Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland: The Reemergence of Geopolitics

Abstract

Few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of geopolitics. Popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century by an eccentric British geographer, Sir Haiford Mackinder, geopolitics posits that the earth will forever be divided into two naturally antagonistic spheres: land and sea. In this model, the natural repository for global land power is the Eurasian ?the territory of the former Russian empire. Whoever controls the heart land, wrote Mackinder, will forever seek to dominate the Eurasian land mass and ultimately the world. Unsurprisingly, this theory of geopolitics has not gone unnoticed in the heartland itself. Today, in the shadow of the Kremlin's spires, geopolitical theory has a fast growing set of devotees. Many Russian intellectuals, who once thought their homeland's victory over the world would be the inevitable result of history, now pin their hope for Russia's return to greatness on a theory that is, in a way, the opposite of dialectical materialism. Victory is now to be found in geography, rather than history; in space, rather than time. A geopolitical theory called Eurasianism has become the common focus of Russia's red-brown coalition?the alliance of