Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

The best-known quote attributed to Henry Kissinger originated in the 1970s, when he is reported to have asked: ‘If I want to phone Europe – who do I call?’ The Poles have an updated question: ‘If the Russians threaten, do we call Brussels or Washington?’ They know the answer.

Russia, which has yet to forgive the Western nations for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the separation of Kosovo, is still attempting to coax Serbia into its orbit via the gravitational pull of language, ethnicity, religion and energy deals.

The EU and NATO countries need to present a united front to these challenges, but this will be impossible unless the key relationship in the EU remains intact – that between France and Germany.

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.

However, what began in 1951 as the six-nation European Steel and Coal Community became the multi-nation EU with an ideological core of ‘ever closer union’.

What is clear now, and was to some clear at the time, is that at its launch in 1999 many countries which did join were simply not ready.

In 1999 many of the countries went into the newly defined relationship with eyes wide shut. They were all supposed to have levels of debt, unemployment and inflation within certain limits. The problem was that some, notably Greece, were cooking the books. Most of the experts knew, but because the euro is not just a currency – it is also an ideology – the members turned a blind eye.

If the EU splinters then the German question may return. Seen through the prism of seven decades of peace, this may seem alarmist, and Germany is among the most peaceful and democratic members of the European family; but seen through the prism of seven centuries of European warfare, it cannot be ruled out.

German Conundrum

Watching all of these Continental machinations from the sidelines of the Atlantic is the UK, sometimes present on the territory of the Continent, sometimes in ‘splendid isolation’, always fully engaged in ensuring that no power greater than it will rise in Europe. This is as true now in the diplomatic chambers of the EU as it was on the battlefields of Agincourt, Waterloo or Balaclava.

UK concerns

In modern times, the UK seeks to insert itself into the great post-war Franco-German alliances. Failing that, it seeks alliances among other, smaller, member states to build enough support to challenge policies with which it disagrees. For several centuries, the British sought to ensure that there was not an overwhelmingly dominant power on the continent. This policy continued during EU membership, and will in the future, whether the UK is a member or not.

The GIUK is one of many reasons why London flew into a panic in 2014 when, briefly, the vote on Scottish independence looked as if might result in a Yes. The loss of power in the North Sea and North Atlantic would have been a strategic blow and a massive dent to the prestige of whatever was left of the UK.

The Achilles heels of Scotland

The two main issues that caused the British to edge towards the exit door are related: sovereignty and immigration. Anti-EU opinion, backed by some EU waverers, has been fuelled by the amount and type of laws enacted by the EU, which the UK, as part of the membership deal, had to abide by. For example, headlines were made about foreign criminals convicted of serious crimes in the UK who cannot be deported because of rulings from the European Court of Justice. At the same time, the wave of economic immigrants and refugees arriving in Europe from the Middle East and Africa has also driven anti-EU feeling as many of those migrants want to reach Britain, and it is believed they have been encouraged to so do by the EU countries through which they pass.

A stark example came in early 2016 when, for the first time in half a century, Sweden began checking the documents of travellers from Denmark. This was a direct response to the numbers of refugees and migrants flowing into northern Europe from the wider Middle East and to the IS attacks on Paris in November 2015. The idea of the EU’s ‘Schengen Zone’, a border-free area comprising twenty-six countries, has taken some heavy blows, with different countries at different times reintroducing border controls on the grounds of security. Fearing a bottleneck, Denmark then began checking people crossing from Germany. This all has an economic cost, makes travel more difficult, and is both a physical and conceptual attack on ‘ever closer union’. Some analysts have begun to speak of a ‘Fortress Europe’ due to bids to reduce immigration levels, but this misses the fact that there is also a drift towards a ‘Fortress Nation State’.

Voltaire’s maxim that he would defend to the death the right of a person to say something, even if he found it offensive, was once taken as a given. Now, despite many people having been killed because what they said was insulting, the debate has shifted.

