11.3.Kaplan1994The Coming

8/8/2019 11.3.Kaplan1994The Coming

1/21

44

by ROBERT D. KAI)LAN

Righi : oi l l i l id e Monrol"" _Lib eria . ci v i l / a n " l el ;m lf

0 / c i v i l IDa I'. du mp ed n ear Ih ea irp or ' . 1"0 1' ";6" ' : Ko v e r n -

m enl '1'001' . In S ie r r a Le o n er eo c cup :r a r eb e l p Oll/l l on

ANARCHYHow sc a rci ty,

c r ime, ov e r p opulat ion"t r iba lis m , and di sea sea re rap id ly dest ro y ing t he so cial

f ab ric o f onr pla ne t

COMINGTHE

HEMinister's eyes wereLke egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses,malaria especially. endemic in his country. There was alsoan irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow andcreak ing voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flametrees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composedthe background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. " Inforty-five years I have neve r seen things so bad. We did notmanage ourselves well after the British departed. But whatwe have now is something worse-the revenge of the poor,of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modem society." Then he referred to the recentcoup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boyswho look power in Sierra Leone come from houses like

this." The Minister jabbed hisf inger at a corrugated metalshack teeming with children." In three month s these boysconfiscated all the officia lMercedes, Volvos, and BMWs


2/21


3/21

OF WHAT IS OCCURRING

DEVELOPED WORLD: THE

LEONE IS AMICROCOSM

could cross 10 the army 's positions and there bury charms.. . to improve the rebels' chances of success."

Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy . De- _sig ned for a pas toral way of life, polygamy continues tothrive in sub-Saharan Afr ica even though it is increasing lyuncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on theroad in West Africa told me that they were from "extended"families, with a mother in one place and a father in another.Translated to an urban environment, loose family structuresare largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates andthe exp losion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like thecommunalism and animi m, they provide a weak shieldagainst the corrosive social effectsof life in cities . In thosecities Africanculture isbeing redefined while desertificationand deforestation-alsotied to overpopulation-drive moreand more African peasants out of the countryside.

A PR EMO NITI ON OFT ilE F lT t REWST Africa is becoming the symbol of worldw idedemographic, environmental,and societal stress, inwhichcriminal anarchy emergesas the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopu lation. unprovoked crime,

scarcity of resources, refugeemigrations, theincreasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowennent of private armies , security firms, and interna-tio nal dru g canels are now most tell ingly demonstratedthrough a West African prism. Wesl Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unp leasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. Toremap the political earth the way it will be a few decadeshence- a s I intend to do in this anicle-I find I must beginwith West Africa.The re is no other place on the planet where political maps

are so deceptive-where, in fact, they tell such lies- as inWest Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to the map, itisanation-stateof defined borders, withagovernment incontrolof its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government, runby a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valent ine Strasser,controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of therura interior. In the government's terri tory thenational annyis an unruly rabble threatening drive", and passengers at mostcheckpoints. In theother panof the country unitsof two separate armies from the war in Liberiahave taken upresidence,as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The governmentforce fighting the rebels is full of renegade commanders whohave aligned themselves with disaffected village chiefs. A premodern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the warsin medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia,which ushered in the erao forgan ized nation-states.

As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians areinternally displaced, 280 ,000 more have fled to neighboringGuinea , and another 100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as

was tied up and robbed atgunpoint in the ambassador'sresidence. Arte r universitystudents in the Ivory Coastcaught bandits who had been. .......- IERRA p laguing the ir dorms, th eyexecute d them by hangingtires around their necks andsetting the tireson fire. In oneinstance Ivorian po licemensto od by and wa tc he d th eIN WEST AFRICA AND "necklacings." afra id to inter-vene. Each time I went to theMUCH OF THE UNDER- Abidjan bu terminal, groupsof yo ung men with res tless,sc anningeyessurrounded mytaxi. putt ing the ir hand s allWITHERING AWAY OF ove r the windows, demanding" tip s" fo r ca rrying my luggage even though I had only arucksack. In cities in sixWestAfrican countries I saw similar young men everywhere-hordes of them. They we reREGIONAL DOMAINS . like loose molecules in a veryunstable soc ial fluid, a flu idthat was clearly on the vergeof igniting.OF DISEASE, AND "You see," my friend theMinister told me, "in the vil-THE GROWING PERVA- lages of Africa it is perfectlynatu ral to feed at any tabl eSIVENESS OF WAR . and lodge in any hut. But inthe cities this communal existence no longe r holds. You

must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When youngmen find out that their relations can not put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually intothe criminal process."

"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there ismuch lesscrime, becauseIslam providesa social anchor: of educaton and indoctrination. Here in WestAfrica we have a lot of superficial Islam and supe rficialChristianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are basedon irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreakvengeance by one person against another, or one groupagainst another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberiancivilwar havebeen tied to belief in juju spirits , and the BHe hasreported, in its magazine Focus 0 11Africa . that in the civilfighting in adjacent SierraLeone, rebelswere said to have loayoung woman with them who would go to the front naked,always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to seewhere she was going. This made her invisible, so that she

THE RISE OF TRIBAL AND

THE UNCHECKED SPREAD

CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS ,

46 ft: 8 RL ,\ R \' . ' !H


4/21

The pr e lls 01 popula t ion .RiShl : do i n8 th e ."o sh In a1080 0n i n A " l dj o n . tl t e t o o r yCOOllt. Lel t: Ih e n e a r l }'i m pollllo " ' e ,Io w n/ow n o jLagos . N ig f!.r ia .

400 ,000 Liber ian s have n ed to Sierra Leone. The thi rdlargest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-personscamp. With anadditional 600,000 Liberians in Guineaand 250 ,000 in the Ivory Coast. the borders dividing thesefour countries have become largely meaningless. Even inqui et zones none of the governments exce pt the Iv oryCoast's maintains the schools, bridges. roads, and policeforces in a mannernecessary for functional sovereignty. TheKoranko ethnic group in northeastern Sie rra Leone does allits trading in Gu inea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are morelikely to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern

provincesof Sierra Leone youcan buy Liberian beer bUI notthe local brand. ,InSierra Leone, as inGuinea, as in the IvoryCoast. as inGhana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondarybush is being destroyed at an alarmin g rate . I saw convoys oftrucks bearing majest ic hardwood trunks to coastal ports.When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, asmuch as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest.Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion hasfallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestationhas led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and48

moremosquitoes. Virtually everyoneinthe West African interior hassome form of malaria.

Sierra Leoneisa microcosm of what isoccurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout WestAfrica and much of the underdeveloped world: the witheringaway of central governments, the rise of tribal and regionaldomains, the unchecked spread of disease , and the growingpervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africaof the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastaltrading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interi-or that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is againbecoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and"unexplored." However. whereasGreene 's vision impliesacertain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedyFreetown of his ce lebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, itis Thomas Malthus, the philosopher o f demographic doomsday , who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. AndWest Africa 's future, eventually, will also be that of most ofthe rest of the world .CONSlDER "C hicago. " I refer not to Chicago, Illinois,but to a s lum distri ct o f Abidj an , wh ich the yo ungtough in the area have named after the American city.("Washing ton" is ano the r poor section of Ab idja n.) Al-though Sierra Leone is widely regarded as beyond salvage,the Ivory Coast has been con sidered an African success story, and Abidj an has been called " the Paris of West Africa."Success, however, was built on two art ificia l factors: thehigh price of cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is the world 'sleading prod ucer, and the talents of a French expatriate community, whose members have helped run the governmentand Lhe private sector. The expandingcocoa economy madethe Ivory Coast a magnet for migran t workers from all ove rWest Africa: between a third and a half of the country's population is now non-Ivorian , and the figure could be as high as75 percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices feUand the French began to leave. The skyscrapers of the Parisof West Africa are a facade , Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan ' spopulation of three milli on people Jive in shantytowns likeChic ago and Wash ington, and the vast majority live inplaces that are not much better, Not all of these places appearon any of the readi ly available maps. This is ano ther indication of how political maps are the products of tired conventional wisdom and, in theIvoryCoast's case , of an elitethat will ult imately be fo rced to relinqui sh power .Chicago, like more and more of Abidj an, is a slum in the

bush: a checkerwork of corrugated zinc roofs and wal ls madeof cardboard and black plastic wrap. 11 is located in a gullyteeming with coconut palmsand oil palms, and is ravagedby flooding . Few residen t shave easy accesstoelectricity,a sewage system, or a cleanwater supply. The crumbly red

F t: U Il UA R \ 1 9 9-1


5/21

laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both inside andoutside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled withgarbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In thisstream women do the washing. Young unemployed menspend their time dr inking beer, palm wine, and gin whilegambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting woodand ru ty nails. These are the same youths who rob houses inmore prosperous Ivorian neighborhoods at night. One man Imet, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago from Burkina Faso in1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-twochildren, not one of whom bas made it to high school. He has

demographic present- and even more of the future - thanany idyll icjunglescape of women balancing earthen jugs ontheir heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model ofThi rd World succe ss, is becoming a case study in ThirdWorld catastrophe.

President F61 ix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of about ninety, left behind a weak cluster ofpolitical parties and a leaden bureaucracy that discouragesforeign investment. Because themilitary is small and the 000 -Ivorian population large, there is neither an obvious force tomaintain order nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen

seen his shanty community destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming tothe area. Each time he andhis neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.

Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast' population is urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by2000. The yearly net popu lation growth is 3.6 percent. Thismeans that the Ivory Coast' s 13.5 million people will become 39 mill ion by 2025, when much of the population willconsist of urbanized peasants like those of Chicago. Butdon't count on the Ivory Coast's still existing then. Chicago,which is more indicative of Africa's and the Third World'sr n e AT I.ANT I (; '1 0 S T l l l . \ '

the need for such enforcement.The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the IvoryCoast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminalviolence-an urbanized version of what hasalready happenedin Somalia. Or it maybecome an African Yugoslavia, but onewithout mini-states to replace the whole.Becau e the demographic reality of West Africa is a coun

tryside draining into dense slums by the coast, ultimately theregion's rulerswill come to reflect the valuesof these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in Sierra Leone-

49


6/21

and in Togo, whe re the dictator Etienne Eyaderna, in powers ince 1967 , was nea rly toppled in 1991 , not by democratsbut by tho usands of you ths whom the London -based magazine West Africa descr ibed as "Soweto-like stone- throwingadolescents." Their behav ior may heralda regimemore brutaJ than Eyadema's repressiveone.The fragility of these West African "countries" impressed

itsel f on me when I took a series of bush taxis along the Gulfof Guinea , from the Togole se capital of Lome, across Ghana,to Abidjan . The 400-mile journey requ ired two full days ofdriving, because of stops at two border crossings andan additional eleven customs stations, at each of which my fellowpassengers had their bags searched . I had to change moneytwice and repeatedly fill in currency-declarat ion form s. I hadto bribe a Togolese immigrati on offic ial with the equivalentof eighteen dollars before he would agree to put an exit stampon my passport , Nevertheless , smuggling across these borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that in1992 the equivalent of $856 milli on left West Africa fo r Europe in the form of "hot cash" assumed to be laundered drugmoney. International cartels have discovered the utility ofweak, financially strapped West African reg imes.The more fictitious the actual sovereignty. the more severe

border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise.Getting visas for these stares can be as hard as crossing theirborders. Th e Washingt on embassies of Si erra Leon e andGuinea- the two poorest nations on earth, according to a1993 United Nations report on "human development"- askedfor letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaid round-trip tickets)andalso personal references, in orderto prove that I had sufficient means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded ofmyvisa and currency hassles while traveling to the commun ist states of Easte rn Europe , pan icul arly East Germanyand Czechoslovakia, before those states co llapsed .

Ali A . Mazrui , the director of the Institu te of Global Cultural Studies at the Sta te Un iver sity of New York at Binghamton , pred icts that West Africa- indeed, the whole cont inent-is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazru iwrites,Inthe 21st century France will bewithdrawing fromWestAfrica as she gets increasingly involved in the affairs [ofEurope]. France's West African sphere of influence willbe filled by Nigeria- a more natura l hegemonic power... . Itwill be underthose circumstances that Nigeria's ownboundaries arelikely to expand to incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin (theYoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon.

THE futurecould bemore tumultuous, and bloodier, thanMazrui dares to say. France will withdraw from fannercolonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, andthe IvoryCoast, whereit has been propp ing up local currencies. II will do so notonly because its attention will be diverted to new challenges52

in Europe and Russ ia but also because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotional ties to the exco lonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it,too , is likely to split into severa l pieces. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research recently madethe following point s in an ana lysis of Nigeria:Prospects fora transition tocivilian rule and democratiza-tion are slim The repressive apparatus of the state se-curity serv ice will be difficult for any future civiliangovernment to control. The country is becoming in-creas ingly ungovernable Ethnic and regional splits aredeepen ing. a situat.ion made worse by an increase in thenumberof states from 19 to30 and adoubling inthe numberof local governing authorities; religious cleavages aremore serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelicalChristian militancy areon the rise; and northern Muslimanxiety over southern [Christian] control of the economyis intense . . . the will to keepNigeriatogether is now veryweak.Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the regionits population of roughly 90 million equals the populat ions

of all the other We st African states combined- it is apparentthat Africa faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopianand Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especiallyso because Nigeria's population, including that of its largestcity, Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and overcrowdingmakeit the c liche par excellence of Third Wor ld urban dysfunction. is set to double during the next twenty-fi ve years, whilethe country continues to deplete its natural resources .Part of West Africa ' quandary is that a lthough its popu

lation belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and towardthe tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borderserected by European colonialists are vertical, and thereforeat cross-purposes with demography and topography. Sate llite photo s depict the same real ity I experienced in the bushtaxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal corridor-indeed, the entirestretch of coast from Abidjan ea tward to Lagos- is oneburgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic andgeographical standard should constitute a single sovere ignty,rather than the five (the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo. Benin ,and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.As many internal African borders beg in to crumble. amore impenetrab le boundary is being erected thar threatens

to isolate t.he continentas a whole: the wall of disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spentabout$500 fora hepatitis B vaccination series and otherdisease prophylaxis. Africa may today be more dangerous inthis rega rd than it was in 1862, before antibiotics, when theexplorerSirRichard Francis Burtondescribed the healthsituation on the continent as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum. " Of the approximately 12 million people worldwidewhose blood is H1 V-pos itive, 8 million are in Africa. In thecapita l of the Ivory Coast, whose modern road system only

F I, II Il U \ II \' 19904


7/21

TIS

DEADLY FORMS .

