The British geographer Halford J. Mackinder developed two different concepts of a dystopian new global order. The first, developed in 1904 and known as the pivot area concept, was adopted by German geopolitician Karl Haushofer in the 1920s. The second, developed in 1919, was named the heartland theory and was adopted in Great Britain and the USA. Haushofer reversed the dystopian vision of the pivot area concept into a utopian concept for German world power. Due to Haushofer's adaptation, interest in Mackinder's theories rose in the USA in the 1940s. Within the process of adaptation in the USA, both concepts were intertwined, resulting in the perception of the two as a monolithic bloc. Through this multi-layered process of intercontinental reception and adaptation in Germany and the USA, the term “heartland” became a generic spatial denomination detached from the geographical region it originally prescribed, integrable with various geopolitical concepts as the centre of an imagined world order. The reduction of complexity of the theory through the translation of text into maps led to its popularization among the US public during the 1940s and 1950s. Mackinder himself laid out the flexibility of the theory's interpretive possibilities by reflexively revising the theory and adapting it to the history of events over the course of the first half of the 20th century itself. In consequence, the generic spatial denomination “heartland” and the associated adopted theory served as a geopolitical argument for the strategic narrative legitimizing US foreign policy in World War II and during the Cold War.
During the session of the US Senate on 21 January 1948, Arkansas Senator James William Fulbright
requested that the Marfleet lectures he had delivered at the University of Toronto on 9 and 10 December of the previous year be printed in the Congressional Record. Fulbright had spoken in Toronto about the future of Europe as a federation of states and the Western interest in a powerful Europe and addressed the Soviet Union's actions in Europe. In the lecture, he drew a line of continuity between the geopolitical goals of German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, Adolf Hitler's former deputy Rudolf Hess, and Russia's claim to power after World War II. Let us be under no illusions. If Russia obtains control of western Europe, the control of Africa, the Near East, and the Middle East will fall into her lap like a ripe plum. She will thus be able to carry into full effect the geopolitical objectives of Haushofer and Rudolf Hess. The only difference will be that Russia – not Germany – will become the master of Europe. Russia will then control not only the heartland but the whole world island, and Europe, Asia, and Africa will become the arsenal of the Slavs. That, in rather naked terms, is the fundamental power issue which lies behind the federation of Europe. (Congressional Record, 1948a)
The analysis will show how journalists and politicians used the spatially imagined heartland to legitimize US foreign policy in the public sphere (Dalby, 1990:105–122; Fröhlich, 1998:96–105; Helmig, 2008:38; Sharp, 2000:156–168). The result will be the deconstruction of a legitimizing, geostrategic narrative that was developed primarily by US journalists in newspapers and magazines and by European immigrants in books through the conjunction of text and maps (Ó Tuathail, 1996). Following the argument by Albert et al. (2003), the heartland as a spatial imagination became part of the discursive strategy of actors in the USA to legitimize and enforce US political objectives from 1939 onwards (Albert et al., 2003:518).
First, special emphasis is given to the changes between the first version of the theory from 1904 and the second version delivered in 1919 (Mackinder, 1904, 1919). Even though both have already been explained innumerable times, some of the differences between the two versions must be pointed out (Blouet, 1987; Kearns, 2009; Ó Tuathail, 1996). What should be made clear is that Mackinder himself opened up the possibility of detaching the theory from its authorship and attachment to a particular region (Taylor, 2003:47–48). Second, it is demonstrated why and how the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer transformed Mackinder's dystopian threat scenario into the pseudo-scientific basis of a utopia of German great power and German world domination, which was crucial for the reception and adaptation of the heartland theory in the USA (Koselleck, 2018:131–149). Third, the perception, adaptation, and popularization of the heartland theory in the USA will be analysed to explain how the denomination “heartland” became generic.
