The European Manifesto

[ogenoct]

http://pcn-ncp.com/English.html

THE EUROPEAN MANIFESTO :

EUROPE BACK TO THE EUROPEANS !


1. CIVILIZATION CRISIS AND THE COLLAPSE OF OUR SOCIETY

European countries remain attached to the greatness of a civilization
wich they believe still exists : there is however a gap between
reality and its representation since the only crisis of civilization
that we know is presently that of the european countries.
At the top, a wealthy ruling class which after 30 years in power is
only capable of perpetuating illusions.
The regimist Europe was able to prolong its existence thanks to its
obedient submission to that corrupted ruling class. But this class
has no freedom of action, it is only a hostage and a toy in the hands
of the american super power.
As things stand the ruling class naturally imposes myths and models
alien to the European Mind particularly the so called "Consumer
society" or more precisely the "Production Society"; a social
organization "massified" to the extreme and in which popular
community has been completely eliminated to the benefit of machines,
money and crass consumerism.
Given that state of affair it is logical that our society becomes
more and more dehumanized, that our press no longer plays role and
that nothing ever stands in the way of power and profit.
To remediate the present situation one must first discover the
primary causes of the European Bankruptcy. This is important to give
Europe the Moral, the ethics and the aesthetics wich have been so
much lacking to this day.
The question is simple to put : we only have to be masters in our
land.
Contrary to what imperialist ideology claims we say that the US have
their own life wich has nothing in common with that of Europe since
our political and cultural heritage represents a fracture in the
process of uniformization accomplished so far.
Societies do not escape to historical significations or those that
emerge by the analysis of reality. Freedom can only be guaranteed by
force.
Europe must be in europan hands.

2. THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE : EUROPE BACK TO THE EUROPEANS !

Europe's liberation implies a global withdrawal of the US. The end of
american domination must intervene at the military level (disbandment
of NATO) as well as at the economical level (nationalization of
european based american companies and financial assets).
The liberation of Europe is the indispensable prelude to any attempt
of european unification. There cannot be unification as long as
Europe remains under the influence of the US. To be independent
Europe must be liberated from the malevolent dominance of its
american "ally".
The unification of Europe will be possible if its revolves around
several axis : mystic -The european Nation -, political - The
European STATE - indispensable to exert power and force and a state
making device : a united political party with a genuine European
dimension.

3. THE EUROPEAN NATION

At the end of this century we are witnessing the making of Big
International Blocks, there no longer are small independent nations.
This fact is the result of the law of "political physics", it is a
question of DIMENSION. It is no longer possible to rely on France,
Germany or Italy alone. If we aspire to freedom, we must be strong
and to be strong we must build Europe. The EUROPEAN NATION or FUTURE
NATION is radically opposed to "nostalgism" of ancient little
nations.
Therefore we condemn :

Left and Right nationalism which divide Europe and are thus
consciously or not anti european. Present national borders must cease
to exist to allow the supranationality to confort polical
independence.

We reject micro-regional nationalism which are chimerical and noxious
to the European cause. If we can understand the motivations of the
Basque, Corsican movements we must also understand that the more
Europe will be divided the weaker it will be and the weaker it will
be the more it will remain under the dominance of "protectors" wether
americans or other.

We are however favorable to regionalist movements which are capable
of getting integrated within the framework of the European Nation.

4. THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM

Our EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM is an aspiration to liberation in stark
opposition with bellicose expansionism. It is the will of men who
share a common destiny. The framework in which that will can be
expressed and achieved is Europe.

The EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM in itself sumarizes our originality, it
is a political project socially global and total. Europeans want
freedom for Europe, therefore its economical and political
independence and a common justice. In order to reach those goals
communitarianism integrates the socialist dimension.

Our EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM is a PROGRESSISM since far from
negating the rich cultural heritage of the various european nations
it combines them in a constructive synergy to face the great socio-
economical mutations of this ending century.

Such is the project that we must seek to propagate throughout Europe.
That project would be vain without the political will to build a
European STATE and a European SOCIALISM.

5. THE EUROPEAN STATE AND THE EUROPEAN SOCIALISM

The question is to know if the european peoples want to be free or if
they will accept to live in the year 2000 in political and economical
slavery.
To master their own destiny, they must conquer their liberty, they
must be the founders of a United Europe and a European STATE this
implies :

A European Government, one sole legislative and executive Body. The
United Government will be in charge of defence, foreign affairs,
finance and large portions of the economy (nationalization will be
required) and Justice.

The State will be organized in provinces and regions (economical
criterium will be used to divide the regional competence) which will
enjoy a large autonomy in economical managment and cultural affairs.

European Socialism in order to protect economical independence and
social justice presupposes the primacy of the policy over the economy.
But, the unification of Europe remains over all a political problem
and the Eurocrats of Brussels and Strasbourg have shown to the world
the extent of their incompetence in the realization of the political
unification of Europe.
The creation of a political power is a prerequisite to any attempt of
economical, political and social unification.
The Common Market is the perfect illustration of that idea, exempt of
any political substance it is merely a vehicle for the economical
penetration of american goods and services in the European continent.
The liberation of Europe from the yoke of capitalism and the power of
transnational trusts will be achieved thanks to European socialism
but most of all thanks to the creation of A EUROPEAN STATE.

6.MEANS AND ONE ORGANIZATION : A UNITED EUROPEAN PARTY

The creation of a European State, the liberation of the European
Nation and the realisation of the EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM imply
changes of such magnitude that in our project can be seen as a
REVOLUTION EUROPEAN. The sole revolutionary agent capable of
achieving these goals is the National-european Communitarian Party.
The National-european Communitarian Party (NCP-PCN), wich is still in
the making today, must place itself in a situation where it will be
able to lead a continental action against the servants of US
imperialism. We must therefore confront the european puppets who have
chosen to betray the European Nation to further the interests of the
american ruling class.
The National-european Communitarian Party is the AVANT-GARDE of the
European liberation struggle and will tomorrow be the crossroad where
the builder of the 21st century will meet.

[Deling]

http://www.fpri.org/orbis/4702/hay.g...icseurope.html

[Oskorei]

Good find, Deling. If you have any other articles on geopolitics, it would be welcome

In the meantime, here is an introduction and biography on the geopolitical theorist, Karl Haushofer:
http://www.geocities.com/integral_tr...haushofer.html

[morfrain_encilgar]

Mackinders World by Francis P. Sempa

The study of international relations is impossible without a firm grasp of geography. The geographic factor in world history is the most fundamental because it is the most constant. Populations increase and decrease, natural resources are discovered and expended, political systems frequently change, empires and states rise and fall, technologies decline and advance, but the location of continents, islands, seas and oceans has not changed significantly throughout recorded history. That is why great nations neglect the study of geography at their peril.

No one understood better the important relationship between geography and world history than the great British geographer, Halford John Mackinder. Born in Gainsborough, England, in 1861, Mackinder attended Gainsborough Grammar School and Epsom College before entering Oxford in 1880. As a boy, according to W. H. Parker, Mackinder had “a strong curiosity about natural phenomena, … a love of the history of travel and exploration, an interest in international affairs, and a passion for making maps.”

At Oxford, Mackinder fell under the influence of Michael Sadler and Henry Nottidge Mosely, key figures in the effort to establish geography as an independent field of study in England. Mackinder was appointed a lecturer in natural science and economic history in 1886 and that same year joined the Royal Geographical Society. According to Brian W. Blouet, one of Mackinder’s biographers, the membership of the Royal Geographical Society “consisted of men with a general interest in the world and its affairs, officers from the army and navy, businessmen, academics, schoolteachers, diplomats, and colonial administrators.” The next year (1887), Mackinder wrote his first major paper, “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” which has been called “a classic document in the history of the development of British geography.” In that paper, Mackinder argued that “rational” political geography was “built upon and subsequent to physical geography.” “Everywhere,” he wrote, “political questions will depend on the results of the physical inquiry.” Political geography’s function was “to trace the interaction between man and his environment.” That environment, Mackinder explained, included the “configuration of the earth’s surface,” climate and weather conditions, and the presence or absence of natural resources.

