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Chapter SIX

Geopolitics and the Age of Imperialism, 1890–1932

GEOGRAPHY AND INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Geopolitics as a self-conscious and distinct subject began at the close of the nineteenth century. It would be misleading to ascribe this development to one specific cause, but international competition was clearly the key element. Crucial forces during the latter decades of the century stimulated the construction of formalized geopolitics, which, in turn, would irretrievably alter the visualization, pace and conduct of international relations. These forces can be attributed to the distinctive, but also linked, drives of Western industrialism, growing nationalism, and overseas expansion (the New Imperialism), and to the mechanical, electrochemical, and military technological leapfrogging accompanying them. This more dynamic environment encouraged and appeared to make necessary the fruition of new ideas for conducting statecraft and international relations and, notably, a move from the somewhat static approach toward regulating European affairs seen from the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815.1 Increased competition and anxiety led to a search for alliances. However, the creation of alliances, and then changes in alliance systems, brought in their wake new opportunities and, correspondingly, also a new awareness of strategic vulnerabilities. Moreover, academic and quasi-academic deterministic doctrines and polemics arising from new scientific and social science fields, most prominently social Darwinism, invigorated the push for a novel way of envisioning and using the international environment. Weaker states, such as the Netherlands, felt vulnerable in the new environment,2 and understandably so, while would-be states, such as Poland and Finland, sought to establish themselves.

Developments in printing and mapmaking, including steam presses, mechanized papermaking, and lithography, were all important in the spread and depiction of ideas. The increase in the scale of publication was linked to mass literacy, urbanization and democratization. Politics played a role, both international and domestic. In 1884, the US map publisher Rand McNally produced a map for the Democratic Party showing the wide tranches of the United States that had been given to railway corporations, with a printed accompanying text, including the statement, “We believe that the public lands ought . . . to be kept as homesteads for actual settlement.”

The ability of the major Western states to expand outside Europe without conflict between them, other than the Crimean War of 1854–1856, can lead to a failure to heed the extent to which their international relations on the global scale were intensely competitive, and were widely seen in this light. Moreover, this global competition increased toward the close of the century, and the trend was seen in this light. This increase in competition arose both because most of the world had already been divided up, either as colonies or as spheres of influence, but also as a result of the rise of new imperial powers—Germany, Italy, the United States, and Japan—to add to the expanding imperial powers earlier in the century—Britain, France and Russia. In addition, the latter group of powers was still actively expanding: Britain and France, in particular, in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Lesser imperial powers, Portugal, the Netherlands and Spain, expanded, in part in response, in order to preempt threatening moves by others.

There was a high rate of international tension. The United States and Spain fought in 1898, the year in which, in the Fashoda Crisis, Britain and France came close to conflict over Sudan; while, in southern Africa, Britain went to war with the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State in 1899, a conflict that was to lead to their annexation. Five years later Japan and Russia went to war on a far greater scale. In the 1900s, moreover, a range of disputes threatened conflict, although they did not lead to war, including between France and Germany over Morocco and between Britain and the United States over Venezuela.3

In addition, there was a situation of great flux as powers sought to advance their positions. Thus in 1912, Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, the Chief of the War Staff of the British Admiralty, in a memorandum on the Italian occupation of some of the Turkish Aegean Islands, noted of British policy:

A cardinal factor has naturally been that no strong naval power should be in effective permanent occupation of any territory or harbour east of Malta, if such harbour be capable of transformation into a fortified naval base. None can foresee the developments of material in warfare, and the occupation of the apparently most useless island should be resisted equally with the occupation of the best. The geographical situation of these islands enable the sovereign power, if enjoying the possession of a navy, to exercise a control over the Levant and Black Sea trade and to threaten our position in Egypt.4

Whether or not advanced in conceptual terms, or as a formal doctrine, geopolitics provided both a means to understand international competition and a way to urge particular policies, generally in the shape of alleged national destinies. These destinies were apparently given scientific form by the language of geopolitics. Countries that gained or sought independence asserted a distinctive political geography, while empires saw their rivalry in the same terms. In Bulgaria, under Ottoman control from the close of the fourteenth century until 1878, the first map with a Bulgarian text was published in 1843, while the first Bulgarian atlas was printed, in Vienna, in 1865. The publication of an atlas of Finland by the Finnish Geographical Society in 1899 marked a declaration of hostility toward Russian rule.

More generally, literary nationalism, notably books celebrating and uniting all that was known about one’s homeland, found a ready readership, and publishers were keen to feed the demand. In France, the old sixteenth-century idea of a Tour de France that served to unite the national territory in the public imagination was a constant theme, as in Gaston Bonnefont’s Le Voyage en zigzags de deux jeunes français en France (1889).

THEORISTS OF SPATIAL POWER: RATZEL, KJELLÉN, AND TURNER

Geopolitics as a self-conscious intellectual tradition rested on the realist theory of international relations and on the geography of states, as developed by Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), a professor of geography in Germany, and the country’s leading political scientist. He influenced a younger scholar, the Swede Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), who in 1899 actually coined and defined the term Geopolitik. The key element was an approach to state competition in which the territorialization of space was presented as an expression of conflicting political drives, and as held in tension by them. Ratzel, who was trained in the natural sciences (like Halford Mackinder) and had served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, explained international relations in the Darwinian terms of a struggle for survival, although arguing that Charles Darwin had failed to devote due attention to the issue of space. A Darwinian explanation appeared modern and relevant and a form of universal explanation that contrasted with more conventional accounts of international relations and, in particular, the apparently more mannered, more historical and more limited nature of an explanatory pattern that looked back to the Classics.

War, to Ratzel, was natural. He also saw states as organic, although accepting that such a term was a simile. Ratzel thereby largely ignored divisions within states, let alone the play of individual political and military leaders who, in practice, provide the key level for understanding geopolitical pressures. In his Anthropo-geographie (The Geography of Environmental Influences, 2 volumes, 1882 and 1891) and his Politische Geographie (1897), a systematic analysis, Ratzel stressed the close relationship of people and environment. The struggle for space was central to his Die Erde und das Leben (The Earth and Life, 1902). In this work, Ratzel deployed the concept of Lebensraum (living space) that had been devised in 1860 by the biologist Oscar Penschel in a review of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Focusing on Lage (position), Raum (space), and Raumsinn (the sense of space held by the group that dominates the state), Ratzel emphasized the role of environmental circumstances in affecting the process and progress of struggle between states. Ratzel’s Politische Geographie (1897) treated war as a normal process. Its second edition, which appeared in 1903, was entitled Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehres, und des Krieges (Political Geography, or, The Geography of the State, Traffic, and War5). Ratzel’s book was to be recommended to Hitler.

Ratzel was much engaged in German maritime and colonial expansion, supporting the development of a large fleet and the establishment of overseas bases as the means to secure Germany’s “place in the sun,” a reference to the tropical location of many colonies, notably in Africa and Oceania.6 Such a policy was highly provocative as far as other international powers were concerned.

Ratzel’s work was important for the development of geopolitics, not least because of its influence abroad. Thus, Polish geographers held Ratzel in high esteem.7 He was particularly influential on Kjellén, who held the chair of political science at Sweden’s leading university, Uppsala. Kjellén’s early work focused on the conventional treatment of the state, in terms of historical identity and constitutional character, a treatment appropriate for nation-states ruled by limited monarchies, such as Sweden. Moreover, the emphasis on historical identity and constitutional character also characterized British writers, not least because they presented Britain’s imperial position in a benign light and notably in progressive terms that looked toward colonial self-government. A similar emphasis emerged in the work of US historians of the 1870s and 1880s, such as Henry Baxter Adams. These writers traced US institutions and national character to roots in Anglo-Saxon England, the seedbed also favored by English historians.

