By: Robert D. Kaplan

As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. I do not mean to say that Eurasia is becoming unified, or even stable in the manner that Europe was during the Cold War and the Post Cold War – only that the interactions of globalization, technology and geopolitics, with each reinforcing the other, are leading the Eurasian supercontinent to become, analytically speaking, one fluid and comprehensible unit. Eurasia simply has meaning in the way that it didn’t use to be. Moreover, because of the reunification of the Mediterranean Basin, evinced by refugees from North Africa and the Levant flooding Europe, and because of dramatically increased interactions across the Indian Ocean from Indochina to East Africa, we may now speak of Afro-Eurasia in one breath. The term “World-Island,” early 20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder’s phrase for Eurasia joined with Africa, is no longer premature.

The slowly vanishing West abets this development by depositing its seeds of unity into an emerging global culture that spans continents. Further encouraging this process is the erosion of distance by way of technology: new roads, bridges, ports, airplanes, massive container ships and fiber-optic cables. It is important, though, to realize that all this constitutes only one layer of what is happening, for there are more troubling changes, too. Precisely because religion and culture are being weakened by globalization, they have to be reinvented in more severe, monochromatic and ideological form by way of the communications revolution. Witness Boko Haram and the Islamic State, which do not represent Islam per se, but their botched version igniting with the tyrannical conformity and mass hysteria inspired by the internet and social media. It isn’t the so-called Clash of Civilizations that is taking place, but the clash of artificially-reconstructed civilizations. And this only hardens geopolitical divides, which, as the collapse of Middle East prison states indicates, are in evidence not only between states but within states themselves.

The combination of violent upheavals and the communications revolution in all its aspects – from cyber interactions to new transportation infrastructure – has wrought a more claustrophobic and ferociously contested world: a world in which territory still matters, and where every crisis interacts with every other as never before. This is all intensified by the expansion of megacities and absolute rises in population. No matter how overcrowded, no matter how much the underground water table and nutrients in the soil have been depleted, people will fight for every patch of ground. On this violent and interactive earth, the neat divisions of Cold War area studies and also of continents and subcontinents are starting to be erased as the Long European War passes from living memory. Europe, North Africa, the Near East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent are destined to have less and less meaning as geopolitical concepts. Instead, because of the erosion of both hard boundaries and cultural differences, the map will manifest a continuity of subtle gradations, which begin in Central Europe and the Adriatic, and end beyond the Gobi Desert where the agricultural cradle of Chinese civilization begins. Geography counts, but legal borders will matter less so.

This world will be increasingly bound by formal obligations that exist both above and below the level of government, a situation that recalls the functionality of feudalism. Just as medieval Al-Andalus in Spain and Portugal saw a rich confection of Muslim, Jewish and Christian civilizations, where the Arabs ruled but forced conversions to Islam did not occur, this emerging world – outside of conflict zones, of course – will be one of tolerance and pungent cultural mixes, into which the liberal spirit of the West will dissolve and only in that way have its place. As for the regional conflicts, they almost always will have global implications, owing to how every part of the earth is now increasingly interwoven with every other part. To wit, local conflicts involving Iran, Russia and China over the decades have led to terrorist and cyber attacks on Europe and the Americas.

Geographical divisions will be both greater and lesser than in the 20th century. They will be greater because sovereignties will multiply; that is, a plethora of city-states and region-states will emerge from within existing states themselves to achieve more consequence, even as a supranational organization like the EU wanes and one like ASEAN is destined to have little meaning in a world of intimidation and power. Geographical divisions also will be lesser because the differences – and particularly the degree of separation – between regions like Europe and the Middle East, the Middle East and South Asia, and South Asia and East Asia will decline. The map will become more fluid and baroque, in other words, but with the same pattern repeating itself. And this same pattern will be encouraged by both the profusion and hardening of roads, railways, pipelines and fiber-optic cables. Obviously, transportation infrastructure will not defeat geography. Indeed, the very expense of building such infrastructure in many places demonstrates the undeniable fact of geography.

Anyone in the energy exploration business, or who has participated in a war game involving the Baltic States or the South China Sea, knows just how much old-fashioned geography still matters. At the same time, critical transportation infrastructure constitutes yet another factor making geography – and, by inference, geopolitics in our era – more oppressive and claustrophobic. To be sure, connectivity, rather than simply leading to more peace, prosperity and cultural uniformity as techno-optimists like to claim, will have a much more ambiguous legacy. With more connectivity, the stakes for war will be greater, and the ease in which wars can proliferate from one geographic area to another will also be greater. Corporations will be the beneficiaries of this new world, but being (for the most part) unable to provide security, they will ultimately not be in control.

Nothing is more illustrative of this process than the Chinese government’s attempts to build a land bridge across Central and West Asia to Europe, and a maritime network across the Indian Ocean from East Asia to the Middle East. These land and sea conduits may themselves be interlinked, as China and Pakistan, as well as Iran and India, hope to join the oil and natural gas fields of distant, landlocked Central Asia with the Indian Ocean to the south. China is branding these infrastructure projects “One Belt, One Road” – in effect, a new Silk Road. The medieval Silk Road was not a single route but a vast and casual trading network, tenuously linking Europe with China both overland and across the Indian Ocean. (The Silk Road was only named as such – the Seidenstrasse – in the late 19th century by a German geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen.) The relative eclectic and multicultural nature of the Silk Road during the Middle Ages meant, according to historian Laurence Bergreen, that it was “no place for orthodoxy or single-mindedness.” Medieval travellers on the Silk Road encountered a world that was, furthermore, “complex, tumultuous and menacing, but nonetheless porous.” Consequently, with each new traveller’s account, Europeans saw the world not as “smaller and more manageable,” but as “bigger and more chaotic.” This is a perfect description of our own time, in which the smaller the world actually becomes because of the advance of technology, the more permeable, complicated and overwhelming it seems, with its numberless, seemingly intractable crises that are all entwined. The late 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who travelled the length and breadth of the Silk Road, is most famously associated with this world. And the route he travelled provides as good an outline as any for defining the geopolitics of Eurasia in the coming era.

Vocab Card

(1) cohere: bind, cling, fuse, form a whole
(2) monochromatic: having one colour
(3) per se: as such, intrinsically, in essence
(4) wrought: moulded, shaped
(5) claustrophobic: uncomfortably closed
(6) confection: assortment, combination
(7) pungent: acrid, acrimonious, virulent, vitriolic
(8) supranational: transcending established national boundaries
(9) baroque: flowery, overblown, turgid
(10) conduit: channel, sluice, spillway
(11) tenuous: fine, attenuated, gossamer, unspecific
(12) eclectic: broad-based, extensive, multifaceted
(13) permeable: porous, pervious, absorptive
(14) intractable: ungovernable, complex, troublesome
(15) entwined: interlaced, knitted, woven