MACKINDER'S WORLD
by Francis P. Sempa
“No mere scraps of paper, even though they be
the written constitution of a League of Nations, are, under the conditions of
today, a sufficient guarantee that the Heartland will not again become the
centre of a world war.”
Mackinder’s
proposed solution to the problem of
During
the 1920s and 1930s, unfortunately, Mackinder’s ideas had little influence in
During
the inter-war period, Mackinder was knighted (1920), lost his seat in
Parliament (1922), chaired the Imperial Shipping Committee (1920-1939), sat on
the Imperial Economic Committee (1925-1931), was made a Privy Councilor (1926),
and continued to write and lecture on geography and related topics. His
inter-war writings included: “Geography as a Pivotal Subject in Education”
(1921); “The Sub-Continent of India”(1922); The Nations of the Modern World: An
Elementary Study in Geography and History After 1914 (1924); and “The Human
Habitat”(1931).13
The
Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the beginning of the Second World War and
Germany’s subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union drew attention in the United
States to Mackinder’s works. In 1941 and 1942, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest and
Life published articles which prominently mentioned Mackinder and his writings.
Democratic Ideals and Reality was reprinted in 1942. That same year, Hamilton
Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, asked Mackinder to write an
article to update his Heartland theory. That article, entitled “The Round World
and the Winning of the Peace,” appeared in July 1943, and was Mackinder’s last
significant statement of his global views.
"[M]y
concept of the Heartland,” wrote Mackinder, “is more valid and useful today
than it was either twenty or forty years ago.”14 He described the Heartland in
geographical terms as “the northern part and the interior of Euro-Asia,”
extending “from the Arctic coast down to the central deserts,” flowing westward
to “the broad isthmus between the Baltic and Black Seas.” The Heartland
concept, he explained, is based on “three separate aspects of physical geography.”
First,
“the widest lowland plain on the face of the globe.” Second, “great navigable
rivers [that] flow across that plain [but have] no access to the ocean.” And
third, “a grassland zone which . . . presented ideal conditions for the
development of high mobility” by land transportation.
The
Heartland, in essence, wrote Mackinder, was equivalent to the territory of the
Soviet Union, minus the land east of the Yenisei River.
If the
Soviet Union defeated Germany in the war, opined Mackinder, “she must rank as
the greatest land Power on the globe.” “The Heartland is the greatest natural
fortress on earth,” he explained, and “[f]or the first time in history it is
manned by a garrison sufficient both in number and quality.”
A second
geographical feature which Mackinder estimated to be “of almost equal
significance” to the Heartland was the "Midland Ocean,” consisting of the
eastern half of Canada and the United States, the North Atlantic basin and its
“four subsidiaries (Mediterranean, Baltic, Arctic and Caribbean Seas),” Britain
and France (a remarkable description of the NATO alliance that was formed six
years after Mackinder wrote his article).
Completing
his updated global sketch, Mackinder identified three additional geographic features.
The first was “a girdle of deserts and wildernesses” extending from the Sahara
Desert eastward to Arabia, Tibet, and Mongolia to eastern Siberia, Alaska, part
of Canada, and the western United States. The second consisted of South
America, the South Atlantic Ocean, and Africa. And the third encompassed the
“Monsoon lands” of China and India. He expressed the hope that those lands
would prosper and, thereby, balance the other regions of the globe. “A balanced
globe of human beings,” he wrote, “[a]nd happy, because balanced and thus
free.”15
Mackinder
expressed the hope that Heartland Russia would cooperate with the Midland Ocean
powers in the postwar world and, thereby, prevent future German aggression. But
his theories and concepts proved readily adaptable to the emerging Cold War
struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. American strategists
during and after the Second World War borrowed aspects of Mackinder’s world
view in formulating and implementing the policy of “containment” of Soviet
Russia.16 Anthony J. Pierce, in his introduction to the 1962 edition of
Democratic Ideals and Reality, could confidently assert that “[i]n America and
in England, since 1942, most studies of global strategy or political geography
have been based, in whole or in part, upon [Mackinder’s] theories.17
“Mackinder, of course, had his share of critics,18 but as Colin Gray has
pointed out, “Mackinder’s interpretations of historically shifting power
relationships in their geographical setting have stood the test of time much
better than have the slings and arrows of his legion of critics.”19
More
recent and current political observers and strategists attest to the continuing
influence of Mackinder’s ideas. In 1974, R.E. Walters wrote that “the Heartland
theory stands as the first premise in Western military thought.”20 In 1975,
Saul B. Cohen noted that “most Western strategists continue to view the world
as initially described by Mackinder.”21 Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Game Plan (1986)
and The Grand Chessboard (1997) present global views almost wholly based on
Mackinder’s concepts. In 1980, Robert Nisbet claimed that "[e]very
geopolitical apprehension that Sir Halford Mackinder expressed some six decades
ago in his Democratic Ideals and Reality has been fulfilled.”22 The influential
journals, Strategic Review and The National Interest, published several
articles in the 1980s and 1990s wherein the authors applied Mackinder’s
theories and concepts to contemporary global issues.23 In 1988, the respected
strategist Colin Gray asserted that “[t]he geopolitical ideas of the British
geographer Sir Halford Mackinder … provide an intellectual architecture, far
superior to rival conceptions, for understanding the principal international
security issues.”24 In 1992, Eugene Rostow remarked that “Mackinder’s map
remains an indispensable tool of analysis” of global politics.25 In 1994, the
former State Department Geographer, George J. Demko, wrote that “the geographic
ideas of … Mackinder, still provide important insights into international
political processes.”26 Henry Kissinger in his book, Diplomacy (1994),
concludes with a warning that “Russia, regardless of who governs it, sits
astride territory Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland….”27 Paul
Kennedy, Robert Chase, and Emily Hill invoked Mackinder’s theories in a 1996
Foreign Affairs article on post-Cold War “pivot states.”28 Finally, in 1996 the
National Defense University issued a reprint of Democratic Ideals and Reality.
Twentieth
century global politics were shaped, in part, by Mackinder’s geopolitical
vision. Following his concepts, the continuing struggle for Eurasian mastery
was the geopolitical essence of the First World War, the Second World War, and
the Cold War. First Great Britain, then the United States, organized great
coalitions to oppose successive bids for Eurasian hegemony launched by
Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Great Power
struggles of the twenty-first century will likely repeat this pattern.
The
People’s Republic of
In 1944,
the American Geographical Society awarded Mackinder the Charles P. Daley Medal,
which was presented to him at the American Embassy in