Heartland vs Rimland, Continental vs Maritime Power: The Geopolitics of the First World War*

Hew Strachan

On 25 January 1904, Halford Mackinder, Reader in Geography at Oxford and Director of the London School of Economics, delivered a lecture entitled ‘The geographical pivot of history’ at the Royal Geographical Society of London.  He described a world which had been fully explored and fully politicised – in that its territories had all been allocated to states and their frontiers had been defined.  It was, he said, ‘a closed political system’.  As a result, in Mackinder’s opinion, ‘Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organisation of the world will be shattered in consequence’.^[1]

Mackinder’s characterisation of the world before 1914 emphasised the interdependence of its elements: like many of his contemporaries, he used vocabulary which anticipated the phrases employed today – often rhetorically and frequently vacuously – to describe the phenomenon which we have come to call globalisation.   Most of Mackinder’s peers located their early twentieth-century understanding of globalisation in the adoption of the gold standard.  On the eve of the First World War, 59 countries cleaved to a system of international finance, which established an exchange system dependent on the pound sterling and delivered a measure of economic stability.   The City of London was dominant in other respects, as Britain’s merchant banks, and its insurance and shipping companies, underpinned the patterns of world-wide trade.^[2]   

While others saw Britain and its maritime and financial strengths as the hub of this world-wide closed political system, Mackinder stressed their vulnerability.  For him, the states of western Europe, with their ready access to the Atlantic ocean and global trade, were no longer ‘the geographical pivot’.  The latter now lay further to the east, to an expanse that he called ‘Euro-Asia’, or the ‘world island’.  This was a land mass of 21 million square miles, ‘or half of all the land on the globe, if we exclude from reckoning the deserts of Sahara and Arabia’.  The heart of Euro-Asia was Russia, and at the dawn of the twentieth century others – not just Mackinder – began to recognise that it had the military and economic potential to exploit its central position.  As Mackinder put it, ‘Trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power, and nowhere can they have such effect as in the closed heart-land of Euro-Asia, in vast areas of which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for road-making.  Railways work the greater wonders in the steppe, because they directly replace horse and camel mobility, the road stage of development having been omitted.’   Thanks to the railway, even as Mackinder spoke, the Russian army in Manchuria provided ‘as significant evidence of mobile land-power as the British army in South Africa [in the war of 1899-1902] was of sea-power’.^[3]  As Japan’s threat to its foothold on the Pacific coast grew, Russia planned to reinforce its base at Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea with troops brought from the Baltic, a redeployment dependent less on Russia’s fleet than on the trans-Siberian railway.^[4]  The conclusion which followed was popularised by Mackinder in 1919 as: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland, commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World’.^[5]

Mackinder’s lecture was important for three reasons.  First, it marked the arrival in the Anglophone world of geopolitics as a form of study.  Secondly it provided a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy which rested on the supremacy of maritime power and was most popularly articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan in The influence of seapower upon history, published in 1890. Mackinder set his notion of a dominant land mass against Mahan’s idea of (in Mackinder’s formulation) ‘the one and continuous ocean enveloping the divided and insular lands’.  This he said was the basis of ‘the whole theory of modern naval strategy and policy as expounded by such writers as Captain Mahan and Mr Spenser Wilkinson’.^[6] (Spenser Wilkinson, the military correspondent of The Morning Post and soon to be Oxford’s first professor of military history, was in the audience for Mackinder’s lecture.).  Thirdly, Mackinder’s thesis, that sea power was losing out to land power, and western Europe to eastern, has come to provide one of the foundations for a grand strategic analysis of the Anglo-German antagonism and its playing out in two world wars.

