Mackinder's “heartland” – legitimation of US foreign policy in World War II and the Cold War of the 1950s

Abstract

Abstract. The British geographer Halford J. Mackinder developed two different concepts of a dystopian new global order. The first, developed in 1904 and known as the pivot area concept, was adopted by German geopolitician Karl Haushofer in the 1920s. The second, developed in 1919, was named the heartland theory and was adopted in Great Britain and the USA. Haushofer reversed the dystopian vision of the pivot area concept into a utopian concept for German world power. Due to Haushofer's adaptation, interest in Mackinder's theories rose in the USA in the 1940s. Within the process of adaptation in the USA, both concepts were intertwined, resulting in the perception of the two as a monolithic bloc. Through this multi-layered process of intercontinental reception and adaptation in Germany and the USA, the term “heartland” became a generic spatial denomination detached from the geographical region it originally prescribed, integrable with various geopolitical concepts as the centre of an imagined world order. The reduction of complexity of the theory through the translation of text into maps led to its popularization among the US public during the 1940s and 1950s. Mackinder himself laid out the flexibility of the theory's interpretive possibilities by reflexively revising the theory and adapting it to the history of events over the course of the first half of the 20th century itself. In consequence, the generic spatial denomination “heartland” and the associated adopted theory served as a geopolitical argument for the strategic narrative legitimizing US foreign policy in World War II and during the Cold War.

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