At this point we would return to a Europe of sovereign nation states, with each state seeking alliances in a balance of power system. The Germans would again be fearing encirclement by the Russians and French, the French would again be fearing their bigger neighbour, and we would all be back at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For the French this is a nightmare. They successfully helped tie Germany down inside the EU, only to find that after German reunification they became the junior partner in a twin-engine motor they had hoped to be driving. This poses Paris a problem it does not appear to be able to solve. Unless it quietly accepts that Berlin calls the European shots, it risks further weakening the Union. But if it accepts German leadership, then its own power is diminished. France is capable of an independent foreign policy – indeed, with its ‘Force de frappe’ nuclear deterrent, its overseas territories and its aircraft carrier-backed armed forces, it does just that – but it operates safe in the knowledge that its eastern flank is secure and it can afford to raise its eyes to the horizon.

France Fears

Both France and Germany are currently working to keep the Union together: they see each other now as natural partners. But only Germany has a Plan B – Russia.

Plan B of Germany

The end of the Cold War saw most of the Continental powers reducing their military budgets and cutting back their armed forces. It has taken the shock of the Russian–Georgian war of 2008 and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 to focus attention on the possibility of the age-old problem of war in Europe.

The Damocles Sword

history tells us how much things can change in just a few decades, and geography tells us that if humans do not constantly strive to overcome its ‘rules’, its ‘rules’ will overcome us.

History's Golden Lesson

‘For those who didn’t live through this themselves and who especially now in the crisis are asking what benefits Europe’s unity brings, the answer despite the unprecedented European period of peace lasting more than 65 years and despite the problems and difficulties we must still overcome is: peace.’

There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’

Africa’s rhinos, gazelles and giraffes stubbornly refused to be beasts of burden – or as Diamond puts it in a memorable passage, ‘History might have turned out differently if African armies, fed by barnyard-giraffe meat and backed by waves of cavalry mounted on huge rhinos, had swept into Europe to overrun its mutton-fed soldiers mounted on puny horses.’

How African history would have been different

Unlike in Europe, which has the Danube and the Rhine, this drawback has hindered contact and trade between regions – which in turn affected economic development, and hindered the formation of large trading regions. The continent’s great rivers, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile and others, don’t connect and this disconnection has a human factor. Whereas huge areas of Russia, China and the USA speak a unifying language which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size. Europe, on the other hand, was small enough to have a ‘lingua franca’ through which to communicate, and a landscape that encouraged interaction.

How rivers are not helping Africa

The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.

Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them.

The ethnic conflicts within Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Mali and elsewhere are evidence that the European idea of geography did not fit the reality of Africa’s demographics. There may have always been conflict: the Zulus and Xhosas had their differences long before they had ever set eyes on a European. But colonialism forced those differences to be resolved within an artificial structure – the European concept of a nation state. The modern civil wars are now partially because the colonialists told different nations that they were one nation in one state, and then after the colonialists were chased out a dominant people emerged within the state who wanted to rule it all, thus ensuring violence.

The African Problem

This is how the Greeks, Romans and Turks all ruled the area – it is how the people had thought of themselves for centuries. The mere decades-old European idea of Libya will struggle to survive and already one of the many Islamist groups in the east has declared an ‘emirate of Cyrenaica’. While this may not come to pass, it is an example of how the concept of the region originated merely in lines drawn on maps by foreigners.

However, one of the biggest failures of European line-drawing lies in the centre of the continent, the giant black hole known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – the DRC. Here is the land in which Joseph Conrad set his novel Heart of Darkness, and it remains a place shrouded in the darkness of war. It is a prime example of how the imposition of artificial borders can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.

The DRC is not developing, nor does it show any signs of so doing. The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most under-reported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars which have been fought since the late 1990s.

The people are divided into more than 200 ethnic groups, of which the biggest are the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree. The French comes from the DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60) and before that, when King Leopold of the Belgians used it as his personal property from which to steal its natural resources to line his pockets. Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. When the Belgians went in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.

