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

by Tim Marshall

While all the other countries in the region matter, in what is a complicated diplomatic jigsaw puzzle, the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. These three sit astride the Strait of Malacca, which at its narrowest is only 1.7 miles across. Every

day through that strait come 12 million barrels of oil heading for an increasingly thirsty China and elsewhere in the region. As long as these three countries are pro-American, the Americans have a key advantage.

There are flashpoints. The Americans

have a treaty with Taiwan which states that if the Chinese invade what they regard as their 23rd province, the USA will go to war. A red line for China, which could spark an invasion, is formal recognition of Taiwan by the USA, or a declaration of independence by Taiwan. However, there is no sign of that, and a Chinese invasion cannot be seen on this side of the horizon.

The election of Mr Trump demonstrated that democracies are not immune to the cult of personality and the attraction of a strong man with easy answers to hard questions. He is the result of an increasing disdain among sections of the Western electorates for ‘politics as usual’. His mantra of ‘America first’ has been put into action, especially in economic policy, but in some respects he has not broken from the truism that ‘America has presidents and it

has interests; the presidents come and go – the interests remain’. After all, previous presidents also felt it was in the USA’s interests to curtail North Korea’s nuclear expansion, to persuade NATO countries to spend more on defence and to prevent the rise of one overly dominant power on the European continent. Trump has followed all these policies but gone about them in a different way, using language that many people see as undiplomatic. The moral stature of the USA as the leader of the free world, and indeed the presidency, may have been damaged but that is more down to the ugly belligerence of Trump rather than the massive and sudden complete reversal of decades of policy.

Good harvests mean surplus food that can be traded; this in turn builds up trading centres which become towns. It also allows people to think of more than just growing food and turn their attention to ideas and technology.

Cracks are appearing in the edifice of the ‘family of Europe’ and not only because of the British voting for Brexit. That was a symptom of a problem, not the cause. On the periphery of Western Europe the financial crisis has left Greece looking like a semi-detached member; to the east it has again seen conflict. If the aberration of the past seventy years of peace is to continue through this century, that peace will need love, care and attention.

The Americans embraced the Poles and vice versa: both had the Russians in mind. In 1999 Poland joined NATO, extending the Alliance’s reach 400 miles closer to Moscow. By then several other former Warsaw Pact countries were also members of the Alliance and in 1999 Moscow watched helplessly as NATO went to war with its ally, Serbia. In the 1990s Russia was in no position to push back, but after the chaos of the Yeltsin years Putin stepped in on the front foot and came out swinging.

Denmark is already a NATO member and the recent resurgence of Russia has caused a debate in Sweden over whether it is time to abandon the neutrality of two centuries and join the Alliance.

the majority of Swedes remain against NATO membership, but the debate is ongoing, informed by Moscow’s statement that it would be forced to ‘respond’ if either Sweden or

Finland were to join the Alliance.

The dilemma of Germany’s geographical position and belligerence became known as ‘the German Question’. The answer, after the horrors of the Second World War, indeed after centuries of war, was the acceptance of the presence in the European lands of a single overwhelming power, the USA, which set up NATO and allowed for the eventual creation of the European Union. Exhausted by war, and with safety ‘guaranteed’ by the American military, the Europeans embarked on an astonishing experiment. They were asked to trust each other.

It has worked particularly well for Germany, which rose from the ashes of 1945 and used to its advantage the geography it once feared. It became Europe’s great manufacturer. Instead of sending armies across the flatlands it sent goods with the prestigious tag ‘Made in Germany’, and these goods flowed down the Rhine and the Elbe, along the autobahns and out into Europe and the world, north, south, west and, increasingly since 1990, east.

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’. After the first major financial crisis to hit the Union,

that ideology is on an uncertain footing and the ties that bind are fraying. There are signs within the EU of, as the geopolitical writer Robert Ka...

The eurozone countries agreed to be economically wedded, as the Greeks point out, ‘in sickness and in health’, but when the economic crisis of 2008 hit, the wealthier countries had to bail out the poorer ones, and a bitter domestic row broke out. The partners are still throwing dishes at each other to this day.