Four of the ideas mentioned in “On the Scope and Methods of Geography” are key to understanding Mackinder’s subsequent geopolitical writings.

"First, Mackinder expressed his view that the goal of a geographer was to “look at the past [so] that he may interpret the present.”

Second, he noted that man’s great geographical discoveries were nearing an end; there were very few “blanks remaining on our maps.”

Third, Mackinder described the two kinds of political conquerors as “land-wolves and sea-wolves.”

And, fourth, he recognized that technological improvements made possible “the great size of modern states.”

Upon the foundation of those four ideas Mackinder later constructed his famous global theory.

In June 1887, Mackinder was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford, and he began to lecture on the influence of geography on European history. He visited the United States in 1892, lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton and Johns Hopkins. The same year, he was appointed Principal of Reading College at Oxford, a position he held for eleven years. In 1893-1894, Mackinder gave a series of ten lectures on the relations of geography to history in Europe and Asia. Five years later, he helped found the School of Geography at Oxford, and participated in an expedition that climbed Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-highest peak.

In 1902, Mackinder wrote his first major book, Britain and the British Seas. Although primarily concerned, in Mackinder’s words, “to present a picture of the physical features and conditions” of Britain, the book’s chapters on “The Position of Britain,” “Strategic Geography,” and “Imperial Britain” contain insights on global affairs that foreshadowed Mackinder’s subsequent geopolitical works. In the book, he described Britain as being “of Europe, yet not in Europe,” and as lying “off the shores of the great continent.” British predominance in the world rested on its “command of the sea,” wrote Mackinder, because “[t]he unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world.” “A new balance of power is being evolved,” Mackinder opined, and it included “five great world states, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and America.” Mackinder suggested, however, that Britain’s position as the preeminent world power was endangered due to “permanent facts of physical geography” in the form of “the presence of vast Powers, broad-based on the resources of half continents” (i.e., Russia and the United States).

The threat to British preeminence and to the liberty of the world was the subject of Mackinder’s bold, provocative essay, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which he delivered to the Royal Geographical Society on January 25, 1904. He began this seminal work by noting that the last stage of “geographical exploration” (which he called the “Columbian epoch”) was nearing its end. “In 400 years,” he wrote, “the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy.” Moreover, since conquerors, missionaries, miners, farmers and engineers “followed so closely in the travelers’ footsteps,” the world was for the first time a “closed political system.” This meant, wrote Mackinder, that “every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” Nations, in other words, could no longer safely ignore major events that occurred in far away places of the globe.

Mackinder’s avowed purposes in writing the “pivot” paper were to establish “a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations,” to provide “a formula which shall express certain aspects… of geographical causation in universal history,” and to set “into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.”

Mackinder pictured Europe and Asia as one great continent: “Euro-Asia.” He described Euro-Asia as: “a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring twenty-one million square miles….” The center and north of Euro-Asia, he pointed out, measure “some nine million square miles, … have no available waterways to the ocean, but, on the other hand, … are generally favorable to the mobility of horsemen…. ” To the “east and south of this heart-land,” he further explained, “are marginal regions, ranged in a vast crescent, accessible to shipmen.”

Mackinder noted that between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, a “succession of … nomadic peoples” (Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols and Kalmuks) emerged from Central Asia to conquer or threaten the states and peoples located in the “marginal crescent” (Europe, the Middle East, southwest Asia, China, southeast Asia, Korea and Japan). Beginning in the late fifteenth century, however, the “great mariners of the Columbian generation” used seapower to envelop Central Asia. “The broad political effect” of the rise of sea powers, explained Mackinder, “was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia….” “[W]hereas in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west, and icy or forested wastes to north and north-east, and in the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the superior mobility of the horsemen,” Mackinder further explained, “she now emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which she had access, and wrapping her influence around the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto threatened her very existence.”

Often unappreciated, however, Mackinder believed, was the fact that while Europe expanded overseas, the Russian state based in Eastern Europe and Central Asia expanded to the south and east, organizing a vast space of great human and natural resources. That vast space would soon be “covered with a network of railways,” thereby greatly enhancing the mobility and strategic reach of land power.

