Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
over a lifetime, often as a lone academic voice in the wilderness, comprised the perfect syn-
thesis of a measured idealism that was employed both against communism and the notion
that freedom and security were only for some peoples and not for others. His philosophy
and the ideal of Central Europe were perfect fits.
But though Central Europe writ large, as expounded by these wise and eloquent intel-
lectuals, was indeed a noble cause, one which should perennially play a role in the foreign
policies of all Western nations as I will demonstrate, it does face a hurdle with which I am
also forced to deal.
For there remains a problem with this exalted vision, an ugly fact that throughout history
has often turned the concept of Central Europe into something tragic. Central Europe
simply has no reality on the relief map. (Garton Ash intuited this with the title of his own
lowering compared to the gentle voice of Isaiah Berlin: particularly the Edwardian era
voice of Sir Halford J. Mackinder and his disciple James Fairgrieve, for whom the idea of
Central Europe has a “fatal geographical flaw.” Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve
tell us, belongs to the “crush zone” that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its “oceanic
interests,” and the “Eurasian Heartland with its continental outlook.” In short, strategically
speaking, there is “no space” for Central Europe in the view of Mackinder and Fairgrieve.
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The celebration of Central Europe, the justifiable indulgence of it by the liberal intellec-
tuals, the writings of Mackinder and Fairgrieve suggest, indicates a respite from geopolit-
ics—or at least the desire for one. Yet the fall of the Berlin Wall did not—could not—end
geopolitics, but merely brought it into a new phase. You cannot simply wish away the
struggle of states and empires across the map.
I will explore Mackinder's work, particularly his “Heartland” thesis, later at great length.
Suffice it to say now that, expounded well over a hundred years ago, it proved remarkably
relevant to the dynamics of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Stripped down
to their most austere logic, the two world wars were about whether or not Germany would
dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the
Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe—the western edge of Mackinder's Heart-
land. This Soviet Eastern Europe, by the way, included in its domain East Germany, his-
toric Prussia that is, which had traditionally been territorially motivated with an eastward,
Heartland orientation; while inside NATO's oceanic alliance was West Germany, historic-
ally Catholic, and industrially and commercially minded, oriented toward the North Sea
and the Atlantic. A renowned American geographer of the Cold War period, Saul B. Co-
hen, argues that “the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany … is one of
the oldest in history,” the one which separated Frankish and Slavonic tribes in the Middle
Ages. In other words, there was little artificial about the frontier between West and East