Kjellén subsequently rethought his views in accordance with Ratzel’s emphasis on the role of geographical factors. To Kjellén, full, like many intellectuals, of fin de siècle (end of century) pessimism about the future of both Western civilization in the face of international competition and ascendant democratic populism, it was necessary to understand geopolitics in order to appreciate the true nature of national interests. Kjellén was particularly concerned about the fate of Sweden, a failing empire since defeat at the hands of Russia in 1709. Overshadowed by Russia, which, as a result of sweeping success in a series of wars, had gained Ingria and Livonia from Sweden in 1721, Karelia in 1743 and, most traumatically, Finland in 1809, Sweden was also affected by the consolidation of Germany around Prussian power and ambition, and by rising Norwegian nationalism. Indeed, Norway became independent from Sweden in 1905. Moreover, Sweden had no overseas colonies.

The fin de siècle was felt far more in Europe than in the United States, which offers another approach to the origins of formal geopolitics as, in part, a response to US power. This power, that of the world’s leading manufacturer, was newly expressed on the global scale as the United States spread its strength across the Pacific in the 1890s, and was to be driven home by sweeping and dramatic success in war with Spain in 1898.

At the same time, a particular geographical basis for US political culture had been offered on July 12, 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner delivered an address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to the American Historical Association in Chicago. Turner argued that the availability of “free land” ensured that Americans developed distinctive character traits and institutions, with individualism and democracy based on economic opportunity. The frontier was presented as a “crucible” that explained US development. The Census Bureau had itself declared the frontier closed in 1890, ending a defining period of United States history. Turner thus redefined this history from a focus on European links and the East Coast to an emphasis on the West and on the American nation.8 Indeed, Turner’s account was very much based on the idea of agency by “European” Americans. Accepting the nineteenth-century idea of a hierarchy of races and civilizations, Turner did not see Native Americans as playing a significant role in the contact zone other than as resisting the advance of civilization. Because of the Pacific and the lure of East Asia, notably the China trade, the United States was not comparable geopolitically to China, in that the turn from the ocean (the Atlantic for the United States) was not simply a turn into the interior, as it had been for China. However, that element was strongly present for US commentators. Turner’s approach was scarcely apolitical, and it was unsurprising that Turner praised Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. A prominent expansionist of the 1830s and 1840s, Benton argued for the country’s westward destiny and pressed hard for the United States to occupy the Oregon region, preempting Britain.9

In Europe in the 1890s, the strong sense of fin de siècle also produced an assumption that the new century would lead to new beginnings, and that the resulting discontinuity required new analytical concepts as well as new solutions.10 Emphasizing the value and application of scientific methods, Kjellén presented the state as taking on particular significance in terms of its existence and effectiveness as a geographical entity. To him, both existence and effectiveness rested in part on the state’s relationship with other states as geographical entities.

This approach took forward Ratzel’s stress on territorial expansion as both product and cause of a state’s success as an organic phenomenon. Indeed, to Ratzel, this union of expansion and strength, the two being crucial to the state’s existence (rather than simply controlling space itself), was expressed in terms of its pursuit of Lebensraum. Success in this pursuit would guarantee, as well as define, power, and thus permit the pursuit of great-power status. Power, in short, was cumulative, with space a crucial means and measure of power.

Kjellén provided the vocabulary and theoretical term of Geopolitik, opening the way to formal geopolitical reasoning in terms of an explicit methodology that was regarded as more rigorous and with reference to a specific literature. Kjellén saw this new-coined term as one offering a new understanding for a new age—in short an advance through classification on the existing subject of political geography. Kjellén presented Geopolitik as one of the key factors in a theory of politics and government; the others were Ekonomopolitick, Demopolitik, Sociopolitik, and Kratopolitik. The emphasis, as in other intellectual fields of the period, was on a universal law (and issue) that would provide both explanation and a key to reordering circumstances and developments. A belief in the possibility of the latter, moreover, was to help make geopolitics fashionable.

Ironically, 1899 also saw another attempt to offer a new ordering of the world, with the convening of the First Hague Peace Conference, in which 26 countries were represented. Like its sequel in 1907, this conference led to significant developments in international law. However, there was no comparable success in addressing or settling international differences.11

To Kjellén, an advance in understanding was necessary because of the pronounced flux in world affairs, one of transformative international political and economic changes, notably the rise of the United States. In explaining them (as part of his thesis, a part that was not strictly necessary), Kjellén argued that geopolitics took precedence over the other forms of politics. Such an argument represented a departure from historicist accounts of states in terms of particular constitutional, legal, diplomatic, and political legacies, rationalizations and legitimations: historicist accounts that lent themselves to cultural interpretations. Kjellén, indeed, argued that these accounts were overly narrow and drew on a particular political and intellectual strand, that of French bourgeois republicanism and, before that, eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, both of which he saw as weak.

Instead, adopting a widespread counterpoint, Kjellén pressed for a broader concept of states as organic communities endowed with biological characteristics and, therefore, with a life of their own—communities that were geographically grounded. To Kjellén, the legitimation offered in geopolitics was that of control over space, and control, moreover, in a competitive situation in which conflict was natural.

Moreover, this approach permitted Kjellén to measure states by the same criteria, as in his Die Grossmächte der Gegenwert (1914), a study of the power position of the major states. He was thereby able to put aside what he presented as subjective approaches and views such as those centered on ethical standards. His was an international order or system in which all were to be judged as one and to be understood and ranked accordingly. The world was as if isomorphic (equal at every point), and thus readily subject to international change. In his Stormakterna (The Great Powers, 1905), Kjellén urged the value of super states and, specifically, a larger Germany. At the same time, Kjellén advocated particular Swedish goals, notably the maintenance of the 1814–1905 union with Norway and the containment of Russia. Russia had destroyed Sweden’s empire in the eastern Baltic in 1709–1713, finally annexing Finland in 1809 after the third Russian conquest of the territory. Containment was to become a key concept in geopolitics, more particularly one directed against Russia.

The process of applying geopolitical perspectives to particular national interests (as well as of such interests to geopolitics) was a widespread feature of a period in which politicians, military planners, diplomats, and commentators sought to respond to escalating international problems and opportunities by creating alliance systems. These systems were designed to foster these interests and to be viable if the interests were correctly understood. Military strategies were devised accordingly.12 Thus, at one level, geopolitics was an aspect of the period of strategic concern and planning prior to World War I (1914–1918).

Geopolitics was also related to a rise in the late nineteenth century in industrial, commercial, and agrarian protectionism and related concerns. This protectionism reflected both economic nationalism and the strains and anxieties arising from global competition in a world that seemed smaller and more interdependent. Indeed, the idea that the world would be dominated by large and competitive international blocs that sought strategic and economic self-sufficiency and, thereby, security, was one that lent itself to geopolitical discussion. This idea appeared to pose a major challenge to the European states and empires as, in a changing environment, they needed to retain a competitiveness, both to outside powers and to each other. In Britain, Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903, pushed this argument particularly hard.

