness and diversity of the continent’s geography. Diversity, dynamism and particularism have been the key words for the birth of a common “idea of Europe”, which still holds the record of having bestowed the highest contributions to world civilization. The notion of Europe as a sole political unity, as the EU now pretends to be, dates back to the time of Charlemagne, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. After Charlemagne, other statesmen endeavored to unify Europe into a single polity once again: the Hohenstaufen emperors, emperor Charles V of Hapsburg, Louis XIV of France, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and, ultimately, Adolf Hitler: shortly, all of them failed. The European integration process, started with the Treaty of Paris (1951) and the Treaties of Rome (1957), aims at a similar purpose: to forge a political unified Europe through economic ties. Indeed, there are some resemblances between Charlemagne’s Europe and the current EU; for instance, the present EU ruling regions stand where once laid the core lands of the Frankish Holy Roman Empire of old: Burgundy, Flanders, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Alsace, Lotharingia, Lombardy and Catalonia. Undoubtedly, in the contemporary EU the central, northern and northwestern regions overlay supremacy over the southern (Mediterranean), southeastern (Balkan) and eastern (Eastern European) ones. To be more precise, within this general pattern Germany enjoys the status of hegemonic EU power. Besides, the Balkan countries play a crucial role: first, it is towards these regions, along with the others in Eastern Europe, that the European Union wills to expand and to establish her control; then, the Balkan whole range is just outside Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland and lays right on top of Spykman’s Rimland. In this context, the roles of Greece and of Turkish Eastern Thrace are particularly significant.

The book then continues speaking of Russia. Actually, Russia is to consider mainly as a land power. By so being, she naturally expresses all of the uncertainties and insecurities typical of land powers that are usually landlocked or semi-landlocked. Historically, Russia was a semi-landlocked country until the XVIII century: in fact, as we know, the Arctic Ocean froze during the winter and trades towards Europe or Eastern Asia stopped. This geographical condition, as well as the need to protect the frontiers, gave birth to Russian territorial expansionism. The imperatives of Russian historical foreign policy were two: on one hand, that of defending the steppes from the ever raids of the nomadic horse-riding Turkish-Mongolian tribes (the continuous struggle between Cossacks and Tatars exemplifies the matter), and on the other, that of seeking for warm waters from which carrying on trading during wintertime. Interestingly, Kaplan believes to find the spring of both tsarist autocracy and soviet totalitarianism in the climate and landscape of the Russian country, showing once more how geographical determinism affects the evolution of political systems. Summarizing Russian history, the author points out the prominence of Ukraine, whose relevance is already contained in the name she bares: “borderland”. The reason for Ukrainian past and present territorial crises rely on the fact that this crammed flatland lays exactly in-between the Eurasian Heartland and the European Rimland. Moreover, the author cites once again the rivalry between tsarist Russia and the British Empire for the control of Eurasia during the nineteenth century also known as “Great Game” or “Tournament of Shadows”. The Russian strategic interest to reach the warm waters could de facto threaten the British communication lines with the Indian Raj and with the English areas of influence in the Orient. As for the conquest of Siberia, her climate and natural conditions implied the birth of a coercive and centralized kind of government. The building of railways helped joining the vast Siberian widths, though suggesting a sense of unsafety and insecurity typical of Russian historical mentality. In Siberia, rivers play a relevant role: the Yenisei splits Western from Eastern Siberia and the Lena Eastern Siberia from the Russian Far East; meanwhile, the Ussuri forms the natural border between the Russian Far East and Chinese Manchuria. The conquest of Siberia obliged Russia to participate to the Pacific geopolitical contest, leading her to compete with Japan, China and, later, the United States for the hegemony over the area: think of the wars fought by tsarist Russia against Qing (Manchu) China or against the Japanese Empire of the Rising Sun. When the Soviet Union replaced imperial Russia, the Bolsheviks had to face the evidence that a land power always suffers the threat of an attack on its outskirts: the gruesome years of the civil war and of foreign interventionism (1918-23) reestablished the difficulty of defending the Russian borders. Bolshevik imperialist realism was able enough to consider moving the back the capital to Moscow rather than Saint Petersburg, a core region from which the Eurasian control would be easier to foster. Later, the