With that geo-historical background, Mackinder identified the northern-central core of Euro-Asia as the “pivot region” or “pivot state” of world politics. He placed Germany, Austria, Turkey, India and China, lands immediately adjacent to the pivot region, in an “inner crescent,” and the insular nations of Britain, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada and Japan in an “outer crescent.” He then warned that, “[t]he oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.” Mackinder suggested that either a Russo-German alliance or a Sino-Japanese empire (which conquered Russian territory) could contend for world hegemony. In either case, “oceanic frontage” would be added to “the resources of the great continent,” thereby creating the geopolitical conditions necessary for producing a great power that was supreme both on land and at sea.

“I have spoken as a geographer,” Mackinder acknowledged toward the end of the paper. But he carefully avoided geographical determinism in assessing the world situation: “The actual balance of political power at any given time is… the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment and organization of the competing peoples.”

Mackinder’s “pivot” paper caused one member of the Royal Geographical Society to “look with regret on some of the space which is unoccupied here.” Unfortunately, as W. H. Parker has pointed out, “in the English-speaking world Mackinder’s paper lay forgotten . . . for thirty-five years.” It was only during and after the Second World War that Englishmen and Americans began to appreciate the wisdom and prescience of Mackinder’s “pivot” paper and his 1919 masterpiece, Democratic Ideals and Reality.

A few months before he delivered the “pivot” paper to the Royal Geographical Society, Mackinder was appointed the director of the London School of Economics, a post that he held until 1908. In 1910 he was elected to the House of Commons, where he served until 1922. In 1919, as civil war raged in Russia, Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, chose Mackinder to be British High Commissioner for South Russia. In that post, Mackinder promoted the idea of a British-supported anti-Bolshevik alliance because he feared that if the Bolsheviks consolidated their control of Russia “there is… great risk that such a weapon may be forged as may become a danger to the world.” “[T]here is to-day,” he warned, “a growing threat from Moscow of a state of affairs which will render this world a very unsafe place for democracies. . . .” Among British policy makers of the time, only Winston Churchill voiced strong support for Mackinder’s anti-Bolshevik strategy.

During his directorship of the London School of Economics and his stay in Parliament, Mackinder continued to think and write on geography and world affairs. His articles and books included: “Man-Power as a Measure of National and Imperial Strength” (1905), Our Own Islands: An Elementary Study in Geography (1906), “On Thinking Imperially” (1907), “The Geographical Environment of Great Britain” (1908), The Rhine: Its Valley and History (1908), “Geographical Conditions Affecting the British Empire” (1909), “The Geographical Conditions of the Defence of the United Kingdom” (1909), “The New Map” (1915), “Some Geographical Aspects of International Reconstruction” (1917), “This Unprecedented War” (1917), and “The New Map of Europe” (1918).

Shortly after the end of the First World War, Mackinder wrote Democratic Ideals and Reality, arguably the most important work on international politics ever written by a geographer. Here Mackinder greatly expanded on his 1904 “pivot” paper, drawing on recent lessons learned from the Great War. In the book’s preface, referring to the continuing relevance of the ideas expressed in the “pivot” paper, Mackinder opined that “the war has established, and not shaken, my former points of view.” In the two hundred or so pages that followed, Mackinder presented a masterful synthesis of historical and geographical analyses that has withstood the test of time.

Early in the book, Mackinder emphasized the paramount importance of geography to the study of history and global politics. “The great wars of history,” he wrote, “are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations, and that unequal growth… in large measure … is the result of the uneven distribution of fertility and strategical opportunity upon the face of the globe.” The “facts of geography” indicated to Mackinder that “the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single world empire.” In order to prevent future world conflicts, he advised, “we must recognize these geographical realities and take steps to counter their influence.” He proposed to reveal those “geographical realities” by measuring “the relative significance of the great features of our globe as tested by the events of history….”

Mackinder pointed out that although the “physical facts of geography have remained substantially the same during … recorded human history,” it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the globe became, in political terms, a “closed system.” “Every shock, every disaster or superfluity,“ he wrote, ”is now felt even to the antipodes…. Every deed of humanity will henceforth be echoed and re-echoed in like manner round the world.”

