Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Whereas Mackinder, influenced by Wilsonianism and the need to preserve the balance
of power in Eurasia, recommended in 1919 a belt of independent states in Eastern Europe,
Haushofer, inverting Mackinder's thesis, calls a few years later for the “extinction of such
states.” Haushofer, Strausz-Hupé reports, calls them “bits of states … fragments,” whose
inhabitants think only in terms of “narrow space,” which to Haushofer, as Strausz-Hupé
explains, “is the unmistakable symptom of decay.” Strausz-Hupé goes on, uncovering
Haushofer's “neat logic” about the dissolution of the British Empire and the need to break
up the Soviet Union into its component ethnic parts, which will all lean on a Greater Ger-
many, which in Haushofer's view is the only state entitled to national self-determination.
For in Haushofer's own words, “one-third of the German people [are] living under alien
rule outside the borders of the Reich.” German
Geopolitik
, Strausz-Hupé warns, is a world
of “acrobatics on the ideological trapeze,” with conclusions of “stark simplicity.” The Ger-
man new world order presupposes a Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a U.S.-
dominated “Pan-America,” and a German-dominated Eurasian Heartland with a “Mediter-
ranean-North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.” But for Haushofer, this is
only an intermediate step: for, according to Mackinder, the Heartland dominates the World-
Island and hence the world.
3
Strausz-Hupé tells us that Mackinder's concept of the Heartland “is colored by the very
personal point of view of an Edwardian Englishman.” For Mackinder's generation, Russia
had been Great Britain's antagonist for almost a century, and consequently British states-
men lived with the fear of a Russia that would control the Dardanelles, consume the Otto-
man Empire, and fall upon India. Thus, Mackinder fixated upon a tier of independent buffer
states between Russia and maritime Europe, even as he identified the Heartland inside Rus-
sia itself as a visual tool of strategy. “Mackinder's vision,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “accorded
only too well with the morbid philosophy of world power or downfall which explains so
much about German national pathology. There is in Mackinder's dogma just the kind of
finality for which the Wagnerian mentality yearns.” And yet Strausz-Hupé ultimately res-
cues Mackinder's reputation:
Mackinder's topic—written when the armies had not yet returned from the bat-
tlefields—is dignified by a cool detachment and never loses sight of the broad
perspectives of history. It is his faith in the individual which his German admirer
so woefully lacks. For, though Haushofer likes to stress the part of heroism in the
shaping of history, it is the collective sacrifice of the battlefield rather than the
anonymous struggles of ordinary men and women … which he has in mind.
4
Strausz-Hupé and Mackinder both believe in human agency, in the sanctity, as they say,
of the individual, whereas the German
Geopolitikers
do not.
