The Atlantic Monthly Feb 1994 v273 n2 p 44(21) The coming anarchy: how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. The crime and lawlessness of West Africa is a model of what future life could become everywhere as demographic, environmental, health and social problems increase. The threats of scarce resources, cultural conflicts, overpopulation and war are discussed. COPYRIGHT 1994 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine
value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring
How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet
order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State
The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of
Department report cited the airport for "extortion by
some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in law-enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his
the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a
eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of
foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime.
hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a
In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or
ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of
Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding
it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have
guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your
never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves
car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what
well after the British departed. But what we have now is
American cities might be like in the future. An Italian
something worse--the revenge of the poor, of the social
ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded
failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a
an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian
modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in
ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the
the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who
ambassador's residence. After university students in the
took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this."
Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their
The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack dorms, they executed them by hanging tires around their teeming with children. "In three months these boys
necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian
confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs
policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid
and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister
to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal,
mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony
groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes
Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his
surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the
schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate
windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even
the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."
though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere--hordes of
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of
them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable
West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing
social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.
lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages
Crime was what my friend--a top-ranking African official
of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and
whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence precisely--really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on
for food. When young men find out that their relations
what the political character of our planet is likely to be in
cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other
migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued,
places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack
"there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social
gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leone has Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging.
Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist
When I was in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an
based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to
American man. They tied him up and stole everything of
wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one
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group against another." Many of the atrocities in the
In the other part of the country units of two separate
Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and
armies from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, as
the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa,
has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government
that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels
force fighting the rebels is full of renegade commanders
were said to have "a young woman with them who would
who have aligned themselves with disaffected village
go to the front naked, always walking backwards and
chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield,
looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made
evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648
her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's
Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of
positions and there bury charms. to improve the rebels'
As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy.
internally displaced, 280,000 more have fled to
Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to
neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled to
thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly
Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra
uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the
Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is
road in West Africa told me that they were from "extended"
a displaced-persons camp. With an additional 600,000
families, with a mother in one place and a father in
Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the
another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family
borders dividing these four countries have become largely
structures are largely responsible for the world's highest
meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of the
birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the
governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the
continent. Like the communalism and animism, they
schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner
provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects
necessary for functional sovereignty. The Koranko ethnic
of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being
group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in
redefined while desertification and deforestation--also tied
Guinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely to be
to overpopulation--drive more and more African peasants
sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern provinces
of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in
West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide
Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary
demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which
bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I saw convoys
criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger.
of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal
Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of
ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in
resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of
1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary
nation-states and international borders, and the
rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the
empowerment of private armies, security firms, and
proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The
international drug cartels are now most tellingly
deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more
demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa
flooding and more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the
provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often
West African interior has some form of malaria.
extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in
be a few decades hence--as I intend to do in this article--I
a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West
Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal
There is no other place on the planet where political maps
and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease,
are so deceptive--where, in fact, they tell such lies--as in
and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is
West Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to the
reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now
map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a
of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and
government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra
Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility,
Leonian government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army
and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once
captain, Valentine Strasser, controls Freetown by day and
observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas
by day also controls part of the rural interior. In the
Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the
government's territory the national army is an unruly rabble
somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his
threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints.
celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas
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Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who
Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast's population is urban,
is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West
and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by
Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the
2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6 percent. This
means that the Ivory Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the population
Consider "Chicago." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a
will consist of urbanized peasants like those of Chicago.
slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area
But don't count on the Ivory Coast's still existing then.
have named after the American city. ("Washington" is
Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa's and the Third
another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is
World's demographic present--and even more of the
widely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has
future--than any idyllic junglescape of women balancing
been considered an African success story, and Abidjan
earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory
has been called "the Paris of West Africa." Success,
Coast, once a model of Third World success, is becoming
however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of
a case study in Third World catastrophe.
cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer, and the talents of a French expatriate
President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last
community, whose members have helped run the
December at the age of about ninety, left behind a weak
government and the private sector. The expanding cocoa
cluster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracy that
economy made the Ivory Coast a magnet for migrant
discourages foreign investment. Because the military is
workers from all over West Africa: between a third and a
small and the non-Ivorian population large, there is neither
half of the country's population is now non-Ivorian, and the
an obvious force to maintain order nor a sense of
figure could be as high as 75 percent in Abidjan. During
nationhood that would lessen the need for such
the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began to leave.
enforcement. The economy has been shrinking since the
The skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade.
mid-1980s. Though the French are working assiduously to
Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan's population of three million
preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse
people live in shantytowns like Chicago and Washington,
than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence--an
and the vast majority live in places that are not much
urbanized version of what has already happened in
better. Not all of these places appear on any of the readily
Somalia. Or it may become an African Yugoslavia, but one
available maps. This is another indication of how political
without mini-states to replace the whole.