A Swede writing in Swedish is unlikely to make a major overseas impact, but Kjellén’s Staten som Lifsform (States as Living Organisms, 1916) was published in Leipzig in 1917 as Der Staat als Lebensform.13 Germans scarcely needed to read this in order to consider the possibility for a total geographical reordering of Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Romanov dynasty that February. This collapse was the latest version of a reordering of parts of Europe that the Germans had been pursuing from 1914. The emphasis on the now was particularly appropriate to them. German plans then for a new Mitteleuropa looked toward the later German expansionism of the 1930s.

So also for Japan. At the time of the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and Russo-Japanese (1904–1905) wars, in both of which they had been victorious, the Japanese political and military leadership of the 1890s–1900s had a specific worldview, one convinced of the social Darwinist interpretation of geopolitics. The Japanese translation of “survival of the fittest” was “jaku niku kyoo shoku,” literally “weak meat, strong eat.” Moreover, a recurring phrase about their own situation in the world was that Japan was like “a piece of meat before tigers.” This was a reference to a sense of anxiety in the face of Western expansion in the western Pacific and East Asia, and not to Japan’s own expansionism at the expense of Korea and China. This anxiety had been at the fore since the enforced opening to the West in 1854 as a result of the arrival of US warships the previous year.14

MACKINDER

Meanwhile, a global dimension had been added from London, itself a cityscape that blatantly expressed power—economic, political, and governmental15—and the global significance of which had been celebrated in Halford Mackinder’s Britain and the British Seas (1902). On January 25, 1904, at a meeting at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Mackinder (1861–1947), an influential British academic geographer who was director of the London School of Economics (1903–1908), presented a paper entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History.”16 In this, he focused on the largest landmass on Earth and advanced a notion of a Eurasian “pivot,” the basis for his view of the importance of the “heartland”: “[T]hat vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads.” The “pivot” was the key term in Mackinder’s 1904 paper, but it was central to the notion of a heartland, a notion that was developed in later work. Impregnable to attack by sea, the heartland, therefore, could not be attacked by the leading naval power, Britain and, later, the United States. Whoever controlled the “heartland,” Mackinder claimed, threatened to overrun the whole of Eurasia. He argued that the heartland of Eurasia constituted “the pivot region of the world’s politics,” past, present, and future, control over which would threaten other powers. Mackinder saw “Europe and European history . . . subordinate to Asia and Asiatic history, for European civilisation is . . . the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasions[;] . . . for a thousand years a series of horse-riding peoples emerged from Asia.”

This was a theme straight out of Edward Gibbon. However, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Gibbon argued that civilization had led to science, such that “cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier against the Tartar horse.”17 Gibbon was particularly impressed by the Westernization of Russia under Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725).

Taking conflict as normal, Mackinder also claimed that, thanks in part to technology in the shape of railroads, the nature of the military challenge in Eurasia had altered. He presented the advantage as restored to the attacker. “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 steppeman[;] . . . the camel-men and horse-men are going[,] . . . railways will take their place, and then you will be able to fling power from side to side of this area.”

The threat to Scandinavia would have echoed with Kjellén. Thanks to railways, Mackinder saw a heartland power in Eurasia that was now able to deploy its strength more effectively than the nomads had done. In this case, the emergence of “the geographical pivot of history,” as a strategic entity, was presented as a result of technological change. Mackinder was interested in the Trans-Siberian Railway, a railway begun in 1891 and nearing completion, and on its implications for the unity of the “heartland.”18 Indeed, rail links were regarded as key demonstrations and enablers of power, and in particular spatial contexts.19 Mackinder assumed that a more extensive rail network would be created in Eurasia. Today, there is similar interest. This is shown not only in new rail links—notably Chinese rail construction, for example, in Tibet—and plans for additional rail links, but also in the implications of new oil and gas pipelines, not least in the central regions of Eurasia and pipelines from these regions.

Technology, to Mackinder, thus enhanced, indeed created, geopolitical forces and axes, although he did not like the term geopolitical and did not use it. In his perspective, territorial power was, in large part, a function of technology or with the latter at any rate acting as a force-multiplier. In the “pivot” lecture, Mackinder argued that the greater powers were playing on a global board with a great ocean in which the size and arrangement of continents presented opportunities to the players, an approach that looked toward the popular later board game, Risk. Yet, arguing that human perceptions of, and reactions to, geographical realities were crucial, Mackinder was no environmental determinist.20 At the end of his 1904 lecture, Mackinder declared: “I have spoken as a geographer. The actual balance of political power at any given time is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.” The last was an organic view of the nation, one conducive to social Darwinians and to British Liberal Unionists, such as Mackinder. He stepped back from predicting which state would be successful, although he mentioned those that might dominate the “pivot.”

At the lecture, Mackinder’s interpretation was challenged by the young Leo Amery, then a Times journalist, later a Conservative cabinet minister and prominent exponent of British imperialism. Amery emphasized the onward rush of technology and the role of industrial capacity. He told the gathering that sea and rail links and power would be supplemented by flight, a remarkably prescient remark, given that the Wright Brothers had only launched their first powered flying machine the previous year, on December 17, and that balloons had earlier failed to fulfil hopes of their potential.21 Amery added that, once air power played a role, then: “a great deal of this geographical distribution must lose its importance, and the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial basis. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.”

The United States, where manned powered flight had begun 39 days earlier, was an obvious candidate for this role, and this was indeed to be the case. It was to be the air power, just as Britain had been the sea power. Thus, geopolitics was being challenged, even as it was advanced as a concept—or, rather, it was being reconceptualized. Mackinder himself failed in 1904, and again in 1919, to rise to the geopolitical challenge of assessing air power.22 From a different direction, Spencer Wilkinson, a major British commentator on military matters and military history, criticized Mackinder at the meeting for using a Mercator projection, thereby exaggerating the size of the British Empire, as well, more pertinently given the map employed in Mackinder’s article, that of the Eurasian heartland.

At a time of growing concern in British political circles about both overreach and a deteriorating global position, Mackinder’s survey was, in effect, a call for vigilance and for a united British Empire able to resist whichever of Germany or Russia dominated the “pivot area” and became the “pivot state.” British imperial moves which, in 1904, included a successful advance on Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, were made in a context of pronounced international competition. Germany and Russia appeared threats, but there were also concerns about US and French intentions. In hindsight, in his essay “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” published in 1943, Mackinder presented his account as motivated by concern about Russia but also arising from the growth of German power, notably the extent to which “the nation already possessing the greatest organized land power and occupying the central strategical position in Europe was about to add to itself sea power.”23 In practice, in terms of 1904, the notion of the “pivot” related to Russia, not Germany, and Mackinder’s 1943 gloss reflected the subsequent relations of Britain, Germany, and Russia. By 1943, Russia, now the Soviet Union, was an ally against Germany.

