chlamor
10-07-2007, 10:27 PM
http://www.bcpl.net/~sullivan/modules/imperial/images/imperialism.gif
From 1899 to 1939, Halford Mackinder was active in imperial affairs. In 1899, the same year he climbed Mount Kenya, he set out the case for free trade. Rapidly he converted to imperial protectionism, left the Liberal Party and joined the Conservatives. Mackinder, along with his associates in the Conservative Party, Leo Amery and Lord Milner, promoted the cause of imperial unity and imperial preference in trade. During the period 1899–1903, Mackinder's evolving ideas about empire helped shape the Pivot paper, and he spelt out a prescription to avoid imperial decline: bind Britain and the Dominions into a League of Democracies with one fleet and one foreign policy, and encourage economic growth within the empire by a system of tariffs that promoted imperial trade. In Mackinder's parliamentary career (1910–22), his party was never in power and the Liberals retained free trade. Only after World War I, at the end of his parliamentary career, did Mackinder become active in imperial policy as chair of the Imperial Shipping Committee and the Imperial Economic Committee.
http://www.ewpnet.com/Halford.jpg
Mackinder, Sir Halford (1861-1947), British political geographer, exponent of geopolitics. Mackinder was reader in geography at Oxford, director of the London School of Economics, and a key figure in the creation of the federal University of London. In 1904 he outlined his idea of the ‘heartland’ in a paper to the Royal Geographical Society. He argued that the greater mobility made possible by railways had made Asia and eastern Europe (the heartland) the strategic centre of the world island. The heartland stood in opposition to the maritime or oceanic lands, and would triumph. ‘Those who control eastern Europe dominate the Heartland: those who rule the Heartland dominate the World Island (that is, Eurasia): those who rule the World Island dominate the world.’ Mackinder's views clashed with the US strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose views on the importance of sea power supported the idea that the oceanic powers would win any conflict. WW I tended to support Mahan, and Mackinder shifted his views. In 1924 he first mooted the idea of the Atlantic community, one of a number of ‘regional organizations’ of minor powers. Two years after his death, the idea came into reality, with NATO.
http://www.tcnj.edu/~ho5/Imperialism%20ii.jpg
There is perhaps more to Mackinder than the heartland theory, and arguably a key dimension of Mackinder’s strategic writing was to define for Twentieth Century Britain a “Grand Strategy”. In effect, although Mackinder does not use such an expression to qualify his writings, it remains a crucial aspect of his work and fits remarkably well with the textbook definition of Grand Strategy as “a comprehensive plan of action, based on calculated relations of ways and means to large ends.”
http://www.effedieffe.com/tasti/img/Brzezinski2.jpg
Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and Policymaking in the 21st Century
CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS
© 2000 Christopher J. Fettweis
From Parameters, Summer 2000, pp. 58-71.
"A victorious Roman general, when he entered the city, amid all the head-turning splendor of a `Triumph,' had behind him on the chariot a slave who whispered into his ear that he was mortal. When our statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World." --Sir Halford Mackinder, 1919[1]
"Few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of `geopolitics.'" --Charles Clover, 1999[2]
The world today hardly resembles the one that Sir Halford Mackinder examined in 1904, when he first wrote about the advantages of central positioning on the Eurasian landmass. His theories would have influence throughout the century, informing and shaping US containment policy throughout the Cold War. Today, almost a century after his "Heartland" theory came into being, there is renewed interest in the region that Mackinder considered the key to world dominance. The Heartland of the Eurasian landmass may well play an important role in the next century, and the policy of today's lone superpower toward that region will have a tremendous influence upon the character of the entire international system.
Eurasia, the "World Island" to Mackinder, is still central to American foreign policy and will likely to continue to be so for some time. Conventional wisdom holds that only a power dominating the resources of Eurasia would have the potential to threaten the interests of the United States. Yet that conventional wisdom, as well as many of the other assumptions that traditionally inform our policy, has not been subjected to enough scrutiny in light of the changed international realities. Many geopolitical "truths" that have passed into the canon of security intellectuals rarely get a proper reexamination to determine their relevance to the constantly evolving nature of the system. Were the world system static, no further theorizing would be necessary. Since it is not, we must constantly reevaluate our fundamental assumptions to see whether or not any "eternal" rules of the game, geopolitical and otherwise, truly exist.