In geographical terms, Mackinder’s world as sketched in Democratic Ideals and Reality consisted of the following: (1) one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe; (2) one great continent encompassing Europe, Asia and Africa; and (3) several smaller islands including Britain, Japan, North America, South America and Australia. The one great continent, which Mackinder called “the World-Island”, he further subdivided into six regions: the European coastland (Western and Central Europe), the Monsoon or Asian coastland (India, China, Southeast Asia, Korea and eastern Siberia), Arabia (the Arabian peninsula), the Sahara (North Africa), the Southern Heartland (Africa south of the Sahara), and, most important, the Heartland (the northern-central core of Eurasia which he had called the “pivot region” in his 1904 paper).

Mackinder showed the significance of the position of the Eurasian-African “World-Island” on the globe by geo-historical analogy. The "World-Island” was to North America, he explained, what Greece under the Dorians had been to Crete, and what the Roman Empire had been to Britain, i.e., an unchallenged peninsular land power versus an insular sea power. In both of those instances of history, strongly-based unchallenged land power defeated the less strongly-based sea power. But it was not simply a case of land power being superior to seapower. The victorious land power had to be unchallenged by land, and had to possess sufficient resources to enable it to construct a fleet powerful enough to defeat the insular sea power. Absent those two conditions, a strongly-based insular power would prevail, as evidenced by the British defeat of Napoleon’s France, the latter of which, while possessing tremendous resources, faced a significant land power challenge to the east (Russia) which prevented it from harnessing those resources to overwhelm British seapower.

Indeed, in Mackinder’s view, the optimum geographical position combined insularity with greater resources, and that was precisely the position of the “World-Island.” Strategists, he explained, “must no longer think of Europe apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe.” In the First World War, had Germany conquered Russia and France, “she would have established her sea-power on a wider base than any in history, and in fact on the widest possible base.” Although Germany lost the war, Mackinder cautioned, “must we not still reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might some day be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it?” “[T]hat,” Mackinder wrote, “is the great ultimate threat to the world’s liberty.”

The most strategically significant geographic feature of the “World-Island” was the Heartland, which Mackinder described as “a great continuous patch in the north and center of the continent… from the icy, flat shore of Siberia to the torrid, steep coasts of Baluchistan and Persia.” This region’s great rivers (Lena, Yenisei, Obi, Volga and Ural) emptied either into the frozen Arctic Ocean or inland seas (the Caspian and Aral), thereby rendering the Heartland “inaccessible to navigation from the ocean.” The Heartland also included a great “lowland” plain that formed “a broad gateway from Siberia into Europe,” which is suitable to highly mobile land power.

As in his 1904 “pivot” paper, Mackinder in Democratic Ideals and Reality, used history to illustrate the strategic significance of geography. He noted that beginning with the Huns in the fifth century, successive waves of mobile hordes emerged from the Heartland to conquer or threaten the coastlands of Europe and Asia. Those hordes, however, lacked sufficient manpower and organization to conquer the whole World-Island, or a large part of it (although the Mongols came close to doing so). Two modern developments—increased population and advanced means of overland transportation (railroads, motorcars)—threatened to upset the balance between land power and seapower, and constituted, in Mackinder’s words, “a revolution in the relations of man to the larger geographical realities of the world.”

Mackinder described how during the nineteenth century following the defeat of Napoleon and until the rise of the German empire, British sea-power sought to contain Russian land-power, a geopolitical struggle that has since been called the “great game.” Germany’s rise to world power after 1871 shifted the geopolitical focus of British statesmen and set the stage for the First World War. For Mackinder, the most important aspect of that war, for the purposes of strategy, was Germany’s near successful conquest of Eastern Europe and the Heartland. Had Germany discarded the Schlieffen Plan, remained nominally at peace with France and Britain, and directed all her efforts and resources eastward, the world would be “overshadowed by a German East Europe in command of the Heartland.” “The British and American insular peoples,” warned Mackinder, “would not have realized the strategical danger until too late.”

