The Revenge of Geography (2 page)

But like the Carpathians, whose passes were penetrated by traders, geography on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has different lessons to offer: for what the British were the first to call the “North-West Frontier” was “historically no frontier at all,” according to Harvard professor Sugata Bose, “but the ‘heart’ ” of an “Indo-Persian” and “Indo-Islamic” continuum, the reason why Afghanistan and Pakistan form an organic whole, contributing to their geographical incoherence as separate states.
⁴

Then there were borders more artificial still:

I crossed the Berlin Wall into East Berlin twice, in 1973 and in 1981. The twelve-foot-high concrete curtain, topped by a broad pipe, cut through a filmy black-and-white landscape of poor Turkish and
Yugoslav immigrant neighborhoods on the West German side, and deserted and World War II–scarred buildings on the East German one. You could walk up and touch the Wall almost anywhere on the western side, where the graffiti was; the minefields and guard towers all lay to the east.

As surreal as this prison yard of an urban terrain appeared at the time, one didn’t question it except in moral terms, for the paramount assumption of the age was that the Cold War had no end. Particularly for those like myself, who had grown up during the Cold War but had no memory whatsoever of World War II, the Wall, however brutal and arbitrary, seemed as permanent as a mountain range. The truth only emerged from books and historical maps of Germany that I had, entirely by coincidence, begun to consult during the first months of 1989, while in Bonn on a magazine assignment. The books and maps told a story:

Occupying the heart of Europe between the North and Baltic seas and the Alps, the Germans, according to the historian Golo Mann, have always been a dynamic force locked up in a “big prison,” wanting to break out. But with the north and south blocked by water and mountains, outward meant east and west, where there was no geographical impediment. “What has characterized the German nature for a hundred years is its lack of form, its unreliability,” writes Mann, referring to the turbulent period from the 1860s to the 1960s, marked by Otto von Bismarck’s expansion and the two world wars.
⁵
But the same could also be said for Germany’s size and shape on the map throughout its history.

Indeed, the First Reich, founded by Charlemagne in 800, was a great shifting blob of territory that, at one time or another, encompassed Austria and parts of Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Europe seemed destined to be ruled from what now corresponds with Germany. But then came Martin Luther, who split Western Christianity with the Reformation, which, in turn, ignited the Thirty Years’ War, fought primarily on German soil. Hence, Central Europe was ravished. The more I read—about the eighteenth-century dualism between Prussia and Habsburg
Austria, about the early-nineteenth-century tariff union between the various German states, and Bismarck’s late-nineteenth-century Prussian-based unification—the more it became apparent that the Berlin Wall was just another stage in this continuing process of territorial transformation.

The regimes that had fallen soon after the Berlin Wall did—in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere—were ones I had known intimately through work and travel. Up close they had seemed so impregnable, so fear-inducing. Their abrupt unraveling was a signal lesson for me, not only about the underlying instability of all dictatorships, but about how the present, as permanent and overwhelming as it can seem, is fleeting. The only thing enduring is a people’s position on the map. Thus, in times of upheaval maps rise in importance. With the political ground shifting rapidly under one’s feet, the map, though not determinitive, is the beginning of discerning a historical logic about what might come next.

Violence was the reigning impression of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas. In 2006, I saw South Korean soldiers standing frozen in tae kwon do–ready positions, their fists and forearms clenched, staring into the faces of their North Korean counterparts. Each side picked its tallest, most intimidating soldiers for the task. But the formalized hatred on display in the midst of barbed wire and minefields will probably be consigned to history on some foreseeable morrow. When you look at other divided-country scenarios in the twentieth century—Germany, Vietnam, Yemen—it is apparent that however long the division persisted, the forces of unity ultimately triumph, in an unplanned, sometimes violent and fast-moving fashion. The DMZ, like the Berlin Wall, is an arbitrary border of no geographical logic that divides an ethnic nation at the spot where two opposing armies happened to come to rest. Just as Germany was reunited, we might expect, or at least should plan for, a united Greater
Korea. Again, the forces of culture and geography are likely to prevail at some point. A man-made border that does not match a natural frontier zone is particularly vulnerable.

I crossed, too, the land borders from Jordan to Israel and from Mexico to the United States: more on those borders and others later. For I now wish to take another journey—of a radically different sort—through selected pages of history and political science that have survived across the chasm of the decades and, in some cases, the centuries, and on account of their emphasis on geography allow us to read the relief map better, and with that, help us glimpse, however vaguely, the contours of future politics. For it was the very act of crossing so many frontiers that made me intensely curious about the fate of the places through which I had passed.