Looking back in 1943, Mackinder noted that “the particular events out of which sprang the idea of the heartland were the British war in South Africa and the Russian war in Manchuria,”24 each fought at a great distance from the center of power of the respective states. Russia, not Germany, was the key element in the 1904 paper, not least because Mackinder argued that “it is desirable to shift our geographical view-point from Europe, so that we may consider the Old World in its entirety.”25 The map “Continental and Arctic Drainage” that he offered was a map of much of Russia; Germany was not included. Asiatic “hordes” were a theme in the essay, and, separately and later, the expansion of Russia was presented as a counterpoint to Europe’s maritime expansion. This was presented as culminating in a situation in which “the Russian army in Manchuria is as significant evidence of mobile land-power as the British army in South Africa was of sea-power.”26 Indeed, where Russia is directly compared with Germany, it is the former that is held to be more of a challenge: “In the world at large she occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe.”27

In practice, Mackinder exaggerated Russian power. In 1914, the first general mobilization of Russia’s reservists was successful, producing 3,915,000 men in two weeks.28 However, the Russian attack on Germany was to be easily defeated that year, notably at Tannenberg, and much of Russian Poland was conquered by the Germans in 1915. While fearing encirclement by Russia and France, the Germans were motivated by racialism and by ideas of race war between Teutons and Slavs. Voicing pejorative racial stereotypes about the Russians and arguing the need to keep the Slavs in check,29 the Germans, both the military and the politicians, had consistently overestimated Russia’s military potential and underestimated that of France and Britain. There is nothing to suggest that this was deliberate, but the misperception proved very powerful. Similarly, Britain (including Mackinder) and France, each of which was equally impressed by Russia’s size and population, overestimated Russia’s military potential, as indeed Russia’s own leaders did.

With great prescience, Mackinder in 1904 raised the issue of social revolution in Russia: “Nor is it likely that any possible social revolution will alter her essential relations nor the great geographical limits of her existence.”30 While impressive, given that Russia was to be convulsed in 1905 and, more seriously, in 1917, this remark did not capture the extent to which revolution altered the international parameters within which Russia operated. In addition, Mackinder’s suggestion that the contrast between land and sea power was one between Romano-Teutons and Graeco-Slavs, a difference linked to “the source of ideals” as well as the “material conditions” of mobility, was deeply flawed, not least as an account of Europe’s development but also as a view on the existence, nature, and significance of racial–cultural traditions.31

Meanwhile, presenting a theme that was more common in Australia and the United States, Mackinder was worried about the situation in East Asia, where the Boxer Uprising of 1900 in China and the rise of Japanese power indicated challenges to Western power. In 1904, he suggested in his lecture: “Were the Chinese organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”

A different Chinese challenge to global order and the British Empire was provided by the sinister orientalism of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the creation of the British crime reporter Arthur Sarsfield, who wrote under the pseudonym of Sax Rohmer. In adventures such as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) and The Devil Doctor (1916), the geopolitics was of a global network of terror able to attack the British Empire at its heart in London. This was an account that led to a major theme in the geopolitics of imaginative fiction.32 More generally, Mackinder, both in his 1904 lecture and in other works, offered accounts that gave interpretative weight to growing interest in geography among the British public. This interest was shown in the increase in maps in newspapers.

Mackinder’s concern about the “pivot,” more specifically Russia, offered a parallel to the views of Kjellén. The geopolitical dimension looked toward later anxieties about developments in the “heartland,” helping to give a measure of consistency and coherence. Looked at differently, this consistency in part reflected the extent to which new problems were shoehorned into existing categories and concepts. For example, Japan’s role in Western ideas about the containment of Russia, later the Soviet Union, was to be transferred to an understanding of Japan as playing a key part in the containment of China. This shoehorning had, and has, its weaknesses.

To respond to the crisis of British power, Mackinder turned to protectionism and social reform and to the Dominion status of the former settlement colonies—Australia, Canada and New Zealand: “The whole course of future history depends on whether the Old Britain besides the Narrow Seas have enough of virility and imagination to withstand the challenge of her naval supremacy, until such time as the daughter nations shall have grown to maturity, and the British Navy shall have expanded into the Navy of the Britains.”33

Mackinder, indeed, was an advocate of imperial federation. In his unsuccessful 1900 election campaign for Parliament, he pressed the case for the empire as a league of democracies with a common defense policy. His was a federated empire characterized by equality among nationalities, the diffusion of manufacturing activity beyond the United Kingdom and a commonwealth in which Muslims were not thought of as pagans. In a 1907 essay “On Thinking Imperially,” Mackinder advocated the creation of a multicultural empire.34 In 1908, he went to Canada to deliver lectures in favor of imperial unity.

The theme of imperial cooperation in a competitive world was very much that of Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914). A former manufacturer who entered politics as a Liberal, Chamberlain was a keen exponent of imperial expansion and formally broke with the Liberals over the Irish Home Rule issue in 1886, becoming, instead, a Liberal Unionist. Allying with the Conservatives, Chamberlain subsequently became colonial secretary (1895–1903). As such, he pressed for the development of what he termed Britain’s “imperial estates” and for expansion in South Africa. In the 1900s, Chamberlain campaigned for imperial preference by means of tariff reform, an imperial protectionism that, however, did not find favor with the electorate, which, instead, voted Liberal in 1906 and twice in 1910. A supporter of an imperial tariff system, Mackinder was adopting a Liberal Unionist position when he argued in his 1904 lecture that the world was now a “closed political system” where, due to changed opportunities, statesmen would have to divert their attention “from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency.”35

Mackinder’s was a geography and geopolitics of challenge and threat, one that gave depth to, but otherwise reflected, much of the contemporary writing about Britain’s position. Although he disliked the words geopolitics and geopolitician, and wrote extensively and successfully on geographical topics, Mackinder is generally considered the leading British geopolitician.36 Geopolitics as an analytical approach was clearly not incompatible with the definition of geography he offered in 1904: “It answers two questions. It answers the question Where? and it then proceeds to answer the question Why there?”37 Mackinder repeatedly pressed the pedagogic case for geography, seeing it as the interaction of science and the environment and as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences, as well as a support for British imperialism. From 1913 to 1943, he was chairman of the Geographical Association.38

The son of a provincial doctor who had studied medical geography and sought to relate diseases to environmental conditions, Mackinder had been appointed reader in Geography at Oxford in 1887 becoming, as well: principal of Oxford’s extension college at Reading (1892); head, at Oxford, of Britain’s first university geography department (1899); and the second director (1903–1908) of the London School of Economics (LSE). Resigning from Reading in 1903, he combined his Oxford and London School of Economics commitments until 1905 when he focused alone on the latter. There, in 1907, he was responsible, alongside Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, for instituting a “class for the administrative training of army officers,” the students of which primarily consisted of army logistics officers. The focus was on efficiency and Mackinder was the key figure in getting the syllabus organized. As an aspect of the course, geography was approached in part as a theatre of military operations and with an emphasis on India, and in part with a concern with geostrategy, notably the defense of Britain by means of the command of the sea.39

Mackinder was certainly far more influential and engaged than most academics. Having fought Warwick unsuccessfully as the Liberal Imperial candidate in the “Khaki election” of 1900 during the Boer War, an election that was a Conservative triumph, Mackinder was persuaded by Amery to join the Conservatives in 1903, and, in 1908, Amery and Alfred, Viscount Milner, a keen advocate for imperial expansion, secured the money to enable Mackinder to resign from the LSE and focus on politics. After fighting a bye-election unsuccessfully in 1909, he was successful in the 1910 general election very narrowly (being reelected in the second election that year) and was a Conservative MP until 1922, at a time when the party supported imperial protectionism. The Conservatives entered a coalition government in 1915 as a result of World War I, and this government continued until 1922. (Kjellén, too, was a member of his country’s parliament, serving as a Swedish MP for six years.) As a British MP, Mackinder made perceptive remarks deploying geopolitical arguments, for example, on the future of Ireland.40 During World War I, he helped military recruitment in Scotland. Mackinder’s roles included British High Commissioner to South Russia in 1919–1920, during the British intervention in the Russian Civil War, and chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee in 1920–1945, a position that revealed the difficulties in imperial cooperation, but also the possibility of seeking such cooperation. Mackinder argued that the empire needed good maritime communications. He also chaired the Imperial Economic Committee in 1925–1931.