The euro crisis and wider economic problems have revealed the cracks in the House of Europe (notably along the old fault line of the north–south divide). The dream of ever closer union appears to be frozen, or possibly even in reverse. In the spring of 2017 the EU Commission circulated a paper laying out several options on the direction in which the EU should be going. The choice of more power for Brussels was roundly rejected in most European capitals.

The 2016 vote in the UK to leave the EU was a deep psychological blow to the European dream. 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.

Through the EU and NATO Germany is anchored in Western Europe, but in stormy weather anchors can slip, and Berlin is geographically situated to shift the focus of its attention east if required and forge much closer ties with Moscow.

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. Prejudice against immigrants always rises during times of economic recession, such as recently suffered in Europe, and the effects have been seen right across the continent and resulted in ...

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.

Europe’s traditional white population is greying. Population projections predict an inverted pyramid, with older people at the top and fewer younger people to look after them or pay taxes. However, such forecasts have not made a dent in the strength of anti-immigrant feeling among what was previously the indigenous population, which struggles to deal with the rapid changes to the world in which it grew up.

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. It is not uncommon to hear the idea that perhaps insulting religion should be beyond the pale, possibly even made illegal.

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.

This is what Helmut Kohl meant when he warned, upon leaving the Chancellorship of Germany in 1998, that he was the last German leader to have lived through the Second World War and thus to have experienced the horrors it wrought. In 2012 he wrote an article for Germany’s best-selling daily newspaper, Bild, and was clearly still haunted by the possibility that because of the financial crisis the current generation of leaders would not nurture the post-war experiment in European trust: ‘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.’

If you look at a world map and mentally glue Alaska onto California, then turn the USA on its head, it appears as if it would roughly fit into Africa with a few gaps here and there. In fact Africa is three times bigger than the USA. Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.

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.

Back in the great capital cities of London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon, the Europeans then took maps of the contours of Africa’s geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies. In between these lines they wrote words such as Middle Congo or Upper Volta and called them countries. These lines were more about how far which power’s explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves. 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 peopl...

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 an illustration of why the catch-all term ‘developing world’ is far too broad-brush a way to describe countries which are not part of the modern industrialised world. 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 DRC is neither democratic, nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of about 81 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France and Spain combined and cont...

In recent years the fighting has died down, but the DRC is home to the world’s most deadly conflict since the Second World War and still requires the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission to prevent full-scale war from breaking out again.

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.’ That sentence encompassed both the colonial legacy of Africa and how its modern leaders have often been part of the problem rather than the solution to that legacy.

Africa has been equally cursed and blessed by its resources – blessed in so far as it has natural riches in abundance, but cursed because outsiders have long plundered them.

Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, and all of this high-quality oil is in the south. Nigerians in the north complain that the profits from that oil are not shared equitably across the country’s regions. This in turn exacerbates the ethnic and religious tensions between the peoples from the Nigerian delta and those in the north-east.

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north. Boko Haram fighters are usually ethnic Kanuris from the north-east. They rarely operate outside of their home territory, not even venturing west to the Hausa region, and certainly not way down south to the coastal areas. This means that when the Nigerian military come looking for them Boko Haram are operating on home ground.

The territory taken by Boko Haram does not yet endanger the existence of the state of Nigeria. The group does not even pose a threat to the capital Abuja, despite it being situated halfway up the country; but they do pose a daily threat to people in the north and they damage Nigeria’s reputation abroad as a place to do business.

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).

China does not have a view on human rights or corruption in Africa – only on economics.

Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth as the IMF or

World Bank...

For example, China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner, which goes some way to explaining why China consistently protects Sudan at the UN Security Council and continued to back its President Omar al-Bashir even when there was an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court. Western criticism of this gets short shrift in Beijing, however; it is regarded as simply anoth...

All the Chinese want is the oil, the minerals, the precious metals and the markets. This is an equitable government-to-government relationship, but we will see increasing tension between local populations and the Chin...