My reporting over three decades has convinced me that we all need to recover a sensibility about time and space that has been lost in the jet and information ages, when elite molders of public opinion dash across oceans and continents in hours, something which allows them to talk glibly about what the distinguished
New York Times
columnist Thomas L. Friedman has labeled a
flat world
. Instead, I will introduce readers to a group of decidedly unfashionable thinkers, who push up hard against the notion that
geography no longer matters
. I will lay out their thinking in some depth in the first half of this journey in order to apply their wisdom in the second half, as to what has happened and is likely to happen across Eurasia—from Europe to China, including the Greater Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. To find out what it is exactly that has been lost in our view of physical reality, to discover how we lost it, and then to restore it by slowing down our pace of travel and of observation itself—by way of the rich erudition of now deceased scholars: that is the goal of this journey.

Geography, from a Greek word that means essentially a “description of the earth,” has often been associated with fatalism and therefore stigmatized: for to think geographically is to limit human choice,
it is said. But in engaging with such tools as relief maps and population studies I merely want to add another layer of complexity to conventional foreign policy analyses, and thus find a deeper and more powerful way to look at the world. You do not have to be a geographical determinist to realize that geography is vitally important. The more we remain preoccupied with current events, the more that individuals and their choices matter; but the more we look out over the span of the centuries, the more that geography plays a role.

The Middle East is a case in point.

As I write, the region from Morocco to Afghanistan is in the midst of a crisis of central authority. The old order of autocracies has become untenable, even as the path toward stable democratization is tortuous. The first phase of this great upheaval has featured the defeat of geography through the power of new communications technologies. Satellite television and social networking Internet sites have created a single community of protesters throughout the Arab world: so that democracy advocates in such disparate places as Egypt and Yemen and Bahrain are inspired by what has begun in Tunisia. Thus, there exists a commonality in the political situations of all these countries. But as the revolt has gone on, it has become clear that each country has developed its own narrative, which, in turn, is influenced by its own deep history and geography. The more one knows about the history and geography of any particular Middle Eastern country, therefore, the less surprised one will be about events there.

For it may be only partly accidental that the upheaval started in Tunisia. A map of classical antiquity shows a concentration of settlements where Tunisia is today, juxtaposed with the relative emptiness that characterizes modern-day Algeria and Libya. Jutting out into the Mediterranean close to Sicily, Tunisia was the demographic hub of North Africa not only under the Carthaginians and Romans, but under the Vandals, Byzantines, medieval Arabs, and Turks. Whereas Algeria to the west and Libya to the east were but vague geographical expressions, Tunisia is an age-old cluster of civilization. (As for Libya,
its western region of Tripolitania was throughout history oriented toward Tunisia, while its eastern region of Cyrenaica—Benghazi—was always oriented toward Egypt.)

For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity based on nomadism—which the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun said disrupted political stability—is correspondingly weak. Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202
B.C
. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or
fossa regia
, that marked the extent of civilized territory. The
fossa regia
remains relevant to the current Middle East crisis. Still visible in places, it runs from Tabarka on Tunisia’s northwestern coast southward, and turns directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The towns beyond that line have fewer Roman remains, and today tend to be poorer and less developed, with historically higher rates of unemployment. The town of Sidi Bouzid, where the Arab revolt started in December 2010, when a vendor of fruit and vegetables set himself on fire as an act of protest, lies just beyond Scipio’s line.

This is not fatalism. I am merely providing geographical and historical context to current events: the Arab revolt for democracy began in what in historical terms was the most advanced society in the Arab world—the one physically closest to Europe—yet it also began specifically in a part of that country which since antiquity had been ignored and suffered consequent underdevelopment.

Such knowledge can add depth to what has been transpiring elsewhere: whether it be in Egypt, another age-old cluster of civilization with a long history as a state just like Tunisia; or Yemen, the demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula, whose attempts at unity have been bedeviled by a sprawling and mountainous topography that has worked to weaken central government and consequently raise the importance of tribal structures and separatist groups; or Syria, whose truncated shape on the map harbors divisions within it based on ethnicity and sectarian identity. Geography testifies that Tunisia and Egypt are naturally cohesive; Libya, Yemen, and Syria less so. It
follows, therefore, that Tunisia and Egypt required relatively moderate forms of autocracy to hold them together, while Libya and Syria required more extreme varieties. Meanwhile, geography has always made Yemen hard to govern at all. Yemen has been what the twentieth-century European scholars Ernest Gellner and Robert Montagne call a “segmentary” society, the upshot of a Middle Eastern landscape riven by mountains and desert. Hovering between centralization and anarchy, such a society in Montagne’s words is typified by a regime that “drains the life from a region,” even though “because of its own fragility,” it fails to establish lasting institutions. Here tribes are strong and the central government comparatively weak.
⁶
The struggle to construct liberal orders in such places cannot be divorced from such realities.

As political upheavals accumulate and the world becomes seemingly more unmanageable, with incessant questions as to how the United States and its allies should respond, geography offers a way to make at least some sense of it all. By engaging with old maps, and with geographers and geopolitical thinkers from earlier eras, I want to ground-truth the globe in the twenty-first century much as I did at these frontiers beginning in the late twentieth. For even if we can send satellites into the outer solar system—and even as financial markets and cyberspace know no boundaries—the Hindu Kush still constitutes a formidable barrier.