Guest post: The Return of the Heartland

Richard Drayton on the 21st Century’s New Great Game

It’s tempting, watching the 21st century’s liberal ‘world order’ going up in smoke, to reduce the ongoing mayhem to the pathologies of individual leaders and random agents of chaos. Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Because Putin is a megalomaniacal autocrat. Why is Trump threatening to annex Greenland and Canada and take over the Panama Canal? Because he’s a chauvinistic ignoramus trolling the libs.

But to paraphrase Marx, bad men make history in circumstances not chosen by themselves, and they also act in pursuit of geopolitical objectives not chosen by themselves. And even the worst of men may well pursue well-established strategic objectives in any given moment, whether to seize resources, control trade routes, create or defend zones of influence, or dominate geopolitical spaces considered essential to their national interests.

To recognise that such logic exists, doesn’t mean that you have to accept or approve of its assumptions and premises. Just because Russia thinks that Ukraine should be a ‘buffer zone’, or America decides it needs to take possession of the Panama Canal, doesn’t mean that buffer zones, ‘backyards’, and ‘core interests’ are unchanging and inevitable. Nor does it necessarily mean that the leaders who pursue these goals are strategic geniuses.

But geopolitics is not a morality play. And an understanding of the strategic context in which imperialist and would-be imperialists make their calculations can often be more illuminating than reducing geopolitics to the machinations of evil men. And it can also explain how smaller states can fall victim to these machinations, and how geopolitical outcomes that seem to have come out of nowhere, actually follow strategic rationales that precede their often mediocre human instruments.

In this guest post, Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History of Imperial History at King’s College London, explores the legacy of the British geographer and geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder, and the continued relevance of his famous theory of the Eurasian ‘heartland’ to Russia, Ukraine, and 21st century geopolitics.

HALFORD MACKINDER AND UKRAINE

The British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), is best known for an essay and a book, which constitute two of the foundational texts of geopolitics. Around 1900 he worried that Russia, in the age of the railway, was creating a continental power which made irrelevant Britain's maritime supremacy.

In his seminal essay ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904), he argued that the core of world history was ‘the world island’ of Eurasia plus Africa; within this a 'hinge' or 'pivot' lay where Europe entangled with Asia.

‘Inaccessible to ships’, he wrote, this island stretched ‘from the Pusstas of Hungary to the Little Gobi of Manchuria’, and contained ‘potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop’.

This was a threat: any power that controlled the core of the world island, in the age of the railway, would control the world.

In February 1919, in the midst of the peace talks after World War I, and in the midst of the Russian Revolution, he completed the manuscript of Democratic Ideals and Reality, in which he expanded his 1904 thesis, that Britain's strategic destiny, and indeed the dominance of Anglo-America in the world, ultimately lay in control of the destiny of ‘the hinge’.

In a chapter on 'The Freedom of Nations', Mackinder began with the resonant declaration: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World’.

But how could Britain control the hinge? It could not submit it to colonial control, like India, which Mackinder seems to have assumed would be British in perpetuity. The solution was to ensure that it was broken up into weak sovereign nations which would look to British power. To use the language which John Robinson and Ronald Gallagher offered in 1953, the strategy against Bolshevik Russia was a British 'informal empire' in Eastern Europe, exercised through new states like Poland, which would be a kind of continental Belgium for Britain.

It is striking, of course, that the question of Africa, which c. 1919, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, was under European domination, did not excite his curiosity; self-government for him, as for Woodrow Wilson, was on offer only to some nations.

Mackinder caught the eye of men like Curzon and Churchill. In October 1919, astonishingly, he got a chance to try to implement his strategy, when he was appointed British High Commissioner for South Russia. After the Russian Revolution, and the defeat of Germany, Britain along with other powers intervened in Russia on the side of the counter-revolutionary ‘Whites’, in Churchill's notorious phrase, ‘to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle’.

It looked good for a while, the Whites could count on 600,000 troops to the ‘Reds’ 450,000. In October 1919 they controlled all the great cities of Russia apart from Moscow and Petrograd. When Mackinder was dispatched in October to attach himself to the White generals in 'South Russia', it looked as if a new post-Czarist and post-Bolshevik political order was coming which Britain might control.

But it all unraveled, as the Bolsheviks fought harder, and formed alliances with anarchists (whom they would later betray, especially Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, but that's another story for another day). By 1920, Mackinder clung to the hope that the Whites with foreign help could at least beat back the boundaries of Russia, and he offered the map, in which he imagined the future geography of sovereignty in ‘the pivot’:

New sovereign states in 'White Russia', Ukraine and 'South Russia', now joined Poland and Romania, as the means of ensuring Anglo-American interests in 'the heartland'. By late 1920 and, definitely by 1921, however, Lenin's strategy of a USSR as a federal entity, within which, in theory, the nationalisms of Ukraine and Georgia, and so on, would have full expression, had won. Mackinder returned home to relative obscurity.

Mackinder's geostrategic ideas had massive influence over the next 100 years, however. They informed Nazi German grand strategy, the US decision to intervene in Europe during the Second World War, and the unfolding of the Cold War, in particular in places like Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were central to the United States's grand strategy, as it formed close strategic relationships with the new post-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and in ‘the Stans’ of Central Asia.

After 9-11, this grand strategy was deeply entangled with the ‘Global War on Terror’. Poland and Ukraine, notoriously, joined the United States, Britain and Australia in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is clear also that China's ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, with its vision of a ‘new silk road’ of railways pushing across Eurasia to end in Germany owes some debts to Mackinder.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, of course, let us get this out of the way - a crime in international law, which in its implementation is attached to many other kinds of crimes. Putin is a tyrant who has crushed democratic opposition in Russia. But it is important to locate the Russian invasion relative to this strategic context. From their point of view: the United States has planted a ring of military bases in friendly states across Mackinder's ‘hinge’, on the immediate periphery of Russia, in order to keep Russia under perpetual threat.

There is a 'Russian imperialism' in Ukraine, but it is deeply entangled with how other, more powerful, imperial powers are operating.

That Russia views the claims to sovereignty of Ukraine with the contempt that the United States viewed the sovereignty of Panama or Iraq is, of course, unacceptable. But equally at odds with the hopes of most people in the 21st century world is Mackinder's liberal imperialist logic, with its programme for domination and exploitation, its devil's eye view of human beings as abstractions from space.