Geopolitics is traditionally defined as the study of "the influence of geographical factors on political action,"[3] but this oft-cited definition fails to capture the many meanings that have evolved for the term over the years. Dr. Gearoid Ó Tuathail, an Irish geographer and associate professor at Virginia Tech, has identified three main uses of "geopolitics" since the end of World War II. First, it is sometimes used to describe a survey of a particular region or problem, to "read the manifest features of that which was held to be `external reality.'"[4] Geopolitics, according to this usage, is a lens through which to survey a problem: "The Geopolitics of X, where X is oil, energy, resources, information, the Middle East, Central America, Europe, etc." Second, geopolitics can be synonymous with realpolitik, which according to Ó Tuathail is "almost exclusively the legacy of Henry Kissinger."[5] Kissinger used the term to describe his attempts to maintain a "favorable equilibrium" in world politics, and his singular ability to see the proper course and set sail for it. His Machiavellian approach was infamously devoid of ideology (or "sentimentality"), and as such caused the term geopolitics to fall out of favor with many of the foreign policy practitioners who followed. Last, and most important for our purposes, geopolitics has become synonymous with grand strategy, "not, as in Kissinger, about the everyday tactical conduct of statecraft."[6] Theorists like Colin Gray place geography in the center of international relations and attempt to decipher the fundamental, eternal factors that drive state action. This belief traces its roots directly back to Sir Halford Mackinder and his theories of the Heartland.
A Brief History of Geopolitics in Theory and Policy
To the early 20th-century British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, world history was a story of constant conflict between land and sea powers. In the past, during what he described as the Columbian Epoch, increased mobility that the sea provided put naval powers at a distinct advantage over their territorial adversaries. The classic example of this advantage was the Crimean War, in which Russia could not project power to the south as effectively as the sea-supplied French and British, despite the fact that the battlefields were far closer to Moscow than to London. But the Columbian Epoch was coming to a conclusion at the turn of the 20th century when Mackinder was first writing, as evolving technology, especially the system of railroads, allowed land powers to be nearly as mobile as those of the sea. Because land powers on the World Island had a smaller distance to travel than the sea powers operating on its periphery, any increase in their mobility would tip the balance of power in their favor. These "interior lines" gave the power with the "central position" on the World Island the ability to project power anywhere more rapidly than the sea powers could defend. Thus, who ruled the Heartland would have the possibility of commanding the entire World Island.
Mackinder believed that the world had evolved into what he called a "closed system." There was no more room for expansion by the end of the 19th century, for colonialism had brought the entire world under the sway of Europe. Power politics of the future, Mackinder speculated, would be marked by a competition over the old territories rather than a quest for new ones. His Heartland concept recalled the 18th-century strategists' notion of the "key position" on the battlefield,[7] the recognition of which was crucial to victory. Traditional military strategists thought that control of the key position on the map was crucial to winning the war, and since Mackinder recognized that the round world was now one big battlefield, identification and control of the key position would lead to global supremacy.
Mackinder's theories might have faded into irrelevance were it not for their apparent influence on the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. A German geopolitician and devotee of Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, spent the interwar period writing extensively about the Heartland and the need for Lebensraum (additional territory deemed essential for continued national well-being) for the German people. One of Haushofer's pupils was Rudolph Hess, who brought his teacher into the inner intellectual circles of the Reich. Haushofer was appointed by Hitler to run the German Academy in Berlin, which was "more a propagandic institution than a true academy in the continental European sense,"[8] according to one observer. The actual effect of his teachings upon German policy is open to debate--Haushofer may have had an enormous effect on Hitler through his pupil,[9] or he may have been "a neglected and slighted man who would certainly enjoy learning about the hullabaloo raised by his doctrine" in the United States.[10] It cannot be proven that the Drang nach Osten (eastward push) was affected by a desire to control the Heartland. Here policy may just overlap with, rather than be dictated by, geotheory. But the possibility that there was a secret master plan at work in Berlin created a whole new interest in geopolitics and what Mackinder and geopolitics had to say.
Haushofer's ideas probably had a larger influence upon American strategic studies during the war than they did on German policy. Wartime paranoia fed an image of a secret German science of geopolitik that was driving Nazi action, bringing Mackinder and Haushofer onto the American intellectual radar screen. In 1942 Life magazine ran an article titled "Geopolitics: The Lurid Career of a Scientific System which a Briton Invented, the Germans Used, and the Americans Need to Study,"[11] which captured the mood of the period, imagining a cabal of foreign policy "scientists" dictating policy for the dictator. Opinions differed between those who prescribed rapid acceptance of geopolitik and those who dismissed it as pseudoscience. The latter opinion was strengthened, of course, by Germany's eventual defeat.
<snip>
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Para ... ttweis.htm (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/00summer/fettweis.htm)
Remember the day when explorer, geographer and Liberal Imperialist Halford Mackinder gave a series of lectures on imperialism at the London Institute of Bankers?