United States perceived the birth of the great Soviet empire onto the ashes of the shattered German Third Reich as the happening of Mackinder’s prophecies on the control of the World-Island (i.e. Eurasia). Indeed, after World War 2 appeared two main superpowers: on one side the USSR, that almost encompassed the whole of Mackinder’s Heartland, and on the other the United States of America, that embodied the perfect example of Mahan’s great sea power. Since then, the Eurasian Rimland (including the Greater Middle East, Western Europe and Southeastern Asia) would feel jeopardized both by the spread of Soviet land power and by the pressure of American sea (and air) power. After the USSR’s demise and the outburst of newly discovered nationalistic feelings amongst the variegated former Soviet subjects, vulnerability was again Russia’s keyword, deriving mainly from the unbalanced ratio between Russian demographic rates and geographic extensions of the country. Things have changed now in Eurasia. It seems to be that China is gaining always quicker a hegemonic role on the Eurasian continent. So being things, should Russia focus her attention more on the Eurasian Heartland or on her fringes like the European peninsula and the Pacific Rim? What would Russia need to attract back to her former USSR subjects? Unfortunately, Russia still needs to face the never-ending issue of being, in fact, borderless. Furthermore, Ukraine plays a strategic role for the relationships between the European Union and the Russian Federation: it is throughout the Ukrainian flatland that superpowers currently confront each other and within the present crisis, as foreseen by Brzezinski, Poland could play a pivotal role, for better or for worse. Paradoxically, the Soviet subdivision of Central Asia survived to the downfall of the USSR; despite feeble political movements like pan-Turanianism or pan-Iranianism, Central Asian republics are relatively stable though their ethnic composition does not often coincide with the borders of the existing sovereign Turkestan States. For instance, Kazakhstan, a significant portion of Mackinder’s Heartland, finally returned to its native inhabitants. To conclude the chapter, the author dedicates some space to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), described as a group of Eurasian powers in anti-US fashion whose effectiveness over international politics is still uncertain and in progress. 

The chapter dedicated to China opens with Mackinder’s view over this demographic and geographic giant. China is even more threatening than Russia, because not only does the country possess direct access to the Eurasian Heartland and its resources, but in addition to this enjoys a strategic frontal position towards the Pacific Ocean: this makes China a potential blend of land power and sea power and gives full meaning to her Mandarin name of “Middle Kingdom”. Only now, is this double role of Chinese power arising clearly and becoming a worrisome truth. The concept of Inner Asia, including the lands of Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan and Tibet, appears to be of fundamental geopolitical interest when considering the huge Chinese landscape. In Eastern Turkestan dwell the Muslim Turkic Uighurs that have been continuously struggling for secession from China, finding moral support in other Turkic nations. In Inner Mongolia live the Mongols, unfairly separated by their kinsmen of Outer Mongolia. In Tibet are the Lamaist Tibetans who still oppose as they best can Beijing’s communist regime, attempting to call back from his Indian exile the Dalai Lama.  Finally, Manchuria, a land from where the last Chinese imperial dynasty originated (the Manchus), represents a border region that has been historically claimed by Chinese, Russians and Japanese (think of the birth of the Japanese puppet-State of Manchukuo in 1932). China still suffers in remembering her dishonorable historical break up between the nineteenth and twentieth century, when European powers snatched coercively Chinese territorial concessions, trade deals and juridical capitulations, before the Japanese would start their own continental expansion against China. Beijing conceives its international affairs as a mean to avoid any new possible Chinese loss of sovereignty, reflecting it on its relationships with Taiwan and Hong Kong. Indeed, Russia has to fear the risk of a re-population of Eastern Siberia by Chinese pioneers and settlers, considering that the demographic ratio between Russians and Chinese in the Far East is completely unbalanced making future scenarios in the area uncertain. Historically, the Nixon administration, with the aid of Kissinger’s advice, took the advantage of both Brezhnev’s detent strategy towards the US and of the Sino-Soviet split in order to open diplomatically to communist China within the framework of a truly realistic strategy, devoid of ideology and emotionality. China has been opposing the ethnical diversity within her territory by colonizing the sensitive zone, say, Tibet or Xinjiang, with ethnic Hans. However, the real grand strategy of a Greater China would consist in penetrating Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland. A