The Revenge of Geography (21 page)

The very burden of governing vast, poor urban concentrations has made statehood more onerous than at any previous time in history; a reason for the collapse of sclerotic dictatorships, as well as for the weakness of young democracies. A state like Pakistan can have weapons of mass destruction, even as it can barely provide municipal services and protect its population from suicide bombers. States like Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, to name but a few, barely function, and are besieged by substate militias. The Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, have engaged in violence to protest their condition, even as they have eschewed the compromises required for statehood. The same with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could have toppled the government in Beirut anytime it wanted, but chose not to. A state has to abide by certain rules and thus makes for an easier target. And so we have a new phenomenon in this age of megacities and mass media: the power of statelessness. “The state is a burden,” writes Jakub Grygiel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, so these substate groups “seek power without the responsibility of governing.” Modern communications and military technologies allow these groups to organize, to seek help abroad, and to arm themselves with lethal weapons so that the state no longer owns the monopoly on violence. As I’ve said earlier, whereas the Industrial Revolution was about bigness (airplanes, tanks, aircraft carriers, railways, factories, and so on) the post–Industrial Revolution is about smallness—miniature bombs and plastic explosives that do not require the large territory of a state to deploy. Small stateless groups are beneficiaries of this new age of
technology. In fact, there are more and more reasons not to have a state. Grygiel writes:

A state is a bad fit, he goes on, for those with absolutist goals inspired by religious zeal or ideological extremism that can never be realized by statehood. The mass exodus to slums in our era, by cutting off the link with the traditional countryside, has helped in this process of radicalization along the broad swath of the southern Eurasian rimland. The mass media, to which these groups have access, publicize their demands and in the process further fortify their identities, creating crowd packs of fellow thinkers not necessarily defined by state loyalties. In sum, if we step back a moment and consider the situation, we have a map of Eurasia that is one huge area rather than the smaller divisions of Cold War regions that we have grown used to. This map is overloaded with nodes of contact and communications that never or barely existed before: for in addition to extended cities and overlapping missile ranges and ideologies that reverberate on account of mass media, we will have new roads and ports and energy pipelines connecting the Middle East and Central Asia with the rest of Eurasia from Russia to the Indian Ocean to China. With civilizations densely jammed one against the other, and the media a vehicle for constant verbal outrages, as well as for popular pressure from oppressed groups, the need for quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy will never be greater. One crisis will flow into the next, and there will be perennial need for everyone to
calm down
. Because of the map’s very cohesion and shrinkage, concepts like “Heartland” and “Rimland” and “marginal” zones, which imply a horizontal separating out into large component parts, will in one sense be less relevant, but in another sense will be fraught with consequence because
of the perpetual interactions between these areas: a watch, or a computer chip for that matter, is no less complex because of its size, and to understand how that watch or chip works one must still disaggregate it to see how one part affects the other. The airplane, the Internet, the concentration of politics in vast cities that more and more look like one another will, to be sure, erode the importance of the relief map. Indeed, the very orality of the Internet has a way of turning territorial battles into battles of ideas (a reason why the humanism of Isaiah Berlin is something we will desperately need to hold on to). But as states themselves, no matter how well armed, become fragile, precisely because of how democracy and cyberspace will be friendly to subnational and supranational forces, smaller regions will emerge in bolder lines, as they did during the Middle Ages following the breakup of the Roman Empire.

Yet now that we inhabit Mackinder’s “closed political system,” which, as Bracken notes, has closed much further in the course of the twentieth century, the map is also subject to the law of entropy, meaning a state of equilibrium will eventually set in, with each human habitation on the relief map—not just the megacities—looking increasingly like one another, and be subject to similar passions. The result, according to Ohio State University political science professor Randall L. Schweller, is that “a sort of global ennui” will result, the consequence of overstimulation, “mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states.”
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In other words, the world will be both duller and more dangerous than ever before.

But before the dullness completely sets in, there will upheavals and power shifts and natural geopolitical evolutions that can usefully be described by reference to the relief map.

It is now time to explore in depth various regions of the globe, with a particular emphasis on the super-continent of Eurasia, bearing in mind all that we have learned from these historians, geopoliticians, and other thinkers. For in the chapters that follow, I will try to adhere
to their sensibilities as well as to their theories. I will write about Europe, which lies adjacent to Mackinder’s Heartland and is so influenced by it; about Russia, Mackinder’s Heartland itself; China, which may in future decades come to dominate part of the Heartland and part of Spykman’s Rimland; the Indian Subcontinent, which forms the core region of the Rimland; Iran, where the Heartland and Rimland actually meet; the Turkish and Arab Middle East, which approximates Hodgson’s Oikoumene; and finally North America, the largest of Mackinder’s continental satellites to challenge Eurasia and the World-Island. I will try not to make predictions, but rather to describe geography as it affects history, so as to get some idea of what the future might hold.

