MACKINDER’S LEGACY: WAS IT A PROPHESY?

Abstract

Today the planet seems to be brimming with surprises—it is too changeable and too unpredictable. The man in the street, as well as people well-versed in the world order theory cannot help wondering whether there is a system in the world able to regulate the relations among all entities.

This is not a novel feature of our times: in the past, too, thinkers pondered over questions of world order and relations between the key members of the world community and the members of secondary importance. Halford Mackinder, who is well known to the world as one of the founders of geopolitics, was among these thinkers. I am not going to discuss his numerous merits in the field of political geography—I am going to discuss his heritage and use his major “geographical pivot of history” theory as applied to the present foreign policy realities of Kyrgyzstan, which cannot, and should not, be divorced from its Central Asian neighbors, the CIS countries, China, and the United States.

It should be said that one of the key ideas of a man born nearly 150 years ago has found a new lease on life in the 21st century in light of the new relations between the “key and secondary” actors. This happened not because he dotted all the “i’s” in the world politics of his time. On the contrary, after describing the process that led to the present intertwining of international relations and presenting practical recommendations on how to untwine them, he offered his own forecast of the future of interstate relations and bequeathed a number of questions to future generations. Who is destined to become “ruler of the world?” By way of an answer, he hinted that the future leader of world politics would use geographic location, one of the key factors in any state’s destiny, as its trump card. Having described the central location (which he called the Heartland) as geographically the most advantageous, he posed another, no less important question: which country can be described as the Heartland, a position that gives it considerable advantages over others?1 And he provided the answer: the central location is a relative concept. A state that manages to dominate the central country will acquire all the advantages of the Heartland. This obviously brings up another consideration: he was probably referring to a country’s political weight, rather than to its geographic location, that is, to its ability either to capitalize on its advantages independently, or to remain a dependent country even when holding the trump card yet lacking adequate resources for its own protection. In other words, it is less important to be located in the Heartland—it is enough to command political (and foreign policy) resources to dominate the center.