Category: Eduardo Velasco

by Eduardo Velasco

Antiquity

The first great empire of the Heartland, the Persians, arose after the irruption onto the Iranian plateau of various Aryan tribes from present-day Russia and Ukraine: the Medes, Persians and Parthians. Since then, Persia has been a country that has merely recycled itself as an empire over and over again throughout history, tending to project power across the five seas of Penthalasia (Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caspian, Persian Gulf and Red Sea) and to be a bridge between Europe-Esthasia, Stasia-Africa, Central Asia-Indian and the Eurasian and Arabian Heartland.

The 4th century saw an event that would have a decisive influence on the consolidation of the Silk Road as the backbone of international trade: the eastward thrust of Alexander the Great. Starting from their Balkan base in northern Greece, the Macedonians conquered Anatolia, the Levant, Pentalasia, Egypt and the Achaemenid Empire, reaching as far as India. The Greeks founded several Alexandrias in the Heartland: Alexandria of Aria (today’s Afghan city of Herat, through which passes a strategic gas pipeline and road, and near which there is a Spanish-Italian military base), Alexandria Eschate (today’s Jodzend, Tajikistan), Alexandria of Oxo (today’s Ai Khanum, Afghanistan), Alexandria Caucasus (probably present-day Bagram, Afghanistan, where there is a major NATO air base) and Alexandria Aracosia (present-day Kandahar, Afghanistan, where there is another US military base). According to Isidore of Carax, the Parthians called this region ‘White India’. North of these militarised and fortified Greek colonies, the Scythians and Masagetes—whom Alexander the Great never dared to attack—flowed freely across the steppe. The Macedonians had reached the gates of Gog and Magog.

Greek expeditions from the Tajik valley of Fergana reached the city of Kashgar (present-day Uiguristan), home to an Indo-European tribe, the Tocaryans. The Dayuan (‘great Ionians’) of the Han Chinese chronicles are believed to be descendants of these Greek settlers of the Heartland. Alexander the Great was the first who, by stabilising a vast space between the Great West and the Great East, opened both domains to mutual trade. Thus, the most important and lasting effect of the Macedonian campaigns was the definitive opening of the Silk Road.

When Alexander the Great died in 323 b.c.e., the Diadoks (generals of the Macedonian army) divided up his empire, fighting for twenty years for regional hegemony. After his death, the epigones, his successors, reigned over the territorial units resulting from the fragmentation of the Alexandrian empire. The one that interests us most in this article is the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, centred in Bactria (present-day Balkh, northern Afghanistan). The 3rd century b.c.e. saw the entry into this Greek domain of Buddhism from the Maurya Empire of India, with which the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom maintained numerous political and commercial relations. It is the beginning of an extraordinary Hellenistic-Buddhist civilisation, led by Greek monks and a Greek military aristocracy, descendants of the ancient Macedonian armies, in the heart of Central Asia, an episode rarely remembered in modern historiography.[1]

The earliest artistic depictions of the Buddha, which strongly influenced Buddhist imagery throughout Asia, occurred in this kingdom. It has even been reasonably speculated that Apollo influenced the early sculptures of the Hindu saint so that the legacy of the more typically Western god would have reached the Pacific—something the shepherd warriors of the Balkans could surely never have imagined. The entire Gandhara artistic current is of Greek and therefore European genesis. In the middle of the Silk Road, the colossal Buddha statues in Bamiyan (Afghanistan, demolished by the Taliban in March 2001), were clearly of Greco-Buddhist heritage. This cultural stream is a superb example of the extraordinary fruits that a healthy and positive interaction between the West and the East could bring.

Around 130 b.c.e., the Greco-Bactrian kingdom was overrun by the Toccharians, who eventually founded the Kushan Empire. For a time, however, the Indo-Greek kingdom survived, detached from the Greco-Bactrian when the latter conquered the Indus basin and part of the Ganges basin in an expansion reminiscent of the Indo-Aryan conquests fourteen centuries earlier.