Paul Kennedy has been the most important exponent of this last approach, first in an article published in the Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen in 1974^[7] and then in The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery in 1976. Part 2 of the latter book, called ‘Zenith’, ends with a chapter entitled ‘Mahan versus Mackinder’. That chapter is immediately followed by part 3, ‘Fall’.  Kennedy’s thesis, put simply and possibly over-simplified, was that Mackinder replaced Mahan, and that, because the former was more right about the future than the latter had been, he explained more satisfactorily the ebbing of British power.  Kennedy concluded his chapter on the First World War with these words: ‘”History”, Mahan had asserted, “has conclusively demonstrated the inability of a state with even a single continental frontier to compete in naval development with one that is insular, although of smaller population and resources”.’   History was indeed part of Mahan’s problem: his understanding of strategy rested on the past, and specifically both on that of Britain and on the technologies available to eighteenth-century maritime powers.  The application of steam power to navigation in the nineteenth century raised serious questions about Mahan’s approach to naval strategy in particular, quite apart from what it might say about strategy more broadly defined.  As early as the 1840s Britain had worried about the threat of a sudden steam-borne invasion from France, a fear reflected in the formation of auxiliary ground forces for home defence and in the construction of coastal fortifications.^[8]  Kennedy concluded that ‘by the twentieth century, with the rise of super-powers rich enough to support both a large army and a navy,’ Mahan’s point about the inherent strength of insularity ‘was no longer true.  Mackinder, as it turned out, had proved to be far more prescient.’^[9]

The purpose of this essay is to challenge that presumption.  What was striking about Mackinder’s lecture, given the freight which it is now made to carry, was how limited its immediate effects were, not least in Britain, Mackinder’s own country and the one which stood to lose most if he were right.  

Mackinder had been President of the Union in 1883 when an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford and had stood for Parliament as a Liberal Imperialist in 1900.^[10]  His lecture was attended by Leo Amery, also a Liberal Imperialist, and both a Fellow of All Souls and the correspondent of The Times in the South African War.  Through Amery, Mackinder was associated with the groups (all of them with strong Oxford links) which advocated imperial efficiency and tariff reform, such as Lord Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the ‘Co-efficients’ and the ‘Compatriots’.  As Britain faced relative industrial decline because of the rapid growth of others in the late nineteenth century, especially the United States and Germany, these groups sought to reconstruct its empire on lines which would maximise its economic and military potential.  Mackinder’s lecture ought by rights to have appealed to them, and especially to the leading Liberal Imperialist politicians with whom he consorted, including Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary between 1895 and 1903, and Richard Burdon Haldane, who would become Secretary of State for War at the end of 1905.

But there is no evidence that it did, or at least not in Kennedy’s terms.  The point that Mackinder wanted the British political classes to draw from his geopolitical presentation was not so much that they should accept inevitable decline but that they should wake up to the challenge and think how best to confront it.  They needed to answer a geographical problem with a political solution.  Britain could not re-position itself in the world, but it still had to make its empire and its navy work more effectively in order to off-set the growth of continental powers and their armies.  In 1902, Mackinder had published Britain and the British Isles, a book which dealt with –among other things – Britain’s strategic geography.  It manifested, as did other publications in Britain at the time, a view of strategy which was much broader than the conceptions prevalent either on the continent of Europe or within armies.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Clausewitz had defined strategy as the use of the battle for the purpose of the war, and most pre-1914 interpretations still reflected that approach: strategy was a matter for generals and its function was to aid them in their employment of the forces at their disposal within a specific theatre of war.  By contrast, Mackinder saw defence as ‘essentially the protection of economic subsistence’, and regarded the distinction between war and peace as irrelevant since ‘the pressure of strategical considerations is urgent upon governments at all times’.^[11]  Nothing in this would have struck a British reader as either new or remarkable.  Sir John Colomb had made similar points in 1867, and they were popularised by works like Sir Charles Dilke’s and Spenser Wilkinson’s Imperial Defence, published in 1892.  This understanding of what later generations would call ‘grand strategy’ reflected the need to address imperial defence and to sustain a navy and its bases to protect it.^[12]

In Britain and the British Isles, Mackinder did not reject Mahan.  Indeed he embraced him (and Spenser Wilkinson), averring that the defence of Britain ‘rests fundamentally upon the theory implied in the command of the sea‘.  What this meant ‘in a military sense’ was that in its wars  Britain ‘has destroyed the enemy’s fleet or securely blockaded it, and has thus carried the natural frontier for the purpose of the war, and for that purpose only, to the enemy’s coast’.^[13]  However, Mackinder was concerned that economic decline might mean that ‘Britain may no longer have the means of building and maintaining an adequate fleet’, and so would lose command of the sea.  He feared Russia and Germany not because of a geopolitical shift from maritime power to continental power, but because both aspired to be like Britain - maritime powers with large navies.  If Britain declined to such an extent that it could no longer maintain a fleet to match those of its competitors, it should – he said - create a navy of ‘all the Britons’, to be resourced not only by the empire but also by the United States.^[14]  The views which he expressed in his lecture of 1904 did not represent an abdication of this position.  When Britain and the British Isles came out in a second edition in 1907, Mackinder changed nothing that he had written on command of the sea.  His views on British strategy displayed a continuity which is obscured if his 1904 lecture is read in isolation.^[15]

