Changing fears in European geopolitical discourses from the First till the Second World War: Halford Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman and Arnold J. Toynbee

Abstract

This contribution aims at exploring one aspect of the “production” of fears in the 20 th century, analysing the period between the Two World Wars, namely a crucial turning point in the history of the geopolitical and political thought and reconstructing the genesis of the fears concerning the Western civilisation and Europe, that have originated from the end of the Second WW till now. Amongst the academics who dealt with the crisis of the European political system were three main intellectuals, who belonged to different disciplinary fields and were members of key political organizations in their countries: Halford Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman and Arnold J. Toynbee. In this article their ideas will be investigated from the perspective of the history of political thought: they will be considered as “political thinkers”, whose comments on contingent political facts were supported by their academic and intellectual expertise and whose ideas, at their turn, had a certain impact on the political ideas and praxis in the 20 th century. In so doing, I will trace back to the genesis of the idealistic paradigm of IR during the crisis of the main institutions of the political national and international order, as well as its fragmentation into two main strains: the geopolitical and the “civilizational” paradigms of interpretation. I will demonstrate, on the one hand, the impact of the political transformations of their “geopolitical conceptual map” from the First to the Second World War – namely their ideas of Europe, America and the “Other” -; on the other hand, I will trace back to the origin of the split between these two main paradigms, used in order to explain the crisis of the order in international order and its possible “restoration”.