The Revenge of Geography (20 page)

The worries of Mackinder and Spykman will not only be intensified by the disruptive technologies that Bracken concentrates on, but by the sheer rise of urban populations themselves, which will make the map of Eurasia only more claustrophobic. In the 1990s, during the first intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War, when the terms “realist” and “determinist” were vilified in the heady days following the overthrow
of communism, the ideas of the late-eighteenth century English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus were mocked by many intellectuals as too grim and fatalistic: for Malthus treats humankind as a species reacting to its physical environment, rather than as a body of self-willed individuals motivated by ideas. Malthus’s specific theory—that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically—was wrong. Yet as the years pass, with great fluctuations in world food and energy prices, and teeming multitudes of angry,
lumpen
faithful—young males predominantly—walled off in places like Karachi and Gaza (the Soweto of the Middle East), Malthus, the first philosopher to focus on demography and the political effects of the quality of life among the poor, has been getting more respect. Half the population of the West Bank and Gaza is under fifteen. Indeed, while the population of the Greater Middle East grows from 854 million to over 1.2 billion over the next twenty years, with the Arab world in the midst of nearly doubling its population even as supplies of groundwater greatly diminish, especially in places like Yemen, leading to explosive side effects on politics, the word “Malthusian” will be heard more often.

Though proving Malthus right may be a useless exercise, his general worldview fits well with Bracken’s conception of a loss of room in Eurasia. Crowded megacities, beset by poor living conditions, periodic rises in the price of commodities, water shortages, and unresponsive municipal services, will be fertile petri dishes for the spread of both democracy and radicalism, even as regimes will be increasingly empowered by missiles and modern, outwardly focused militaries.

The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography. There are already twenty-five cities in the world with a population of over 10 million people, and that number will rise to forty by 2015, with all but two in the former Third World. Greater Tokyo leads with 35 million; Lagos is at the bottom with nearly 12 million. Thirteen of the twenty-five are in South or East Asia. Karachi, Tehran, Istanbul, and Cairo are the megacities in the Greater Middle East. The key fact is that there are many cities in the former Third World which just miss making the list, and that over half of humanity
now lives in urban conditions, a statistic that will rise to two-thirds by 2025. There are 468 cities in the world with populations exceeding one million. Almost all urban growth in the future will be in developing countries, specifically in Asia and Africa. We are in an era with a significant percentage of people living in slumlike conditions. During Mackinder’s time at the turn of the twentieth century, only 14 percent of humanity were urbanites.

As I’ve noted, Ibn Khaldun writes in his
Muqaddimah
, or “Introduction” to a world history, that desert nomads, in aspiring to the physical comforts of sedentary life, create the original dynamic for urbanization that is then captured by powerful rulers and dynasties, which in turn, by providing security, allow cities to flourish. But because authority requires luxury, decay eventually sets in, as group solidarity erodes and individuals, through their accumulation of wealth and influence, weaken executive power. Thus, systems grow brittle and fragment, and are superseded by other formations.
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For the first time in history this process is operating on a global scale. Vast cities and megacities have formed as rural dwellers throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America migrate toward urban centers from the underdeveloped countryside. As a consequence, the mayors and governors of these conurbations can less and less govern them effectively from a central dispatch point: so that these sprawling concentrations informally break up into suburbs and neighborhood self-help units, whose own local leaders are often motivated by ideals and ideologies originating from afar, by way of electronic communications technology. Radical Islam is, in part, the story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the Greater Middle East. Urbanization also accounts for the far more progressive demonstrators for democracy who overthrew various Arab regimes in 2011. Forget the image of the Arab as the nomad or inhabitant of an oasis on the steppe-desert. In most instances he is a city dweller, of a crowded and shabby city at that, and is at home in vast crowds. It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions
and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.
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A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the
crowd
being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book
Crowds and Power
, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

Loneliness is a particular characteristic of urban existence, in which strangers are many and true friends and family relatively few. And so the new urban geography of the former Third World in the
twenty-first century will constitute a map of intense, personal longing. Indeed, George Orwell’s depiction of tyranny rests to a great degree on the human proclivity, however much it may be denied, to trade individual freedom for the enfolding protection and intimate contact of the group. “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe,” one character declares in Orwell’s novel
1984
.
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Indeed, the Internet, explains the novelist Thomas Pynchon, offers the protection of a virtual crowd, and thus “promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy mustaches could only dream about.”
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Meanwhile, the media amplify
presentness
, the rage and ecstasy and virtue—whatever the case may be—of the present moment, for good and for bad. In other words, politics in the mass media age will be more intense than anything we have experienced, because the past and future will have been obliterated.

Crowd psychology supplanted by technology was at work in the election of Barack Obama and in the panic selling on Wall Street in 2008. It was at work in the anti-Muslim pogroms in Hindu Gujarat, in India in 2002, in the mass public demonstrations in Europe against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, in both the pro- and anti-regime demonstrations in Iran in 2009 and 2010, in the mass populist rallies against the Thai government in Bangkok in the same time period, and endemically in the anti-Israel demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza; and, of course, in the Middle East’s year of revolution in 2011, even as the Arab Spring promoted the sanctity of the individual while attacking the power of autocrats who robbed individuals of their dignity.

It is in the megacities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will have its greatest geopolitical impact. Ideas do matter as the liberal humanists and anti-determinists proclaim. And it is the very compression of geography that will provide optimal circumstances for new and dangerous ideologies—as well as for healthy democratizing ideas. Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability. Lack of space will be the key factor. The psychological hearth place
of nationalist identity is increasingly the city and not the idealized rural landscapes of the past, even as urban crowds will at times demand maximalist foreign policies from their governments based on this very idealized terrain.

The media will play a crucial role in this process. “No tamer has his animals more under his power” than the media, writes Oswald Spengler in
The Decline of the West:

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 technology. 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:

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 combines 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 objects of the crowd.
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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. Meanwhile, some states will slowly, inexorably lose the battle against globalization, as their bureaucratic 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 weaken 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 northwestern Pakistan, the Taliban itself in Afghanistan, and the plethora of militias in Iraq, especially during the civil war of 2006–2007, are examples of this trend of terrain-specific substate land forces. For at a time when precision-guided missiles can destroy a specific house hundreds of miles away, while leaving the adjacent one deliberately undamaged, small groups of turbaned irregulars can use the tortuous features of an intricate mountain landscape to bedevil a superpower. In the latter case the revenge of geography is
clear. But in the former case, too, those missiles have to be fired from somewhere, which requires a land or a sea base, thus bringing us back to geography, albeit to a less intimate and traditional kind. For Spykman’s Indian Ocean Rimland is crucial for the placement of American warships, whose missiles are aimed deep into Iran and Afghanistan, two Heartland states, the latter of which is as riven by tribal conflicts as it was in the time of Alexander the Great. Spykman’s and Mackinder’s early-twentieth-century constructs coexist with those of antiquity, and both are relevant for our own era.