WHITHER “HEARTLAND”? CENTRAL ASIA, GEOGRAPHY AND GLOBALIZATION
Abstract
This article attempts a double task. First, it looks at the main premises of Halford J. Mackinder’s analysis in his renowned 1904 address to the Royal Geographical Society, The Geographical Pivot of History, and discusses some of the problems. It observes that these problems have actually rendered the whole Heartland thesis a fallacy from its very inception and argues that this resilient fallacy continues to distort perceptions and policies in/on Central Asia. Second, it draws attention to the severe geographical predicament of Central Asia in an era of rapid globalization and points out how a host of myths led by the ghost of Mackinder’s Heartland, in conjunction with the biases and flaws of neoliberal dogma, serve to impede the development of strategies for dealing with that predicament.
The landlocked interior of the Eurasian continent was called the “Heartland” and “the Pivot area” in Mackinder’s 1904 address, not because he attributed some metaphysical intrinsic strategic quality to the region, but because he believed that the region possessed vast natural resources, including a huge agricultural potential. He was convinced that thanks to the revolution in land transportation recently brought about by railroad technology, Inner/Central Asia was destined to provide its contemporary political master with an unequalled economic capability, becoming the engine of an inevitable Russian bid for world dominance.
Mackinder’s confidence in the commercial competitiveness of railroads with maritime transport and in the vastness of resources in Inner/Central Asia both have turned out to be misplaced. The region couldn’t have and has not lived up to the “pivot” billing given to it by Mackinder. The Heartland thesis has survived not on account of the validity of the underlying premises and the merits of the argument, but because its conclusions recommending the containment of Russia fit snuggly into the Cold War ideational scheme that dominated much of the 20th century.
The ghost of the Heartland fallacy is still very much around, and it is not a benign one.
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As even W.H. Parker, who otherwise tends to treat Mackinder as a genius, concedes, “many of his ideas had been anticipated by others, and doubtless many of them originated from a familiarity with earlier work” (W.H. Parker, Mackinder:
eography as an Aid to Statecraft, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 250). I have discussed some of these antecedents both in Britain and the United States in Hekimoglu (see: L. Hekimoglu, “The Absent Pivot: Reflections on Mackinder’s Heart-land Fallacy on its Centennial,” in: Governance and Global (Dis)Orders: Trends, Transformations, and Impasses, ed. by Alison Howell, The York Centre for International and Security Studies, Toronto, 2004).
H.J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1943, p. 595.
H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, Heinemann, London, 1902, p. 358.
See: W.H. Parker, op. cit., p. 231.
H.J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, April 1904,
Ibid., 436.
Probably the best study in the English language on the 19th century transformation of “New Russia” is Mose Lof-ley Harvey’s 1938 PhD dissertation, which unfortunately remains unpublished. Vassilis Kardasis’s 2001 book is also use-ful despite its more specific focus on the Greek communities of Southern Russia.
See: V. Kardasis, Diaspora Merchants in the Black Sea: The Greeks in Southern Russia 1775-1861, Lexington Books, New York, 2001, p. 29.
See: M.L. Harvey, The Development of Russian Commerce on the Black Sea and its Significance, PhD dissertation,University of California, 1938, Ch. 3.
See: Ibid., p. 218.
See: Ibid., Ch. 4.
See: Ibid., pp. 238-242. A 1906 U.S. Department of Agriculture report written by I.M. Rubinow, drew attention to the fact that despite the use of rather backward agricultural methods by its farmers and despite the comparatively small size of its wheat growing area largely confined to the black-soil region, Russia still produced more wheat than the United States. The report emphasized that despite its vastness Siberia currently accounted for barely 6 percent of the wheat acre-age of all Russia (see the summary of the report in “Russia’s Wheat Surplus,” National Geographic Magazine, October 1906,pp. 580-583).
H.J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” pp. 433-434.
Although not specified in the published text, it is certain that he was Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery (1873-1955), journalist and Conservative politician. Born in India, he later served as Colonial Under-secretary (1919-1922), First Lord of the Admiralty (1922-1923), Colonial Secretary (1924-1929), and Secretary of State for India (1940-1945).
H.J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” p. 441.
Ibid., pp. 441-442.
Ibid., p. 442.
Ibid., p. 443.
Ibidem.
Ibidem.
H.J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” p. 604.
G. Ó Tuathail, “Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy,” Polit-ical Geography, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1992, pp. 191-192.
See Spykman’s posthumous short book of 1944 (The Geography of Peace, Harcourt Brace, New York). Later commentators have frequently presented the arguments of Mackinder and Spykman as complementary. That, however, is an optical illusion, brought about from inattentively looking at them through the lens of the containment policy. Beyond a similarity in their policy recommendations, the two arguments were almost diametrically opposite. For Spykman, Inner/
entral Asia by itself had little to offer and was rather inconsequential except for allowing the Soviet Union means of ac-cess for its expansionist designs on the “Rimland” which was the real prize, well endowed in population, resources and wealth, and with access to maritime transport which he thought had uncontested superiority.
Quoted from: G. Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century, Croom Helm, London, 1985,p. 128.
For instance, R. Muir, who is often cited/quoted for his comment: “On several occasions the Heartland thesis has been systematically dismantled only to rise Phoenix-like for further punishment” (Modern Political Geography, Macmil-lan, London, 1975); or M. Blacksell who remarked on Mackinder’s arguments: “despite being repeatedly challenged ... they are still allowed to form a basis for argument. The ghost seems never to be completely laid” (Post-War Europe: A Politi-cal Geography, Dawson, London, 1977). For both quotes, see: W.H. Parker, op. cit., p. 213).
C.S. Gray, The Geopolitics of Super Power, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1988, p. 4.