OTHER PARTS OF

MALARIA THAT IS

T il .; ~ E AS AII OSTI u ; POWERFR a while the media will cont inue to asc ribe riots andothe r violent upheava ls abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will

become apparent that something e lse is afoot, making moreand more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.

rusted shipping conta iners, j unked cars, and j umbles o f wiremesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage .Mosqu itoe s and flies were everywhere. Children, many ofwhom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerou s as ants.When the ride went out, dead rats and the skeletons of carswere ex posed on the mucky beach. In rwenty-e ight yearsGuinea 's population wi ll do uble if grow th goes on at currentrates . Hardwood logging co ntinues at a madcap speed, andpeop le flee the Guinea n countryside for Conakry. ILseemedto me that here. as elsew here in Africa and the Thi rd World ,man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature isnow beg inning to take its revenge.! FRICA may be as relev ant 10 the futu re character of.fl: wo rld po litics as the Ba lkans were a hundred yearsago , prior Lo the two Balkan wars and the First World War .Then the threat was the co llapse of empires and the birth ofnation s based solely on tri be . Now the threat is more e lemental : nature unchecked. Africa 's immediate future couldbe very bad. The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut dow n, states co llapse. and contact with theoutside world takes place through dangerous, disease-riddencoastal trad ing posts, will 100111 large in the century we areentering. (Nine of twen ty-one U.S. foreign-aid mission s tobe closed over the next three years are in Africa-a prologueto a consolidation of U.S . embass ies them selves.) Precise lybecause much of Africa is set to go over the edge at a limewhe n the Co ld War has ended. when envi ronme ntal anddemograph ic stress in other parts of the globe is becomingcritical , and when the post- First World War sys tem of nation-states- not j ust in the Balkans but perhaps also in theMiddle East- is about to be toppled , Africa suggests whatwar, borders. and ethnic po litics will be like a few decadeshence.To under stand the events of the next fifty years, then , one

must understand enviro nmental scarcity, cultural and racialclash, geographic destiny, and the tran sformat ion of war.The order in which I have named these is not acci dental.Each concept except the first re lies part ly on the one or onesbefo re it , mean ing that the last two-new app roaches tomapmaking and to wa rfare- a re the most important. Theyare also the least understood . I will now look at each idea.drawing upon the work of pec ialists and also my own trave l experiences in various pan s of the globe besides Africa, inorder to fill in the blanks of a new political atlas.

MORE-DEVELOPED

THE DISEASE WALL

helps to spread the disease , 10 perc ent of the population isHIV -posit ive. And wa r and refugee movem en ts help thevirus break thro ugh to more -remote area s of Africa . AlanGreenberg, M.D., a represent ative of the Centers for DiseaseControl in Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virus andtuberculosis are now " fast-forwarding each other." Of theapproximately 4 ,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patientsin Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be HIV-positive .As Africa n birth rates soar and slums proliferate , some expert s worry that viral mu tations and hybrid izat ions might,ju st conceivably, res ult in a form of the AIDS virus that iseasier to catch than the present stra in.

It 1S malaria that is most responsible for the disease wallthat threatens to separate Africa and othe r parts of the ThirdWor ld from more-deve loped regions of the planet in thetwenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria, unlikeAIDS, is ea sy ro catch. Most peop le in sub-Saharan Afric ahave recurring bouts of the di sease throughout their entireJives. and it is mutating into i.ncreasingly deadly fonns. "The

great g ift o f Mala ria is utterap a thy ," wrot e Si r Richa rdBu rton, accurate ly por trayingthe situ ation in much of th eThird World today. Visitors tomalaria-afflicted parts of theplanet are protected by a newdrug, rnefloqu ine, a s ide effectof which is vivid, even violent,dream s. But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on the offensive.Con sequently, defending oneself aga inst malaria in Africais becoming more and morelike defending oncsc lf aga instviolent crime. You engage in"be havior modificati on ": notgo ing ou t at d usk , wearingmosquito repellent all the time.And the cities kee p gro w

ing. 1 got a genera l sense o fthe future while driving fromthe airport to downtown Conakry, th e capita l o f Guinea .The forty-five-minute joumeyin heavy tr affic was throughone ne ver-e ndi ng s ha nt ytown : a nightmar ish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never havegiven credence. Th e corruga ted meta l shacks and sca brouswalls were coated with blackslime. Stores were bu ilt out of

THAT THREATENS TO

INTO INCREASINGLY

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

SEPARATE AFRICA AND

REGIONS OF THE PLANET

MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR

THE TH IRD WORLD FROM

CENTURY. IT IS MUTATING

54 1' 1;11 11V A II , . I !I !J "


8/21

Mention "the environment" or "diminishing natural resources" in fore ign-policy circles and you meet a brick wallof skepticism or boredom. To conservatives especially, thevery terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focusedenvironmental studies replete with technical jargon whichforeign-affairs expens just let pile up on their desks.

It is time to understand "the environment" for what it is:the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.The political and strategic impact of surging populations,spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water de-

tween Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse withethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "Wehave a foreign policy today in the shape of a doughnutlots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." Theenvironment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array ofproblems that will define a new threat to our security, fi llingthe hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a postCold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.

pletion, airpollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Ni le Delta and Bangladesh--developments that will promptmass migrations and,in turn , incite group conflict s -will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests leftover from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century waterwill be in dangerously short supply in such diverse localesas Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern UnitedStates. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia overN i le River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen be-58

OR Cold War foreign policy truly began with GeorgeF. Kennan ' s famous article, signed "X," published inForeign Affa irs in July of J947, in which Kennan argued fora "finn and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that. wasimperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may bethat our post-Cold War foreign policy will one day be seento have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security . The article, published in the fallof 1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head ofthe Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of


9/21

Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold: EnvironmentalChanges as Causes of Acute Conflict." Homer-Dixon has,

more successfully than other analysts, integrated two hitherto separate fields-m ilitary-conflict stud ies and the study ofthe physical environment.

ill Homer-Di xon's view, future wars and civil violencewill often arise from scarcities of resources such as water,cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will beenvironmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally induced praetorian regimes-o r , as he puts it, " hardregimes." Countrieswith the highest probability of acquiringhard regimes, according to Horner-Dixon, are those that arethreatened by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state [read 'military ' ] strength." Candidates includeIndonesia, Brazil, and, of course. Nigeria. Though each ofthese nationshasexhibited democratizing tendenciesof late,Homer-Di xon argues that such tendencies are Likely to besuperficial "epiphenomena" having nothing to do with longterm processes that include soaring populationsand shrinking raw materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity ismore certain,

Indeed , the Saddam Hussein s of the future will havemore, not fewer, opportunities. In addi tion to engenderingtribal strife, scarcer resources will place a great strain onmany peopleswho never hadmuchof a democratic or institutional tradition to begin with. Over the next fifty years theearth 's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more thannine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new resourcetechnologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointedout, 95 percent of the population increasewill be in the poores' regions of the world, where governments now- just look at Africa- show little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements.Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, "Neo -Malthusians mayunderestimate humanadaptability in todays environmentalsocial system, butas time passes their analysismay becomeevermore compelling."

