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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.
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