Savile Row, located in central London, was once the home of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Lord Curzon described the building as “cramped and rather squalid,” but on January 25, 1904, the audience heard a paper read by Halford Mackinder entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which was later published in The Geographical Journal. After the reading, Spencer Wilkinson remarked that he “looked with regret on some of the space that is unoccupied here, and I much regret that a portion of it was not occupied by members of the Cabinet.” It was arguably the most important paper ever written on global geopolitics, and some of Mackinder’s ideas remain relevant to the 21st century world.
It is rare that an article or policy paper on international politics maintains its relevance even for a few years.
Born on February 15, 1861, in Gainsborough in Lincolnshire near the Trent River, Mackinder at an early age was drawn to history and geography and according to biographer Brian Blouet, he “was fascinated by the Franco-Prussian War” of 1870-71. Mackinder studied at Epsom College and in 1880 entered Christ Church in Oxford, where he joined the Oxford University Rifle Volunteers. He later studied geology, historical geography, and law. Mackinder became a member of RGS in 1886, and one year later delivered a lecture there titled “The Scope and Methods of Geography,” in which he noted that “we are now near the end of the roll of great discoveries.” The future work of geographers, he said, was to study the relationship of geography and history and to trace the “causal relationship” between the two. In several papers that foreshadowed his “pivot paper,” Mackinder noted the centrality of Eurasia to global politics and wrote that “the greatest events in the world’s history are related to the greatest features of geography.” (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The Arctic Thaw, Sino-Russian Partnership, and Control of the World-Island)
Mackinder was not just an “armchair” geographer. He participated in the first ascent of Mt. Kenya in 1899. Mackinder wrote a book about the expedition, and a scenic route on the mountain is today named “The Mackinder Valley.” He was instrumental in founding the School of Geography at Oxford. He authored several books on the geography of England, continental Europe, Asia, Africa, and other regions of the globe. He was also a Conservative Member of Parliament between 1910 and 1922. In Parliament, he urged Britain’s government to crush Russia’s newly installed Bolshevik regime which, if left alone to spread its virulent ideology, he predicted, would become a threat to the democracies.
But it was the paper he delivered to RGS in 1904 that immortalized his name and his ideas. Mackinder in the “pivot paper” drew a geopolitical sketch of the globe, identifying the vast Eurasian landmass as the seat of a potential world empire. He expressed dismay that Britain’s empire forged by sea power could be supplanted by a power or alliance of powers that gained hegemony in Eurasia and used its human and natural resources to become the world’s dominant land power and sea power — a 20th century version of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Technology was enabling continental-sized states to cohere politically and to expand physically. He foresaw that Germany, Russia, Japan, and possibly China could, either separately or combined, challenge the British world order. And he urged democratic statesmen to adjust their philosophical ideals to geographical realities. He was not, as some later argued, a geographical determinist. In the “pivot paper,” he wrote that the global balance of power was shaped by technology, economics, relative population, and organization. Geography presented both challenges and opportunities to the world’s great powers.
The ideas of the “pivot paper” would influence policymakers and statesmen throughout the 20th century. Some of those ideas remain relevant to 21st century geopolitics. Mackinder has influenced the strategic thinking of generations of scholars, analysts, and practitioners of geopolitics. In the 1920s, German geopolitical thinkers, led by Karl Haushofer, imbibed Mackinder’s theories, leading some scholars to blame Mackinder’s ideas for Hitler’s quest for lebensraum (“living space”). In 1942, Life magazine published a piece by Joseph Thorndike urging America’s leaders in the midst of World War II to study Mackinder. Mackinder’s book Democratic Ideals and Reality, which in 1919 expanded on his “pivot paper,” was reissued in 1942 (and later in 1962, and then again in 1996 by the National Defense University), and one year later the editor of Foreign Affairs asked Mackinder to discuss the relevance of the ideas in the “pivot paper” in the context of the Second World War, which Mackinder did in “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” In that 1943 essay, Mackinder foresaw a world divided between the continental empire of the Soviet Union, a North Atlantic alliance (six years before it was actually formed), and the rise of the Asian powers of China and India. The best anyone could hope for, he explained, was a “balanced globe of human beings.” (READ MORE: The Folly of Empire, 20 Years Later)
In the 1970s, Colin S. Gray revived interest in Mackinder with The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era, which placed the U.S.-Soviet Cold War struggle in the context of Mackinder’s global analyses. Gray followed that up with The Geopolitics of Superpower (1988). In 1994, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded his book Diplomacy noting the continuing relevance of Mackinder’s ideas. In 1997, former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi wrote The Grand Chessboard, which used Mackinder’s ideas to discuss the geopolitics of the post-Cold War world. In the 21st century, Robert Kaplan in The Revenge of Geography and in a brilliant paper he wrote for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment entitled “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” examined the U.S.-China conflict in the context of Mackinder’s geopolitical ideas.
It is rare that an article or policy paper on international politics maintains its relevance even for a few years. Mackinder’s “pivot paper” stands apart as a timeless analysis of the factors that influence — -and that have nearly always influenced — the global balance of power.