Greater China implies a Chinese preponderant over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Southeastern Asia and the Chinese First Island Chain (which, going from north to south, comprises Japan, the Ryuku Islands, the so-called half-island of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australasia). As we can imagine, the very idea of a Greater China, with her preponderant influence over almost half of Asia, finds a natural rival in the parallel Indian rise. Evidently, the rivalry between China and India will be a leitmotiv for the future international internationals, among which the Dalai Lama’s exile issue is just the tip of the iceberg, if not a mere casus belli. Besides the enmity for Tibet, an Indo-Chinese “Great Game” is taking place, embracing countries like Nepal and Bhutan (the two Himalayan buffer States) on one side and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on the other. The projection of sea power over the city-State of Singapore expresses a risk of a Chinese dominion over the Indian and Pacific Oceans through the trade routes that track the Strait of Malacca. The international relations in the Far East cannot neglect the significant role that North Korea covers for being the pivot of East Asia: the possible reunification of the Korean peninsula under a single State could alter the entire balance of power in Eurasian Eastern Rim. As said above, China is leading a double penetration both in Mackinder’s Heartland and in Spykman’s Rimland: her new task consists in transforming a traditional continental power into a mixed land-sea power. China is trying to absorb the nature of sea power also by building a mighty fleet but still lacks of self-confidence in rushing towards the oceanic challenge. Anyways, through its projection of power over all Eastern Asia, Beijing is newly shaping the Western Pacific’s geographic strategy and altering the balance of power of the region: this could lead in the near future to the need for reconsidering the diplomatic alignments and the strategic alliances for all actors here entangled.

As far as India is concerned, Mahan and Spykman considered this country’s position as critical for being a Rimland power naturally oriented towards the Middle East and China from her maritime subcontinental position. As we have already seen, Eurasia consists of a landmass, which encompasses the former USSR, and greatly populated fringes (Europe, India, Indochina and China): amongst the latter, the Indian subcontinent represents one of the most heavily populated and various from an ethnic, linguistic and religious point of view. Mackinder found India’s vulnerability on her northwestern frontier, from which historical invasions came crossing the Khyber Pass. Describing India’s landscape, her mainland embodies two geographical facts: it appears to be a standing-alone subcontinent on one side, and a vibrant extremity of the Greater Middle East on the other. Moreover, from a linguistic and ethnic point of view India appears to be as split into two areas: the Indo-European north and the Dravidian south. Unlike China, India grew as a democratic and pluralist political system thanks to the British rule of yore, which commenced through the creation of small English footholds on the Indian shores. Britain introduced in India the parliamentary mentality, the common-law juridical system, the European administrative model and, of course, the English language. Thanks to British-built railways, the English governors managed for the first time in history to unite the Indian subcontinent into a single polity. Besides, the countries that neighbor India present a lack of geographical coherence. Pakistan was hastily born in 1947 for unraveling the Indian Muslims from the Hindu majority. Bangladesh was born in 1971, seceding from Pakistan for political reasons. Nepal and Bhutan symbolize two buffer states between India and China. The Afghan borders descend from the Russo-British imperial rivalry in Central Asia (think of the Wakhan Corridor, that currently separates Tajikistan from Pakistan, conceived to keep a bumper zone between the Russian and the British empires). Indeed, Afghanistan holds a strategic position for being a buffer between the Iranian Plateau, the Central Asian steppes and the Indian Subcontinent; verily, it is the crossroad of the entire Asian continent. Today, the Eurasian Heartland is vast landscape where the interests of Russia, China, India and Iran intertwine and where the Central Asian strips, including Afghanistan, play a major role. A stable Afghanistan could become the hub of Eurasia, and all nearby countries would benefit from that. Actually, after the Greater Middle East region, the Greater Indian subcontinent represents one of the least stable geopolitical areas in the world. One of the reason for the somewhat tarnished relations between India and China relies on the fact that the Chinese regime upholds military and political support to India’s regional rivals, significantly Pakistan: India feels somehow surrounded by China. The issue of Kashmir, a land partitioned between Pakistan, India and China, keeps the tensions high amongst them.