Ironically, long after Mackinder many in the West continued to hold their breath in anticipation of an agricultural boom in Central Asia. Both misinformation and disinformation helped to keep the expectation alive. Typical are the remarks of a rare Western visitor to the region in the late 1950s: “...the opening of Central Asia to agriculture is one of the most daring feats of Soviet development and, if successful, could have incalculable effects on Soviet and world markets” (L.W. Hend-erson, A Journey to Samarkand, Longmans, Green and Company, Toronto, 1960, p. 109).
See: W.W. Newey, “Biogeography—the Vegetation, Soils and Animal Life,” in: The Soviet Union: A Systemic Geography, ed. by Leslie Symons, Routledge, New York, 1990.
That is, “Inner/Central Asia” minus the current territory of the Russian Federation; roughly corresponding to the territories of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. Below I will use “Central Asia” as a term to refer to these seven countries plus Xinjiang.
See: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2003.
See: Ibidem.
See: M.J. Sagers, “The Nonferrous Metals Industry of Kazakhstan,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, Vol. 39,No. 9, 1998; idem, “The Iron Ore Industry of Kazakhstan: A Research Report,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics,Vol. 40, No. 3, 1999.
See: M.J. Sagers, “The Iron Ore Industry of Kazakhstan: A Research Report,” pp. 220-221.
Calculated from World Bank, 2003 World Development Indicators, and 2001 International Yearbook and States-men’s Who Is Who.
G. Parker, op. cit., pp. 132-134.
G. Parker, Geopolitics: Past, Present and Future, Pinter, London, 1998, p. 151.
P. Ochirbat, “Foreword,” in: Sustainable Development in Central Asia, ed. by Shirin Akiner, Sander Tideman and Jon Hay, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998, pp. vii-viii.
Which, actually, is the title of a widely read book by Frances Cairncross, now in its second edition. She makes “goods” (which have the terribly inconvenient trait of not being convertible to electrons for transmission over fiber-op-tic cables or via satellite) to disappear through some semantic legerdemain (“The old divide between goods and servic-es is giving way to a new divide, between products requiring physical delivery and products that can be delivered on-line” (F. Cairncross, The Death of Distance 2.0., Texere, London, 2001, p. 189) and raves throughout the book about a new global economy of “on-line products.” It is as if what she renames “products requiring physical delivery” is now something marginal to the global economy, something that is no longer relevant to our lives. In her brave new world of this global on-line economy, geography hardly matters as societies now engage in the production and trade of what she calls “weightless products.” Companies can locate pretty much anywhere to run their screen-based activities as long as they find good bargains in skills and productivity, she argues, and offers a magic remedy for development: “Develop-ing countries will increasingly perform on-line services—including monitoring security screens, inputting data and forms,running help-lines, and writing software code—and sell them to the rich countries that generally produce such services domestically» (ibid., p. xi).
D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt, J. Perraton, “Globalization,” Global Governance, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1999, pp. 490-492.
The Economist, 15 November, 1997, pp. 85-86.
R. Axtmann, “Globalization, Europe and the State: Introductory Reflections,” in: Globalization and Europe: The-oretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. by R. Axtmann, Pinter, London, 1998, p. 4.
See: M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, Chatto & Windus, London, 1973, p. 126, citing an earlier work by A.H.M. Jones regarding an edict by emperor Diocletianus (reigned between 284-306 AD).
R. Hausmann, “Prisoners of Geography,” Foreign Policy, January-February, 2001, p. 7.
P. Krugman, Geography and Trade, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 2.
Ibid., p. 8.
Examples are far too many to cite but I would like to make an exception by mentioning a study by two senior World Bank economists (M. de Melo, A. Gelb, “A Comparative Analysis of Twenty-Eight Transition Economies in Europe and Asia,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, Vol. 37, No. 5, 1996) who assessed twenty-eight “transition economies” and tried to account for the differences in economic performance among them by the different intensities and timing of “liber-alizing reforms,” because it was ironic that an article that so utterly ignored geography and location was published in the journal Post-Soviet Geography and Economics.
See: J. Sachs, “The Limits of Convergence: Nature, Nurture and Growth,” The Economist, 14 June, 1997, pp. 19-22.
Between his enthusiasm about global capitalism as “the most promising institutional arrangement for worldwide prosperity” on the one hand, and his recognition of the constraints imposed by geography on the other, Sachs is forced to engage in a balancing act: his expressions of optimism are often followed by bleak reservations. “Capitalism has now be-come common property. So too can economic prosperity become common property,” he suggests, “at least for those regions not impeded by fundamental geographical barriers.” He believes Asia’s prospects to be bright, but immediately excludes Central Asia which “faces profound, and largely unsolved, geographical obstacles.”
R. Hausmann, op. cit., pp. 45-46.
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., pp. 46-47.
See: R. Axtmann, op. cit., p. 3.
R. Pomfret, The Economies of Central Asia, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p. 134.
S.G. Tideman, “The Shortcomings of the Classical Economic Model: Appropriate Economic Parameters are Re-quired for Sustainable Development in Central Asia,” in: Sustainable Development in Central Asia, ed. by Shirin Akiner,Sander Tideman and Jon Hay, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998, p. 85.
For a typical example, see Zbigniew Brzezinski’s widely-read 1997 book. After paying due tribute to Mackinder,Brzezinski keeps repeating the assertion that the region possesses vast natural resources, and trusts the United States with the task “...to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it” (Zb. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Ge-ostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, New York, 1997, p. 148). He proceeds to envision “large-scale international invest-ment in an increasingly accessible Caspian-Central Asian region” and “accelerated regional development, funded by external investment” (ibid., p. 203).
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