WorldView: Ukraine is one of the world's pivotal states, in the language of geopolitics. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Euro-Asian empire. With it, that option is kept open for Vladimir Putin writes Paul Gillespie
However much the Ukranian people resist being categorised in terms of east or west, and seek to retain their autonomy, this crisis forces such choices on them, by virtue of the involvement in it of Russia, the European Union and the United States.
Since such geographical realities continue to determine Ukraine's politics it is worth looking back at how such theorising arose and how it remains influential.
The term geopolitics was coined in 1899 by a Swedish geographer and political scientist, Rudolf Kjellan. It rapidly became popular, meeting a felt need to match geographical realities to political power when Germany was breaking into the system of imperial states. The German geopolitical writer, Karl Haushofer, defined it in the 1920s as "the dependence of all political events on the enduring conditions of the physical environment". He worked closely with Hitler, elaborating the notion of lebensraum (living space), involving German expansion eastwards towards Ukraine and Russia, and relating "politics to the soil".
Such states and regions were identified as central to the imperial power system by the British geographer Halford Mackinder in a famous essay published in 1904: "The Geographical Pivot of History". He defined the pivot area of world politics as "that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with a network of railways". Russia "occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe", he wrote.
With remarkable insight, he went on: "Nor is it likely that any possible social revolution will alter her essential relations to the great geographical limits of her existence".
Mackinder returned to these themes after the first World War in an effort to influence the Versailles negotiations. From the British point of view it was necessary above all to prevent an alliance between Germany and Russia - or one conquering the other. In a celebrated passage he renamed Euro-Asia the "World-Island", and the "pivot area" the "Heartland", and wrote: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World".
That these are not only historical points is readily clear from current events. There is an abiding suspicion of US intentions among the Russian foreign policy elite, especially about the idea that Ukraine would join NATO.
In both Moscow and Washington geopolitical thinking, which was revived during the Cold War by military and political strategists, still influences policy-making.
Two of the most influential geopolitical theorists of US hegemony, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntingdon, put Ukraine at the centre of their work. Huntingdon's book, The Clash of Civilisations says a "civilisational faultline" runs through the country.
Brzezinski's Polish father was born in Lvov in 1918, before the region was ceded to Ukraine after the second World War and its population transferred to Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, in southern Poland to replace the Germans expelled from there. Ukraine's future is a centrepiece of his book, The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, published in 1997.
He has been a regular celebrity visitor to Kiev ahead of the elections this year and was the principal speaker at a conference on Ukraine's future in Washington this autumn.
He says Ukraine "is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia". Without it Russia would become a predominantly Asian imperial state. With it Poland would once again be transformed "into the geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe".
Brzezinski salutes Ukraine's achievements since it achieved independence in 1991 (except for a brief three years after the Bolshevik revolution it was under Russian rule from 1654 when the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky sought help from there for his rising against Polish rule). But he says it will be up to Ukrainians themselves to make the progress required to join up with an enlarged EU (including Turkey) over the next generation.
Preferably this would be in tandem with the US, so that Russia's constructive engagement with both could be guaranteed, closing off its imperial option. If this fails, Ukraine could repeat in the 21st century Poland's fate in the 18th, to be partitioned between competing powers.
In Moscow geopolitics has also enjoyed a renewal in the last 10 years, as its strategists came to terms with the end of the USSR.
Clearly Putin is not reconciled to such a foreclosure. One faction close to him has suggested rewriting Mackinder's formula as follows: "Who controls the heartland possesses an efficient means to command world politics, by maintaining the geopolitical balance and the balance of power in the world. Stable peace is unthinkable without it."
EU leaders have a huge responsibility and opportunity to modify and mediate US-Russian competition by engaging constructively with Ukraine and Russia through this crisis.
This year they launched a European Neighbourhood Policy to tackle relations with their "near abroad" following EU enlargement. It is being implemented variously with Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Ukraine and Moldova. It has a stronger political emphasis on democracy, good governance and human rights, than on the economic and developmental goals previously involved.
Ukraine refused to sign the action plan last July, saying it did not go far enough, influenced by Putin's new para-imperial activism.
Besides, the implication they are not European is resented, when many of them want to join the EU eventually.
This crisis should force EU leaders to think beyond such a structure towards a selective sharing of sovereignty and new institutions stopping short of full EU membership with Ukraine - and with Russia.
Otherwise events will outpace their capacity, and that of a young Ukrainian democracy, to chart the way towards a stable and peaceful Euro-Asian heartland.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie