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Marginal note to the debate with Aleksandr Duguin
The Pivot of History according to Halford J. Mackinder
Olavo de Carvalho
debateolavodugin.blogspot.com,
6 de julho de 2011
On January 25, 1904, the geographer and political scientist Halford
J. Mackinder (1861-1947) presented to the Royal Geographic Society
the thesis that Central Asia was the “pivot of History”
and that in the following decades Russia, based on that area, was in
a most advantageous position to expand its power.
[1]
Halford J. Mackinder
With no intention of creating a general theory of History, or of
postulating a geographical determinism à la Buckle, and
rather recognizing that all he could do was to speculate about
“some aspects” of the geographical determinants of the
historical process, Mackinder stressed that geography imposed
precise limits upon human initiative, favoring some actions and
rendering others difficult.
The geographical configuration of the Russian steppe had specially
favored the action of nomadic hordes which, coming from the depths
of Asia, rode through the area on horseback to invade Western
Europe. [2] The
consequences of this had been portentous:
“A repellent personality performs a valuable social
function in uniting his enemies and it was under the pressure of
external barbarism that Europe achieved her civilization.”
[3]
“For a thousand years a series of horse-riding peoples
emerged from Asia through the broad interval between the Ural
mountains and the Caspian sea, rode through the open spaces of
southern Russia, and struck home into Hungary in the very heart
of the European peninsula, shaping by the necessity of opposing
them the history of each of the great peoples around—the
Russians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the
Byzantine Greeks.”
[4]
What swayed the tides of fate in favor of the Europeans were two
factors. First, the intrinsic limitations of the barbarians’
attack potential:
“That [the barbarian invasion] stimulated healthy and
powerful reaction, instead of crushing opposition under a
widespread despotism, was due to the fact that the mobility of
their power was conditioned by the steppes, and necessarily
ceased in the surrounding forests and mountains.”
[5]
Secondly, the evolution of maritime technique, which inaugurated the
era of the great navigations:
“The all-important result of the discovery of the Cape
road to the Indies was to connect the western and eastern
coastal navigations of Euro- Asia, . . . and thus in some
measure to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central
position of the steppe – nomads by pressing upon them in
rear. The revolution commenced by the great mariners of the
Columbian generation endowed Christendom with the widest
possible mobility of power...
“The broad political effect was to reverse the relations
of Europe and Asia, for whereas in the Middle Ages Europe was
caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to
west, and icy or forested wastes to north and north-east, and in
the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the
superior mobility of the horsemen and camelmen, she now emerged
upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea
surface and coastal lands to which she had access”.
[6]
But this did not lead to the end of land-power. If this kind of
power was concentrated in the East, while the West further developed
maritime power, it was not only due to diversity of geographic
conditions, but because of a difference of cultures:
“It is probably one of the most striking coincidences of
history that the seaward and the landward expansion of Europe
should, in a sense, continue the ancient opposition between
Roman and Greek. Few great failures have had more far-reaching
consequences than the failure of Rome to Latinize the Greek. The
Teuton was civilized and Christianized by the Roman, the Slav in
the main by the Greek. It is the Romano-Teuton who in later
times embarked upon the ocean; it was the Graeco-Slav who rode
over the steppes, conquering the Turanian. Thus the modern
land-power differs from the sea-power no less in the source of
its ideals than in the material conditions of its
mobility.”
If the era of the great navigations had favored Europe, in more
recent times, the evolution of technique indicated that land-power,
hence Euro-Asia, received a fresh invigoration:
“A generation ago steam and the Suez canal appeared to
have increased the mobility of sea-power relatively to
land-power. Railways acted chiefly as feeders to ocean-going
commerce. But transcontinental railways are now transmuting the
conditions of land-power, and nowhere can they have such effect
as in the closed heart-land of Euro- Asia, in vast areas of
which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for
road-making. . . The Russian army in Manchuria is as significant
evidence of mobile land-power as the British army in South
Africa was of sea-power.” [7]
In the medium term, everything favored Russian hegemony:
“The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so
vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton,
fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable
that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there
develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.”
At this point came a decisive generalization, which would make
Mackinder famous:
“As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents
of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical
relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the
world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is
inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the
horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with a
network of railways?
. . . Russia replaces the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on
Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on
India, and on China, replaces the centrifugal raids of the
steppemen. In the world at large she occupies the central
strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike
on all sides and be struck from all sides, save the north. The
full development of her modern railway mobility is merely a
matter of time." [8]
And the prediction that would become so influential on international
politics in the twentieth century:
“The oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the
pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands
of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental
resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would
then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally
herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should,
therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers,
and France, Italy, Egypt, India, and Korea would become so many
bridge heads where the outside navies would support armies to
compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them
from concentrating their whole strength on fleets. . . . The
development of the vast potentialities of South America might
have a decisive influence upon the system. They might strengthen
the United States…”
Notas:
1. Halford J. Mackinder,
“The geographical pivot of History”, The
Geographical Journal, No 4, April, 2004, Vol. XXIII, pp.
421-444. [voltar]
2. “Thus the core of
Euro-Asia, although mottled with desert patches, is on the whole
a steppe-land supplying a wide-spread if often scanty pasture,
and there are not a few river-fed oases in it, but it is wholly
unpenetrated by waterways from the ocean. In other words, we
have in this immense area all the conditions for the maintenance
of a sparse, but in the aggregate considerable, population of
horse-riding and camel-riding nomads.” Op. cit. p. 429.
[voltar]
3. P. 423.
[voltar]
4. P. 427.
[voltar]
5. Id. ibid.
[voltar]
6. p. 432-433.
[voltar]
7. P. 434.
[voltar]
8. P. 435-36.
[voltar]
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