Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
victory in the Cold War, which many believed would simply bring freedom and prosperity
under the banners of “democracy” and “free markets.” Many suggested that even Africa,
the poorest and least stable continent, further burdened with the world's most artificial and
illogical borders, might also be on the brink of a democratic revolution; as if the collapse of
the Soviet Empire in the heart of Europe held supreme meaning for the world's least deve-
loped nations, separated by sea and desert thousands of miles away, but connected by tele-
usher in less democracy and global peace than the next struggle for survival, in which evil
would wear new masks.
Democracy and better government would, in fact, begin to emerge in Africa of all places.
But it would be a long and difficult struggle, with anarchy (in the cases of several West
African countries), insurrection, and outright wickedness (in the case of Rwanda) rearing
their heads for considerable periods in between. Africa would go a long way toward de-
fining the long decade between November 9, 1989, and September 11, 2001—between the
collapse of the Berlin Wall and the al Qaeda attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade
Center: a twelve-year period that saw mass murder and belated humanitarian interventions
frustrate idealist intellectuals, even as the ultimate success of those interventions raised
idealist triumphalism to heights that were to prove catastrophic in the decade that began
after 9/11.
In that new decade following 9/11, geography, a factor certainly in the Balkans and
Africa in the 1990s, would go on to wreak unmitigated havoc on America's good intentions
in the Near East. The journey from Bosnia to Baghdad, from a limited air and land cam-
paign in the western, most developed part of the former Turkish Empire in the Balkans to a
mass infantry invasion in the eastern, least developed part in Mesopotamia, would expose
the limits of liberal universalism, and in the process concede new respect to the relief map.
The Post Cold War actually began in the 1980s, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, with
the revival of the term “Central Europe,” later defined by the journalist and Oxford scholar
Europe,
Mitteleuropa
, was more of an idea than a fact of geography. It constituted a declar-
ation of memory: that of an intense, deliciously cluttered, and romantic European civiliza-
tion, suggestive of cobblestone streets and gabled roofs, of rich wine, Viennese cafés, and
classical music, of a gentle, humanist tradition infused with edgy and disturbing modernist
art and thought. It conjured up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and such names as Gustav
Mahler, Gustav Klimt, and Sigmund Freud, leavened with a deep appreciation of the likes
of Immanuel Kant and the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Indeed, “Central
Europe,” among so many other things, meant the endangered intellectual world of Jewry
before the ravages of Nazism and communism; it meant economic development, with a