DRC DIsaster

This was not quite what President Obama had in mind when, during his Africa tour in July 2015, he criticised African leaders, saying, ‘The continent will not advance if its leaders refuse to step down when their terms end . . . Sometimes you will hear leaders say, “I’m the only person who can hold this nation together.” If that’s true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.’

Water wars are considered to be among the potential coming conflicts this century and this remains one to watch.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the ‘socialists’, the USA and apartheid South Africa backed the ‘rebels’. Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles while its opponents would become anti-Communist.

What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products. So when former president José Eduardo dos Santos, who had been in charge for thirty-six years, decided to pay Mariah Carey $1 million to sing at his birthday party in 2013, that was his affair – as was any other way he chose to spend his vast wealth in his poverty-stricken country. And if the Mbundu, to which dos Santos belongs, continue to dominate, that is theirs. China does not have a view on human rights or corruption in Africa – only on economics.

THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S very name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

Nevertheless, as we saw in Africa, arbitrarily creating ‘nation states’ out of people unused to living together in one region is not a recipe for justice, equality and stability.

‘The Kurds have no friends but the mountains’.

President Erdog˘an was not prepared to risk a ‘mini Kurdistan’ on his Syrian border as that in turn would risk invigorating Turkish Kurds with ideas of their own autonomous region, which might one day join with its Syrian counterpart.

Syria has become, like Lebanon, a place used by outside powers to further their own aims.

Groups such as Al Qaeda and, more recently, Islamic State have garnered what support they have partially because of the humiliation caused by colonialism and then the failure of pan-Arab nationalism – and to an extent the Arab nation state. Arab leaders have failed to deliver prosperity or freedom, and the siren call of Islamism, which promises to solve all problems, has proved attractive to many in a region marked by a toxic mix of piety, unemployment and repression. The Islamists hark back to a golden age when Islam ruled an empire and was at the cutting edge of technology, art, medicine and government. They have helped bring to the surface the ancient suspicions of ‘the other’ throughout the Middle East.

Its main attraction, though, was its success in creating a caliphate; where Al Qaeda murdered people and captured headlines, IS murdered people and captured territory.

IS also seized upon an area that is increasingly important in the internet age – psychological space. It built on the pioneering work of Al Qaeda in social media and took it to new heights of sophistication and brutality. By 2015 IS was ahead of any government in levels of public messaging using jihadists brought up on the sometimes brutalising effects of the internet and its obsession with violence and sex. They are Generation Jackass Jihadis and they are ahead of the deadly game.

However, it is the very fanaticism of their beliefs and practices that explains why they cannot achieve their utopian fantasies.

The Kurdish lands cannot be brought under their control, the cities south of Baghdad such as Najaf and Karbala are overwhelmingly Shia, and the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr are far away from the Sunni territory. This dilemma leaves the Sunnis fighting for an equal share in a country they once ruled, sometimes toying with the idea of separation, but knowing that their future would probably be self-rule over not very much.

The Iraqi dilemma

The intelligence services in London believe that around 2015 there were more British Muslims fighting in the wider Middle East region for jihadist groups than were serving in the British Army.

The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world.

Obvious Bias of the author

The Elburz range also begins in the north, but along the border with Armenia. It runs the whole length of the Caspian Sea’s south shore and on to the border with Turkmenistan before descending as it reaches Afghanistan. This is the mountain range you can see from the capital, Tehran, towering above the city to its north. It provides spectacular views, and also a better-kept secret than the Iranian nuclear project: the skiing conditions are excellent for several months each year.

In 1980, when the Iran–Iraq War broke out, the Iraqis used six divisions to cross the Shatt al-Arab in an attempt to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. They never even made it off the swamp-ridden plains, let alone entered the foothills of the Zagros. The war dragged on for eight years, taking at least a million lives.

Meanwhile Turkey, which could have benefited from Israeli energy, remains largely reliant on its old foe Russia for its energy needs whilst simultaneously working with Russia to develop new pipelines to deliver energy to EU countries.