Colin Taylor

THE GEOGRAPHY TEACHER WHO TAUGHT BRITAIN TO FEAR RUSSIA How one ambitious academic’s determination to make geography matter may have helped create a century of geopolitical paranoia By John Mappin | IF Magazine There is something almost comical about the possibility that a substantial part of Britain’s enduring fear of Russia may owe its intellectual origins not to a Russian invasion, a Soviet conspiracy or some great discovery by British intelligence, but to the professional ambitions of an English geography teacher. His name was Sir Halford Mackinder. And I suspect that most of those presently advocating an increasingly dangerous confrontation with Russia have never heard of him. They should have. Because Mackinder may have done more to establish the intellectual foundations of modern British Russophobia than almost any other individual. And the extraordinary thing is that his original ambition was not necessarily to make Britain afraid of Russia. It was to make Britain take geography seriously. THE AMBITIOUS GEOGRAPHER In 1887, a young Halford Mackinder became Oxford University’s first Reader in Geography. At the time, geography occupied a comparatively modest position within the academic establishment. It was commonly regarded as a descriptive subject concerned with mountains, rivers, climates, maps and the location of foreign capitals. Mackinder had considerably greater ambitions for it. He wanted geography recognised as a serious intellectual discipline, one capable of explaining the course of history, the rise and fall of empires and the distribution of political power. He believed geography could provide a unifying framework for understanding the world. It was an intellectually ambitious undertaking, and in many respects a perfectly respectable one. But there was a difficulty. If geography was to acquire the status Mackinder believed it deserved, it needed to demonstrate that it could explain something enormously important. Preferably something upon which the fate of nations depended. And what could be more important to the British establishment of the early twentieth century than the survival of the British Empire? Mackinder found his answer in Russia. THE GREAT GEOGRAPHICAL FRIGHT In January 1904, Mackinder presented a paper to the Royal Geographical Society entitled The Geographical Pivot of History. It was an extraordinary proposition. He argued that the great Eurasian landmass, with Russia occupying much of its strategic centre, possessed geographical characteristics that could eventually enable a continental power to challenge the maritime supremacy upon which Britain’s empire depended. Britain had ships. Russia had land. And Mackinder believed that land, particularly when connected by modern railways and developed industrially, might ultimately prove more powerful than ships. The argument was elegant, memorable and wonderfully alarming. Russia’s immense territory, previously regarded in many respects as a handicap because of its distances, climate and difficulty of administration, was suddenly transformed into a potentially overwhelming strategic advantage. Mackinder had discovered a way of making geography appear central to the survival of civilisation itself. Whether he had discovered an immutable geopolitical truth was another matter entirely. But one can hardly doubt that he had succeeded in making geography sound important. THE THEORY THAT BECAME A WARNING In 1919, Mackinder developed his argument in Democratic Ideals and Reality, producing the famous declaration: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.” There it was. A formula sufficiently simple to be remembered by politicians and sufficiently ominous to alarm generals. Control Eastern Europe, and one might eventually control the world. And who occupied much of this supposedly decisive geographical territory? Russia. Mackinder’s actual concern was broader than Russia alone. He particularly feared the possibility of German industrial power combining with the resources and territory of the Eurasian interior. Nevertheless, his theory created an enduring intellectual framework in which Russia’s geography could itself be interpreted as a strategic danger. Not necessarily what Russia intended to do. Not necessarily what Russia had done. But what Russia might conceivably become capable of doing. This is the critical distinction. A geographical possibility had been elevated into a permanent strategic anxiety. And once such an anxiety becomes embedded in the thinking of an establishment, it can acquire a life entirely independent of the circumstances that originally inspired it. WHEN A THEORY BECOMES AN INHERITED FEAR It would be historically inaccurate to suggest that Mackinder invented British hostility towards Russia. Britain and Russia had already been imperial rivals for generations. The Crimean War and the Great Game in Central Asia long preceded his celebrated lecture. But Mackinder offered something different. He gave an existing political suspicion an apparently scientific justification. The rivalry no longer needed to be understood merely as a disagreement between governments, dynasties or competing imperial interests. It could be presented as a permanent consequence of geography. And geography, unlike governments, does not change after an election. This was the potentially dangerous legacy of Mackinder’s thinking. Once the geographical existence of Russia itself becomes the foundation of a strategic threat, almost any Russian government can be regarded with suspicion. Tsarist Russia. Communist Russia. Post-Communist Russia. The ideology may change. The economic system may change. The leadership may change. But the map remains. And therefore, according to the most rigid interpretation of this doctrine, so does the threat. One begins to see how a theory conceived in an Oxford academic environment might eventually contribute to a remarkably persistent form of geopolitical prejudice. THE PHANTOM IN THE FOREIGN OFFICE There is an important qualification here. Mackinder did not single-handedly write British foreign policy, and the documentary record does not establish an unbroken chain of instruction from his Oxford lectures to today’s Foreign Office. His ideas were initially more influential in some foreign strategic circles than within Britain’s own government. Nevertheless, the wider geopolitical tradition he helped establish became enormously influential during the twentieth century. American strategists revisited his arguments during the Cold War. The importance of preventing a hostile power from dominating Eurasia became a recurring theme of Western strategic thought. And the language of containment, spheres of influence, buffer states and the balance