For what concerns the Middle East, this pan-region represents a vast quadrilateral where Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa intersect: with the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert to the west; the Black sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian steppe-land to the north; the Hindu Kush and the Indian Subcontinent to the east; and the Indian Ocean to the south. One of its main distinguishing features is that it lacks of a single State that has hegemony over the area. In fact, which country should gain the rule of the Middle East? Turkey has a vast population, but is not Arabic. Iran has a vast population too, but it neither Arabic nor Sunni. Saudi Arabia controls the Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina, but has a small population. Egypt has a large population, but its African location turns it away from the Asian Near East. The weakness of all the Middle East depends on the lack of unity among its countries. Pan-Arabism once embraced the idea of unification of all Arab nations, but even if it had reached the goal, countries like Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan would have stayed out from the union. Within the Middle East, there are three main ethnic strains: the Arab, the Iranian, and the Turkic: each of them declare its respective superiority over the others. The Arabic Islamic world divides in three parts: the Maghreb (Northern Africa), the Mashreq (the Near East) and the Khalij (the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf). All of the Mashreq is instable mainly due to European colonization (keep in mind the British and French mandates over the former Ottoman Near East after World War 1) on one hand and the presence of the Zionist State of Israel on the other. Furthermore, Wahhabism influences greatly the Saudi Arabian view of politics and religion. Its fanatical interpretation of the Quran originated from the central Arabic region of Najd where the society’s backbone consisted in camel-based nomadism; thus, Najd represents the core of Wahhabi rule and Saudi sovereignty. As for Iran, it embodies the Middle Eastern universal juncture, just as the Middle East incarnates the quadrilateral of the World-Island (Eurafrasia). Can Iran become a new geographical pivot despite its reactionary theocracy and its nuclear enrichment program? Though Iran is much smaller than India and China, or Russia or Europe for the matter, it is merely because it is in possession of the key geography of the Middle East in terms of position, population and energy resources that is fundamental to global geopolitics. Indeed, the originality of the Iranian revolution of 1979 lies in the alliance between the clergy and the Islamist intelligentsia. The Iranian state has been stronger and better organized than any others in the greater Middle East, save for turkey and Israel, and the Islamic Revolution did not dismantle the Iranian State, but, rather, attached itself to it. It is also true that the somewhat suffocating Shiite clergy of Iran dispirits an allure of Central Asian, Caucasian or Arabian Muslims towards the country. In addition, Iraq’s destiny is deeply dependent on that of Iran, being a country that hosts a numerous number of Shiite Muslims. Undoubtedly, for better or for worse, Iran will affect the Eurasian future fate. Also, what to say about Turkey? Turkey’s geographical nature is that of a natural land bridge, or almost of an island: it links the Middle Eastern core land with the southeastern European gate. In being one of the most secular and open-minded nations among the Islamic world, Turkey has the opportunity, due to her Kemalist past, to interact effectively with the European nations and the West. Although the current Turkish leadership seems to yield somehow from the Kemalist laicism, the overall positive condition of Turks, the concrete respect for human rights and the membership within NATO make Turkey a good interlocutor for the US, and who knows if this Islamic overpopulated republic will one day join the EU. For sure, Turkey still projects a relevant shadow-power both in the Balkans and in Caucasia, and stands as a gifted opponent to Iranian hegemony over the Muslim world.

Finally, Kaplan dedicates Part 3 of his book to the Americas, particularly North America. Mackinder calls the outlying area that includes the Americas the Outer Crescent in order to differentiate it from the Marginal Crescent or Rimland. As we already know, the entire North American continent comprises the most crucial of the continental satellites around the World-Island and a land from which sea power and air power projects over the Marginal Crescent. Kaplan introduces here some thought-provoking ideas. He highlights that the United States, having dropped down the material barriers towards the Canadian border, stay vulnerable in their southeastern frontier with Mexico. The US own an Anglo-Protestant backbone that the Hispanic Catholic immigration from Mexico may put at stake in the future. American Protestantism closely aligns with nationalism; it helped releasing a typical American mentality based upon dissent, individualism, republicanism and patriotism. This entire scale of values, as well as the white race predominance, is endangered by the risk of a Mexican “Reconquista” of the American southeastern States due to the surprising demographic augmentation of Hispanic individuals and to a difficult containment of illegal immigration from Mexico. Now, Kaplan’s suggestion is very simple and smart: he asks why the US government should worry so much of starting expensive wars in far lands like Afghanistan, entangling in extremely complicated crises and circumstances, when it would be so more useful to fix the problems on the southern border. In other words, the United States of America should care less of foreign countries that lay out of their territorial range and should instead focus the attention on its own mainland. Not only would this political strategy bring closer the public opinion of all those extra-American countries where the US somehow intervened, but also it would utterly mean to uphold the very American-born Monroe Doctrine.