Mackinder’s views and roles were affected by the strains in Britain’s imperial position and, subsequently, by World War I. This war did not see the geopolitics anticipated by Mackinder, in that Britain allied with the heartland power (Russia) against another that was more on the periphery (Germany). Looked at differently, Russia and Germany competed for control of the heartland, while, at the same time, as Mackinder noted, Germany also bid for naval success as an Atlantic power. At the same time, geopolitical drives can appear not only as explanations of policy, but also as abstractions that do not capture serious differences over policy. For example, once World War I had begun, particular German lobbies had their own goals. Naval commanders were keen on obtaining bases on the coast of Belgium and, if possible, France.41 Indeed, Tirpitz, the administrative head of the navy and a bitter opponent of Britain, suggested in November 1914 to the head of the German general staff that Germany focus on the Western Front and pursue a separate peace with Russia on the basis of prewar territorial boundaries. There was no dynamic behind such a proposal because Germany had an interest in territorial gains, interest encouraged by military success. Meanwhile, Bethmann-Hollweg, the German chancellor, had, on September 9, 1914, announced war aims that included territorial gains, notably the Longway-Briey iron ore basin from France, dominance of Belgium, and colonial gains in Africa. By March 1918, military success against Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution the previous autumn led Germany to demand and obtain vast tracts of territory as part of its peace treaty with Russia. In contrast, the opposition Social Democrats were to call for a peace without annexations or indemnities.

Other states, such as Italy, also produced rationalizations of their territorial claims, generally in terms of historical and ethnic considerations. The Bulgarians in their Historical, Ethnographical and Political Frontiers, 679–1917 (1917), an atlas produced by the Bulgarian envoy in Berlin and published in December 1917 in English, German, French, and Bulgarian, declared that peace in the Balkans was only possible if frontiers were settled on principles “that be as natural as possible; that they enclose the respective nations, with their natural constitutive parts; that they safeguard the political independence of those nations; that they correspond to their historical traditions and do not conflict with the right of each nation to self-government.”42

Mackinder was not alone among British commentators of the period in being affected, both by the major strains in Britain’s imperial position and by World War I. This was true, for example, of J. A. (John Atkinson) Hobson, the author of The Physiology of Industry (1889), a critique of laissez-faire economics, and of Imperialism: A Study (1902). In the latter, Hobson ascribed the formative role to the tendency of these economies to overproduce capital and goods. His work served as inspiration for Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), a work that was to be a bible for the Soviets in international relations. Whereas Mackinder was important in the development of Conservative thought on international relations, Hobson was involved in the New Liberalism of the same decade. Whereas Mackinder came to favor imperial protection, Hobson moved away from this remedy. Indeed, Hobson argued against imperialism and, instead, in favor of a peaceful democracy seeking to widen social prosperity. He also came to favor an internationalism linked to free trade. In his Democracy after the War (1917), Hobson returned to his critique of imperialism and protectionism as anti-democratic and anti-liberal.43 Thus, what for Chamberlain and Mackinder were geopolitical building blocks and clear policies were far more problematic to some other commentators.

During Mackinder’s career, geographers continued to serve the cause of British imperialism, not least because World War I added extensive German and Ottoman possessions to the British Empire, while the pressure for the economic development of existing colonies, especially by improving communications, gathered pace. These were not the limit of British interests. For example, an Imperial Conference that met in 1926 decided to assert British and Dominion title to parts of Antarctica. To support these claims, the Committee on British Policy in the Antarctic commissioned a revision of the Hydrographic Office’s South Polar Chart, one that emphasized the role of British explorers.

Mackinder himself responded to the European situation at the close of the World War I—not least the German success against Russia in 1917–1918, and Russia’s move to Communism in 1917—by proposing a new order in Eastern Europe, namely a group of “buffer states” backed by Britain and France. This was in order to restrain both Germany and Russia. Already, in 1904, he had warned: “If Germany were to ally herself with Russia,” as was threatened when the two signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, there would be the danger of “the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.”44 Karl Haushofer, the key German geopolitician, was to be greatly influenced by this argument. In January 1918, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, had suggested that the Allies help anti-Bolshevik movements in Russia that “might do something to prevent Russia from falling immediately and completely under the control of Germany . . . while the war continues[;] a Germanized Russia would provide a source of supply which would go far to neutralize the effects of the Allied blockade. When the war is over, a Germanized Russia would be a peril to the World.”45

In many respects, Mackinder’s proposal for buffer states was a rationale of Anglo-French policy. This was the case of the postwar settlement in Eastern Europe, in particular the support for the creation of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the expansion of Romania, Greece, and Serbia. It was also the case for intervention in the Russian Civil War, which indeed personally involved Mackinder in 1919–1920. Moreover, the Anglo-French military and political support in 1919–1920 for the new states resisting Russian expansionism, notably the Baltic Republics, Finland and Poland, was a key aspect of the new order advocated by Mackinder. He was convinced of the threat posed by Communist expansion. As high commissioner in South Russia, Mackinder pressed the British cabinet in January 1920 on the danger of “a new Russian Czardom of the Proletariat” and of “Bolshevism sweeping forward like a prairie fire” toward India and “lower Asia.”46 There was a general tendency to see anti-imperial rebellions in the British Empire as part of a global Communist conspiracy that had to be stopped. Indeed, that was precisely the intention of the Soviet Comintern. Mackinder was knighted in 1920.

Although a buffer was created, the intervention in the Russian Civil War failed. In large part, this failure was because of the weaknesses of the anti-Communist “White” forces in Russia, notably their internal divisions and their political and strategic mismanagement. The latter provides an insight into the significance of the internal dimensions of the military blocs that attract geopolitical attention. Thus, the British general staff report of July 22, 1919, was pessimistic about the prospect for Anton Denikin, the White commander in the South: “Unless he can offer to the wretched inhabitants of the liberated districts . . . conditions of existence better than those which they suffered under the Bolshevik [Communist] regime, he will in the course of time be faced with revolt and hostility in his rear just at the time when the Bolsheviks will be concentrating large numbers of troops for a counter-offensive.”47

British officers on the ground were very depressed by the corruption, weakness, and attitudes of the White camp.48 Indeed, the collapse of the Whites helped make foreign intervention redundant. Although pressed by Winston Churchill, the secretary for war, as well as by Mackinder, this intervention faced the legacy of World War I in the shape of financial burdens and a widespread wish for demobilization. The latter was an aspect of the degree to which resources do not exist in the abstract. Moreover, Britain had a range of commitments, including in Ireland, Iraq, and Egypt. The British withdrawal from intervention in the Russian Civil War culminated when the Georgian port of Batumi on the Black Sea, where the British had landed troops in late 1918, was evacuated in July 1920. This was the final abandonment of Mackinder’s call for the British to hold the rail line from there to Baku on the Caspian, a position presented as supporting British interests in Persia (Iran) as well as being inherently significant due to the line’s major role in oil extraction.