Mackinder referred in his lecture “The geographical pivot of history” to a region, which he later called heartland, as the “pivot of history” (Mackinder, 1904). The resource-rich “pivot area” was the centre of an imagined tripartite world order. The centre of the order was surrounded by the “inner or marginal crescent” and the “outer or insular crescent”. Mackinder's decision to locate the pivot area of a future global order in northern Asia was primarily due to the wealth of raw materials and the sheer size of the region. Using the potential by developing the railroad infrastructure of the region, the inhabitants could threaten the adjacent regions and the existing world order. Mackinder underpinned the choice of northern Asia by including a map that appeared in the 1904 reprint of the lecture in
The decision to choose a cylindrical Mercator projection for the depiction of the imagined world order leads to distortions in the south and north of the globe. For that reason, the pivot area in northern Asia appears larger in a Mercator projection than it is, which leads to an overestimation of its importance within the world order in terms of the ratio of its landmass compared to other regions (Wardenga, 2012:138). At the same time, the map reduced the complexity of the concept to the division of the globe into a tripartite order of two constructed regions grouped as crescents around the pivot area. Neither the geographical argument of characterizing the pivot area as a drainage basin, showing how the rivers of the region drain into the Arctic Ocean or inland waters such as the Caspian Sea, which made it impossible to trade with the world over navigable rivers, nor Mackinder's environmentalism as a reason for the expansionary ambitions of the Asiatic peoples inhabiting the pivot area could be visualized on the map and, therefore, were missed by looking only at the map (Kearns, 2006:75, 2010:188). The extension of the pivot area was based on hydrographic parameters as well as on the settlement behaviour of the nomads (Kearns, 2009:143; Whittlesey, 1945:16–17).
In order to stigmatize the rulers of the “natural seats of power” as a threat to the existing world order in which the British Empire, despite the rapid rise of the USA and the German Empire, was still the hegemon at the beginning of the 20th century, it was necessary to project a conflict between an emerging land power in the pivot area and the British sea power, the latter of which would oppose the threatening transformation of the existing spatial order for her own ends. As Gerry Kearns has shown, in 1904 Mackinder was issuing an imperialist warning of the threats to the existing world order by a rising opponent to British trade and military hegemony (Kearns, 2009). The concentration on European history and the continents of Europe and Asia in 1904 proves that Mackinder was thinking on a transcontinental and not a global scale from a Eurocentric perspective. The USA was only seen as an ally for the British Empire by Mackinder for when it would be necessary to fight against a land power rising in the pivot area (Mackinder, 1904:436). In the pivot area concept of 1904, Mackinder tried to transmit the 19th-century political and military conflict between Great Britain and Russia in central Asia, known as the Great Game, into the hypothesis of an ongoing expansion of Asiatic peoples into Europe by referring to historical analogies to provide supporting evidence (Kearns, 2009:203). The assumption was driven by Mackinder's environmentalism, including the racial argument, that the climate and, in particular, the hydrosphere were responsible for the habit of the pivot area inhabitants to expand beyond the region they are settled in (Kearns, 2010:187–188). In that system of thought, the environment influences the physiology of men, which results in genetic habits. In the case of the Asiatic peoples of the pivot area, these habits inevitably led to conflicts with the peoples in adjacent territories. Referring to Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Friedrich Ratzel, Mackinder regarded ethnic communities and nations as organisms (Kearns, 2009:68). The idea of this concept is that every growing organism legitimized by natural law could replace a passing organism. In the pivot area concept, the environment was responsible for the genetically determined habit of Asiatic peoples to expand beyond the pivot area. That the conflict between Asiatic land and British sea power was inevitable by natural law, threatening the hegemony of the British Empire, was the dystopia.
