The Revenge of Geography (12 page)

Meanwhile, Russia, protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host, nevertheless fell prey in the thirteenth century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. Thus would Russia be denied access to the European Renaissance, and branded forever with the bitterest feelings of inferiority and insecurity. The ultimate land-based empire, with no natural barriers against invasion save for the forest itself, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered, and as a result would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory, or at least dominating its contiguous shadow zones.

Whereas the Mongol invasions out of Central Asia decimated and subsequently changed not only Russia, but Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the northern reaches of the Arab Middle East, Europe in many parts knew no such level of destruction, and thus was able to emerge as the political cockpit of the world.
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Indeed, given that the Sahara Desert blocked Europe off from almost all of Africa, the macro-destiny of medieval Europe up until the Columbian epoch, according to Mackinder, was to be generally conditioned by what happened on the Asian steppe. And it wasn’t only the Mongols that we are talking about; the Seljuk Turks, bursting out of the heartland steppe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, overran much of the Middle East, and it was their ill treatment of Christian pilgrims at Jerusalem that ostensibly led to the Crusades, which Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe’s collective modern history.

Mackinder goes on in this vein, laying out for the reader a Eurasia bounded by ice to the north and tropical ocean to the south, which has four marginal regions at its extremities, all of them positioned under the shadow of the vast and pivotal expanse of Central Asia and its Mongol-Turkic hordes. These four marginal regions, as he informs us, correspond not coincidentally to the four great numerical religions: for faith, too, in Mackinder’s judgment, is a function of geography.
There are the “monsoon lands,” one in the east facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe itself, watered by the Atlantic to the west, the hub of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four outliers is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa,” and “except in the oases … thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is). Devoid of forest, dominated by desert, and thus wide open to nomadic invasions and to subsequent upheavals and revolutions, the Middle East is, in addition—because of its propinquity to gulfs, seas, and oceans—particularly vulnerable to sea power (even as it benefits by it). Strictly speaking, the Greater Middle East, in Mackinder’s wholly geographic viewpoint, is the ultimate unstable transition zone, the sprawling way station between the Mediterranean world and Indian and Chinese civilizations, registering all the monumental shifts in power politics. This is an altogether consistent precursor to Hodgson’s depiction of the Greater Middle East as the Oikoumene of the world of antiquity, which gave birth to three of the great confessional religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and continued its pivotal role in geopolitics into modern times.

And yet for Mackinder, writing in an age before Big Oil and pipelines and ballistic missiles, the globe’s geographical pivot, nevertheless, lies slightly afield. For he brushes aside the Middle East and plows onward with his thesis.

The Columbian epoch, he writes, featured the discovery of the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope, thus bypassing the Middle East. Whereas in the Middle Ages, Europe was “caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west … icy or forested wastes to north and north-east,” and “horsemen and camelmen” to the east and southeast, she now suddenly had access via the Indian Ocean to the entire rimland of southern Asia, to say nothing of her strategic discoveries in the New World.

But while the peoples of Western Europe “covered the ocean with their fleets,” Russia was expanding equally impressively on land, “emerging from her northern forests” to police the steppe with her
Cossacks against the Mongol nomads. So just as Portuguese, Dutch, and English mariners triumphantly rounded the Cape, Russia was sweeping into Siberia and sending peasants to sow the southwestern steppe with wheat fields, outflanking the Islamic Iranian world. Toynbee and others would make this point decades later, but Mackinder was among the first.
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It was an old story this, Europe versus Russia: a liberal sea power—as were Athens and Venice—against a reactionary land power—as was Sparta and Prussia. For the sea, in addition to the cosmopolitan influences it bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the sort of inviolate border security necessary for liberalism and democracy to take root. (The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)

Mackinder notes that in the nineteenth century steam and the Suez Canal increased the mobility of sea power around the southern rimland of Eurasia, even as the development of railways began to act as “feeders for ocean-going commerce.” But as he also notes, railways were now beginning to do the same for land power as they already had for sea power, and nowhere so much as in the heartland of Eurasia, which was previously hampered by the lack of stone and timber necessary for road making.

At last, he reaches his main point:

In Mackinder’s view, the centrality of an expanded Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century would replace that of the Mongol hordes, which some might argue had the greatest effect on world history during the second millennium. Just as the Mongols banged at—
and often broke down—the gates of the marginal regions of Eurasia (Finland, Poland, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, India, and China), so, too, now would Russia, sustained by the cohesiveness of its landmass, won by the recent development of its railways. For as Mackinder writes, “the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human.” Forget the czars and in 1904 the commissars-yet-to-be, they are but trivia compared to the deeper, tectonic forces of geography and technology. This is not to say that Mackinder was helped by current events. For within two weeks of his famous lecture, the Japanese navy attacked Port Arthur at the southern entrance to Manchuria in the first battle of the Russo-Japanese War. The war ended a year later with the Battle of Tsushima Strait, where the Japanese won a great victory at sea. In other words, while Mackinder was proclaiming the importance of land power, it was sea power that defeated the most sprawling land power on earth in this early conflict of the twentieth century.
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Still, Mackinder’s seeming determinism prepared us well for the rise of the Soviet Union and its enormous zone of influence in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as for the two world wars in the first half, which were, as the historian Paul Kennedy points out, struggles for Mackinder’s “rimlands,” running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond.
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From the Russian Revolution right up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, railways in Central Asia and Siberia expanded by 45,000 miles, proving Mackinder’s point.
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Cold War containment strategy, moreover, would depend heavily on rimland bases across the Greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection of power into the rimlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America’s tension with Russia over the political fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus—the geographical pivot itself—have given yet more legitimacy to Mackinder’s thesis. In his last paragraph, Mackinder raises the specter of Chinese conquests of Russian territory, which would make, he says, China the dominant geopolitical power. If one looks at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claiming 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 aftermath of the debilitating Boer War (1899–1902).
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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.”
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This is the very essence of Raymond Aron’s “probabilistic determinism,” to which most of us can subscribe.
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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.
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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:

Mackinder was opposed to complacency in all its forms. Again, here is a telling example from the beginning of
Democratic Ideals and Reality:

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 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
global
system at a
time when Edwardian-era minds were still employed in exertions over a European
continental
system.
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That continental system had its roots in the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna almost a hundred years earlier, and was in its dying days though few, save for Mackinder and some others, intuited it. The cataclysm of World War I, which erupted a decade after the publication of “The Geographical Pivot of History,” pitted Germany-Prussia and czarist Russia against each other on the eastern front, and German land power against British-French maritime power on the western front, thus upholding in a vague manner Mackinder’s struggle-for-the-Heartland idea, while at the same time adding complications and adjustments to it.
Democratic Ideals and Reality
was his book-length update to “The Geographical Pivot of History,” appearing the same year as the Versailles Peace Conference. He warned the peacemakers “that the issue between sea power and land power had not been finally resolved and that the duel between Teuton and Slav was yet to be fought out,” despite a war that had cost millions of lives.
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“The Geographical Pivot of History” was a theory only;
Democratic Ideals and Reality
, rather, a revised and expanded thesis that was also a far-sighted warning.