| Popis: |
Sir Halford Mackinder's paper, The Geographical Pivot of History, has retained a power to engage those concerned with the analysis of epochal events in world geopolitics. The end of the Cold War witnessed the geopolitical phoenix rising in the "new world order," to the extent that the legacy of Mackinder has been consistently revisited in geopolitical discourse on Central Asia and, inter alia, Eurasia. If the "age of discovery" had been the prima facie introduction to Europe of new lands and new societies across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, then the age of capitalism had given way to virtually the complete political appropriation of these continents. Otherwise, how could there have been a sudden realization in the form of Mackinder's cognitive metaphor that the "Heartland," hitherto the vast moribund steppes of Eurasia, had suddenly become of prime importance? The paper presented here addresses a dual question. First, it looks into the historical-geographical conditions in which the Pivot was construed, and the systemic variables of global capitalism which are the source of its programming across time-space. Second, it addresses an aspect of Mackinder's model that has seldom been considered-the spatial. One of the prime reasons that the latter has so often been overlooked could be the prevalent abhorrence of mapping simple geometrical and physical tools into the complex and changing nature of the geopolitical world. Had it not been for the 11 September, 2001 episode, the restive state of world affairs would have found few takers for the platonic Heartland-Rimland debates that often used to wash the shores of Cold War geopolitics. Here, an attempt has been made to look into the dual nature of Mackinder's theory both as map and concept. The paper's original contribution is to show how new light is shed on the Pivot by tilting it on its axis. |