What ‘the geographical pivot of history’ did not say was therefore at least as important as what it did say.  Leo Amery, who was present at the lecture, commented – extensively - on Mackinder’s remarks.  He praised them for their presentation of ‘the whole of history and the whole of ordinary politics under one big comprehensive idea’.  However, he then took up the rivalry between railway-mobility and sea-mobility: ‘Sea-mobility has gained enormously in military strength to what it was in ancient times, especially in the number of men that can be carried.  In the old days the ships were mobile enough, but they carried few men, and the raids of the sea-people were comparatively feeble.  … I am merely stating a fact that the sea is far better for conveying troops than anything, except fifteen or twenty parallel lines of railway.’^[16]

For Amery too the question facing Britain was how it could make sea power work.  Moreover, he was right about the superiority of sea-mobility over rail-mobility, at least for the time being.  In 1904 Euro-Asia was not in fact a direct threat to Britain for, as Mackinder acknowledged, Russia lacked the capital to develop its resource base.  In the following year, the Russian army, operating at the end of a long but single railway line, was defeated in Manchuria by a Japanese army, dependent on ‘sea-mobility’. Any immediate threat from Russia was subsumed first by its military humiliation at the hands of a non-European power and then by the revolution which accompanied its defeat.  In 1905 the danger to Britain came not from Russia, but from Germany, whose suzerainty in western Europe looked even more imposing as any danger to its east receded.  Britain’s vulnerability as a ‘rimland’ would only be manifested if Germany allied with Russia, something which briefly looked possible in October 1905, or if  – as Mackinder himself was to argue in 1943 – Russia defeated Germany.^[17]

At bottom Mackinder’s famous lecture was an endorsement of Britain’s policy of pursuing a balance of power within Europe.  He saw that France could be the counter-weight to Russia, and to that extent his lecture could be read as an argument for a different sort of change – for British diplomacy to move from isolation to alliance. ^[18]  Indeed at this level his remarks did no more than reflect the direction that British policy was already taking.  In 1901 the Hay-Paunceforte treaty with the United States and in 1902 the Anglo-Japanese alliance had addressed some of the Royal Navy’s problems of maritime ‘overstretch’ in the western Atlantic and in the northern Pacific respectively.   The ententes with France in 1904 and then with Russia in 1907 went on to deal with the more proximate issues which Mackinder had raised at the Royal Geographical Society, those of British interests within Euro-Asia.  Within three years Britain both had a west European ally to balance Germany if the latter defeated Russia or allied itself with it, and an Asian ally to ease its security concerns in what it would come to call the southern arc of empire – the swathe of British interests running through south Asia from Egypt to India.

So the reason for the lack of resonance within Britain from a lecture which we are now encouraged to see as epoch-making was simple.  It may have been revolutionary for the study of geopolitics in Britain; it was less so for British policy.  Britain already had some answers in hand, and they rested on the reformulation of maritime power, not on its ultimate rejection.  Nor was this response simply a product of ill-founded British complacency.  Both its immediate rival, Germany, and the potential super-power of the Euro-Asia land mass, Russia, were also bent on the acquisition of maritime capabilities.  Logically, the power to which Mackinder’s view of geopolitics ought to have appealed was not Britain, but Germany.  At the core of the lecture was an argument about continental power and its vulnerability to an industrialised Russia. This was indeed the fear that caused German leaders to lie awake at night, as Russia recovered in the years leading up to 1914.  Yet before the First World War, Mackinder had little, if any, impact in Berlin. 

In the very same month in which Mackinder delivered his lecture, January 1904, Curt von Maltzahn, who had been director of the German Marine-Akademie until the previous month, also gave one, at the Institut für Ozeanographie at Berlin University.  Entitled ‘Das Meer als Operationsfeld’, this too was a lecture on geopolitics.  Maltzahn used Mahan to stress the importance of the global choke points, such as Gibraltar, Hawaii and the Dardanelles, for the control of the world’s sea lanes, but he also deployed the work of Friedrich Ratzel, the founding father of German geopolitics and an influence on Mackinder, to deny that geographical position would determine the outcome of a naval war.^[19]

Ratzel, professor of geography at the University of Leipzig, had published Politische Geographie in 1897, and had added a chapter to its 1900 edition on ‘Gesetz der Seeherrschaft’ which he called ‘Das Meer als Quelle der Völkergröße’.  Like Mackinder, he had been influenced by Social Darwinism, and saw the state as an organism which was required to expand its territory in order to survive.  Like Mackinder too, he recognised that the world had become a closed political system, and that the living space, the ‘Lebensraum’, into which a flourishing state could expand was therefore no longer available.  The sea provided a solution to the problem.  Here there was space; the sea could enable Germany to grow just as it had enabled other smaller states, like Greece, Rome, Venice, Portugal, Holland and Britain, to acquire empires.  Trade followed the flag, and sea power both protected trade and expanded trading freedom.^[20]

Two policy conclusions followed for Germany.  First, Germany had to support the principle of freedom of the seas in order to prevent their domination by Britain.  This was an argument played out in 1909 at the London conference, called to address the laws of maritime warfare.  If Britain were a neutral in a future war, it would benefit from a narrow definition of contraband, which was restricted to munitions of war and their direct inputs.  Since on 30 June 1914 the ship-owners of the British empire possessed 47.9 per cent of the world’s registered tonnage, they dominated the carriage of goods not only to and from the United Kingdom but also between other countries.^[21]  In the event of war, they stood to profit from their neutrality.  But, if Britain were a belligerent, it would need the definition of contraband to be as wide as possible so that it could use the weapon of economic warfare and prevent other powers from cross-trading as neutrals.  In that case its aim would be not to maintain the trades to mainland Europe but to close them down.  Some Germans argued that Britain would not in practice be able to mount a blockade that would be legal.  International maritime law required blockade to be effective to be lawful.  Britain would have to have enough warships physically to be able to enforce a blockade and, to do that, its ships would need to be close to the German coastline and so vulnerable to mines, coastal artillery and shore batteries.  Maltzahn did not subscribe to this view.  He recognised that Britain, equipped with a broad definition of contraband, could mount a blockade that would work through the use of the right to stop and search merchant ships on the high seas and to seize the goods they were carrying.^[22]

Maltzahn’s second conclusion was that Germany must concentrate its naval forces in order to exercise great and disproportionate influence from a small area of coastline.  Unlike Britain, France and even Russia, Germany had no direct access to any ocean of the world.  Its traditional trade had been confined to the Baltic.  Its North Sea coast gave it better access to the Atlantic, but primarily through the ports of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven, neither of them optimally positioned.  A German cruiser fleet, designed to wage ‘guerre de course’ across the world’s seas, would be easily cut off from its bases.  As Ratzel had put it in 1900: ‘Das Zusammenfassen aller Kräfte an einer Stelle is die Grundregel des Seekrieges …. Der Seekrieg verneint die auf dem Lande geltenden Machtanschläge.  Ein kleiner Staat, der auf dem entscheidenden Punkte eine kampffähige Flotte zusmmenbringt, setzt den Großstaat matt.’^[23]

Maltzahn liked this argument because it reflected his desire to adapt Clausewitz’s ideas to a maritime context, and particularly the principle of concentrating mass in order to seek a decision through battle. But he confronted an intellectual problem.  An operational principle derived from military strategy, while it made sense in relation to Germany’s confined geographical position within Europe, made less sense at the level of  what later generations would call ‘grand strategy’.  As Maltzahn put it in a book first published in 1905, ‘the naval warfare of to-day has assumed a different position in national life and in politics from that which it occupied a few decades ago.  And the reason for this is that all the great civilised countries have now become States that carry on a world-embracing commerce, and are thus dependent upon maritime trade and the results of naval wars.’^[24]  The global dimensions of commerce had led Maltzahn to argue in 1899 that Germany needed a capacity to wage oceanic cruiser war, which did not necessarily depend on its exercising command of the sea but did require it both to be able to operate on the world’s trade routes and to fight a battle in the North Sea.  For his old school friend, Alfred von Tirpitz, appointed in 1897 to head the Imperial Naval Office, this was heresy, since it threatened a dangerous division of finite resources.  The difference between the two was sufficiently major to cause Maltzhan’s retirement.^[25]

