How should we understand Mackinder’s insights? We generally understand them in terms of geopolitics. Yet, as Professor Xiaofeng just said, Mackinder’s British-style geopolitics and German-style geopolitics represent two entirely different ways of understanding the world. Mackinder’s most important understanding of geopolitics is found in the address he gave to the Royal Geographical Society when he was twenty-six.
应该怎样理解麦金德的洞见？我们一般都将麦金德的洞见理解成地缘政治学。但就像刚才小枫老师说的，麦金德的英国式的地缘政治学，与德国式的地缘政治学是两种完全不同的理解世界方式。麦金德对地缘政治学最重要的理解，就是他26岁的时候在皇家地理学会所做的演讲。
Geography as we speak of it today arose alongside modern natural science, the great geographical discoveries, and modern geographical surveying techniques such as mapping. Together, these constituted modern scientific geography. In the classical history of the West, by contrast, those portions of the Homeric epics and Herodotus’s Histories that dealt with geography were called human geography. After the rise of modern geography, one important undertaking was exploration around the globe. Britain’s Royal Geographical Society was also an explorers’ club, and Mackinder himself went exploring in Africa.
我们今天说的地理学与现代自然科学、地理大发现、地图等现代地理测量技术兴起，这一切构成了现代的科学地理学。而在西方古典历史上，《荷马史诗》和希罗多德《历史》中讲的那一部分与地理相关的内容被称之为人文地理学。现代地理学兴起之后，一个重要工作就是从事全球探险活动。英国皇家地理学会也是一个探险俱乐部，麦金德也曾经去非洲探险。
By the nineteenth century, however, which is to say Mackinder’s era, geographical exploration was essentially over. All the mountains and rivers we could find had already been found. The end of geographical exploration also meant the end of the European great powers’ partition of the world. The period of Mackinder’s research coincided with the Congo Conference on African affairs and the Eight-Power Allied Forces’ invasion of China. What, then, could geography still do after this? Behind this question lay another: how would the great powers subsequently confront a world whose partition was complete? The answer was undoubtedly world war. As geography served the great powers’ struggles, it naturally developed into political geography, or geopolitics.
但是到了十九世纪，也就是麦金德这个时代，地理探险基本结束，我们能够找到的山川和河流，都已经找到了。而地理探险的结束也意味着欧洲列强瓜分世界的结束，在麦金德研究之际，就是关于非洲问题的刚果会议和八国联军侵华。那么，此后地理学还能做什么呢？这个问题的背后就是此后列强如何面对瓜分完毕的世界呢？答案无疑是世界大战，而地理学服务于列强的争夺，那自然就发展出了政治地理学或地缘政治学。
Yet in this lecture, the twenty-six-year-old Mackinder explicitly proposed bringing scientific physical geography and human geography together. The basis for this union was the intrinsic connection between the laws of nature and the laws of human activity, and the unity of human knowledge that followed from it. He therefore firmly opposed the division of disciplines in American and British universities, arguing that it left the natural sciences and the humanities completely unable to understand one another, to the point that the geography statesmen needed and the geography university professors taught were two entirely different things.
不过，26岁的麦金德这个演讲中明确提出科学的自然地理学和人文地理学结合起来。这个结合的基础是自然法则与人类活动法则的内在关联以及由此形成的人类知识的整体性。因此，他坚决反对美英大学中的分科化，认为分科化带来的是自然科学和人文科学完全不能互相理解，以至于政治家所要的地理与大学教授所讲授的地理完全是两回事。
Mackinder thus arrived at a concept: “force.” He tells us that, when all is said and done, whether we study physical geography or human society, we are studying the same thing: forces. Geography studies the forces of geographical and natural elements, while history and political science study the forces generated by human activity. In proposing political geography, he sought to bring these two kinds of force together. And all of this had to take physical geography as its starting point.
因此，麦金德就找到了一个概念，这个概念就是“力”。他告诉我们，说来说去，无论是自然地理、还是人类社会都是研究一个东西，就是力量。地理学研究的地理、自然要素的力量，而历史学和政治学研究的是人的活动所产生的力量。而他提出政治地理学，就是要将这两种力量结合起来。而这一切一定要以自然地理学为前提。
In fact, what Mackinder meant by physical geography was very different from the understanding of physical geography in his time. The latter was essentially geology, studying such things as volcanoes, glaciers, and continental plates. Mackinder’s physical geography, by contrast, brought together everything that could provide human activity with the support of natural forces. It included not only elements of geology but also physiography and, indeed, meteorology. On this basis, Mackinder sought to examine how natural forces and human forces reinforced one another.
其实，麦金德所说的自然地理学和他们那个时代对自然地理学的理解很不一样了，后者其实就是地质学，研究火山、冰川、大陆板块这些对象，而麦金德讲的自然地理学恰恰只要为人类活动提供自然力量支持的东西全部组织在一起，不仅有地质学的东西，也会有地文学的东西，更会有气象学的东西。在此基础上，麦金德要去考察自然力量和人类力量是怎样相互促进的。
Before people recognize them, all natural forces are blind forces that cannot be understood. Only when you understand what a natural force is can you make effective use of it. He gave many examples. Why, for instance, did Alexander’s expedition fail to conquer India? To a great extent, it was because he chose the wrong route. Alexander did not understand the geography; he did not know where to enter India in order to conquer it.
