The EU’s Mackinder Moment

It seems like the right moment to re-read Halford Mackinder, a British geographer, politician and influential thinker, whom many regard as the father of geopolitics.¹ Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), Mackinder’s most famous book, is surprisingly contemporary in content.

For Mackinder neither geopolitical passivity, nor the pieties of early twenty-first-century liberal internationalism, would be an option for Europe right now. Reality has trumped the ideals of the liberal internationalism that has underpinned the world order in recent decades. Today, the EU urgently needs to secure and protect its backyard. A project long dedicated to dismantling borders needs to carve out a protected space of its own.

The last ten years have clarified that the EU is severely restricted in geographical scope. Europe is a mere promontory of the giant Eurasian land mass, and by no means the largest, or even the most populated part of it. It now needs to defend what it has painstakingly constructed in the two per cent of the world’s landmass that it administers.

According to Mackinder, Eurasia itself is part of the ‘World Island’, the swathe of territory that stretches from Sakhalin in the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, from northern Scandinavia to South Africa, and from Murmansk to Singapore. When he was writing, Arctic ice prevented the ‘World Island’ from being entirely circumnavigated, but thanks to global warming this is changing fast (and it is no coincidence that Greenland is entering history as an object of contention).

Mackinder’s ‘World Island’ has two ‘heartlands’. The northern heartland consists of the endless plain that stretches from the Carpathians in Romania to the Urals and beyond the Caspian Sea, and southwards to the vertiginous mountain ranges that separate it from Turkey and Iran. The southern heartland is sub-Saharan Africa, the vast territories of modern-day Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania. When Mackinder was writing, the second of these heartlands was under the sway of European empires and he dedicates little space to it. Were he alive today, he would give it much greater attention.

Heartland in the North

The northern heartland, by contrast, was crucial for his analysis. Mackinder argued that ‘modern’ (in 1919!) communications and transport meant that it was now possible to exercise political control over vast territories. For the first time since the medieval Khans, it was imaginable that the principal world power would not be a maritime nation on the coastlands of the ‘World Island’ (as history has shown through the conquests by the Romans, the Saracens, the Spanish and the British) but a land power that controlled the Island’s core. To quote his famous refrain: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.’²

Hitler and Stalin recognized the force of this strategic insight. Had Soviet resistance cracked at Stalingrad, Nazi Germany would have been able to strike down into Iran and Turkey and from there towards Cairo. Its strength would have been unassailable – the Normandy landings could never have been attempted had Hitler been freer to move hundreds of thousands of troops from the Russian Front to Normandy.

After World War II, Stalin and his heirs did command the northern heartland and were kept from leveraging their geographical weight only by America’s superiority in nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them, and by its military presence in Western Europe and elsewhere. But even the United States – a great oceanic power, with the immense luxury of a continental heartland of its own – was not able to roll back the Soviet Union until communism collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.

If we look at the recent history of EU enlargement through Mackinder’s lens, the common early twenty-first-century notion that the EU might have mounted a mission civilisatrice by spreading its values across the Eurasian landmass seems absurd. Europe has borders defined by mountain ranges, rivers, and the historical experience of peoples, not by the appeal of its peaceful, mercantile vision of global politics.

As Russian drones pound hospitals, supermarkets and power plants to rubble, with little or no respect for the rules of war, we have become uncomfortably aware of this fact. Who rules in Kyiv or Minsk is of consequence for comfortable burghers in Ghent or Hamburg. Ukraine or Belarus are not faraway places that we can safely ignore.

Indeed, Europe cannot ignore developments in either of the World Island’s heartlands, as the flow across the Mediterranean of migrants trafficked by unscrupulous gangs attests. The African heartland today is a place of both dynamism and turmoil, with a rapidly growing population, many failed states but also some highly disciplined ones (Rwanda, like its government or not, has increased its per capita income tenfold since the genocide). It holds resources the rest of the world needs, a worldwide diaspora and hundreds of millions of restless people mired in desperate poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is vibrant, but its growth is not enough to contain the energies of its overwhelmingly young population – hence the mass migrations of the last decade and the larger migrations that will inevitably come.