The British withdrawal was followed by a Soviet advance. By February 1921, Soviet forces had taken over Azerbaijan, Armenia and, lastly, Georgia. The fate of the Caucasus underlined some of the problems with facile explanations of geopolitical pressures and factors. In particular, the role emerges of second-rank powers whose efforts should not be readily incorporated into theories of binary rivalry. In this case, Turkish opposition to Britain was a key element. Focusing on the geopolitics of a global empire, the British saw the states in the Caucasus as a buffer for their interests in Iraq, Persia (Iran), and India; but, to weaken Britain and to win Soviet assistance, including arms, the Turkish nationalists, under Kemal Atatürk, were willing to attack Armenia, while the strong Turkish presence in Azerbaijan did not resist the Soviet invasion. The Turks also wanted to gain Batumi, which they failed to do.

Mackinder’s work at this juncture was not only directed against the Soviet Union. It was also intended as a response to the internationalism offered by proponents of the League of Nations, an internationalism that looked back to The Hague peace conferences in 1899 and 1907. Mackinder felt that Wilsonianism, the democratic internationalism, ideas, and policies associated with Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, was naïve. He argued that it was necessary for commentators to distinguish between reality, in the shape of geopolitical realities, and democratic ideals, a theme of his Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). Mackinder claimed that it was important to understand the fundamental geographical inequalities of nations. This alleged tension between reality and idealism was to be one of the binary divides that geopoliticians regarded as a defining characteristic of the situation and a rationale for their subject.

The Soviet leader, Lenin, the leading opponent of Mackinder’s prospectus for Eurasia, adopted a very different geopolitical approach, notably in the second edition of his Imperialism, which was published in 1918. Lenin developed a form of “reverse heartland” thesis, insofar as the heartland was reconceptualized and located far further west in Eurasia, and this heartland was presented as vulnerable from the periphery. Arguing that colonial peoples can rebel against the Western colonial powers, Lenin’s thesis presented the colonial areas, notably in Asia, as a soft underbelly of the West. The Soviet Union was seen as a key actor, able through proper agitation to turn these areas, particularly India and China, against the imperialists, as indeed it sought to do.

NAVALISM

Geopolitical discussion responded to strategic issues and notions, and to related spatial awareness and assumptions. Thus, the geopolitics of navalism advanced in influential works such as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US naval commander and lecturer at the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, can be seen as responding not only to the potential of naval power but also to the immensity of the oceans, notably as depicted in the Mercator projection. At the same time, Mahan’s call for the United States to develop its naval strength as a strategic tool allowed for the specific maritime requirements of particular states as a consequence of their geographical position and their strength vis-à-vis the other naval powers. In short, there was a two-way relationship between state and system, a relationship in which geopolitics seemed to have particular weight. In his book, Mahan listed and then discussed, “the principal conditions affecting the sea power of nations.” They were: “I. Geographical Position. II. Physical Conformation, including, as connected therewith, natural productions and climate. III. Extent of Territory. IV. Number of Population. V. Character of the People. VI. Character of the Government, including therein the national institutions.”49 Mahan’s theories reflected US economic development and encouraged the United States to play a role in international relations. Powerful East Coast industrial and commercial interests backed navalism.50

In some respects, the geopolitics of navalism described a system in which major differences in strategic culture and tasking affected powers that had access to and used similar weaponry, a situation that was to be more generally true of geopolitical writings. Thus, Britain had to protect maritime routes that provided her with food, raw materials and links to export markets, a case argued by navalist interests funded by the City of London, for example, the Navy League.51 In contrast, naval challengers to Britain, such as France, where the thinkers of the Jeune École were active in the 1880s, sought a doctrine, force structure, strategy, and operational practice that could contest the British maritime routes. Navalists, in France and elsewhere, argued that an appropriate force structure would enable them to change power relations.52

Mahan was influenced by the German historian, Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who, in his Römische Geschichte (History of Rome, 1843–1846, English translation, 1862–1866), presented Roman naval power as playing a crucial role against Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE). Reading this in Lima in 1884, while on naval duty protecting US interests in Peru, Mahan was struck by “how different things might have been could Hannibal have invaded Italy by sea . . . instead of by the long land route, or could he, after arrival, have been in free communication [with Carthage].”53 This was a reasonable observation, one made more pertinent by the fact that Rome’s maritime achievement against Carthage in the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) was far from inevitable. Indeed, unlike Carthage, Rome did not have a background as a naval power, and had to create the relevant strength and infrastructure.

Building on the relationship between geopolitical arguments and particular political requirements, navalism as a thesis for strategic strength was linked to the particular nature of British and US societies. Neither had a large army nor employed conscription. This situation was a reflection of political norms that favored freedom and liberty (at least for their citizens as opposed to their imperial subjects, for example, in India and the Philippines respectively), over the authoritarian political cultures of states with large armies, such as Germany and Russia in the late nineteenth century.

For Britain, as for the United States, the key question was how best to pursue a strategy that made optimal use of its resources without requiring a change in strategic culture and, as a consequence, political culture. Like Germany, the United States wished to use its navy to become a great oceanic power as well as a major continental force; and Britain wished to do so to prevent losing this status. Each therefore required a geopolitical prospectus that made sense of this position or could limit challenges to it. Yet, that suggests an instrumentalism for which direct evidence is scanty. Moreover, in both Britain and the United States, as in France, Germany, Russia, and Japan, there was a pronounced tension between maritime and territorial, navy and army, priorities. Discussion of national interest and geopolitics has to be seen, at least in part, in terms of this tension.

This point underlines the controversial nature of geopolitical works, whether they are explicitly geopolitical or, more commonly, implicitly so. Thus, Mahan sought naval power for the United States to effect his view of the national destiny of international power expressed through naval strength. Similarly, Mackinder, in the early 1900s, came to support the new imperialism of the Liberal Unionists, such as Joseph Chamberlain, as he saw territorial control over land as a key to economic strength. The combination of economics, strategy, and geopolitics appeared to offer coherence for both views. Growing overseas trade underlined the importance of sea power, not least with its capacity to protect or to blockade and, thus, interrupt this trade. On the other hand, irrespective of their oceanic profiles and strength, the industrialization and political coherence of large land powers—the United States, Germany, and Russia—appeared to challenge the value of sea power,54 or to give it a new direction and energy, by linking this naval strength to continental ambitions and by basing their strengths on continental (land) resources. This was the case whether these states were part of the Eurasian heartland or not. Mackinder made reference to Mahan in his 1904 paper.

In his Britain and the British Seas (1902), Mackinder argued forcefully that the development of rail technology and systems altered the paradigm of economic potential away from maritime power. This view seemed borne out by the economic growth of the United States and Germany, both of which benefited greatly from the impact of rail. Mackinder told his audience at the Royal Geographical Society in 1904 that an international system based on sea power, which he termed the Columbian epoch,55 was coming to an end as a result of the reassertion of land power made possible by the railway. He argued that “a generation ago steam and the Suez Canal appeared to have increased the mobility of sea-power relatively to land-power,” but “trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power.”56

Alongside the technology of transport came the importance of communications, notably telegraphy and the advent of radio.57 These technologies were important to military command and control, as well as to imperial governance and economic activity, especially maritime trade. The geopolitics of the communication routes were strategic in intent; although the costs stemming from the specifications arising from that rationale considerably affected their profitability. The strategic nature of these routes was seen in hostile British action against German radio posts and submarine cables immediately after the outbreak of World War I in 1914.58 Radio made it possible to direct naval units at sea.

ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM

More generally, the development of geopolitics reflected not only the impact of strategic issues, but also the environmental determinism that was so influential from the 1890s. Although not all geographers accepted the idea of such determinism, geography was a central aspect of an intellectual world that linked humans and the physical environment and helped explain these linkages. Environmentalism played a crucial role in the organic theories of the country, nation and state, and in the treatment of the culture of particular peoples and countries as defined by the integration and interaction of nature and society. Thus, distribution maps played an increasing role in scientific investigation and exposition, whether with the science of mankind or with biological and physical sciences.59 Furthermore, the very notion of environmental determinism, or at least its influence, politicized the physical environment and geographical relationships because this environment and these relationships were seen as directly affecting the strength and policies of states.

Environmental causation was particularly attractive to geographers because it emphasized their importance: they apparently could best explain the present and suggest the future. Advances in map production and in the printing of color, in particular, made it easier both to include more physical details, such as color-coded contour zones—for example, brown for 1000–2000 feet—and to juxtapose such details against those of states and societies. The use of color increased the density and complexity of information that could be conveyed; and this made the role of the map as an explanatory device easier and clearer. In addition, environmental causation made geographers appear better interpreters of the past than historians, providing a rationale for historical geography, as well as facilitating the understanding of change by archaeologists.

The rise of environmentalism looked back to eighteenth-century notions of the role of geography in culture and society,60 and to nineteenth-century interest in nationalism and evolution. These concepts combined to suggest an agenda of political history—domestic and international—in which environmentally molded nation-states played a crucial role, displacing the dynastic interests of ruling houses in favor of what were styled national interests. In the eighteenth century, the thesis that objective national interests existed had developed rapidly. In large part, this thesis was a product of the Enlightenment proposition that humans live in a universe governed by natural laws that proclaim, among other things, the existence of “nations.” These were defined through a mixture of geography, language, culture, physical features, even traits of personality. The “interests of nations,” essentially, were to be understood in terms of protecting their geographical, cultural, and physical integrity (i.e., security).

Such ideas became more prominent in the nineteenth century as states were increasingly defined in nationalist terms. This was a process that led to greater interest in ethnic and environmental factors. It was environmental influence that apparently could best explain the differing political trajectories of various ethnic groups, the processes by which they had become nations and states with particular characteristics and interests. Far from being an alternative to nationalism, environmentalism could make these processes appear natural, necessary and inevitable. In terms of the relations between nations, this situation led to an emphasis on “natural frontiers,” a theme found in the writings of the geopolitical school associated with Ratzel and his disciples. In turn, it was necessary to find and explain these frontiers.

Trained mostly in the natural sciences, nineteenth-century geographers assumed a close relationship between humanity and the biophysical environment. They sought to probe this relationship in terms of the environmental control that they took for granted. Mackinder, who took a degree in history after a first one in animal morphology, wrote in his 1887 paper, “The Scope and Methods of Geography,” of “an interaction between man and environment.” Environmentalism was an attractive method for the geographers and historians of successful and expanding states,61 such as Germany and the United States. The assessment of much of the world, notably the tropics, as a different, indeed diseased and/or degenerate, other62 helped justify a place in the sun for these states, adding a physical dimension to notions of “manifest destiny” about ineluctable expansionism. Environmentalism also played a crucial role in the organic theory of the state and in the treatment of culture as defined by the integration of nature and society.

Thus, in the United States, there was a treatment of the country’s territorial expansion that could be made to seem inevitable, and thus necessary—an academic counterpart to providential notions of American “Manifest Destiny.” Key works included not only Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), but also Albert Brigham’s Geographic Influences in American History (1902) and two books by Ellen Churchill Semple, a geographer at the University of Chicago: American History and its Geographic Conditions (1903) and Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (1911). Semple had studied under Ratzel in Leipzig in 1891–1892 and 1895. She popularized his idea of anthropogeography, the geography of environmental influences. In contrast to the more cautious and less determinist Brigham, Semple argued the relationship between the physical environment and historical movements.63

The political implications of such works were readily apparent. Thus, Semple claimed that Africa was inert. She attributed this in part to what she discerned as the lack of the fructifying variety of geographical conditions, a totally erroneous view. Moreover, the inevitable triumph of the “civilized” was a frequent theme, as with the Oxford geographer, Hereford George (1838–1910), author of Relations of Geography and History (1901).64 This was an influential book, which appeared in new editions in 1903, 1907, 1910 and 1924, the last of which was reprinted in 1930, an instance of prewar ideas extending into the interwar period. George stressed the role of geographical influences, not least on strategy, as in the British campaign in Sudan in 1898 and in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). George also argued that human action could affect the environment, an emphasis that was different from that of Semple and, instead, accorded more with that of Mackinder. Linking geography, war, and strategy, George was also the president of the Kriegspiel (War Games) Club at Oxford, as well as the author of Battles of English History (1895) and Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (1899). Mackinder was a member of the Kriegspiel Club.

The analytical tension over the placing of emphasis in this relationship was an important theme in human geography in the early twentieth century, and one that coincided with the rise of geopolitics as a distinctive discourse. In part, discussion by geographers underlined the idea of inevitable, clear-cut interests for particular states flowing from their geographical nature, a view conducive to a somewhat deterministic geopolitics. However, in addition, geographers’ discussions of the autonomous part of human action undercut this idea and also left much role for intellectual assessment of these interests and the related political debate and contention. Thus, geopolitics, differently understood as involving the debate over national interests, appeared more necessary.

A shift of emphasis, from the environment as a determining force and toward its interaction with human society was particularly associated with Paul Vidal de la Blache (1843–1918). Trained as a historian, Vidal de la Blache played a major role in the development of French geography and was appointed to the chair of geography at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1899. Such a description can serve to depoliticize the development of geography, both in this instance and more generally. In the case of Vidal de la Blache, it was also significant that the chair of history and geography to which he was earlier appointed in Nancy in 1872 was a product of German success in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The chair had originally been a chair of history at Strasbourg, but Strasbourg had been annexed by Germany as a result of the war. Nancy was in the part of Lorraine that remained French and was close to the new German border. In 1917, when France was fighting to regain Alsace-Lorraine, Vidal de la Blache published France de l’est (Lorraine-Alsace), a study of the region.65 This was an academic variant of the map of France displayed in French schoolrooms in which Alsace-Lorraine was shown colored in black.

Geographical and historical studies were closely associated in France, a key unlocking of the potential for geopolitics. Indeed, until 1942, the agrégation, the major competitive examination for admission to teaching posts in French universities and high schools, entailed a joint examination in history and geography. As a result, the two subjects were each far more open to the influence of the other than in Britain or the United States, although the resulting focus in France was largely on particular regions of the country itself.

Publishing his Tableau de la géographie de la France (1903) as the first volume of a history of the country, Vidal de la Blache argued that the environment created a context for human development rather than determining that development. The environment thus set the parameters for sociocultural developments, rather than being the central issue in history. The emphasis was therefore shifted back to humanity and to the varieties of human activity, to cultural geography, and to the complexities of nation building.66 Vidal de la Blache also argued that political geography had to be seen as an aspect of human geography as a whole.

Vidal de la Blache’s work was taken up by another French geographer, Lucien Febvre (1878–1956). Opposed to determinism and the work of Ratzel, who had been influential in France,67 Febvre was suspicious of the use of the notion of influences. Instead, he preferred the idea of an interaction between man and environment. In an argument with instructive implications for geopolitical writing, Febvre directed attention to the problematic nature of the sources of environmental determinism, sources that were all too often presented in simplistic terms, referring, in contrast, for example, to the “complexity of the idea of climate.” Although not published until after World War I, Febvre conceived of his critique in 1912–1913. It can therefore be placed alongside US criticism of Ratzelian notions, most obviously those notions expounded by Ellen Churchill Semple.68 In opposition to determinism, Febvre advanced what he termed “possibilisme.”

