Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Spengler is overly pessimistic and cynical. Nevertheless, recall that the hatred Soviets
and Americans had for each other was cool and abstract, without a racial basis, separated
as they were by oceans and Arctic tundra, during an earlier age of communications techno-
logy. But digital big flat television screens of the present and of the future (that, like CNN
at airports, you can't turn off!) increasingly make everything up close and personal. Here,
again, is Bracken:
What westerners find difficult to understand is the intensity of the feelings that
Asians [and Middle Easterners] bring to these religious and ethnic disputes. In-
ternal disorders could quickly spill over into whole regions, inflamed by mass
media that reach across borders and by the political logic that seeks a foreign
scapegoat for domestic problems. National leaders could then be backed into a
rhetorical corner—a dangerous place for people who have atom bombs at their
disposal.
14
Bracken warns that nationalism is “dangerously underrated” by Western observers, who
see it as part of a retrograde past that economic and social progress moves us beyond. “The
most important issue of the twenty-first century is understanding how nationalism com-
bines with the newly destructive technologies appearing in Asia.” As I've said, the new
nuclear powers, like Pakistan, India, and China, will have poor and lower-middle-class
populations, and this will abet a resentful, hot-blooded nationalism in an age when the new
military symbols are not armies but missiles and nuclear weapons—the latest totemic ob-
jects of the crowd.
15
Though the possession of missiles as objects of pride will strengthen nationalism and
therefore the power of some states, making patriotism more potent, the mass psychologies
that with the help of the media unite various ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups, as well
as groups dedicated to democratic universalism, will dilute the power of other states. Mean-
while, some states will slowly, inexorably lose the battle against globalization, as their bur-
eaucratic capacities are eroded by long-running wars, attendant refugee movements, and
the job of administering vast, badly urbanized cities. In sum, as the map of Eurasia gets
smaller thanks to technology and population growth, artificial frontiers will begin to weak-
en inside it.
Understanding the map of the twenty-first century means accepting grave contradictions.
For while some states become militarily stronger, armed with weapons of mass destruction,
others, especially in the Greater Middle East, weaken: they spawn substate armies, tied to
specific geographies with all of the cultural and religious tradition which that entails, thus
they fight better than state armies on the same territory ever could. Southern Lebanon's
Hezbollah, the former Tamil Tigers of northern Sri Lanka, the Maoist Naxalites in eastern
and central India, the various pro-Taliban and other Pushtun tribal groupings in northwest-
