Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 pro-
cess 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 fur-
ther 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 communic-
ations 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 dip-
lomacy will never be greater. One crisis will flow into the next, and there will be peren-
nial 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 des-
perately 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 hab-
itation 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 con-
sequence of overstimulation, “mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extrem-
