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

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:

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Who rules the World-Island commands the World
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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