Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic
organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.
10
By perceiving that there was no more room on the planet for European empires to ex-
pand, he also understood that European wars would have to be played out on a world-
wide scale, something which would come true in World Wars I and II. Yet, as I learned
years ago at a seminar at the United States Army's Command and General Staff College at
Fort Leavenworth,
attrition of the same adds up to big change
. In other words, while the
Age of Discovery had more or less ended by 1900, throughout the twentieth century and
up through the present day—and especially looking forward to the coming decades—that
closed and crowded map or chessboard of Mackinder's, as I've already indicated, has filled
up even more: not just in terms of population, but in terms of the range of weaponry. The
Middle East, for example, in the last fifty years alone has gone from a rural society to one
of immense megacities. The world, as I've learned as a foreign correspondent for the past
thirty years, is even in some of its remotest parts heavily urbanized. We will later revisit in
depth all the implications of this newly crowded map, but to do that we must first return to
Mackinder and his Eurasia pivot theory.
Mackinder asks us to look at European history as “subordinate” to that of Asia, for he
believes that European civilization is merely the outcome of the struggle against Asiatic in-
vasion. Ahead of McNeill by decades, Mackinder points out that Europe became the cultur-
al phenomenon that it is mainly because of its geography: an intricate array of mountains,
valleys, and peninsulas—from which individual nations would emerge—set against the im-
mense and threatening flatland of Russia to the east. That Russian flatland was divided
between forest to the north and steppe to the south. The earliest incarnations of Poland and
Russia were established, as Mackinder explains, wholly in the protective embraces of the
northern forest; for out of the naked southern steppe from the fifth to the sixteenth centur-
ies came a succession of nomadic invaders: Huns, Avers, Bulgarians, Magyars, Kalmuks,
Cummins, Patzinaks, Mongols, and others. For on the Heartland steppe the land is un-
ceasingly flat, the climate hard, and the vegetable production limited to grass, in turn des-
troyed by sand, driven by powerful winds. Such conditions bred hard and cruel races of
men who had at once to destroy any adversaries they came across or be destroyed them-
selves, as there was no better means of defense in one spot than in another. It was the union
of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for
modern France. Likewise, Venice, the Papacy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other bur-
geoning European powers would all originate, or at least mature, through their threatening
encounter with Asiatic steppe nomads. As Mackinder writes:
When we reflect that through several centuries of the Dark Ages the Norse pa-
gans in their ships were at piracy on the Northern seas, and the Saracen and
