Francis P. Sempa
On the evening of January 25, 1904, at the Royal Geographical Society’s meeting at its building located on 1 Savile Row in London, Halford Mackinder delivered a paper titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” It was arguably the most important foreign policy paper of the 20th century. Mackinder, who at the time was a Reader in Geography at Oxford University and the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, presented a geo-historical sketch of the globe that foresaw the struggles for power that dominated the 20th century. And as China strives for global preeminence in the 21st century, policymakers can still benefit from reading Mackinder’s paper.
Mackinder characterized the preceding 400 years of history as the “Columbian epoch,” which he said had come to an end shortly after the year 1900. “In 400 years,” he noted, “the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy,” and we were now able to “chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.” And what that meant for international relations was that the entire globe was now a “closed political system.” “Every explosion of social forces,” he explained, “instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” It was now possible, he said, “to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations” to express “certain aspects . . . of geographical causation in universal history.”
Mackinder later recalled that the events which inspired what scholars have since called the “pivot paper” were Britain’s war in South Africa and the Russo-Japanese War, which triggered his study of the historical evolution of the expansion of British sea power and Russian land power in the preceding decades and centuries. In the pivot paper, Mackinder recounted the centuries of history from Roman times to the present which exposed the “Asiatic influences upon Europe.” He identified the Mongol invasions of the 15th century, when “all the settled margins of the Old World sooner or later felt the expansive force of mobile power originating in the [Eurasian] steppe,” as particularly revealing about the future of global geopolitics. Europe and Asia were one continent, not two, and Eurasia contained most of the world’s people and resources. And after the Mongol’s decline, British sea power expanded across the globe while, simultaneously, Russian land power expanded across Asia. These broad geopolitical developments eventually led to the “Great Game” of the 19th century when British sea power and Russian land power clashed in Central Asia.
“Russia replaces the Mongol Empire,” Mackinder explained. “Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China, replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppemen. 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.” Russia as the dominant power in Asia occupied the “pivot area,” which he also referred to as the “heartland” of the Eurasian landmass. He placed Western Europe, the Middle East, India, and China in a “great inner crescent,” and Britain, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Canada, and the United States in an “outer crescent.” And then in perhaps the most famous sentence of his address, Mackinder warned: “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 the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.” He suggested that such an outcome could result from a Russo-German alliance or a Sino-Russian-Japanese axis.
Mackinder later refined his pivot paper in his post-World War I book Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) and his World War II article in Foreign Affairs, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” but in the latter work he expressed his opinion that events had fully confirmed his original 1904 geopolitical concept. Indeed, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War were global power struggles for control/denial of control of Eurasia. First, Germany replaced Russia as the potential Eurasian hegemon in both of the 20th century’s world wars. Then the Soviet Union--for a time allied with China--made a bid for Eurasian hegemony. In those three instances, sea powers led first by Great Britain and then by the United States allied with Eurasian continental powers to prevent what Mackinder called in 1904 “the empire of the world” from emerging. And today, China--which has formed a “strategic partnership” with Russia, invested in naval power, and whose Belt and Road Initiative seeks to spread its economic and political influence throughout Eurasia and parts of Africa--is making a similar bid for Eurasian hegemony.
Technology and the means of political conflict and war have changed somewhat in this post-industrial age. The previous global struggles between land powers and sea powers and air powers have evolved to include space, cyber and information warfare. But, as in Mackinder’s day, the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia remains essential to a global balance of power and to the security of the United States and its allies. As we approach the 119th anniversary of Mackinder’s remarkable paper, our policymakers in Washington--and in London, Paris, Berlin, New Delhi, and Tokyo--should acquaint or reacquaint themselves with this great man who in 1944 was lauded by John Winant, then America’s Ambassador to Great Britain, as the person who “fully enlisted geography as an aid to statecraft and strategy” and the “first to provide us with a global concept of the world and its affairs.”
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