When it comes to contemporary geopolitics, with its frequent upheavals and evolutions, the focus is naturally on Afro-Asia, from the Middle East to China. Europe tends to be left out of the equation, reduced as it often is to a financial story. But this is a mistake. The European Union’s population of 500 million is the third largest in the world after China’s and India’s. The EU’s economy of $16 trillion is larger than that of the United States. From its western extremity Europe faces the heart of North America. It is as close to the Southern Cone of South America as is the United States. From its eastern extremity, Europe overlooks Afro-Eurasia. Europe lies at the heart of the Eastern or “Land” Hemisphere, equidistant between the Russian Far East and South Africa.
¹
In fact, our geographical explanation of world politics should begin with Europe. The perspective of Mackinder, Spykman, Morgenthau, and some of the other thinkers we have considered is in large part a European one. Thus, to see how the
world has evolved since their day it helps to start where they did. Though Marshall Hodgson is obviously right about the primacy of the Near Eastern Oikoumene, that region will constitute one of the climaxes of our journey, and so we need not commence with it. Not to worry, Europe will lead us organically to geographical consideration of Russia, China, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Greater Middle East. To understand geopolitics in the twenty-first century, we must start with the twentieth, and that means with Europe.

Europe, as we know from Mackinder, has had its destiny shaped by the influx of Asian hordes. And indeed, in the twenty-first century, Europe will continue to be pivotally influenced by its relations with the East, particularly with Russia. The degree to which Central and Eastern Europe can develop a belt of prosperous and stable states from the ashes of communism will go a long way to protect Europe from Russia, and, in the process, convert the dream of a revived
Mitteleuropa
into reality: a dream that liberal intellectuals actually share with Mackinder.

Yet Europe, precisely because of its quest for a wider and deeper unity, will also continue to be bedeviled by its own internal divisions, which, despite the economic form that these rifts now exhibit on the surface—as with German anger over the Greek debt crisis—are in truth the timeless expressions of geography: that is to say, the different development patterns of Germany in northern Europe and Greece in Mediterranean and Balkan Europe. Europe, largely because of how technology facilitates the movement of peoples, will certainly see its history increasingly intertwined with Africa to the south and Asia to the east. But concomitantly, Europe will not be denied its variety within. In other words, the very fact that Europe at the moment faces no conventional military threat could leave it prey to the narcissism of small differences. And that, in turn, could make Spykman’s worries about a unified Europe challenging the United States premature.

It is the delicious complexity of Europe’s geography, with its multiplicity of seas, peninsulas, river valleys, and mountain masses that have assisted in the formation of separate language groups and nation-states, which will continue to contribute to political and economic
disunity in the years to come, despite pan-European institutions. Europe, the map suggests, has a significant future in the headlines.

Europe, in the words of the Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is the “westerly excrescence” of the continent of Asia, a massive peninsula which came to dominate world politics in the course of the second millennium
A.D
. Geography ordained this, as we know from McNeill, and Cunliffe elaborates on McNeill’s thesis. Europe lay in a “congenial” ecozone between the deserts of Africa and the ice sheets of the Arctic, with a climate moderated by the Gulf Stream. Europe was rich in resources, with wood, stone, metals, and furs. Most crucially, Europe has a deviating and shattered coastline, indented with many good natural harbors, and cluttered with islands and halfislands. This coastline is 23,000 miles long—an epic length equal to the circumference of the earth. In fact, Europe has a higher ratio of coastline to landmass than any other continent or subcontinent.
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Europe borders on no fewer than four enclosed and semi-enclosed seas that squeeze the subcontinent, so to speak, into a relatively narrow peninsula: the Mediterranean, the Black, the Baltic, and the North seas; even as Europe has an advantageous riverine topography blessed with cross-peninsula routes—the Rhine, the Elbe, and above all the Danube. The Danube, as the Italian devotee of Central Europe, Claudio Magris, rhapsodizes, “draws German culture, with its dream of an Odyssey of the spirit, towards the east, mingling it with other cultures in countless hybrid metamorphoses.”
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There are, too, the Moravian Gap, the Brenner Pass, and the broad plain through France to the Rhône valley that act as corridors from one part of Europe to another.