The Macedonian push into the heart of Asia was merely the logical climax of the process initiated centuries earlier by the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, now western Turkey. By now it will have been appreciated that in Hindu civilisation, centred in North Hindustan, the influence of the Heartland predominates, even though India was later conquered by a typically maritime empire such as the British.[2] It seems that since then, the mountainous territories separating Hindustan from Central Asia have been a clear battlefront between thalassocracy and telurocracy. Inevitably, this reminds us of the role of Afghanistan and Pakistan on the international scene today.

Both Rome and China were mutually aware of the existence of the other empire and maintained to some extent essentially indirect relations. The Han Empire regarded Rome as a kind of Western counterpart, and Rome probably had the same image as China. However, between the two powers stood two states in the former Alexandrian conquests: the Parthian Empire and the Kushan Empire. Rome tended to push eastwards, eventually conquering the Caucasus and what is now Iraq, but problems in the Levant meant that Roman conquests in the rest of Pentalasia were rather short-lived. The Mediterranean was the only sea that Rome could call Mare Nostrum; neither the North Sea, the Atlantic, nor the Black Sea, nor the Red Sea—let alone the Caspian or the Persian Gulf—could be called fully Roman.

The Roman Senate even proclaimed several edicts prohibiting, in vain, the use of silk, since its trade bled the Empire of its gold reserves, which indicates that two millennia ago, what happened at one end of the Silk Road influenced the opposite end—an example of proto-globalisation. Pliny the Elder said in Natural History that ‘by the lowest estimate, India, Seres and Arabia cause our Empire to lose 100 million sesterces every year: this is what our luxuries and our women cost us’. There seems to have been phenomena in Rome comparable to the flow of silver to China before the opium wars, as well as the loosening of patriarchy in the West today.

In 56 b.c.e., Rome fights the Parthian Empire at the battle of Carras (modern-day Kurdistan). The feared Parthian cavalry manages to defeat the legion and Crassus, the Roman general, is executed. Ten thousand Roman soldiers were taken prisoner and deported to the far east of the enemy empire, to the Eurasian Heartland; specifically to Bactriana (Afghanistan). Plutarch and Pliny the Elder tell us that many of the Roman survivors were enslaved or sent to forced labour, but that some managed to make their way into the world of labour as mercenaries. These Roman troops were supposedly used by the Parthians to fight the Huns in the province of Margiana, which is now Turkmenistan. The Roman Empire and the Parthians signed a peace treaty in 20 b.c.e. and attempts were made to bring back the prisoners, but by then all traces of the ill-fated legion had been lost. Han chronicles from 36 b.c.e., describing a Chinese military campaign in western China, tell of a disciplined enemy army guarding the square of Zhizhi, present-day Uzbekistan. These chronicles mention a quadrangular wooden fortress and enemy soldiers entering the battle perfectly aligned and building a fish-scale-like formation with their shields: the ‘tortoise’ of the Roman legions had arrived in the Heartland. After finally being defeated, these soldiers were taken, again as mercenaries, to the southern frontier of the Gobi Desert, to protect China from barbarian raids. They were eventually settled at Li-Jien (present-day Liqian), a node on the Silk Road whose very name is a corruption of ‘legion’. The presence of the ‘lost legion of Crassus’ was brought up in 2001 and genetic analysis has confirmed the trace of European blood in this area, a presence that can be seen with the naked eye in the high frequency of more aquiline noses, wavy brown hair and light eyes.

The incursion of the Roman legions into the Levant catalysed a historical process of enormous importance. In the 1st and 2nd centuries, several ethnic cleansings of Greeks took place in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Crete, Crete, Sicily, Rhodes and elsewhere saw Jewish communities, taking advantage of the absence of Roman legions engaged in a military campaign against the Parthian Empire, rise in complete synchronicity against the hated Greek communities of the region. Although these Jewish revolts would be harshly put down by Rome, the Europeanisation of the Levant would never come to fruition, Jewish collaboration with the Parthian Empire would continue and, in the long run, the entire Roman Empire would be semi-ethnicised and would see the eradication of the Greco-Latin legacy, this time under a Christian sign, in a much more resounding way. These ethnic cleansings of European populations were a reaction to the will of the deserted, dry and infertile East, the effect of which was to break the continuity of Greek culture from the Roman Empire to India. The Greek pockets in India and Central Asia, deprived of the source of their culture and human capital, would gradually lose influence until they were swallowed up by the Heartland. It would be fourteen centuries before another power, this time Russia, would reintroduce the flame of Greek culture into the heart of the continent.