Mackinder responded to the fundamental change caused by World War I by
transforming the pivot area concept into a new theory which became known as
heartland theory. The theory, formulated in 1919 by Mackinder in
Most important, however, was Mackinder's decision, after the experiences of World War I, to regard the Germans as the most dangerous ethnic group, whose domination of the heartland would have a devastating effect on the existing world order (Mackinder, 1919:30–1). After World War I, he rated the Prussian militarism and the idealistic–nationalistic philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte as an incomparably stronger motivation for expansion than the deterministic effect of the climate on the expansionist urges of the nomads (Mackinder, 1919:14). Mackinder himself inscribed his theory with a flexibility concerning the motives for and actors of expansionism. The interchangeability of motives and actors releases the concept from its original binding to a specific group of actors and their motives for expansion. This allowed adepts of the theory to set their own parameters without compromising the overall construct of the theory.
That Mackinder in 1919 had located a southern heartland in Africa demonstrated that the geographic location of the heartland was only conditionally tied to a specific region of the world. The heartland was not as Mackinder himself suggested a geographical fact (Mackinder, 1919:143); it was a spatial imagination, which would only come to life if the potential of the geographical preconditions was deployed by men. Without the human factor, the region would remain a negligible territory. For Mackinder, the potential for a region or a greater area to become a heartland or a pivot area lay in the availability of raw materials, which were considered a prerequisite for industrialization carried out by a growing population providing the necessary labour force (Lowe, 1981:22). The southern heartland was also a drainage basin where the rivers, as in the Eurasian heartland, were not navigable to the open sea. It was inaccessible from the outside, and the mobility of the peoples was provided by mounts (Mackinder, 1919:104–7). By integrating a southern heartland in Africa into the theory and altering the boundaries of the Eurasian heartland, Mackinder himself loosened the regional ties of the heartland to northern Asia, thereby making another factor a variable that made it possible to turn potentially every region into an imagined heartland: each one a heartland in a global order representing the adepts' own perspectives.
The natural seats of power (Mackinder, 1904:435).
World island, divided into six natural regions (equal-area projection) (Mackinder, 1919:100–101).
A crucial fact for the reception of the heartland theory was the discrepancy
of the described extension of the heartland in text with the complexity-reducing maps depicting the area in
The heartland (Mackinder, 1919:76).
Looking at the parameters of the pivot area concept and the heartland theory, it is obvious that there are crucial differences between the two systems of thought. The purposes both concepts have been written for determined the difference in their conception and outcome. The common feature of both was the geographical region as the centre of the dystopian world order. However, Mackinder himself mentioned in the preface of
The world island and the world ring (Dryer, 1920:206).
The British geographer James Fairgrieve revised his 1915-published book
Haushofer turned the British geographer's dystopia into a utopian vision of
future German autarky by projecting a continental bloc that would result from a German–Soviet–Japanese alliance, which Mackinder had cautioned against in 1904 and then even more forcefully in 1919 (Haushofer, 1941). The alliance was already in sight after the 1936 “Antikominternpakt” with Japan and the 1939 non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia were concluded. Haushofer's utopia of the alliance with the Soviet Union for the good of Germany was the reversal of the dystopian threat that Mackinder had associated with it. The continental bloc was not the precondition for conquering the world but for the possibility of creating an amphibious Eurasian land power resilient enough to resist aggression of the Anglo-American sea power by using the potential of the region, enabling under German rule a Eurasian Monroe Doctrine. For Haushofer, the continental bloc would have been the implementation of the Eurasian right of self-determination (Jacobsen, 1979:633). Haushofer's bloc combined the landmasses of the imagined German-dominated
The perception of Haushofer's reinterpretation of Mackinder's concept in the USA was not based on a specific article or book as it had been for the
perception of the pivot area concept or the heartland theory by Haushofer
himself. Four points, two of them misleadingly connecting Haushofer to the
national socialist regime's foreign policy, are crucial to the reception of
the heartland theory in the USA. Attention on Haushofer in the USA was
determined by his reversal of the pivot area concept into a utopian concept