所有的自然力量在被人们认识到之前，都是盲目的、不能够被理解的力量，当你能够认识到自然力量是什么的时候，你才能善于利用它。他举了很多例子。比如亚历山大远征为什么没有能征服印度呢？很大程度上是因为他选择的路线错了，亚历山大不了解地理，不知道征服印度需要从什么地方进入。
In discussing the relationship between natural and human forces, he consistently stressed two points. First, he emphasized the influence of natural forces on humanity as studied in geographical science, using the concept of “dominant forces”: the influence of land and sea on human history, for example. Second, what interested him most, in fact, was what human forces could achieve when organized, and how they transformed nature. In the earlier work, The Geographical Pivot of History, he emphasized technology. For example, it was precisely the invention of navigational technologies that shifted the world’s center of trade away from Venice, gradually moving it toward the Atlantic and Britain. Navigational technologies changed the global geographical configuration.
在自然力量与人类力量的关系中，他始终强调两点。第一是强调地理科学中自然的力量对人类的影响，他用的概念是“支配性力量”。比如陆地和海洋对人类历史的影响。第二他最感兴趣的反而是人类的力量组织起来的东西，是人类的力量对自然的改变。在早期的《历史的地理枢纽》中，他强调的是技术，比如说恰恰是航海技术的发明使世界的贸易中心摆脱了威尼斯，慢慢到了大西洋和英国，是航海技术改变了全球地理格局。
In Democratic Ideals and Reality, however, he emphasized the “social momentum” generated by forms of human organization. He regarded Britain and Germany as representing two such forms: one based on freedom, the other on discipline. Britain believed in a “commercial freedom” in which people were scattered like loose sand, each going their own way. Germany’s greatest strengths, by contrast, were strategy, planning, and organization: through organization, it developed human forces to their fullest extent, encompassing ideas, strategies, policies, and methods. For precisely this reason, he believed that the free world would face a threat: Germany’s organized forces would be capable of confronting the entire West. Although he repeatedly discussed the dominant influence of geography and nature on humanity, he also placed particular emphasis on the way human activity acted back upon them.
而在《民主的理想与现实》中，他强调人类组织形式所形成的“社会动量”，他将英国和德国看作是两种组织形式，一种就是自由的组织方式，一种就是纪律的组织方式。英国信奉的是一盘散沙、各行其是的“商业自由”，而德国最强有力的就是战略、规划和组织，通过组织的方式把人的力量发挥到极致，包括观念、策略、政策和手段。正因为这样，他认为自由世界会面临一个威胁：德国有组织的力量将有能力和整个西方对抗。虽然他一直讲地缘的、自然的对人类支配性的影响，但他同时也特别强调人类活动的反作用。
By taking this most basic element, “force,” as his point of departure, Mackinder displayed a thoroughly realist mode of thinking. Political, moral, and natural factors are not separate considerations here; all these factors can in fact be brought together and understood in terms of relations of force. Economic development and social organization alike enter into objective relations of force with land and sea. You may understand these interactions as wars, conflicts, or natural storms, but for him they are all the same: interactions between forces.
正是从“力量”这种最基本的元素出发，麦金德展现出一种非常彻底的现实主义思考。没有什么政治、道德、自然的因素，所有这些因素其实都可以放在一起，用一个力量的关系来理解。经济的发展、社会的组织都会同陆地与海洋发生客观的、力量的相互关系，这种相互关系，你可以理解成战争、冲突、自然的风暴，但在他那里都是一样的，是力量的交互。
This was what enabled him to discern the origins of the First World War. He believed that the underlying cause of the entire conflict between Germany and Britain and America since the First World War was a conflict of economic forces. Britain and America both promoted laissez-faire trade and global free trade; theirs were free-trade economies. Germany, by contrast, expanded its economy in an organized way, constituting what Mackinder called a “predatory economy.” The global expansion of these two kinds of economic force was bound to produce an enormous conflict.
由此，他才能洞见到第一次世界大战的起源。他认为，第一次世界大战以来德国和英美的整个冲突，基本原因是经济力量的冲突。英美都是放任贸易、全球自由贸易的推动者，是一种自由贸易型的经济，而德国则是有组织地拓展自己的经济，用麦金德的概念来说，叫做“掠夺型经济”。这两种经济力量在全球的扩展必然会发生巨大的冲突。
In this sense, the First World War had nothing to do with ideas or moral values. Unlike ideological propagandists, Mackinder would not regard Britain and America as morally superior and Germany as morally base. In his view, war had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with force. World war was a natural outcome: an outcome of geopolitics, of ideas about organization, and of conflict in the realm of economics and trade. If we look at the issue from this angle, is the trade war China and America face today not also a confrontation between two kinds of force?
在这个意义上，第一次世界大战与思想观念、道德价值没有关系，麦金德并不会像意识形态的鼓吹者那样把英美看作是价值上的优胜者，把德国看作是价值上的卑劣者。在他看来，战争与道德无关，而是与力量有关。世界大战是自然而然的结果，这个结果既是地缘政治的，又是组织观念的，同时又是经济贸易领域的冲突。如果我们从这个角度看问题，那么中国与美国今天面临的贸易战，不就是两种力量的对抗吗？