Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
nerable 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 civiliza-
tions, registering all the monumental shifts in power politics. This is an altogether consist-
ent 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 mis-
siles, 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 rim-
land 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 po-
lice 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 Mac-
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 ac-
cess to distant harbors, provides the sort of inviolate border security necessary for liberal-
ism 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, rail-
ways 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:
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a
certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot
