Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD
To recover our sense of geography, we first must fix the moment in recent history when
we most profoundly lost it, explain why we lost it, and elucidate how that affected our as-
sumptions about the world. Of course, such a loss is gradual. But the moment I have isol-
ated, when that loss seemed most acute, was immediately after the collapse of the Berlin
Wall. Though an artificial border whose crumbling should have enhanced our respect for
geography and the relief map—and what that map might have foreshadowed in the adjacent
Balkans and the Middle East—the Berlin Wall's erasure made us blind to the real geograph-
ical impediments that still divided us, and still awaited us.
For suddenly we were in a world in which the dismantling of a man-made boundary in
Germany had led to the assumption that all human divisions were surmountable; that demo-
cracy would conquer Africa and the Middle East as easily as it had Eastern Europe; that
globalization—soon to become a buzzword—was nothing less than a moral direction of his-
tory and a system of international security, rather than what it actually was, merely an eco-
nomic and cultural stage of development. Consider: a totalitarian ideology had just been
vanquished, even as domestic security in the United States and Western Europe was being
taken for granted. The semblance of peace reigned generally. Presciently capturing the zeit-
geist, a former deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Francis
Fukuyama, published an article a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, “The End
of History,” proclaiming that while wars and rebellions would continue, history in a Hegel-
ian sense was over now, since the success of capitalist liberal democracies had ended the
matter of shaping the world more in our own image, sometimes through the deployment of
American troops; deployments that in the 1990s would exact relatively little penalty. This,
the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, was an era of illusions. It was a time when
the words “realist” and “pragmatist” were considered pejoratives, signifying an aversion to
humanitarian intervention in places where the national interest, as conventionally and nar-
rowly defined, seemed elusive. Better in those days to be a neoconservative or liberal inter-
nationalist, who were thought of as good, smart people who simply wanted to stop genocide
in the Balkans.
Such a burst of idealism in the United States was not unprecedented. Victory in World War
I had unfurled the banner of “Wilsonianism,” a notion associated with President Woodrow
Wilson that, as it would turn out, took little account of the real goals of America's European
allies and even less account of the realities of the Balkans and the Near East, where, as
events in the 1920s would show, democracy and freedom from the imperial overlordship of
the Ottoman Turks meant mainly heightened ethnic awareness of a narrow sort in the in-
dividual parts of the old sultanate. It was a similar phenomenon that followed the West's
