Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
result of the war, the diplomats at Versailles had as one of their central purposes the re-
arrangement of the map of Eastern Europe. And thus Mackinder in his topic takes up a
cause that he ignored in “The Geographical Pivot of History” fifteen years previously: the
“vital necessity that there should be a tier of independent states between Germany and Rus-
sia.” For as he puts it, “We were opposed to the half-German Russian Czardom because
Russia was the dominating, threatening force both in East Europe and the Heartland for half
a century. We were opposed to the wholly German Kaiserdom, because Germany took the
lead in East Europe from the Czardom, and would then have crushed the revolting Slavs,
and dominated East Europe and the Heartland.” Thus, Eastern Europe in Mackinder's view
of 1919 becomes the key to the Heartland, from which derives the land power of Germany
and especially that of Russia. For Russia is “knocking at the landward gates of the Indies,”
making it opposed to British sea power, which, in turn, is “knocking at the sea gates of Ch-
ina” around the Cape of Good Hope and later through the Suez Canal. By proposing a bul-
wark of independent Eastern European states from Estonia south to Bulgaria—“Great Bo-
hemia,” “Great Serbia,” “Great Rumania,” and so on—Mackinder is, in effect, providing
nuance to his and James Fairgrieve's idea of a “crush zone,” which Fairgrieve had specific-
ally identified in his writings in 1915, meaning that area liable to be overrun by either land
power originating from the Heartland or by sea power originating from Western Europe.
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For if these newly sovereign states can survive, then there is a chance for the emergence
of a Central Europe, in both a spiritual and geopolitical sense, after all. Mackinder went
further, proposing a series of states to the east, as it were, of Eastern Europe: White Russia
(Belarus), Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Daghestan, in order to thwart the
designs of Bolshevik Russia, which he called “Jacobin Czardom.” In fact, with the demise
of the Soviet Union in 1991 there would emerge a line of newly independent states strik-
ingly similar to what Mackinder had proposed.
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But Mackinder, at least initially, was proven wrong in this matter. He does not seem to
have realized, as Toynbee did, that a Europe whose borders were drawn up on the principle
of national self-determination was liable to be a Europe dominated by Germany—larger,
geographically better positioned, and more powerful than any of the other ethnically bound
states. Indeed, Germany would conquer Eastern Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, and
Russia, in reaction, would conquer these newly independent states of Mackinder's buffer
zone, keeping them in a prison of nations from 1945 to 1989. Only in the last generation
has hope arisen that a spiritual Central Europe can survive between the two land powers of
Russia and Germany. So why did Mackinder, the arch-realist, suddenly go soft, as it were,
in supporting what were, in effect, “Wilsonian” principles of national self-determination?
Because, as one scholar, Arthur Butler Dugan, suggests, Mackinder was, his daring and de-
terministic theories notwithstanding, a child of his time, “a product of the 'climate of opin-
ion' more than he realized.”
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