for German domination of Eurasia seen as the intellectual base for German
expansion. The second factor was the argument that Haushofer's utopian concept was based on Mackinder's heartland theory and that Americans must
also learn from Mackinder as Haushofer had (Thorndike, 1942). The presumption that Haushofer's concept influenced the
The myth, cultivated in the USA, that Haushofer headed an institute for geopolitics in Munich that planned and supervised the German expansion in Europe first appeared in 1939 (Murphy, 2014; Stokes, 1939). With this myth, the controversy around Haushofer's geopolitical ideas and Mackinder's influence on these ideas began, although the foreign policy of the national socialist regime in eastern Europe was guided by other concepts. Much more crucial to the national socialist worldview of the 1940s was the thinking in terms of greater areas, as Werner Best pointed out in a contribution to the 40th-birthday commemoration of Heinrich Himmler or Carl Schmitt did in “Raum und Großraum im Völkerrecht” (Best, 1941; Schmitt, 1940; Natter, 2003), which was also a topic discussed by German geopoliticians but not connected to Mackinder's pivot area concept or heartland theory (Obst, 1940/1941). The staff of the Reichsstelle für Raumordnung was busy planning in detail the layout of towns and villages in the conquered eastern territories oriented on the work of the geographer Walter Christaller (Ó Tuathail, 1996:124; Troebs, 1937). Abstract geopolitical arguments for the establishment of a continental bloc did not play a role in the regime's plan for eastern Europe, as the primary concern was the infrastructural development of the region and the settlement of a German population. There is no evidence that the heartland theory, the pivot area concept, or Haushofer himself had a crucial influence on the national socialist regime's expansionist activities (Jacobsen, 1979:483–97).
The reference to eastern Europe and the western part of the pivot area as the first objective on the path to a German-dominated world order in Haushofer's geopolitical concept and the national socialist policies of conquest made possible the conflation of the two concepts, which in 1939 set the stage for US perceptions in understanding the heartland theory as the intellectual basis of German expansionist policy. The German–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939 fulfilled both Haushofer's utopia of a Eurasian continental bloc and Mackinder's fear of a union of Germans and Slavs, resulting in growing attention to German geopolitics and Mackinder's heartland theory in the USA as concepts explaining German expansionism, describing the danger of the expansion for the existing world order, and showing the need for intervention.
In the year of its publication, a review of Mackinder's
Journalist Richard H. Stokes was one of the first to point out, in an article entitled “Russo-German entente follows path exposed by `geopolitician': Idea of Briton, Sir Halford Mackinder, traced to ears of Hitler after lying dormant for a generation” in
In June 1941, Frederic Sondern Jr. published an article in
Around that time, two books were published in English by Hermann Rauschning,
who had joined the NSDAP in 1932, had been president of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig in 1933–1934, and had been expelled from the party in 1934. Rauschning emigrated to the USA via France in 1941 (Hagemann, 2018:119–32). He belonged to the first circle of recipients of German geopolitics and lectured the readers in his book
The year Neumann's book
The heartland (Thorndike, 1942:106–107).
On one of the following pages, a map showed the consequences of the “Air Age” for cartography, which boosted the reception of the heartland theory in the military and by politicians (Fig. 6). While the map on the first page shows the location of the world island and the heartland in an orthographic projection, the second uses an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on the North Pole to show how short the distance between the world island and the North American continent had become in the Air Age, as long-range bombers could shorten the distance between the continents by flying over the North Pole (Renner, 1942). It was only with the advent of vertical warfare in the Air Age that the technical preconditions were in place to make the heartland theory a realistic scenario to the US military and politicians, threatening the security of the Western Hemisphere, dominated by the USA, which in the map was identified as the western world, the opponent to the world island. The map also lays emphasis on Alaska and Greenland, marked as bridges where planes could stop en route between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres.
Western world and world island (Thorndike, 1942:111).
The popular myth of the geopolitical institute was brought forward to the
public in 1941 as a legitimization for the creation of the Office of the
Coordinator of Information (C.O.I.), the predecessor to the Office of
Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which was headed by William Joseph Donovan.