Mackinder perceived a consistent geographical basis for British policy during the “great game” and the First World War. “We were opposed to the… Russian Czardom,” explained Mackinder, “because Russia was the dominating, threatening force both in East Europe and the Heartland for a half century.” “We were opposed to the… German Kaiserdom, because Germany took the lead from the Czardom, and would have crushed the revolting Slavs, and dominated East Europe and the Heartland.” This strategic insight formed the basis of Mackinder’s memorable advice to the Western statesmen at Versailles: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”

The postwar settlement and reconstruction was the focus of the final part of Democratic Ideals and Reality. Mackinder worried that failure by the statesmen at Versailles to construct an effective security system for Eastern Europe would mean that after the terrible sufferings of the First World War, the Western democracies “shall merely have gained a respite, and our descendants will find themselves under the necessity of marshaling their power afresh for the siege of the Heartland.” To those who argued that Germany’s defeat would alter the German desire for conquest and power, Mackinder sagely replied: “He would be a sanguine man…who would trust the future peace of the world to a change in the mentality of any nation.” To those who argued that peace would be secured by the new League of Nations and its professed ideals, Mackinder prophetically remonstrated: “No mere scraps of paper, even though they be the written constitution of a League of Nations, are, under the conditions of to-day, a sufficient guarantee that the Heartland will not again become the center of a world war.”

Mackinder’s proposed solution to the problem of Eastern Europe, which he derived from “a consideration of the realities presented by the geography of our globe,” was the formation of a “tier of independent states between Germany and Russia,” which would form “a broad wedge of independence, extending from the Adriatic and Black Seas to the Baltic….” This “territorial buffer between Germany and Russia,” wrote Mackinder, must have access to the ocean, and must be supported by the “outer nations” (i.e., Britain and the United States). Otherwise, the East European power vacuum would again serve as the spark to ignite yet another struggle for Eurasian hegemony.

During the 1920s and 1930s, unfortunately, Mackinder’s ideas had little influence in Britain or the United States. That was not the case, however, in Germany where Mackinder’s global view attracted the attention and praise of Karl Haushofer and his associates at Munich’s Institute of Geopolitics. The German geopoliticians, influenced by the writings of Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen, adapted Mackinder’s theories and concepts to promote German expansion. Haushofer in the 1920s and 1930s was close to Rudolf Hess, a close adviser to Hitler. But it is unclear to what extent the German geopoliticians influenced the Führer’s global strategy. Haushofer considered Mackinder the author of “the greatest of all geographical world views.” “Never,” exclaimed Haushofer referring to “The Geographical Pivot of History,” “have I seen anything greater than these few pages of a geopolitical masterwork.” The German geopoliticians divided the world into “Pan Regions” each of which was dominated by a great power. Haushofer advocated the formation of a “Eurasiatic great continental bloc”; in essence, an alliance between Germany, Japan and Russia that would eventually overwhelm the British Empire.

During the inter-war period, Mackinder was knighted (1920), lost his seat in Parliament (1922), chaired the Imperial Shipping Committee (1920-1939), sat on the Imperial Economic Committee (1925-1931), was made a Privy Councilor (1926), and continued to write and lecture on geography and related topics. His inter-war writings included: “Geography as a Pivotal Subject in Education” (1921); “The Sub-Continent of India”(1922); The Nations of the Modern World: An Elementary Study in Geography and History After 1914 (1924); and “The Human Habitat”(1931).

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the beginning of the Second World War and Germany’s subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union drew attention in the United States to Mackinder’s works. In 1941 and 1942, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest and Life published articles which prominently mentioned Mackinder and his writings. Democratic Ideals and Reality was reprinted in 1942. That same year, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, asked Mackinder to write an article to update his Heartland theory. That article, entitled “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” appeared in July 1943, and was Mackinder’s last significant statement of his global views.

"[M]y concept of the Heartland,” wrote Mackinder, “… is more valid and useful today than it was either twenty or forty years ago.” He described the Heartland in geographical terms as “the northern part and the interior of Euro-Asia,” extending “from the Arctic coast down to the central deserts,” flowing westward to “the broad isthmus between the Baltic and Black Seas.” The Heartland concept, he explained, is based on “three separate aspects of physical geography.”

First, “the widest lowland plain on the face of the globe.”

