Mackinder's legacy: was it a prophesy?
Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: oday the planet seems to be brimming with surprises— it is too changeable and too unpredic-table. The man in the street, as well as people well-versed in the world order theory cannothelp wondering whether there is a system in the world able to regulate the relations among allentities.This is not a novel feature of our times: in the past, too, thinkers pondered over questions ofworld order and relations between the key members of the world community and the members ofsecondary importance. Halford Mackinder, who is well known to the world as one of the foundersof geopolitics, was among these thinkers. I am not going to discuss his numerous merits in the fieldof political geography — I am going to discuss his heritage and use his major “geographical pivot ofhistory” theory as applied to the present foreign policy realities of Kyrgyzstan, which cannot, andshould not, be divorced from its Central Asian neighbors, the CIS countries, China, and the UnitedStates.It should be said that one of the key ideas of a man born nearly 150 years ago has found anew lease on life in the 21st century in light of the new relations between the “key and second-ary” actors. This happened not because he dotted all the “i’s” in the world politics of his time. Onthe contrary, after describing the process that led to the present intertwining of international re-lations and presenting practical recommendations on how to untwine them, he offered his ownforecast of the future of interstate relations and bequeathed a number of questions to future gen-erations. Who is destined to become “ruler of the world? ” By way of an answer, he hinted that thefuture leader of world politics would use geographic location, one of the key factors in any state ’sdestiny, as its trump card. Having described the central location (which he called the Heartland)as geographically the most advantageous, he posed another, no less important question: whichcountry can be described as the Heartland, a position that gives it considerable advantages over
Source: Central Asia and the Caucasus
Author: Sayragul Matikeeva
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W30464346