№ 2 - 2011
MacKinder. H.J.
Democratic Ideals and Reality

The journal publishes extracts from the Russian translation of the classical work by Halford John Mackinder: “Democratic Ideals and Reality. A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction” (translation by S.L. Barinov, V.Yu. Kurshakov and I.Yu. Okunev). In this book, originally issued in London in 1919, Mackinder essentially changes not only the habitual interpretation, but even the boundaries of the Heartland, departs from the crude stereotyped scheme, from the habit to straightforwardly oppose the oceanic to the continental geopolitics. He applies this scheme only as point of departure for more flexible and more substantial analysis: seamen and landsmen in many aspects differently solve one and the same universal problem of mastering and uniting the global expanse of the Earth, and in the meantime their efforts display not only differences, but also similarities and are in the long run directed at the solution of the task of forming the just world order.