Second, “great navigable rivers [that] flow across that plain [but have] no access to the ocean.”

And third, “a grassland zone which… presented ideal conditions for the development of high mobility” by land transportation.
The Heartland, in essence, wrote Mackinder, was equivalent to the territory of the Soviet Union, minus the land east of the Yenisei River.

If the Soviet Union defeated Germany in the war, opined Mackinder, “she must rank as the greatest land Power on the globe.” “The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth,” he explained, and “[f]or the first time in history it is manned by a garrison sufficient both in number and quality.”

A second geographical feature which Mackinder estimated to be “of almost equal significance” to the Heartland was the “Midland Ocean,” consisting of the eastern half of Canada and the United States, the North Atlantic basin and its “four subsidiaries (Mediterranean, Baltic, Arctic and Caribbean Seas),” Britain and France (a remarkable description of the NATO alliance that was formed six years after Mackinder wrote his article).

Completing his updated global sketch, Mackinder identified three additional geographic features. The first was “a girdle of deserts and wildernesses” extending from the Sahara Desert eastward to Arabia, Tibet, and Mongolia to eastern Siberia, Alaska, part of Canada, and the western United States. The second consisted of South America, the South Atlantic Ocean, and Africa. And the third encompassed the “Monsoon lands” of China and India. He expressed the hope that those lands would prosper and, thereby, balance the other regions of the globe. “A balanced globe of human beings,” he wrote, “[a]nd happy, because balanced and thus free.”

Mackinder expressed the hope that Heartland Russia would cooperate with the Midland Ocean powers in the postwar world and, thereby, prevent future German aggression. But his theories and concepts proved readily adaptable to the emerging Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. American strategists during and after the Second World War borrowed aspects of Mackinder’s world view in formulating and implementing the policy of “containment” of Soviet Russia. Anthony J. Pierce, in his introduction to the 1962 edition of Democratic Ideals and Reality, could confidently assert that “[i]n America and in England, since 1942, most studies of global strategy or political geography have been based, in whole or in part, upon [Mackinder’s] theories. “Mackinder, of course, had his share of critics, but as Colin Gray has pointed out, “Mackinder’s interpretations of historically shifting power relationships in their geographical setting have stood the test of time much better than have the slings and arrows of his legion of critics.”

More recent and current political observers and strategists attest to the continuing influence of Mackinder’s ideas. In 1974, R. E. Walters wrote that “the Heartland theory stands as the first premise in Western military thought.” In 1975, Saul B. Cohen noted that “most Western strategists continue to view the world as initially described by Mackinder.” Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Game Plan (1986) and The Grand Chessboard (1997) present global views almost wholly based on Mackinder’s concepts. In 1980, Robert Nisbet claimed that “[e]very geopolitical apprehension that Sir Halford Mackinder expressed some six decades ago in his Democratic Ideals and Reality has been fulfilled.” The influential journals, Strategic Review and The National Interest, published several articles in the 1980s and 1990s wherein the authors applied Mackinder’s theories and concepts to contemporary global issues. In 1988, the respected strategist Colin Gray asserted that “[t]he geopolitical ideas of the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder … provide an intellectual architecture, far superior to rival conceptions, for understanding the principal international security issues.” In 1992, Eugene Rostow remarked that “Mackinder’s map remains an indispensable tool of analysis” of global politics. In 1994, the former State Department Geographer, George J. Demko, wrote that “the geographic ideas of … Mackinder, still provide important insights into international political processes.” Henry Kissinger in his book, Diplomacy (1994), concludes with a warning that “Russia, regardless of who governs it, sits astride territory Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland….” Paul Kennedy, Robert Chase, and Emily Hill invoked Mackinder’s theories in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article on post-Cold War “pivot states.” Finally, in 1996 the National Defense University issued a reprint of Democratic Ideals and Reality.

Twentieth century global politics were shaped, in part, by Mackinder’s geopolitical vision. Following his concepts, the continuing struggle for Eurasian mastery was the geopolitical essence of the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War. First Great Britain, then the United States, organized great coalitions to oppose successive bids for Eurasian hegemony launched by Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Great Power struggles of the twenty-first century will likely repeat this pattern.