While aminority of the hum an population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as LO enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs inwhich the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty,cultural dysfunction, and ethnic stri fe will be doomed by alack of watertodrink, soil to till, and space to survive in. Inthe developing world environmental stress will present people

with a choice that is increas.-e l l : 1 Plo p ln , f.' 1 S a l v a d Qr , ingly among totalitarianismr epolriiorJ ' o f g a r bage alld


10/21

icy analysts-children of suburbia and ci ty streets-areblind 10."We need to bringnature back in," he argues. "We have

to stop separating politics from the physical wor ld- the climate, public health. and the environment." Quoting Danie lDeudney. another pioneering expert on the security aspectsof th e environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for too longwe've been prisoners of 'social-social ' theory, which assumes there are only social causes for social and politicalchanges, rather than natural causes, too. This social-socialmentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, whichseparated us from nature. But nature is coming back with avengeance, tied to population growth. It will have incrediblesecurity implications."Think of a stretch limo in the potholed stree ts of New

York City, where homelessbeggars li ve. Inside the limo arethe air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America,Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolatedplaces. with the ir trade summitry and computer- in formationhighways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."W are enteri ng a bi furcated world . Part of the globeis inhabited by Hege l's and Fukuyarn a ' s Last Man ,healthy , well fed, and pampered by technology . The other,lar ger , part is inh abited by Hob bes ' s Fir st Ma n, co ndemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish , and short."Although bot h parts will be threatened by environmentalstress, the Last Man will be ab le to master it; the First Manwill not.The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground watertables in the western United States. He will build dikes to

save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from risingsea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of Indi a, s ink in to ob livion, and the sho re l ines of Egy pt ,Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them, andthus sharpening ethnic divisions.Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in

his Toronto office. "The darker the map color, the worse thedegra dation," he explains. The West African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to wi nds, chem icals, and water problems."The worst degradat ion is generally where the population ishighest. The population is generally highest where the soil isthe best. So we' re degrading earth' s best soil."

China, in Homer-Dixon's view , is the quintesse ntial example of environmental degradation. Its current economic"success" masks deeper problems. "China's founeen percentgrowth rate doe s not mean it's go ing to be a world power. Itmeans that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking p.lace, is joi ning the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensi fying." Re ferring to the envi-611

ronmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born eco logist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capitaavailability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has beendestroyed by deforestation , loss of topsoil , and salinization.He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies,the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systemsand reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 bilLion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China hasgotten its population under contro l. Large-sca le populationmovements areunder way , from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cit ies , leading to a crime surge likethe one in Africa and to growing reg ional disparities andconflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism anda weaktradition of central government-again as in Africa."We will probably see the center challenged and fractured,and China will not remain the same on the map," HornerDixon says .

Environmental scarcity will inflame ex isting hatreds andaffec t power relationships, at which we now look.

SKINIIE AD COSSAC KS,JUJ U WARRIORSI N the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, SamuelP. Huntington, of Harvard 's Olin Institute for StrategicStudies, published a thought-provoking article ca lled

"The Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he arg ues, hasbeen moving during the course of this ce ntury from nationstate conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the wo rld- turningthem into sprawling villages- national borders wi ll meanless , even as more power will fall into the hands of less ed ucated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uned ucated but newly empowered mill ions, the real borders arethe most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture andtribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic ," involving, amongother things, history. language, and religion. "Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civ ilizations are increasing; these increasing interaction s intensify civili zationconsciousness." Eco nomic modernization is not necessarilya panacea , s ince it fue ls indiv idual and group ambitionswhile weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worthnoting, fo r ex ample , that it is precisel y the wealthiest andfastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen theworst intercommunal vio lence between Hindus and Muslims. Consider that Indian cit ies, like African and Chineseones, are eco log ical time bombs-Delhi and Calc utta, andalso Beijing , suffer the worst air quality of any cities in thewo rld-and it is apparent how surging pop ulations , environmental degradation , and e thnic conflict are deeplyrelated.

I U 19 9 ..


11/21

In RONnia , t h e f o rm e r Yugo d a v i a , co mp a l ri olll a d d

one more v ic t im o f c ilJ iI w a rt o n m t, II N g ralJe

Huntington points to interlocking confl. icts among Hindu,Muslim, Slavic Orthodo x, Western, Japanese , Confucian,Latin American, and possibly African civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic Muslims clas hing w ith S lav ic Orthodox Russians in Centra lAsian cities , the Wes t. clashing with Asia. (Even in the United States , Afr ican-American s find themse lves besieged byan influx of competing Latinos.) Whatever the laws, refugees find a way to crash offi cial border s, brin ging their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the United State swill be weakened by cultural disput es.

Becau se Huntington ' s bru sh is bro ad , his spec ifics arevulnerable to attack . In a rebunal of Huntington 's argumentthe John s Hopkins profe ssor Fouad Ajami , a Lebanese-bornSh i' ite who ce rtainly know s the world beyond suburbia,wr ites in the September-October , 1993, issue of ForeignAffairs,

The world of Islam divides and subdivides . The battlelines in the Caucasus . . . are not coextensive with civ ilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interests ofstates . Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Amenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has castreligious zeal . . . to the wind . . . inthat battle the Irani anshave Llted towardChristian Armenia.True, Huntington 's hypothesized war between Islam and

Orthodox Christianity is not borne out. by the alliance networkin the Caucasus. Bu t that is only because he has misiden tifiedwhich cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world's mostsecularShi'ite Muslims, see thei r cultural identity in terms notof religion but of theirTurkic race. The Armenians, likewi se ,figh t. the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but becausethey are Turk s, related to the same Turks who massacred Ar-menian s in 19 IS. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages empl oying a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture(religio usly militant. as defined by Tehran , and wedded to anArabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and theCaucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of theirfellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians.

Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpcim ofcultural and racial war. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington' s plate tectonics are too simple . Two months of recenttravel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although theTurks are developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred,of fellow-Mu slim Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dom inate Turkish public opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly see ing themselves as Muslims bein g deserted by a West that does littleto help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attac ks Turki shMuslims in the streets of Germany.

In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nationstate war at the beginni ng ofthe twentieth century, could

62

be a powder keg for cultural war at the tum of the twentyfirst : be tween Orthodox Christianity (represented by theSerbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanian s) and the Hou se of Islam. Vet in theCaucasus that House of [slam is falling into a clash betweenTurkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this verysubdivision, not to mention aU the divisions within the Arabworld, indicates that the West, including the United States, isnot thre atened by Hunt ington 's scenario. As the Gulf Wardemonstrated, the West has proved capab le of playing onepart of the House of Is lam against another.

True . However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami isdescribing a world even more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into accountHomer-Dixon's research on environmental scarcity. Outsidethe stretch limo would be a rundown. crowded planet ofskinhead Co ssacks and j uj u warriors, influenced by theworst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds. and battling over scraps of ove rused earth in guerrilla

I 1 9 !H


12/21

conflictsthatripple acrosscontinentsand intersect in no discernible pattern-m eaning there's no ea y-to- define threat,Kennan's world of one adversary seems as distant as theworld of Herodotus.Most peop le believe that the political eanh since 1989 has

undergone immense change. But it isminor compared withwhat is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of theatlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of Arab -Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lieahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range thinker for the U.S.Navy, warns, "We arenot in charge of the environment andthe world isnot following us. It isgoing inmanydirections.Do notassumethat democratic capitalism isthe last word inhuman social evolution: 'Before address ing the questions of maps and of warfare, I

want to takea closer look at the interaction of religion, culture. demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle East.'r u e \ T l ,\ 'i TI ( : 1\o1 0 'T II I. l

Til E PAST IS DEAIlBUILT on stee p, muddy hill s, the shantytowns ofAnkara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. AItindag , or "Go lden Mounta in," is a pyramid ofdreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron,rising as though each shack were built on lOP of another, allreaching awkwardly and pain fully toward heaven- theheaven of wealthier Turk s who live elsewhere in the ci ty.Nowhere else on the plane t have I found such a poignant arcbitectural symbo l of man ' s striving, with gap s in housewalls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onion s growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood . Forreasons tha t I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away fromthe African one.To see the twenty-fir t century truly, one' s eyes must learn

a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines. with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. Thereare far too manymillions whose dreams are more vulgar.more real-whose raw energies and desires will overwhelmthe visions of theelites , remaking the future into somethingfrighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned thai shantytownsare not all bad.Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In

Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I go t to Golden Mountain the bette r it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $ 1,500worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler'schecks in the other, yet ( felt no fear. Golde n Mountain was areal neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story:The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal andcardboard walls was deceiving. lnside was a o e ~ r d e that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, atelevision, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of familypictures, a few plants by a window , and a stove. Though thestreets become riversof mudwhen it rains, the floors insidethis house were spotless.Other houses were like this too. Schoolchi ldren ran along

with briefcases strapped to their backs. trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One mansipped beer. Alcohol is easy 10 obtain in Turkey, a secularstale where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet thereis little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versionsofwhat obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of WestAfrica), making it that much harder for religious extremists togain a foothold.My point in bringing up a rather wholesome. crime-free

slum isthis: itsexistencedemonstrateshowformidab le is thefabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made . A culturethis strong has the potential to domin ate the Middle East onceagain . Slumsare litmus tests for innate cultural strengths andweaknesses. Those peop leswhoseculturescanharborextensive slum life withoutdecompos ingwill be. relatively speak-

63


13/21


14/21

r ns 1.1 ES 0 F I I' KE RS

Oppu . i ' e pa g e : Kur d . inTu r ke ,' d el" 'h e g OIJe r nme nb, kindlin g r i tua l f ire ll.A b u ve: a Kurtl i"h g ue r r i l l al i gh 'er: KIJrdi llh c h i ld r e nwllh s p e n' Nht:IIN.

In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardlyforginga consensus withmodernization, a trend that is lessapparem in the Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually invisible in Africa). In [ran the oil boom--because it put development and urbanization on a fast track, making the cultureshock more intense-s-fueled the 19781slamic Revolution. ButTurkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has little oil. Therefore its developmem and urbanization have been more gradual. Islamists have been inlegrated into the parliamentary system for decades. The tensions Jnoticed inGoldenMountainarenatural, creativeones: the kindimmigrantsfacethe world

over. While the world has focused on religious perversity inAlgeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypl, parts ofwhose capital city, Cairo. evince worsecrowding than Ihaveseen even in Calcutta, Turkey has been living through theMuslim equivalent of the ProtestantReformation.

Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in anotherway vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil ,but thei r Anatolian heartland has lots of water-the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey' s SoutheastAnatolia Project, involving twenty-two majordams and irri gation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and68

Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhapsIsrael is will need to drink in the future is controlled byTurks. The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide. sixteenstory Atatiirk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the wordsof modem Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene"("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syr

ia's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which werebuilt largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. Ona recent visit my eyes look in the immaculate offi ces and their gardens, the high-voltage electricgrids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep ofgiant humm ing transformers, the poured-concrete spi llways, and the prim unfold ing suburbia, complete withschools, for dam employees. The emerging power of theTurks was palpable.Erduhan Bayindir , the site manager at the dam, told me

that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites,waterhas to be spreadmore evenly within the society. . . . Itis true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq forup to eight months without the same water overflowing ourdams, in order 10 regulate their political behavior."Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from

the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, La the waterplain of Harran, in southern Anatolia- n ear the site of theAtaturk Dam. But will the nation-slate of Turkey, as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?I very much doubt it.

WEREAS West Africa represents the least stablepart of political reali ty outside Homer-Dixon ' sstretch limo, Turkey. an organic outgrowth of twoTurkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has beenamong the most stable. Turkey 's borders were establishednot by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in theearly I920s. Kemal Atattirk provided Turkey with a secularnation-building myth that most Arab and African slates, burdened by arti ficially drawn borders , lack. Thai lack willleave many Arab stales defenseless against a wave of Islamthat will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in comingyears. Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.II is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on ur

ban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere arealso missing- as are the considerable territories controlledby guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guenrillas in what, acco rding to the map, was nonhernEthiopia. traveling in "northern Ir aq " wi th Kurdis hguerri llas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled

I' t; Il H U A H " 1 9 9 ..


15/21

by a local mafia-to say nothing of my experiences in WestAfrica-led me to develop a healthy skeptic ism towardmaps, which, I beganto realize, create a conceptual barrierthat prevents us from comprehending the political crack-upjust beginning to occur worldwide.

Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries,each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, withwhich all of us have grown up, is generally an invention ofmodernism, specifically of Europeancolonialism. Modernism,in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nationstales in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism

of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.In his book Imagined Communities : Reflections all the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, ofCornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "tota lizingclassificatory gr id. ... It was bounded , determin ate, andtherefore- in princip le----countable." To the colonialist,country maps were the equivalent of an accountan t's ledgerbooks. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" thatwould make possible such questionable concepts as Lraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Ni geria. The state, recall , is a

at the end of the Thirty Years' War- a n event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, whichtogether gave birth to modem science. People were suddenlyflush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map.basedon scientific techniques of measurement, offereda wayto classify new national organisms, making ajigsaw puzzle ofneat pieceswithout transition zones between them . "Frontier"is itself a modem concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind.And as European nations carved out far-flung domain s at thesame time that print technology was making the reproductionof maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a wayT il " A 'r LA I\ T I C . \ IONTIIL l '

purely \Vestern notion, one that until the twentieth centuryapplied to countries covering only three percent of the earth'sland area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as agoverning ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industri alized world. Even the United Stales ofAmerica, in the words of one or our best living poets , GarySnyder, consists of "arb itrary and inaccurate impositions onwhat is really here ."

Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only inthe United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring

69


16/21

AMIDDLE-CLASS LIFE IS

TOWHOM THE COMFORT

OF THE FIGHTING POINTS

be more cr itica l to the futur e of the Middl e East than theeventual outcome of the recentIsraeli-Palestinianagreem ent.AERICA' S fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and ethnicobsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transformthe Middle East. The dip lomatic process involving Israelisand Palestinians will, 1believe, have little effect on the earlyand mid-twenty-first-cent ury map of the region. Israel, with a6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on hightech exports, is about to enter Homer-D ixon's stretch limo,fonified by a well-defined political community that is an organico utgrowth of history and ethnicity, Like prosperous andpeaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-tom and povertywracked Armenia on the other , Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificia l frontiers,fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birthrate of more than 3.2 percent. Seventy percent o f the Arabpopulation has been born since I97o-youths with little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars . The most distant recollection of these youths willbe the West 's humiliation of colonially invented Ir aq in 1991.Today seventeenoutof twenty-two Arab states have adeclining grossnational product; in the next twenty years, at currentgrowth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These stales, like most African ones, will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies. The MiddleEast ana lyst Christine M. Helms explains,

Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political "disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabisrn . . .or reformulating it. Alternative solutions arenot contemplated. They have simply opted for the political paradigmat the other end of the political spectrum with which theyare familiar- Islam.Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of

Syria, iraq, Jordan , Algeria, and other Arab states are oftencontrary to cultural and political rea lity. As state co ntrolmechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demograph.ic stress , "hard" Islami c city- states or shantytownstates are likely to emerge. The fiction that the impoverishedci ty of Algiers. on the Mediterranean, controls Tarnanrasset,deep in the Algerian Sahara , cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peaceprocess, Israel isdestined to beaJewi sh ethnic fortress amid a vast and vo latile realm of Islam . In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gazashantytowns may be indicative of the coming era.The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less cenain, but far

morerelevant to the kindof map that will explainOUf futureworld. The Kurds suggest a geographic reality that cannot beshown in two-dimensional space.The issue in Turkey is notsimply amatter of givingautonomy or even independence to

which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to "country." Newspapers , thismagazine, and this writerare not innocent of the tendency.Accord ing to the map, the great hydropower complex em

blemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Tu rkey. Forgetthe map. This southeas tern region of Turkey is populated almost complete ly by Kurds. About halfof the world' s 20 million Kurds live in "Turkey." The Kurds are predominant inan ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey butalso with Iraq, Iran, Syria , and the former Soviet Union. TheWestern-enforcedKurdish enclaveinnorthern Iraq, a consequence of tbe 199 1Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitiousnature of that supposed nation-state.On a recent vis it to the Turki sh-iranian border, it occurred

to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here [ was on thelegal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic andIranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa,thc border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here thepeople doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were

Kurds. In such a moonscape,over which peoples have migrated and settled in patternsthat ob literate borders, the endof the Cold War will bring ona cruel process of natural se-

HE SAVAGERY lection among existing states .No longer wiUthese states beso fi rmly propped up by theWest or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap withTO ATRUTH THAT near ly everybody in the Middle East, on account of theirWE LACK THE STOMACH being cheated out of a state inthe post -Fir st Wor ld Wa rTO CONTEMPLATE: A peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural se-LARGE NUMBER OF lector- t h e ultimate realitycheck. They have destabilizedIraq and may co nt inue todisrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathingspac e, while s tre ng the ni ng

AND STABILITY OF states that do.Because the Turks, owingto their water resources, theirgrowingeconomy. and the social cohesion evinced by theUT TERLYUNKNOWN, most crime-free slums I haveencountered, are on the vergeFIND WAR AND A of big-power status, and because the 10 million KurdsBARRACKS EXISTENCE withi n Turkey threaten th ats ta tus , the outcome of theASTEP UP. Turkish-Kurdish disput e will

PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET,

70 f'F. K R " tt l I ' S-4


17/21

In ~ / e lIu m n, a r)' jURtlc em e l e ll oul aga i tul a 110 1 d i e r ( a b o v e) an d s u . pe c le llI h l ev u ( IJe / uw r igh l ) . A IJol1er igh l : 0 Rc e o e in "u ko var ,Ih e fo rm er Y"l!oMl av i a .

Kurds in the southeast. This isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely subdividing into smaller units,Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on. Federalismis not the answer. Kurds are found eve rywhere inTurkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey'sprob lem is that its Anatolian land mass is the home of twocultures and languages, Turkis h and Kurdish . Iden tity inTurkey, as in India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complexand suhtle than conventional ca rtography can display.

A NEW KINIl OF WA RTo appreciate fully the political and cartographic im-plications of posunodernism- a n epoch of themelessjuxtapositions. in which the class ificato ry grid of nation-states is go ing to he replaced by a j agged-glass patternof city-states, shanty-Slates, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms- i t is necessary to consider, finally. the whole ques-tion of war.72

"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who de fendthemselves, enemies who are awake!" Andre Malraux wro tein Mall 's Fare. I canno t think of a more suitable battle cryfor many combatants in the ear ly decades of the twenty-firstcentury. The intense savagery of the fighting in such diversecultural se ttings as Liberia, 8 0 nia, the Caucasus. and SriLanka- to say nothing of what ob tains in American innercities-indicates something very troubling that those of usinside the stretch limo , concerned with issues like midd leclas s entitlements and the future of interactive cab le te levision, lack the stomach to contemplate. It is this: a large number of peop le on thi s planet, to whom the comfo rt andstability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find warand a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down."Just as it makes no sense to ask ' why people eat' or

.what they sleep for,'" writes Martin van Creveld, a militaryhistorian at the Hebrew Un iversity in Je rusa lem , in TheTransformation of War, "so fighting in many ways is not ameans but an end. Throughout history, for every perso n whohas expressed his horror ofwar there is another who found init the most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the po int that he later spent a lifetimeboring his descendants by recounting his exp loits." When Iasked Pentagon officials about the narure of war in the twenty-first century, the answer J frequently got was "Read VanCreveld." The top brass are enamored of this historian notbecause his wri tings ju stify their exis tence but. rather, theopposite: Van Creveld warns them that huge state militarymachines like the Pentagon ' s are dinosaurs about to go extinct , and that something far more terrible awa its us.The degree to which Van Creveld 's Transformation of

War complements Homer-Dixon ' s work on the environment , Huntington' s thoughts on cultural clash, my own realizations in trave ling by foot , bus, and bush taxi in more thansixty countries , and America '5 sobering comeuppances inintractable-cul ture zones like Hait i and Somalia is startling.The hook heg ins by demolishing the notion that men don ' tlike to fight. "By compelling the senses to focus themselveson the here and now: ' Van Creve ld wri tes, war "can cause aman to take his leave of them." As anybody who has had experience with Cherniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia,Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone cantell you, in places where the Western Enlightenment has notpene trated and where the re has alway s been mass poveny ,people find liberat ion in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worry ingabout mines and ambushes frees you from worrying aboutmundane detai ls of daily existence. If my own experience istoo s ubjec t ive, there is awea lth of data showing theshee r frequency of war, espe cially in the deve loping worldsince the Second Wor ld War.Physical agg ression is a part

r e e n u vu r 1 9 9 -4


18/21

of being human . Only when people atta in a ce rta in economic, educational, andcultura l standard is this trait tranquilized.