of power continues to echo the geographical assumptions Mackinder helped popularise. Consider the extraordinary persistence of the central idea. Russia is dangerous because of its size. Russia must be contained because of its geographical position. Russia must not be permitted to exercise decisive influence in Eastern Europe because such influence might eventually threaten the wider balance of power. What began as a geographical hypothesis can become, in the hands of less imaginative minds, a political reflex. One need not deny the fact of military actions, to question whether this inherited framework sometimes encourages British policymakers to interpret every disagreement with Moscow as evidence of an existential struggle. The problem arises when a strategic theory ceases to be examined and becomes an article of faith. THE PECULIAR IRRATIONALITY OF BRITISH RUSSOPHOBIA What interests me particularly is the emotional intensity with which sections of the British political and media establishment approach Russia. There appears, at times, to be a peculiar satisfaction in the prospect of confrontation. Diplomacy is treated as weakness. Understanding an adversary’s security concerns is confused with endorsing his conduct. The very suggestion that Britain and Russia might possess legitimate mutual interests is greeted in some quarters as though it were an act of disloyalty. Yet rational foreign policy requires precisely the opposite disposition. It requires the ability to distinguish between an actual threat and an imagined one. Between the intentions of a government and the geographical circumstances of its country. Between defending one’s own interests and perpetuating an inherited hostility. Above all, it requires the capacity to recognise that the security of one nation cannot be considered entirely independently of the security of others. Mackinder’s theory was developed in an age of empires, when great powers commonly assumed that their security depended upon controlling the destinies of smaller nations. We should be rather cautious about allowing the assumptions of that age to determine our thinking in a nuclear one. The existence of nuclear weapons makes the uncritical inheritance of nineteenth-century strategic rivalries particularly dangerous. The stakes are no longer simply imperial prestige or commercial advantage. They include the survival of millions of innocent human beings. THE PROFESSIONAL AMBITION THAT OUTLIVED ITS AUTHOR And here we return to the curious figure of Halford Mackinder. I do not suggest that he consciously set out to manufacture hatred of Russia. There is no sound historical basis for such an accusation. Nor can we prove that his personal desire to elevate geography was the sole or even principal motivation behind his geopolitical theory. But the connection between his academic ambitions and his intellectual achievement is undeniable. He wanted geography to matter. He developed a theory in which geography mattered enormously. And that theory helped establish a tradition of strategic thinking in which the vast territorial position of Russia was regarded as a potentially permanent challenge to Western power. The irony is considerable. A man seeking to elevate the standing of an academic discipline may have contributed to a way of thinking that helped perpetuate international suspicion long after the imperial circumstances that gave rise to it had disappeared. The geography teacher succeeded. His subject became geopolitics. And geopolitics became, for some of its practitioners, a sophisticated language in which ancient fears could be dressed as modern strategic necessities. THE MAP IS NOT THE MAN There is, however, a much more fundamental objection to this entire way of thinking. A country is not simply a coloured shape on a map. Russia is not merely a vast expanse of territory between Europe and the Pacific. It is a civilisation inhabited by human beings. Human beings with families, ambitions, affections, fears, histories and hopes not entirely unlike our own. The same, of course, is true of Ukrainians, Poles, Britons and every other people whose lives can be reduced by geopolitical theorists to questions of territory and strategic advantage. A map cannot tell us whether a particular individual desires peace. A mountain range cannot tell us whether a government is acting wisely. And the number of square miles occupied by a nation cannot establish its moral character. Geography matters. But geography is not destiny. Still less is it a sufficient reason for permanent hostility between peoples. The fundamental building block of civilisation is not the state, the empire or the geographical Heartland. It is the individual human being. And the purpose of diplomacy should be to protect human life, not sacrifice it upon the altar of an academic theory. TIME TO RETIRE THE GEOGRAPHY LESSON Perhaps the most important question we should now ask is not whether Mackinder was right in 1904. It is whether Britain has become so accustomed to viewing Russia through the assumptions of geopolitical competition that it sometimes struggles to imagine any other relationship. A century has passed. Empires have collapsed. Ideologies have risen and fallen. Technology has transformed the nature of warfare, communication and economic power. Yet the suspicion persists that the great landmass to our east must somehow represent an enduring danger simply because it exists. That is not a sufficient foundation for a rational foreign policy. Nor is it a particularly encouraging foundation for peace. The British establishment might profitably revisit the work of Sir Halford Mackinder, not to accept his conclusions unquestioningly, but to understand how profoundly its strategic vocabulary may have been shaped by ideas developed in a very different world. For there is a rather uncomfortable possibility at the heart of this story. What if some of the fear that Britain has inherited about Russia is not the product of an objective assessment of present dangers, but the intellectual afterlife of an ambitious geography teacher’s attempt to make his subject indispensable? If so, the tragedy would not be that Mackinder persuaded the world to take geography seriously. It would be that subsequent generations sometimes forgot that his theory was only a theory. And that no out of date, erroneous theory, however elegant, is worth starting a war over. May Peace and Sanity Reign 🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️ John Mappin IF Magazine @RealCandaceO @Nero @kadmitriev @realannapaulina @RealAlexJones @HarrisonHSmith @joekent16jan19 @JDVance @jimmy_dore @proud_diplomat @georgegalloway @Alice_Weidel @EvaVlaar @RupertLowe10 @SteveWitkoff @jaredkushner @OwenBenjamin