Tirpitz’s suppression of internal differences within the navy did not resolve the fundamental dilemma posed by ‘globalisation’ and cruiser warfare.  In 1897 Bernhard von Bülow, as foreign minister, and from 1900 as chancellor of Germany, had embraced a new direction in German foreign policy, ‘Weltpolitik’.  Its salient feature in the present context was that it was more Mahanian than Mackinderite.   It recognised Germany’s need for overseas markets and the necessity of supporting its trade, and acknowledged the fact that the navy could contribute to this.  In the same year, Germany acquired Tsingtao on the Chinese coast, specifically so that it could become a naval base for cruiser warfare in the Pacific, while at the same time Tirpitz set about creating a battle fleet for the North Sea.   Germany’s naval policy between 1897 and 1911, and the growth in spending on ships while spending on the army stagnated, suggested that nobody in Berlin in 1904 read The Geographical Journal, where Mackinder’s lecture was published, or that if they did they did not believe it.

Germany, since it was the second largest industrial power in the world, had an interest both in free trade and in access to global markets. As Britain had done in the nineteenth century, it stood to gain far more from peaceful economic penetration than it could achieve through war and territorial conquest.^[26]   The idea of Mitteleuropa, a central European and closed economic bloc, or even of German domination of the Euro-Asia ‘heartland’, only made economic sense after 1914, when the advent of war cut Germany off from the rest of the world’s markets.  It was a default position, not an optimum one.  Friedrich Naumann’s popularisation of Mitteleuropa was published in 1915, not before the war.^[27]

Ratzel had died in 1904, and if geopolitics found a spokesman in Germany during the First World War it was not a German, but a Swede, Rudolf Kjellén.  His publications supported a view of Lebensraum which depended less on the ideas of Ratzel, with their attention to the sea, and more on those of Naumann.  They also chimed with the war aims programme of September 1914 drawn up by Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Bülow’s successor as chancellor.  A dynamic polity like Germany had to expand, Kjellén argued, and it could do so through creating regional power blocs.  For him, as for many others in Germany, the pivotal battle of the First World War had become that between Germany and Russia.  The issue was which of the two was to control central Europe, not who was to control the world.^[28]

In this respect Mackinder’s lecture found echoes throughout the war.  Germans launched a number of policy initiatives which recognised that their country had to resolve the heartland problem before it addressed the issues of wider world power.  First was the determination in November 1914 of the chief of the Prussian general staff, Erich von Falkenhyan, to seek a separate peace with Russia.  Falkenhayn, unlike the majority of Prussian officers, had served in China before the war, and had seen at first hand the reach of British imperial and naval power.  As a result he correctly identified Britain as the financial and industrial hub of the enemy alliance.  Germany’s problem was that it lacked the maritime power to deal with Britain directly; and so its best hope was to knock out the principal military power on the continent, France.  If it did that, Britain would no longer be able to sustain a land war.  Falkenhayn therefore believed that the western front should be the focus of the German armies’ efforts, and that accordingly they should be freed from simultaneously fighting the Russians on the eastern front.  He wanted to resolve the heartland problem by securing a negotiated settlement with Russia.  For him, this was as logical politically as it was strategically: the autocratic rule of the Romanovs had more in common with that of the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns than it did with that of their ally, republican France.^[29]  

In practice, however, the outbreak of the war had shifted the geopolitical framework.  As Mackinder realised, a Russo-German alliance made sense for Germany; it no longer made much sense for Russia.  On 5 September 1914 the three powers of the Entente, France, Russia and Britain, had agreed that none of them would seek a separate peace.  Over the course of the same month, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, went on to define his country’s war aims in terms designed to consolidate Russia as the dominant power in ‘Euro-Asia’.  Acquisitions in Silesia, Poland and Galicia would enhance its position in central Europe.  Moreover, as the British attitude towards the Ottoman empire hardened, so did London’s readiness to offer Russia access to the eastern Mediterranean from the Black Sea, an ambition which much of British foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century had been designed to foil.  When at the end of October Turkey attacked Russia’s Black Sea ports, so finally fulfilling the commitment which it had made by allying with Germany on 2 August 1914, Britain responded by offering its eastern ally control of both Constantinople and the Bosphorus.  The immediate pressure on Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, was the need to wage the war and to win it; but in the longer term he preferred to see Russia rather than Germany controlling the straits, particularly if the effect was to draw Russia westwards to Europe and away from Asia and India. &nb