In light of the fact that 95 percent of the earth 's pop ulationgrow th will be in the poo res t area s of the globe, the ques tionis not whether the re will be war (the re will be a lot of it) butwhat kind o f war . And who will fight whom?Debunking the great military strategist Carl von Clausew itz,

Van Creveld, who may be the most original thinker on warsince that early-nineteenth-century Prussian, writes, "Clausewitz's ideas . . . were wholly rooted inthe fact that, ever since1648, war had been waged overwhelmingly by states." But, asVan Creveld explain s, the period of nation-state s and, therefore, of state conflict is now ending, and wi th it the clear" three fold divis ion into government. army. and peop le" whichslate-direc ted wars enforce. Thus, to see the future, the firststep is to look back to the past immediately prior to the birth ofmodemism- th e wars in medieval Europe which began during the Reformation and reached their culmination in the Th irty Years' War.Van Creveld wri tes,In all these struggles political, social. economic, and religious motives were hopelessly entangfed. Since this wasan age when armies consisted of mercenaries,allwere alsoattendedby swarms ofmilitaryentrepreneurs. . . . Many ofthem paid little but lip service to the organizations forwhom they had contracted to fight. Instead, they robbedthecountrysideon their ownbehalf. . . .Givensuchconditions, any finedistinctions. . . between

armies on the one handand peopleson the other werebound to break down. Engulfed by war, civilians sufferedterrible atroc ities.

BACK then. in otherwords. there was no "po litics" as wehave come to understand the term , just as there is lessand less "politics" today in Liberia, Sierra !..eone, Somalia, SriLanka, the Balkans, and the Caucas us, among other places.Because, as Van Creveld notes, the radiusof trust within

tribal societies is narrowed to one's immed iate family andguerrilla comrades, trucesarranged with one Bosniancommander , say, may be brok en immediate ly by anothe r Bosnian commander. The plethora of short-lived ceasefires inthe Balkans and the Caucas us constitute proof that we areno longer in a worl d whe re the old ru les of state warfare apply . More ev idence is provided by the dest ruction of med ieval monuments in the Croatian pan of Dubrovni k: whencultures , ra the r than states, figh t, then c ultura l and religiousmonument areweaponsof war, making them fair game.Also, war-makingentities will no longer be restricted to a

specific territory. Loose andshadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organiza tionssuggest why borders will meanincreasingly little and sedimentary layersof tribalistic identity and control will mean more. "From the vantage point ofthe present. there appears every prospect that reJigious . . .fanaticisrns will play a larger role in the motivationof armedT il l: " T I. " 'T I C )l ON " Il I. Y

co nflic t" in the w est tha n at any tim e " fo r the last 300years," Van Creveld writes. Thi s is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are close ly monitori ng religious cults. Vlahossays, "An ideo logy that challenge s us may not take familiarform, like the old Nazisor Commies. It may not evenengageus initially in ways that fit o ld threat markings." Van Creveldconcludes, "A rmed conflict will be waged by men on earth,not robots in space. It will have more in common with thestrugg les of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While anothermili taryhistorian, John Keegan,in his new book A History o/Wmfare , drawsamore benignportrait of primitive man, it is important to point out thatwhat VanCreveld really means isre-primitlvized man: warrior societiesoperating at a time of unprecedented resourcescarcity andplanetary overcrowding.Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide low

intensity conflict isnot a superficial "backto the future" scenario. Fi rst of all, technology wi ll be used toward primiti veends . In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince John son did n' t

73


19/21

j ust cut off the ea rs of President Samuel Doe before Doe wastortured to de ath in 199D-J ohnson made a video of it .which has circulated throu ghout West Africa. In Decemberof 1992 , when plotters of a failed coup agai nst the Strasse rregime in Sierra Leone had their ears cut off at Freetown'sHamilton Beach prior 10being killed, it was seen by many toi be a copycat execution. Conside ring , as I 've explained earlier, that the Strasser regime is not really a governmen t andathat Sierra Leone isnot really a nation-state, listenclosely toVan Creveld: "Once the legal monopoly of armed force ,long claimed by the state, is wrestedQui of its hands, exist-

tinuc to shrink. being gradually replaced by a booming private security business.as inWestAfrica. andby urbanmafias,especiaJly inthe form er communist world, whomay be betterequipped than municipal police forces to grant physica l protection to local inhabitants .

Future wars wi ll be those of communal survi val, aggravated or, in many cases. caused by environmental scarcity.These wars will be subnational, meaning that i, will be hardfor stales and local governments10 protect their own citizensphysica lly. This is how many states will ultimately die. Asslate power fades-and with it the state's ability to help

ing distinctions between war and crime will break downmuch as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka,EI Salvador, Peru , or Co lombia."

If crime and war become indistinguishable. then "nationaldefense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept. Ascrime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of stategovernments and criminal-justice systems to protec t their citizensdiminishes, urbancrime may, according to VanCreveld,"develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing alongracial, religious, social, and political lines." As mall-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad. state armies will con-74

weaker groups within society, not 10 mention other statespeop les and cultures around the world will be thrown backupon theirown strengthsand weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanismsto protect them. Whereasthedistant futurewill probably see the eme rgence of a racially hybrid. globa lized man, the coming decades will sec us moreawareof ourdif ferences than of our similarities. To the average person,political values will mean less, personal security more. Thebelief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the ove rriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peop les?

..." B H c .\tn 1 !J !f. I


20/21

T il E I,A 8T MAl'

,4 ,. 6 0 n and 100tin6 in 1.0 11n ~ 1 o ft e r tir e a cqu l t t , , '

o f p o l i of f i c e,. . in th eRtH/n e ," Kl n6 C fu e

I NGeography and the Human Spirit . Anne Buttimer, aprofesso r at Universi ty College, Dublin, recalls the workof an early-nineteenth-cen tury German geographer, CarlRitter. whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity"based on regiona lism and a co nstant. living flow of forms. Themapof the future. to the extent that a map iseven possible,will represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's vision. Imaginecartog raphy in three dimension , as if in a hologram. In thishologram would be the overlapping sediments of group andother identitiesatop themerely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in placesby shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead , indica ting the power ofdrug cartels. matias, and private securityagencies. Instead of bord ers. there would bemoving "centers"of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many o r these layers wouldbe in motion. Replacing fixed and abrupt tines on a flat spacewould be a shifling pattern of buffer entitie , like the Kurdishand Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, the TurkicUighur buffer entity between Central Asia and Inner China(itse lf d istinct from coastal China), and the Latino buffer entiry replac ing a prec ise U.S.-Mex ican border . To this proteancartographic hologr am one must add other facto rs, such as migrat ions of populations. explosions of birth rates, vectors ofdisease. Hence forward the map of the wor ld will never be static. This future map-in a sen se. the " Last Map"-w i ll be anever-mutating representation of chaos.

The Ind ian subcontinent offers examples of what is happening. Fordifferent reasons, both India and Pakistanareincreasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy inthese places is less and less relevant to the larger issue ofgovemability. Ln India' s case the question arises, Is one unwieldy burea ucracy in New Delhi the best ava ilab le mechanism for promot ing the lives of 866 million people of diverselanguages. re ligions, and ethnic groups? In 1950, when theIndian popu lation was much less than half as large and nation-building idealism was still strong, the argument fordemocracy wasmore impressive than it is now. Given that in2025 India ' s population could be close to 1.5 billion , thatmuch of its economy rests on a shrinking natural-resourcebase, including dram atica lly decl ining water levels, and thatcommunal violence andurbanization are spiraling upward , itis difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive thenext century. india's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution hasbeen achieve d by overworking its croplands and depletingits watershed. Nonnan Myers, a British development consultant, worries that Indians have "been feeding themselvestoday by borrowing agai nst their children 's food sources."