From 1899 to 1939, Halford Mackinder was active in imperial affairs. In 1899, the same year he climbed Mount Kenya, he set out the case for free trade. Rapidly he converted to imperial protectionism, left the Liberal Party and joined the Conservatives. Mackinder, along with his associates in the Conservative Party, Leo Amery and Lord Milner, promoted the cause of imperial unity and imperial preference in trade. During the period 1899–1903, Mackinder's evolving ideas about empire helped shape the Pivot paper, and he spelt out a prescription to avoid imperial decline: bind Britain and the Dominions into a League of Democracies with one fleet and one foreign policy, and encourage economic growth within the empire by a system of tariffs that promoted imperial trade. In Mackinder's parliamentary career (1910–22), his party was never in power and the Liberals retained free trade. Only after World War I, at the end of his parliamentary career, did Mackinder become active in imperial policy as chair of the Imperial Shipping Committee and the Imperial Economic Committee.
http://www.ewpnet.com/Halford.jpg
Mackinder, Sir Halford (1861-1947), British political geographer, exponent of geopolitics. Mackinder was reader in geography at Oxford, director of the London School of Economics, and a key figure in the creation of the federal University of London. In 1904 he outlined his idea of the ‘heartland’ in a paper to the Royal Geographical Society. He argued that the greater mobility made possible by railways had made Asia and eastern Europe (the heartland) the strategic centre of the world island. The heartland stood in opposition to the maritime or oceanic lands, and would triumph. ‘Those who control eastern Europe dominate the Heartland: those who rule the Heartland dominate the World Island (that is, Eurasia): those who rule the World Island dominate the world.’ Mackinder's views clashed with the US strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose views on the importance of sea power supported the idea that the oceanic powers would win any conflict. WW I tended to support Mahan, and Mackinder shifted his views. In 1924 he first mooted the idea of the Atlantic community, one of a number of ‘regional organizations’ of minor powers. Two years after his death, the idea came into reality, with NATO.
http://www.tcnj.edu/~ho5/Imperialism%20ii.jpg
There is perhaps more to Mackinder than the heartland theory, and arguably a key dimension of Mackinder’s strategic writing was to define for Twentieth Century Britain a “Grand Strategy”. In effect, although Mackinder does not use such an expression to qualify his writings, it remains a crucial aspect of his work and fits remarkably well with the textbook definition of Grand Strategy as “a comprehensive plan of action, based on calculated relations of ways and means to large ends.”
http://www.effedieffe.com/tasti/img/Brzezinski2.jpg
Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and Policymaking in the 21st Century
CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS
© 2000 Christopher J. Fettweis
From Parameters, Summer 2000, pp. 58-71.
"A victorious Roman general, when he entered the city, amid all the head-turning splendor of a `Triumph,' had behind him on the chariot a slave who whispered into his ear that he was mortal. When our statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World." --Sir Halford Mackinder, 1919[1]
"Few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of `geopolitics.'" --Charles Clover, 1999[2]
The world today hardly resembles the one that Sir Halford Mackinder examined in 1904, when he first wrote about the advantages of central positioning on the Eurasian landmass. His theories would have influence throughout the century, informing and shaping US containment policy throughout the Cold War. Today, almost a century after his "Heartland" theory came into being, there is renewed interest in the region that Mackinder considered the key to world dominance. The Heartland of the Eurasian landmass may well play an important role in the next century, and the policy of today's lone superpower toward that region will have a tremendous influence upon the character of the entire international system.
Eurasia, the "World Island" to Mackinder, is still central to American foreign policy and will likely to continue to be so for some time. Conventional wisdom holds that only a power dominating the resources of Eurasia would have the potential to threaten the interests of the United States. Yet that conventional wisdom, as well as many of the other assumptions that traditionally inform our policy, has not been subjected to enough scrutiny in light of the changed international realities. Many geopolitical "truths" that have passed into the canon of security intellectuals rarely get a proper reexamination to determine their relevance to the constantly evolving nature of the system. Were the world system static, no further theorizing would be necessary. Since it is not, we must constantly reevaluate our fundamental assumptions to see whether or not any "eternal" rules of the game, geopolitical and otherwise, truly exist.
