The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

parts of Siberia from Russia, even as Russia’s political control of its eastern
reaches shows strains, one can envision Mackinder being right once more.
Mackinder has been attacked as an arch-determinist and an imperialist. Both
charges are to a degree unfair. An educator all his life, he was not by nature
extreme or ideological. Mackinder was only an imperialist because Great Britain
at the time ran a worldwide empire, and he was an enlightened British patriot,
who saw the prospect of human development—and especially democracy—more
likely under British influence than under Russian or German. He was subject to
the same prejudices of those of his day. He was a determinist only to the extent
that geography was his subject, and geography can by its very nature be
deterministic. Mackinder especially tried to defend British imperialism in the

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aftermath of the debilitating Boer War (1899–1902).
17
But a principal theme of
his 
Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction
is
that human agency can overcome the dictates of geography. “In the long run,
however,” writes biographer W. H. Parker, paraphrasing Mackinder, “those who
are working in harmony with environmental influences will triumph over those
who strive against them.”
18
This is the very essence of Raymond Aron’s
“probabilistic determinism,” to which most of us can subscribe.
19
 In fact, Aron
defends Mackinder, believing at heart he is a social scientist rather than a natural
scientist, as Mackinder, in Aron’s view, believes geography can be conquered
through technological innovation.
20
To erase any doubt as to where Mackinder in
the end came down on the matter, at the beginning of 
Democratic Ideals and
Reality
, he writes:
Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to
think that those forms of organization should survive which adapted
themselves best to their natural environment. To-day we realize, as we
emerge from our fiery trial [of World War I], that human victory
consists in our rising superior to such mere fatalism.
21
Mackinder was opposed to complacency in all its forms. Again, here is a
telling example from the beginning of 
Democratic Ideals and Reality:
The temptation of the moment [in 1919] is to believe that unceasing
peace will ensue merely because tired men are determined that there
shall be no more war. But international tension will accumulate again,
though slowly at first; there was a generation of peace after Waterloo.
Who among the diplomats round the Congress table at Vienna in 1814
foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the world? Is it
possible for us so to grade the stream bed of future history as that there
shall be no more cataracts? This, and no smaller, is the task before us if
we would have posterity think less meanly of our wisdom than we
think of that of the diplomats of Vienna.
22
No, Mackinder was no mere fatalist. He believed that geography and the
environment could be overcome, but only if we treat those subjects with the
greatest knowledge and respect.
To be sure, Machiavelli’s 
The Prince
has endured partly because it is an
instructional guide for those who do not accept fate and require the utmost

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cunning to vanquish more powerful forces. So, too, with Mackinder’s theories.
He sets out a daunting vision that appears overwhelming because of the power of
his argument and prose, and so there is the sensation of being bludgeoned into a
predetermined reality when in reality he is actually challenging us to rise above
it. He was the best kind of hesitant determinist, understanding just how much
effort is required of us to avoid tragedy.
Determinism implies static thinking, the tendency to be overwhelmed by
sweeping forces and trends, and thus to be unaffected by the ironies of history as
they actually unfold. But Mackinder was the opposite. Like a man possessed, he
kept revising his 1904 “Pivot” thesis, adding depth and insights to it, taking into
account recent events and how they affected it. The real brilliance of “The
Geographical Pivot of History” lay in its anticipation of a