FROM
Halford MacKinder was bom in 1861 and took up the study of geography at Oxford. In 1899 he became director of the new School of Geography at Oxford and then held a succession of academic appointments, including director of the London School of Economics. In 1899 he made the first ascent of Mount Kenya. In 1910 he was elected to Parliament. From 1919 to 1922 he was British High Commissioner for occupied South Russia. After his return he was knighted and held a number of official appointments. He died in 1947.
An excerpt from the lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1904. "He was the first/’ said American Ambassador John Winant during World War II, "to provide us with a global concept of the world ." He profoundly influenced "geopolitics ."
When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries through which we are now passing, and see them foreshortened, as we today see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900. . . .
The all-important result of the discovery of the Cape road to the Indies was to connect the western and eastern coastal navigations of Euro-Asia, even though by a circuitous route, and thus in some measure to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central position of the steppe-nomads by pressing upon them in the rear. The revolution commenced by the great mariners of the Columbian generation endowed Christendom with the widest possible mobility of power, short of a winged mobility. The one and continuous ocean enveloping the divided and insular lands is, of course, the geographical condition of ultimate unity in the command of the sea, and of the whole theory of modern naval strategy as expounded by such writers as Captain Mahan and Mr. Spenser Wilkinson.
The Twentieth Century
V
The broad political effect was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia, for whereas in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impossible desert to south, an unknown ocean to west, and icy or forested wastes to north and northeast, and in the east and southeast was constantly threatened by the superior mobility of the horsemen and camelmen, Europe now emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which she had access, and wrapping her influence round the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto threatened her very existence.
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 region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomad, and is today about to be covered with a network of railways? There have been and are here the conditions of a mobility of military and economic power of a far-reaching and yet limited character. Russia replaces the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China replaces the centrifrugal raids of the steppe-men.
In the world at large she occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides and be struck from all sides, save the north. The full development of her modern railway mobility is merely a matter of time. Nor is it likely that any possible social revolution will alter her essential relations to the great geographical limits of her existence. Wisely recognising the fundamental limits of her power, her rulers have parted with Alaska; for it is as much a law of policy for Russia to own nothing overseas as for Britain to be supreme on the ocean.
The oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridge heads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets. On a smaller scale that was what Wellington accomplished from his seabase at Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War. May not this in the end prove to be the strategical function of India in the British Imperial system?
The westward march of empire appears to me to have been a short rotation of marginal power round the southwestern and western edge of the pivotal area. The Nearer, Middle and Far Eastern questions relate to the
Halford MacKinder
unstable equilibrium of inner and outer powers in those parts of the marginal crescent where local power is, at present, more or less negligible.
In conclusion it may be well expressly to point out that the substitution of some new control of the inland area for that of Russia would not tend to reduce the geographical significance of the pivot position. Were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire, and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world's freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.