Pakistan 's prob lem is more basic still: like much of Africa,the country makes no geo-graphic or demographic sense.h was founded as a homelandfor the Muslims of the subcon-

T il E ' T t ,, ' T I C \IU' l I I I.\

tinen t , yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outsidePakistan than within it. Like Yugoslav ia, Paki stan is a patch work of ethnic groups. increasingly in violent conflict withone anothe r. While the Weste rn medi a gushes over the factthat the country has awoman Prime Mini ter, BenazirBhutto,Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos. Lneight visits to Paki stan , I have neve r go tten a sense of a cohesive national identity.With as much as 65 percent of its landdependent on intensive irrigation. withwide-scale deforestalion, and with a yearly po pul ation growth of 2.7 percent(which eosures that the amount or cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet) , Paki sta n is becoming a more andmore desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basinintensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindustrife over fa lling water tables may be unavoidable.

" India and Pak istan will pro bably fall apart ," Homer-Dixonpredicts. "Theirseculargovernments have less and less legitimacy as we ll as les s management ability over peop le and resources: ' Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinentinto IWOparts, the future will likel y see a lot of thin ner linesand smallerparts, with the ethnic entities of PakhtunistanandPunjab gradually replacing Paki stan in the space between theCentral As ian plateau and the heart of the subcontinent.

one of this even takes into account climatic change ,which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode thecapacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance, rece ives 70 pe rcent of its precipitation from the monsoon cy cle, which planetary warm ing cou ld disrupt.

NOl only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last Mapbe in constant motion, but its two-dimensional base maychange too. The National Academy of Sc ience s reports that

as many as one billion people. or 20 per cent of theworld 's population, live on lands likely 10 be inundated ordramatically changed by rising waters. . . . Low-lyingcountries in the deve loping world such as Egypt andBangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas ex ten-sive and densely populated, will be hardest hit. . . . Wherethe rivers are dammed. as in the case of the Nile, the effects . .. will beespecially severe.EgypI could be where cl imatic upheaval-s-to say nothi ng

of the more immediate threat of increasing population-s-w illinc ite religious upheaval in truly biblical fashion. Natural CHl-astrophes, uch as the October, 1992 , Cairo ea rthquake, inwhich the government fai led to de liver relief aid and slum residents were in many instances helped by their local mosques,canonly strengthen the positionof Islamic factions. Ina statement aboutgreenhouse warming whichcould referto any of avariety of natural catastrophes, the environmental expen JessicaTuchmanMatthews warns thatmany of us underestimatethe extent 10 which political systems, in affluent societies aswe ll as in places like Egypt, "depend on the underpinning ofnatural systems."She adds, "The fact thatone canmovewithease from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about theconsequences of Vermont acquiring Miami's climate: '

75


21/21

Indeed, it is not clear that the United Stales will survivethe next century inexactly its present form . Because America isa multi-ethnicsociety, the nation-stale has alwaysbeenmore fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societieslike Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article published in The National Interest in 1992, exp lains that whereas nation-state societies lend to be built arou nd a mass-conscription army and a standardized public school sys tem,"multicultural regimes" fea ture a high-tech, all -vol unteerarm y (and, I would add , private schoo ls that teach competing values), operating in a culture in which the internationalmedia and entertainment industry has more influence thanthe "national political class." In other words, a nation-state isa place where everyone has been educa ted alo ng similarlines, where people take their cue from national leaders , andwher e everyone (every male, at least) has gone through thecrucible of military service, making patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his immigrant famil y in tum-of-the-century Chicago , Saul Bellow states, "The country took us over.J1 was a country then, not a collection of ' cultures. '"During the Second World War and the decade followin g it,the United States reached its apogee asa c lassic nation-state.During the I96Os. as is now clear, America began a slow butunmi stakable process of transformat ion . The signs hardlyneed belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds. Wil liam IrwinThompson, in Passages About Earth: An Exploration of theNew Planetary Culture, writes, 'The educationaJ system thathad worked on the Jews or the Iri sh could no longer work onthe blacks; and when Jewish teachers in New York tried totake black children away from their parents exactly in theway tbey had been taken from theirs, they were shocked toencounter a violent affirmation of negritude."Issues like West Africa could yet emerge a, a new kind of

foreign-policy issue, further eroding America's domesticpeace. The spectacle of several West African nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here athome. That is another reason whyAfricamatters. We mustnot kid ourselves: the sensitivity factor is higher than ever.The Washington , D.C., public schoo l system is already expe rimenting with an Afrocentric curriculum. Summits betweenAfrican leaders and prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyanna-ish prognostications about multipartyelections inAfrica that do not factor in crime, surgingbirth rates, and resource depletion. The Congressional BlackCaucuswasamong thoseurging U.S. involvement in Somaliaand inHaiti. AI the Los Angeles Times minority staffershaveprotested against, among other things, what they allege to betheracisttone of the newspaper'sAfricacoverage, allegationsthat the editor of the "World Report" section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that Africa should be viewed throughthe same rigorousanaJyticallensasother pans of the world.A frica may be marginal in terms of conventional late

twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an age of

cultural and racial clash, when national defense is increasingly local , Africa ' s distress wiJl exert a destabilizing influenccon the United States.This and many other factors will make the United States

lessof a nation than if is today, even as it gains territory following the peaceful d isso lution of Canada. Quebec, basedon the bed rock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity, co uld yet tum out to be North America' s most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal peop les may lop of f northernparts of the province.) "Patrioti sm" will become increasingly regional as peop le in Alberta and Montana discover thatthey have far mor e in common with each other than they dowith Ottawa or Washin gton, and Spanish-speakers in theSouthwest discover a greater commonality with MexicoCity. (The Nine Nations ofNONh America, by Joel Garreau,a book about the continent's reg ionalization, is more relevant now than when it was published , in 1981.) As Washingtori's influencewanes, and with it the traditional symbolsof American patriotism, North Americanswill take psychological refuge in their insulated communities and cultures.RETURNtNG from West Africa last faUwas an illuminating ordeal. After leaving Abidjan, my Air Afriqueflight landed in Dakar, Senega l, where all passengers had todisembark inorder to go through another security check, thisone demanded by U.S. authorities before they would permi tthe flight to set out for New York. Once we were in NewYork , desp ite the midnight hour, imm igration officials atKennedy Airpor t held up d isembarkat ion by conductingquick interrogationsof the aircraft's passengers- thiswas inaddition to all the normal immigration and customs procedures. It was appare nt that drug smuggling, disease, and other factors had contributed to the toughest security proced uresI have ever encountered when returning fromoverseas.Then, for the first time in over a month. r spotted busi

nesspeople with attache cases and laptop computers. When Ihad len New York for Abidjan, all the businesspeop le wereboarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed fromgates near Air Afrique ' s . The only non-Africans off to WestAfrica had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within West Africa are increasingly unreal. those separating West Africa from the outs ide world arein variouswaysbecomingmore impenetrable.But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this

dy ing region at our own risk. When the Berl in Wa ll wasfalling, in ove rnber of 1989 , I happened to be in Kosovo,coveringa riot between Serbsand Albanians. The futurewasin Kosovo , I told mysel f that night , not in Berlin . The sameday that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands onthe White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at theedge of an ex panding desert. The real news wasn' t at theWhit e House, I realized . It was right below.

11.3.Kaplan1994The Coming

Documents

Transcript of 11.3.Kaplan1994The Coming