The People’s Republic of China, situated at the gates of Mackinder’s “pivot region” or Heartland, and with access to the sea, possesses sufficient human and natural resources to make a bid for Eurasian mastery sometime in this new century. Russia, though currently undergoing a new time of troubles, still occupies the Heartland and possesses vast human and natural resources, as well as thousands of nuclear weapons. The nations of Western, Central and Eastern Europe are moving toward economic unity and, perhaps, political unity, with Germany playing a leading role. Whatever specific power constellation emerges, however, U.S. foreign policy will continue to be shaped by Mackinder’s geopolitical vision of a Eurasian-based world hegemon.

In 1944, the American Geographical Society awarded Mackinder the Charles P. Daley Medal, which was presented to him at the American Embassy in London on March 31, 1944. Ambassador John Winant remarked that Mackinder was the first scholar who fully enlisted geography as an aid to statecraft and strategy. A year later, the Royal Geographical Society awarded Mackinder the Patron’s Medal, and its president noted that ”[a]s a political geographer his reputation is … world wide.” Mackinder died on March 6, 1947, at the age of eighty-six. More than fifty years later, as we enter a new century, statesmen and strategists still operate in Mackinder’s world.

[Prince Eugen]

By Julius Evola (from "Men Among the Ruins")


The first political step in forging a united Europe would be the withdrawal of all European governments from the United Nations, a hypocritical organization if there ever was. But the problems of concrete political tactics fall outside the scope of this essay. Here we can only point to what we believe must be the form and the spiritual and doctrinal basis of united Europe.

The condition of a truly European entity must be the binding force of an idea and tradition with which Europe is irrevocably linked. Some argue that the nation state is a model for the merging European nation. According to this view the spiritual precondition for a united Europe exists in the myth of a common destiny defended by the 'national revolutionary' groups of Europe. This view is inadequate. The birth of the European nations was largely the work of dynasties representing a tradition of loyalty to a particular crown. In any case, the factors which created the European nations have been the very ones which have maintained European disunity from the Hundred Years War to the present day.
Among those who possess a spiritual and traditional understanding of Europe we can distinguish between those who believe in an Imperium, and those who talk of Europe as a nation. The concept of nationhood is in my opinion inappropriate. The notion of European unity is spiritual and supranational. Homeland nation, ethnic group subsist at an essentially naturalistic 'physical' level. Europe (Europa una) should be something more than this. The European Imperium will belong to a higher order than the parts which compose it, and to be European should be conceived as being something qualitatively different from being Italian, Prussian, Basque, Finnish, Scottish or Hungarian, something which appeals to a different aspect of our character. A European nation implies the leveling and canceling of all 'rival' nations in or beyond Europe.

So far as 'European culture' is concerned it is these days the stamping-ground of the liberal, humanist intellectual. His 'European culture' is an appendage of 'democracy' and the 'Free World'. In this sense 'culture' is the stock-in-trade of the so-called 'aristocrat of thought', in reality the clothing of the parvenu, his badge of success. A genuine aristocracy of the intellect would not in any case be adequate for the task in hand; the re-animation of the European will and the sustaining of a revolutionary elite who could make this a political possibility. What is more, every time that we try to give the notion of 'European culture' concrete significance, we seem to run up against innumerable 'interpretations' which leave us with nothing conclusive at all. Everyone has their own idea about what European culture is and many Europeans feel reticent or even guilty about championing it and so the parvenus can speculate to their hearts' content in the reviews
and color supplements about all the latest developments in this or that field of art in such a way that 'culture' becomes entirely divorced from the 'serious world', from what matters. Ironically, much of what the defenders of culture admire plays a major role in helping to bring about a spiritual crisis and lack of confidence in European culture.

We must create a 'unity of fighters'. That is a prerequisite. A united Europe, without a communal spiritual identity and sense of direction would become just one more power bloc. In what way would such a United States of Europe be spiritually distinct from the United States of America or China or be anything nobler than the organization of African Unity? Europe must be a revolt against the modern world in favor of what is nobler, higher, and more truly human.

JULIUS EVOLA

SOURCE:http://www.juliusevola.net/pages/5/index.htm