The Huns, who emerged from the Heartland in the latter days of the Roman Empire, are of nebulous ethnogenesis. We know that they were a society of pastoral warriors whose main foodstuffs were meat and milk, and whose military tactics were based on large formations of light cavalry masterfully employing the bow and javelin throw. The Huns were, rather than a specific ethnic group, a confederation of steppe horsemen, whose ranks included Ural-Uralic, Turkic, Mongol, Iranian, Germanic, Slavic and other peoples, probably dominated by a Turkic-Mongol aristocracy, although in the Hunnic territories of Eastern Europe, the lingua franca was Gothic. At Attila’s death, his confederation dissolved as quickly as it had appeared, but the effects of its brief existence—notably setting in motion the great migration of the Germanic peoples who were to constitute the medieval nobilities of Western Europe—were to endure for a long time.

The case of the Huns is comparable to that of the silk trade in terms of the repercussions at one end of the Silk Road of what happened at the other end, for if the Huns spilt over into Europe, it was because they could not spill over into China. Europe, unlike Stasia, lacked a state with a clear strategic doctrine that took into account the importance of the Heartland. On the contrary, the Chinese, who had already built dams to control the disastrous floods of the Yellow River (whose sources are in the Heartland), had decided to dam the human floods coming from the heart of the continent by building the Great Wall of China—again, to preserve their ‘political order’. The Great Wall is an impressive testimony to the importance of the Eurasian hinterland; in many sections, it coincides exactly with the boundaries of the Heartland. It seems that the Chinese emperors saw the Heartland as an impenetrable domain, a source of barbarians and a hornet’s nest best left alone. But the Great Wall was not merely a military barrier, it was also a transport corridor and a system of locks to extract taxes, fees and tolls from Silk Road trade, levy tariffs and control migratory flows.

In 431, Nestorian Christianity was condemned by the First Council of Ephesus, leading to a great exile of Nestorian Christians to Sassanid Persia. Henceforth, Baghdad and Seleukia-Ctesiphon were centres of Nestorianism, which sent large numbers of missionaries (or perhaps better said ‘agents’, mainly Syrians and Persians) to the far reaches of the continent, founding Christian communities throughout most of Asia. Cities such as Herat, Farah, Almalik (known to 14th-century Christians as Armalec), Samarkand, Kashgar and even Tang-era Beijing itself, were home to thriving Nestorian communities from the early Middle Ages onwards.
 

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[1] More information here.

[2] Conquerors of India from the Heartland include the Indo-Aryans, the Macedonians and the Mongols (Moghul dynasty, still active in the 18th century). Nor can the Persian influence be underestimated: Persian was in many parts of India the cultured language of the social elite until the arrival of the English.

by Eduardo Velasco

Previous Heartland entries: 1, 2 and 3.

‘The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on Earth’. —Mackinder.

Heartland comes from heart and land, ‘cardinal region’. The Heartland is the sum of a series of contiguous river basins whose waters flow into bodies of water inaccessible to oceanic navigation. It is the endorheic basins of Central Eurasia plus the part of the Arctic Ocean basin frozen in the Northern Route with an ice cover of between 1.2 and 2 metres, and therefore impassable for much of the year—except for atomic-powered icebreakers (which only the Russian Federation possesses) and similar vessels. Although the word was first used in its specific meaning by James Fairgrieve (a Mackinderian disciple) in Geography and World Power (1915), the concept of Heartland was first defined by the English geographer Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947), one of the founding fathers of modern geopolitics, in his work The Geographical Pivot of History (1904), where he drew the first graphic representation of what he initially called the ‘Pivot Area’:

Mackinder says in his more comprehensive Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919):

The northern margin of Asia is an inaccessible coast, clogged with ice except for a narrow waterway which opens here and there along the beach during the summer, owing to the melting of the local ice formed during the winter between the floes and the land. It so happens that three of the world’s largest rivers, the Lena, the Yenisei and the Obi, flow northwards through Siberia to this coast, and are therefore divorced for practical purposes from the general system of ocean and river navigation. South of Siberia are other regions at least as extensive, drained into salt lakes with no oceanic outlet; such are the basins of the Volga and Ural rivers flowing into the Caspian, and of the Oxo[1] and Jaxartes[2] into the Aral Sea. Geographers usually describe these internal basins as ‘continental’. Taken together, the Arctic and continental flow regions occupy almost half of Asia and a quarter of Europe and form a large continuous patch in the north and centre of the continent. This entire patch, stretching from the icy, flat shores of Siberia to the torrid, rugged coasts of Baluchistan and Persia, has been inaccessible to oceanic navigation. Its opening by railways—for it had no roads beforehand—and by air routes shortly, constitutes a revolution in the relations of men with the greatest geographical realities of the world. Let us call this great region the Heartland of the Continent.

Sticking strictly to the Mackinderian definition of the Heartland, its exact extent would be as follows:

Mackinder describes the interior of this Heartland in these terms:

The north, centre, and west of the Heartland are a plain, rising only a few hundred feet at most above sea level. In that greatest lowland on the Globe are included Western Siberia, Turkestan, and the Volga basin of Europe, for the Ural Mountains, though a long range, are not of important height, and terminate some three hundred miles north of the Caspian, leaving a broad gateway from Siberia into Europe. Let us speak of this vast plain as the Great Lowland.

Southward the Great Lowland ends along the foot of a tableland, whose average elevation is about half a mile, with mountain ridges rising to a mile and a half. This tableland bears upon its broad back the three countries of Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan; for convenience we may describe the whole of it as the Iranian Upland. The Heartland, in the sense of the region of Arctic and Continental drainage, includes most of the Great Lowland and most of the Iranian Upland; it extends therefore to the long, high, curving brink of the Persian Mountains, beyond which is the depression occupied by the Euphrates Valley and the Persian Gulf.

The Eurasian steppe is the most traversable and open part of what Mackinder called the Great Lowland. It can be considered the backbone of Eurasia and the cradle of pastoralism, the spirit of chivalry and land power. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia are the key countries for its domination, indeed control of the steppe is a strategic imperative for the Russian Federation—in the same way, Atlanticism ensures that the steppe is never under the control of a single superpower. The Dzungaria Gate, marked on the map, is a mountain pass that separates Uyghuristan from the rest of Central Asia. Mastering such a mountainous strait is as important to a tellurocracy as control of a sea strait is to a thalassocracy. Between the Great Western Steppe (from Hungary to Kazakhstan) and the Great Eastern Steppe (mainly Mongolia and Manchuria), there is only one major barrier: the Altai massif. Budapest, Bucharest, Odesa, Kiev, Volgograd (Stalingrad), Astana, Omsk and Ulan Bator are key cities in the structuring of the Eurasian steppe.

The basis of geopolitics is the contradiction between sea power (‘thalassocracy’ in Greek) and land power (telurocracy). Sea power tends to engender commercial and liberal states, and land power productive and autocratic states. Typical historical thalassocracies have been Phoenicia, Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Hanseatic League, the Republic of Ragusa, the Republic of Salé, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Holland, the British Empire and the United States after 1898. Clear telurocracies have been the Scythians, Sparta, the Holy Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Russian Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the USA before 1898 and the USSR.

