McKinder Halford Biography

Not with us yet? Catch a discount on the first subscription! Born in the city of Gainsboro, in the north of England, in the family of a doctor. In the year he entered the University of Oxford, received a bachelor's degree of natural sciences in the specialty of animal morphology. The works of evolutionary biologists had a great influence on him. He taught geography at the University of Oxford since the year was not yet appointed director of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.

For a year he was a member of the House of Commons, and in the interval of a British envoy in the south of Russia. McKinder made a major contribution to the development of geopolitical ideas. In its well -known works, the “geographical axis of history”, published in the year [1], was published many years later in Russian [2] and “Democratic ideals and reality”, published immediately after the end of the First World War [3], it formulates the concepts of “world island” and “Middle Earth” “Hartland”.

The world island is a combination of three components - Europe, Asia and Africa. As for the Middle Earth, it means an extensive valley, extending from the Arctic Ocean to the Asian steppes and entering Germany and Northern Europe, the heart of which Russia is. Passing the straight line from the Adriatic to the east of Venice to the North Sea east of Netherlands, he divides Europe into two irreconcilable parts - Hart -Land and Coostland coastal land.

At the same time, Eastern Europe remains a zone of claims of both sides, therefore, an instability zone. Germany claims dominance over the Slavs of Vienna and Berlin in the Middle Ages were Slavic lands, and Elba served as a natural border between the Slavic and non -Slavic peoples. Thus, one of the main ideas of X. McKinder is the allocation of the axial core region of the planet, or Hartlen -yes.

Its boundaries were, in principle, were determined by the zone inaccessible to the ships of the sea powers. The exact boundaries of Hartland were not held for them, moreover, they changed the author from work to work, but always in the center of Hartland lay a significant part of Russia from the White and Baltic Seas to the Caspian, Baikal of North-Eastern Siberia. The key value of X.

McKinder gave the completeness of the formation of the geopolitical integrity of the world by the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th centuries. Thus, he was one of the first to talk about the global style of thinking, that is, about the search for causality at the level of large interconnected structural spatial formations, and not just at the level of relations between states.

Indeed, geographical discoveries in the world by the end of the 19th century are almost completed. The globe, according to X. McKinder, turned into a closed political system of a global scale. McKinder speaks of the body of the Earth, and not the body of only a separate state. The global integrity led to the fact that humanity is first in a situation where you can try to establish a connection between wide geographical and historical generalizations.

In the model of X. McKinder Hartland, the following planetary spatial element surrounds - an internal crescent, which is located in mainland Europe and Asia Germany, Austria, Türkiye, India, China. It is these vast territories as a shield that protect Hartland, but can be an object of expansion from the sea powers. The internal crescent is followed by an external crescent, including Britain, South Africa, both America, Japan.

Based on his spatial-structural constructions, X. McKinder brought three maxims: 1 who controls Eastern Europe, he runs Hartlen-House. In the year, the last, third work of H. McKinder is the “world circle and conquest of the world”, where the future world structure is being reviewed after the end of World War II. The author introduces a new geopolitical axis - the USA, justifies the idea of ​​geopolitical blocks and predicts the formation of a two -pool world rotating around two opposing axes: the United States of America and the Soviet Union Hartland, therefore H.

McKinder, is considered the founder of “Atlantism”.

The contribution made by him in the formation of geopolitics as a science of the relationship of the history of mankind and the natural environment of residence was highly appreciated and developed at the end of the 20th century. Although, according to his colleagues, McKinder did not like the term “geopolitics”, he gained the greatest fame as a scientist - a geopoliticist.