If the broadbrush picture painted above is accurate, then the EU’s central error of recent decades has been to believe its own rhetoric; to see itself as a new form of superpower, one whose appeal was based upon the universal values it espoused and the desire of others to mimic its success. In reality, its values were not universally attractive, its space for geographical expansion after 2007 was virtually nil, and its practical recipe of free trade, transnational law, pooling of national sovereignty, demilitarization and governance by consensus were specific to Europe. The EU is a special case.

Does Mackinder offer us any advice on how Europe should behave when faced with a situation where both the heartlands of the World Island are entirely out of its control? In fact, he does. Democratic Ideals and Reality appeared in 1919 in conjunction with the Versailles peace treaty. Mackinder backed the plan to construct a cordon sanitaire between the new Bolshevik regime in Moscow and a defeated Germany. He also thought that the Middle East – the pathway between the northern and southern heartlands – should be internationalized, and that the headquarters of the League of Nations should be on the Bosphorus. ‘From Constantinople, we might weld together West and East, and permanently penetrate the heartland with oceanic freedom.’ Mackinder was not a determinist. He believed that political organization could compensate for geographical weakness.

Mackinder called well-organized states ‘going concerns’ that possess momentum – an anglicization, presumably, of élan vital. Going concerns have productive capacity and can keep their populations busy and thriving. Mackinder is adamant that the state must be an active one; people cannot be left to rot meaninglessly in slums. This implies a high degree of state-imposed social discipline and social cohesion inculcated by shared ‘habits of thought’. States need a sense of purpose. Consequently, a ‘going concern’ also requires ‘organizers’, his euphemism for leaders. In his view ‘organizers’ are strategists, or ‘great realists’, not saints or moralists. They are apt to look upon their peoples as their tools for the aggrandisement of their state. But they are indispensable. A ‘going concern’, like an industrial corporation, needs an ambitious, able CEO. Or it will dwindle.

Heartland in the South

If Mackinder were alive today, he would, I think, be horrified by the EU’s failure to mount a major effort to ensure that the nations of the Mediterranean’s southern littoral were going concerns. This is not apologetics for neocolonialism, or nostalgia for ‘Eurafrica’.³ If our neighbours’ houses fall into disrepair, there are repercussions for us. In the twenty-first century large parts of North Africa have fallen apart and none of it looks secure.

A brief survey across North Africa from the Atlantic to Egypt confirms this claim with the same picture of state breakdown, growing Chinese economic presence, Russian infiltration, and the rule of strongmen and private militia being apparent almost everywhere. The question is what a geopolitical EU should do. Should it double down (or quintuple down) and back selected local ‘organizers’ with generous resources, which is the logic of Italy’s ‘Mattei Plan’? Or should the EU use its economic leverage to intervene in North African politics and, without mincing words, promote a common European policy that dangles the carrot of serious investment with a degree of EU political guidance (and even ‘advisors’ on the ground)?

The current approach, a tired combination of timidity, a Franco-Italian ‘great game’ for influence, symbolic gesture politics that reflect EU priorities more than the needs of the people, blithe indifference in northern Europe to the Mediterranean’s importance and sotto voce encouragement to local elites to block migrants at all costs, simultaneously manages to be both unethical and ineffective.

Africa is an opportunity for Europe, not a threat. It is the one way out of the European promontory without resorting to war. One is tempted to quip that ‘who rules the southern littoral commands the Sahara. Who rules the Sahara commands the southern heartland.’ Who commands the southern heartland does not rule the world, but is certainly a player who counts on the world stage. Commanding – or simply exerting mutually beneficial influence in – the southern heartland is a goal for another generation (and one that will never be achieved unless the EU has a political and even military presence in Africa), but the state of the southern littoral of the Mediterranean and of the Sahara is a crucial question that the EU needs to sort out now. Unless we are content to wait for further regime collapses, further migration blackmail, further penetration by rival powers and further rises in support for Europe’s far right. Europe, via the EU, needs to show collective political will.

Eastern Borderlands

By the same token, the threat from Russia is also more political than military (Russia has spent three years and hundreds of thousands of casualties to inch its way a few kilometres westwards; we need not fear fleets of tanks sweeping across the north European plain). EU states have a moral obligation to do more to defend their citizens, and should ideally pool their defence spending to get more bang for their buck, but the first issue they need to decide upon is an age-old question blithely forgotten during the years of EU-phoria: where does Europe end?