Both types of power have their natural citadels and their spheres of influence in the terrestrial geography. The citadel of thalassocracy is the northern half of the Atlantic (Midland Ocean or Mediterranean Sea) and its sphere of influence is Oceania described in 1984 by George Orwell, who knew geopolitics. The citadel of the telurocracy is the Heartland and its sphere of influence is Orwellian Eurasia. The Eurasia of 1984 would, in reality, be, along with other regions of the globe, contested between the two archetypal powers, or have a mixture of both: Southeast Asia, Korea, South India and the Chinese coast would have strong oceanic influence, while Tibet, Uiguristan, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Manchuria and Northern India would have continental influence. According to Orwell, in a world where geopolitics has taken over, the contested areas of the globe—perpetually at war, changing hands and being conquered and reconquered again and again by the three superpowers—form a quadrangle with corners at Tangier-Hong Kong-Darwin-Brazaville, as well as the borders between Stasia and Eurasia. These disputed territories loosely correspond to the Muslim world.

Above, the natural citadels of the thalassocracy and the telurocracy. It will be noted that the shortest way between the two is Scandinavia and the Arctic Ocean, near the Russian-Norwegian border. Europe in general has the misfortune of being the natural battleground between thalassocracy and telurocracy. At present, a new thalassocratic space is forming in the Asia-Pacific, which, together with the Atlantic from the West, besieges the Heartland from the East.

Above, in George Orwell’s novel 1984, there is a fictional essay entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, which explains how the USSR has conquered Western Europe to become Eurasia (red), the United States and the British Empire have united to form Oceania (blue), and Stasia (yellow) has emerged after a decade of confused struggles. None of the three superstates can be conquered even by the other two combined, as their military might be at the same level and their natural defences are too formidable. Within the Tangier-Hong Kong-Darwin-Brazaville quadrangle lie the contested zones of the planet. The borders between Eurasia and Stasia are not entirely clear, except for a reference to the unstable border in Mongolia.

Globalisation has its throne in ‘markets’ (mainly banks and multinationals) and in international trade, 90% of which is conducted by sea, even though rail and pipelines are cheaper, faster and more efficient—or would be if it were not for timely instabilities in the most strategic links of land routes. A landlocked state thus has a large vector of influence projection at its disposal and shares a de facto border with all countries with a coastline on the body of water in question.

Unlike the emerged lands, the planet’s seas constitute a single body (Panthalasa or World Ocean theory), so that whoever goes out into the World Ocean and dominates it will tend to envelop all the world’s emerged lands and infiltrate its power into them, especially through the valleys and plains of the great river basins. But despite this great advantage, the sea, changeable, capricious and shifting, serves only to transport things that come from the land and to lay siege to the land itself. If dominating the sea is merely a means to dominate the land, dominating the land is an end in itself so that a maritime superpower needs to besiege the land only confirms the importance of the land itself.

Halford J. Mackinder

This article will therefore take the point of view of the sea’s natural antagonist. The land represents the firm, stable, fertile, nourishing, productive, organised and disciplined, if the sea is very similar to the ‘becoming’ with its ups and downs, the land is close to the ‘being’ with its obstinate permanence. If the sea rises only in stormy moments, the land rises forever in the mountains, which could be defined as ‘concentrated land’. In the economic sphere, the telluric strategy is not to move goods from one place to another but to produce them and make them stay as close as possible to the soil from which they sprang.

Productivity and fertility thus replace trade and speculation to form a political, economic and social system very different from the one that prevails on the planet today. Likewise, the opening up of spaces of free navigation, which is the obsession of Atlanticism, is replaced by the tendency of the great land masses to strangle maritime traffic in delicate bottlenecks, to break up Panthalasa, turning the various seas into mere inland lakes under tight control. For, as we shall see in another article, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Aegean, the entire Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Andaman Sea, the South China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and even the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay, can be excised from the bosom of the World Ocean and turned into lakes as inaccessible as the Caspian, just by activating natural locks: sea straits like Gibraltar or Hormuz, or island barriers like Japan or the Andaman Arc.

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[1] Oxo or Oxus was the Greek name for the Amur Darya (Pamir) river.

[2] The Greek name for the Syr Darya.