HALFORD MACKINDER’S IDEAS TODAY

Ekaterina BORISOVA

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Ekaterina Borisova, Ph.D. (Hist.), Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russian Federation)

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There have always been politicians who considered the cornerstone of their foreign policy efforts to be Halford Mackinder’s imperative about the need to control the Pivot area (or the Heartland) in order to rule the world. Today, some countries are still guided by the key tenets of this theory in their foreign policy pursuits, even though the idea has been revised by a number of thinkers, its author included.

At one time, Mackinder postulated that the maritime nations and the people of the marginal regions [which Nicholas J. Spykman later called Eurasia’s “Rimland”] should do their best to contain those living in the Heartland. This perfectly suited the realities of the bipolar world and largely promoted the ideology of NATO and other postwar blocs (SENTO, ASEAN).

Today, however, it seems that these geopolitical postulations can no longer serve as a sound theoretical basis for explaining the current trends obvious in world politics. It might have seemed that after splitting the continental monolith and turning the fragments into friendly states, the maritime nations had defused the British geopolitician’s key theoretical propositions about the Heartland’s invulnerability and eternal opposition between the sea and land powers.

However, the very fact that the sea powers have moved into the heart of the Eurasian continent shows that……………..

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