Febvre also directed attention to the study of human regions. This approach was geographical, but implicitly challenged the geopolitical emphasis on imperial nation-states—states that dominated the regions of the metropole as well as imperial possessions. Febvre argued that states were man-made, whereas, he claimed, the sole geopolitical entities that were “givens” were natural regions. These regions, he claimed, had a human as well as a physical character. According to Febvre, states could be remade, or could be subsumed, by civilizations based on these regions. Rhenish civilization, which Febvre presented as spanning France and Germany, was an example.69 This argument looked toward the later idea that the one-time Lotharingia, the Carolingian “Middle Kingdom” of the ninth century, was the heartland of the European Economic Community, the basis of the European Union.

To Febvre, distinctive genres de vie existed in human regions, which were specific and distinct physical units. He argued that study of them became the obvious way to understand the relationship between humans and environment. A study at the regional level offered the possibility of a more detailed assessment of the relationship and directed attention to human activity. According to Febvre, although the physical geography of the French regions was far from uniform, the differences between them—for example, in climate—were not sufficient to explain regional variations in human geography. This approach encouraged an emphasis on the consequences of human action and, thus, history. More generally, the path-breaking Annales school of French historians, established in 1929, among whom Febvre was prominent, deliberately set out to fuse history and geography. They stressed regional characteristics that gave places an identity that was historical as well as geographical. However, reacting against conventional political history, the Annales school devoted little attention to geopolitics, and certainly not at the national and political levels. They disaggregated states, an approach that was very different to the contemporary approach to political geography in Germany where the emphasis was on the state as a unit.70 Geopolitics as theme and doctrine was actively pursued in Germany, as it was not by the Annales school. At the same time, geopolitical ideas were very important in the French consideration of empire, and notably of the relationship between the metropole and the colonies.

GEOPOLITICAL CONTINUITY?

It would be very convenient to play forward from the start of the twentieth century to the present day, fitting the major elements of geopolitics and the analysis of the subject throughout the intervening period into the theories and arguments advanced at the time. This is an echo of the tendency in our time to discuss present-day crises—notably over the East and South China Seas and Ukraine—with reference to the background of World War I which, conveniently for commentators, had broken out a century earlier. In the early 1940s, Nicholas Spykman, indeed, used the term “rimland,” taking over Mackinder’s “Inner Crescent” (albeit with significant geographical differences). Moreover, the heartland–rimland contrast provided (and provides) a convenient approach to consider not only the two world wars but also the Cold War. All three can be seen in terms of a struggle between Russia/Soviet Union and Germany/NATO to dominate the Eurasian heartland, and the consequent pressure by Russia/Soviet Union on the rimland. Mackinder’s work was frequently cited, both during the Cold War and thereafter.71

The links were broader-ranging and sometimes more specific. For example, during the Cold War, British strategic thinking, which consciously owed much to Mackinder’s ideas, discerned a tension between heartland and rimland, and thus saw the stability of South Asia as closely linked with that of the Indian Ocean, where Britain was the leading naval power until the decision in the 1960s to abandon the “East of Suez” policy came to fruition in the 1970s. China’s easy victory over India in their short border war of 1962 could be understood in this context, as could the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent Soviet military presence there until 1989. Each was represented as an expansion by the heartland and as a threat to Western interests with major strategic, geopolitical, and resource consequences. Thus, British commitment to the region, specifically in a naval role, could appear necessary, as could efforts to persuade the United States to support or take on Britain’s role.

Looking to the future, the combination of a weak heartland (meaning a Soviet Union shrunk to Russia) with a rising China, has been seen as providing a new geopolitical situation.72 With its emphasis on long-term strategic issues based on geographical considerations, the heartland–rimland analysis employed geopolitics and apparently demonstrated its continued applicability. However, there are serious problems with the applicability of that approach. These include its repeated tendency to underrate the specificity of particular conjunctures, and the contingencies of episodes. There is also the difficulty posed by the relatively limited conceptual and methodological armory of the classical geopolitician, and thus the frequent recurrence of particular concepts.

Instead of emphasizing continuity, however, it is as pertinent to follow Amery’s intervention after Mackinder’s 1904 lecture, and to note fundamental discontinuities in context. These discontinuities can be traced to a number of pressures. Technology provides an important context and a factor for transformative change. The rise, first, of air power and then of the use of space have both proved highly significant over the last century, in terms not only of weapons technology and power projection, but also for assumptions about power and geopolitics. As a challenge to geopolitical continuity, there were key shifts stemming from major changes in public culture. These included: structural factors, notably the rise of democratization, and ideological ones. The latter looked toward Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” (see chapter 9), although requiring a more sophisticated approach than found in that work.

These changes, whether structural or ideological, were downplayed in the classic accounts of geopolitics, as those accounts subordinated everything to the spatial character and interests of the state, understood in terms of conventional power politics and, indeed, as Kjellén did, put the state as an entity above its population. Without neglecting the role of this character and the interests of states, a different geopolitics was offered by the changes in public culture, their consequences and the extent to which states followed different trajectories. This process had already been prefigured in the rise of public politics in selected countries in the West since the late eighteenth century, notably in Britain, the United States and France.73

The need to consider wider perspectives in geopolitics and related fields was indicated, from a totally different direction, by the limitations of strategy as generally conceived in the early twentieth century. In the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the development of general staffs on the model of that of Prussia/Germany encouraged a process of continuous military planning and preparation that adopted a view of geography, physical and human, determined by military exigencies, as well as placing new demands on cartographers. Specifically, aside from planning for war, the regular summer maneuvers that armies undertook to maintain their fighting capacity created a need for maps that integrated topography and transport routes. Yet, this heavy staff emphasis on operational factors also proved to be a key instance of the way in which militaries lost sight of the need to relate planned operations to wider issues of strategic viability, not least the relationship between output (success in operational terms) and outcome (persuading the defeated to accept the victors’ views). The latter brought up aspects of human society that had been underplayed in the instrumentalist perspectives of military planning.

The resulting failure was very much to be demonstrated with German war-making during 1914, because proficiency in moving units and whole armies did not equate with an understanding of the wider political context of the war. Geopolitical discussion needed (and needs) to take account of this context. In the case of the Germans, there was the mistaken assumption that events, through effective planning, could be plotted out and their consequences anticipated, leading to an assured outcome.74 This problem was to recur in 1917 when the Germans embarked for the second time on unrestricted submarine warfare. There was a failure to gauge both the military and political consequences, notably the difficulties of mounting an effective blockade of Britain and of counteracting US entry into the war.

At the same time, alongside the weaknesses of classical geopolitical writing, it is instructive repeatedly to note the discussions of power politics in Eurasia that made, and make, no explicit reference to geopolitical writers but that, nevertheless, employed and employ geopolitical concepts. For an example of such a discussion, Alfred Rieber, in offering in 2007 a borderland perspective on the origins of the Cold War, saw the latter as “a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires . . . began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures.” This argument was related to the social dimension offered by the interaction between conquered borderland populations and imperial authorities.75 At one level, such arguments indicated the centrality of geopolitical analysis; as well as the limitations arising from a reluctance to discuss new perspectives in terms of this geopolitical literature.76 Yet, this issue also highlights the failure of much of this geopolitical literature to advance with reference to such new perspectives.

 

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