The Revenge of Geography (13 page)

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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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 that 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:

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.
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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.
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But Mackinder, at least initially, was proven wrong in this matter. He does not seem to have realized, as Toynbee did, that a Europe whose borders were drawn up on the principle of national self-determination was liable to be a Europe dominated by Germany—larger, geographically better positioned, and more powerful than any of the other ethnically bound states. Indeed, Germany would conquer Eastern Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, and Russia, in reaction, would conquer these newly independent states of Mackinder’s buffer zone, keeping them in a prison of nations from 1945 to 1989. Only in the last generation has hope arisen that a spiritual Central Europe can survive between the two land powers of Russia and Germany. So why did Mackinder, the arch-realist, suddenly go soft, as it were, in supporting what were, in effect, “Wilsonian” principles of national
self-determination? Because, as one scholar, Arthur Butler Dugan, suggests, Mackinder was, his daring and deterministic theories notwithstanding, a child of his time, “a product of the ‘climate of opinion’ more than he realized.”
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Mackinder deep down was a liberal, or at least became one. He imagined the British Commonwealth as becoming an association of cultures and peoples, different but equal; and he believed that a league of democracies would be the best defense against an imperial superpower in the heart of Eurasia (thus foreseeing NATO’s struggle against the Soviet Union).
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Mackinder’s drift toward Wilsonian principles, which began in
Democratic Ideals and Reality
, forms the centerpiece of his revision of his own “Heartland” theory. The theory was first expounded in the “Geographical Pivot” article, without using the term “Heartland.” The term was actually coined by Fairgrieve in his own book,
Geography and World Power
, in 1915. To the pivot areas of Central Asia identified in 1904, Mackinder added in 1919 the “Tibetan and Mongolian upland courses of the great rivers of India and China,” and the whole broad belt of countries going north to south from Scandinavia to Anatolia, and including Eastern and Central Europe: so that the new Heartland would more or less approximate the Soviet Empire at the height of its power during the Cold War.
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Or I should say: the Soviet Empire plus Norway, northern Turkey, Iran, and western China. Because the bulk of the Chinese population live not in the west but in the monsoonal coastlands, Mackinder’s Heartland is the bulk of interior Eurasia that is relatively sparsely populated, with the demographic immensities of China, India, and the western half of Europe to the sides of it. The Middle East (specifically Arabia and the Fertile Crescent) was neither heavily populated nor part of the Heartland, but as Mackinder writes in 1919, now central to the destiny of the World-Island, because it is the “passage-land” from Europe to the Indies and from the northern part of the Heartland to the southern part, as well as being accessible by several water bodies around the Arabian Peninsula.
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But the destiny of Arabia, as that of Europe, is heavily influenced by the Heartland; and the most proximate part of
the Heartland to Arabia is Iran, a lesson we should bear in mind for our own time. Indeed, the Iranian plateau is critical, and I will deal with it later.

A fascinating exception here is Greece, which is geographically part of the independent tier of buffer states between Germany and Russia, but which Mackinder leaves out of his expanded Heartland of 1919 because Greece, as he says, is so much bounded by water and therefore accessible to sea power. Greece was the first of these states to be liberated from German control in World War I. Here, too, Mackinder showed prescience. “Possession of Greece by a great Heartland power,” he writes, “would probably carry with it the control of the World-Island.”
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In fact, that almost happened. After heavy fighting in a civil war between pro-Western and communist guerrillas, Greece became the only one of these buffer lands not to fall within the Soviet orbit after World War II, and later formed with Turkey a strategic southern ridgeline of NATO. The Soviets, as it happened, would go on to lose the Cold War.

According to Mackinder, Europe and the Middle East are much more affected by the Heartland than India and China, whose hundreds of millions of people are self-contained and thus able to peacefully develop. This leads him to predict that the future lies to a large extent in the “Monsoon lands of India and China.”
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But why is the Heartland so important in the first place? Is control of the broad lowlands and tablelands of the Eurasian interior truly pivotal to world power? Yes, they are rich in oil and strategic minerals and metals, but is that even enough? Mackinder’s idea is mechanical in the extreme. And yet, partly as a consequence, it provides a vehicle for explaining so much about the spatial arrangement of states and peoples around the Eastern Hemisphere. It is easier to explain the relationships between one end of Eurasia and the other by having the center of it as a reference point, rather than any coastal margin. The Heartland may best be seen as a register of power around the World-Island rather than the determiner of it. Near the end of
Democratic Ideals and Reality
Mackinder posits that if the Soviet Union emerges from World War I ahead of Germany, “she must rank as the
greatest land Power on the globe,” because of her ability to garrison the Heartland.
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The Soviet Union did so eventually emerge, and did so again after World War II. Thus, it came to face off, as Mackinder indicated it would, against the world’s preeminent sea power, the United States. It was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that the Soviets ultimately invaded Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in Afghanistan the Kremlin’s whole empire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas of our time.