Vladimir Putin is blatantly following a Mackinderist strategy. ‘Who rules in Eastern Europe, commands the heartland’ must be etched on the Russian dictator’s bathroom mirror.⁴ If he successfully convinces a sympathetic US to partition Ukraine – which in Spring 2025 seems a likely outcome to the conflict – and insists on elections, the Russian propaganda machine will foment discontent with a view to weakening Zelenskyy and pro-Western forces inside the country. Putin already has de facto sympathizers in power in Belarus, Hungary and Slovakia. Russia interfered in the recent Romanian and Moldovan presidential elections, though in both cases its attack was temporarily repelled. It will try again. Almost half the deputies of the current Bulgarian parliament represent parties with ties to the Kremlin. The pro-Russian Georgian Dream won a rigged election in October 2024 (and subsequently ‘suspended’ EU membership talks). Putin would like his political influence to reach the borders of central Europe and to loom large in the domestic politics of Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and the Baltic States.

Europe’s geopolitical conundrum – independent of rearmament – is: can it accommodate this conception of the EU’s borders? If it can, then détente with the master of the heartland can be pursued. Trade with Russia, which has declined drastically since 2021, could tick upwards, though the EU would be wise not to become so dependent on Russian oil and gas again.⁵

If it cannot, then Mackinder’s 1919 analysis about the need for a cordon sanitaire follows inexorably. Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia must be anchored permanently within the EU, whatever it takes. The EU needs to decide whether it can risk ever having deeply divided Serbia as a member state. ‘[With a] Middle Tier of really independent states between Germany and Russia [idealists] will achieve their end, and without it they will not,’ says Mackinder.⁶ As in 1919, Europe needs its easternmost states to be ‘going concerns’ that identify with the ‘habits of thought’ underpinning the European project, not ones that are Russian fellow travellers, or opportunists who skilfully play both sides for their own advantage.

A second consequence concerns what the EU’s attitude to a possible post-Erdogan Turkey should be; but that’s another, very complicated discussion for which there is no space here except to underline that Turkey’s geopolitical importance has not diminished since Mackinder’s time.

A third consequence of the analysis of this essay is that, absent dramatic political changes in Moscow and Washington, Ukraine is tragically probably lost, long-term, to the EU, despite the decision to open membership talks in June 2024 and despite the Franco-British proposition of a ‘reassurance force’ to monitor an eventual ceasefire. Can the EU deliver membership to a country that Europeans will have to rebuild, at phenomenal cost, in the face of incessant waves of Russian propaganda that will depict Ukraine as a ‘fascist’ creation? Will European businesses invest in a country that has no solid external military guarantee and whose domestic politics will inevitably be intensely contested to the point of violence? There are too many unknowns for enlargement to include Ukraine to be a safe bet.

The Mackinder moment

The reader will have noted that the United States has barely featured in this essay. That is because this Mackinder moment requires democratic Europe to make decisions for itself. Even if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 presidential elections, the EU would still have needed to wake up from the complacency that has long characterized its strategic thinking.

The recent willingness of European leaders to use the word geopolitical, despite its unsavoury historical associations in the German-speaking world, suggests that powerbrokers in Brussels, Paris or Berlin are alive to this fact (in Rome they certainly are). But it is not clear whether they have thought out the implications of a geopolitical turn, or whether they think that merely spending more money on defence and changing the tone of Europe’s public pronouncements is enough.

A geopolitical approach will require decisions that are at odds with the EU’s longstanding understanding of itself as a liberal international model for good in the world. It will mean a Europe that is a force for good in its restricted neighbourhood. Democratic ideals must be rooted in geographical realities. They must also be promoted by a ‘going concern’ that is unafraid to use economic, political and military instruments, and to intervene judiciously in the domestic politics of sovereign states, including its own members. It remains unclear whether the EU is capable of such bravery, and whether it qualifies itself as a ‘going concern’. In Colombey-Les-Deux-Églises, a ghost is smiling ruefully.