Blair Bolles referred to the exemplary role of the Munich geopolitical
institute for the development of US intelligence in the
One of the most important actors in the popularization of the heartland theory in the US public was the publisher Henry Luce, who, in addition to
World island (Harrison, 1943).
In the article “World View and Strategy”, which Hans W. Weigert, a German
immigrant to the USA, and Richard E. Harrison wrote jointly for
Mackinder's heartland in an azimuthal equidistant map (Weigert and Harrison, 1945:79).
However, it was not only the cartographer Harrison, journalists such as Thorndike, scientists such as Weigert, and the military who were popularizing the heartland theory. Clare Boothe Luce, the media mogul Henry Luce's wife, had entered the House of Representatives for Connecticut's fourth electoral district (Rosenboim, 2017:76). She delivered a speech on US foreign policy on 24 June 1943, which reveals the notion of an “American heartland” and which could be attacked by Russia (Congressional Record, 1943:6340).
That there was a heartland in North America that met Mackinder's definition
was brought into the US political debate by Edward Lewis Bartlett, a member of the House of Representatives from Alaska, on 18 June 1948. Students of geopolitics have long been familiar with the teachings of Sir
Halford Mackinder, who reasoned that whichever nation dominates a certain
land mass (which he called the heartland) lying partly in Europe and partly
in Asia, would be able eventually to control the whole world. More recent
geopolitical theory speaks of two heartlands – the one designated by
Mackinder, and another in North America. The shortest distance between the
two `heartlands' of the world is across the Arctic regions. Our Arctic
frontier has become, therefore, our primary defense consideration. Alaska,
the northernmost portion of our Nation, thus assumes a place of primary
importance in the strategy of national security. (Congressional Record,
1948b)
In October 1945, an unknown journalist at the
Nicholas Spykman's well-known adaptation of the theory did not focus on Mackinder's heartland but on the region invented by himself that he named the “rimlands”, which corresponded to Mackinder's “inner and outer crescent”. Spykman used the Miller projection for his maps, which prevented distortion in the south and north of the map. The Miller projection downsized the heartland in relation to the Mercator projection and enabled Spykman to lay a greater emphasis on the rimlands. Spykman's adaptation was essential to the reception and longevity of the heartland theory, since the major wars fought by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s took place in the regions of the “rimlands”. Following the red-marked border of the heartland in Spykman's map, it is obvious that he had also not depicted the extension of the heartland but that of the pivot area (Fig. 9).
A geopolitical map of Eurasia (Spykman and Nicholl, 1969:38).
The maps included in the paper showed the conjunction of the pivot area concept and the heartland theory as a monolithic system in US perception, which influenced the strategic narrative of US foreign policy, especially in interpreting threat scenario analyses by the military, as another map from the
The heartland and its sea approaches (Sokol, 1952:21).
As not only Dorothy Thompson's myriad articles on US foreign policy in the
The adaptation of the pivot area concept and the heartland theory showed how elements of concepts and theories could be segregated and employed in specific national and ideologically driven strategic narratives, legitimizing foreign-policy activities (Miskimmon et al., 2013). The popularization of the heartland theory in the USA established a spatial literacy among US citizens concerning the term “heartland”. The threat scenario of the theory became well known, and the term heartland represented the dystopia of the theory. References to the theory or even only to the term heartland were legitimizing arguments for US intervention in another world war and the Cold War, prohibiting a fall-back into isolationism in the face of the self-imposed responsibility of the USA as the protector of democracy against fascist, communist, and autocratic opponents (Lossau, 2001; Middell, 2021).
No data sets were used in this article.
The author has declared that there are no competing interests.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
I want to thank René Vèron for editing the article and the reviewers whose comments helped me to strengthen the argument of the paper.
This research has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant no. 433575562).
This paper was edited by René Véron and reviewed by two anonymous referees.