THE EURASIAN MAP - The Revenge of Geography - page 53

Mackinder was only an imperialist because Great Britain at the time ran a worldwide em-
pire, and he was an enlightened British patriot, who saw the prospect of human develop-
ment—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). 17 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, para-
phrasing Mackinder, “those who are working in harmony with environmental influences
will triumph over those who strive against them.” 18 This is the very essence of Raymond
Aron's “probabilistic determinism,” to which most of us can subscribe. 19 In fact, Aron de-
fends 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 in-
novation. 20 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:
Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to think that
those forms of organization should survive which adapted themselves best to
their natural environment. To-day we realize, as we emerge from our fiery trial
[of World War I], that human victory consists in our rising superior to such mere
fatalism. 21
Mackinder was opposed to complacency in all its forms. Again, here is a telling example
from the beginning of Democratic Ideals and Reality:
The temptation of the moment [in 1919] is to believe that unceasing peace will
ensue merely because tired men are determined that there shall be no more war.
But international tension will accumulate again, though slowly at first; there was
a generation of peace after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats round the Con-
gress table at Vienna in 1814 foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the
world? Is it possible for us so to grade the stream bed of future history as that
there shall be no more cataracts? This, and no smaller, is the task before us if we
would have posterity think less meanly of our wisdom than we think of that of
the diplomats of Vienna. 22