Geopolitics is traditionally defined as the study of "the influence of geographical factors on political action,"[3] but this oft-cited definition fails to capture the many meanings that have evolved for the term over the years. Dr. Gearoid Ó Tuathail, an Irish geographer and associate professor at Virginia Tech, has identified three main uses of "geopolitics" since the end of World War II. First, it is sometimes used to describe a survey of a particular region or problem, to "read the manifest features of that which was held to be `external reality.'"[4] Geopolitics, according to this usage, is a lens through which to survey a problem: "The Geopolitics of X, where X is oil, energy, resources, information, the Middle East, Central America, Europe, etc." Second, geopolitics can be synonymous with realpolitik, which according to Ó Tuathail is "almost exclusively the legacy of Henry Kissinger."[5] Kissinger used the term to describe his attempts to maintain a "favorable equilibrium" in world politics, and his singular ability to see the proper course and set sail for it. His Machiavellian approach was infamously devoid of ideology (or "sentimentality"), and as such caused the term geopolitics to fall out of favor with many of the foreign policy practitioners who followed. Last, and most important for our purposes, geopolitics has become synonymous with grand strategy, "not, as in Kissinger, about the everyday tactical conduct of statecraft."[6] Theorists like Colin Gray place geography in the center of international relations and attempt to decipher the fundamental, eternal factors that drive state action. This belief traces its roots directly back to Sir Halford Mackinder and his theories of the Heartland.
A Brief History of Geopolitics in Theory and Policy
To the early 20th-century British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, world history was a story of constant conflict between land and sea powers. In the past, during what he described as the Columbian Epoch, increased mobility that the sea provided put naval powers at a distinct advantage over their territorial adversaries. The classic example of this advantage was the Crimean War, in which Russia could not project power to the south as effectively as the sea-supplied French and British, despite the fact that the battlefields were far closer to Moscow than to London. But the Columbian Epoch was coming to a conclusion at the turn of the 20th century when Mackinder was first writing, as evolving technology, especially the system of railroads, allowed land powers to be nearly as mobile as those of the sea. Because land powers on the World Island had a smaller distance to travel than the sea powers operating on its periphery, any increase in their mobility would tip the balance of power in their favor. These "interior lines" gave the power with the "central position" on the World Island the ability to project power anywhere more rapidly than the sea powers could defend. Thus, who ruled the Heartland would have the possibility of commanding the entire World Island.
Mackinder believed that the world had evolved into what he called a "closed system." There was no more room for expansion by the end of the 19th century, for colonialism had brought the entire world under the sway of Europe. Power politics of the future, Mackinder speculated, would be marked by a competition over the old territories rather than a quest for new ones. His Heartland concept recalled the 18th-century strategists' notion of the "key position" on the battlefield,[7] the recognition of which was crucial to victory. Traditional military strategists thought that control of the key position on the map was crucial to winning the war, and since Mackinder recognized that the round world was now one big battlefield, identification and control of the key position would lead to global supremacy.
Mackinder's theories might have faded into irrelevance were it not for their apparent influence on the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. A German geopolitician and devotee of Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, spent the interwar period writing extensively about the Heartland and the need for Lebensraum (additional territory deemed essential for continued national well-being) for the German people. One of Haushofer's pupils was Rudolph Hess, who brought his teacher into the inner intellectual circles of the Reich. Haushofer was appointed by Hitler to run the German Academy in Berlin, which was "more a propagandic institution than a true academy in the continental European sense,"[8] according to one observer. The actual effect of his teachings upon German policy is open to debate--Haushofer may have had an enormous effect on Hitler through his pupil,[9] or he may have been "a neglected and slighted man who would certainly enjoy learning about the hullabaloo raised by his doctrine" in the United States.[10] It cannot be proven that the Drang nach Osten (eastward push) was affected by a desire to control the Heartland. Here policy may just overlap with, rather than be dictated by, geotheory. But the possibility that there was a secret master plan at work in Berlin created a whole new interest in geopolitics and what Mackinder and geopolitics had to say.
Haushofer's ideas probably had a larger influence upon American strategic studies during the war than they did on German policy. Wartime paranoia fed an image of a secret German science of geopolitik that was driving Nazi action, bringing Mackinder and Haushofer onto the American intellectual radar screen. In 1942 Life magazine ran an article titled "Geopolitics: The Lurid Career of a Scientific System which a Briton Invented, the Germans Used, and the Americans Need to Study,"[11] which captured the mood of the period, imagining a cabal of foreign policy "scientists" dictating policy for the dictator. Opinions differed between those who prescribed rapid acceptance of geopolitik and those who dismissed it as pseudoscience. The latter opinion was strengthened, of course, by Germany's eventual defeat.
<snip>
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Para ... ttweis.htm (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/00summer/fettweis.htm)
Remember the day when explorer, geographer and Liberal Imperialist Halford Mackinder gave a series of lectures on imperialism at the London Institute of Bankers?