maps are the products of tired conventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an elite that will ultimately be
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a
countryside draining into dense slums by the coast, ultimately the region's rulers will come to reflect the values
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the
of these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in
bush: a checkerwork of corrugated zinc roofs and walls
Sierra Leone--and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne
made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It is located in a
Eyadema, in power since 1967, was nearly toppled in
gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is
1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom
ravaged by flooding. Few residents have easy access to
the London-based magazine West Africa described as
electricity, a sewage system, or a clean water supply. The
"Soweto-like stone-throwing adolescents." Their behavior
crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both
may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema's
inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a
stream filled with garbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the washing. Young
The fragility of these West African "countries" impressed
unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm
itself on me when I took a series of bush taxis along the
wine, and gin while gambling on pinball games constructed
Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capital of Lome, across
out of rotting wood and rusty nails. These are the same
Ghana, to Abidjan. The 400-mile journey required two full
youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian
days of driving, because of stops at two border crossings
neighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele,
and an additional eleven customs stations, at each of
came to Chicago from Burkina Faso in 1963. A cook by
which my fellow passengers had their bags searched. I
profession, he has four wives and thirty-two children, not
had to change money twice and repeatedly fill in
one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his
currency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a Togolese
shanty community destroyed by municipal authorities
immigration official with the equivalent of eighteen dollars
seven times since coming to the area. Each time he and
before he would agree to put an exit stamp on my
his neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.
passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across these borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that in 1992
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the equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in
the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern
the form of "hot cash" assumed to be laundered drug
[Christian] control of the economy is intense. the will to
money. International cartels have discovered the utility of
keep Nigeria together is now very weak."
weak, financially strapped West African regimes.
Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region--its
The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe
population of roughly 90 million equals the populations of
border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise.
all the other West African states combined--it is apparent
Getting visas for these states can be as hard as crossing
that Africa faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopian
their borders. The Washington embassies of Sierra Leone
and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is
and Guinea--the two poorest nations on earth, according
especially so because Nigeria's population, including that
to a 1993 United Nations report on "human
of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and
development"--asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of
overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third
prepaid round-trip tickets) and also personal references, in
World urban dysfunction, is set to double during the next
order to prove that I had sufficient means to sustain myself
twenty-five years, while the country continues to deplete its
during my visits. I was reminded of my visa and currency
hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern Europe, particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia,
Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its
population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and
Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural
toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the
Studies at the State University of New York at
borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and
Binghamton, predicts that West Africa--indeed, the whole
therefore at cross-purposes with demography and
continent--is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval.
topography. Satellite photos depict the same reality I
Mazrui writes, "In the 21st century France will be
experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal
withdrawing from West Africa as she gets increasingly
corridor--indeed, the entire stretch of coast from Abidjan
involved in the affairs [of Europe]. France's West African
eastward to Lagos--is one burgeoning megalopolis that by
sphere of influence will be filled by Nigeria--a more natural
any rational economic and geographical standard should
hegemonic power. It will be under those circumstances
constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the
that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expand to
Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it
incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the
Republic of Benin (the Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon."
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more impenetrable boundary is being erected that threatens to
The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than
isolate the continent as a whole: the wall of disease.
Mazrui dares to say. France will withdraw from former
Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I
colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory Coast,
spent about $500 for a hepatitis B vaccination series and
where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do
other disease prophylaxis. Africa may today be more
so not only because its attention will be diverted to new
dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before
challenges in Europe and Russia but also because
antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton
younger French officials lack the older generation's
described the health situation on the continent as "deadly,
emotional ties to the ex-colonies. However, even as
a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Of the approximately 12 million
Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to split into
people worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million
several pieces. The State Department's Bureau of
are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose
Intelligence and Research recently made the following
modern road system only helps to spread the disease, 10
points in an analysis of Nigeria: "Prospects for a transition
percent of the population is HIV-positive. And war and
to civilian rule and democratization are slim. The
refugee movements help the virus break through to
repressive apparatus of the state security service. will
more-remote areas of Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a
be difficult for any future civilian government to control.
representative of the Centers for Disease Control in
The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable.
Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virus and
Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made
tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other." Of the
worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30
approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis
and a doubling in the number of local governing
patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be
authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim
HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums
fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are on
proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and
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hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of
entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid missions to
the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the present
be closed over the next three years are in Africa--a
prologue to a consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set to go
It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall
over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended,
that threatens to separate Africa and other parts of the
when environmental and demographic stress in other parts
Third World from more-developed regions of the planet in
of the globe is becoming critical, and when the post-First
the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria,
World War system of nation-states--not just in the Balkans
unlike AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan
but perhaps also in the Middle East--is about to be
Africa have recurring bouts of the disease throughout their
toppled, Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic
entire lives, and it is mutating into increasingly deadly
politics will be like a few decades hence.
forms. "The great gift of Malaria is utter apathy," wrote Sir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much
To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one
of the Third World today. Visitors to malaria-afflicted parts
must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial
of the planet are protected by a new drug, mefloquine, a
clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war.
side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams. But a
The order in which I have named these is not accidental.
strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on
Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or
the offensive. Consequently, defending oneself against
ones before it, meaning that the last two--new approaches
malaria in Africa is becoming more and more like
to mapmaking and to warfare--are the most important.
defending oneself against violent crime. You engage in
They are also the least understood. I will now look at each
"behavior modification": not going out at dusk, wearing
idea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my
own travel experiences in various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a new
And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the
future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five-minute journey in
heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself
For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and
would never have given credence. The corrugated metal
other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and
shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime.
religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will
Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked
become apparent that something else is afoot, making
cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long
more and more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil
puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were
everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went
Mention "the environment" or "diminishing natural
out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on
resources" in foreign-policy circles and you meet a brick
the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's
wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives
population will double if growth goes on at current rates.
especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy
Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and
foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by
people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It
funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete
seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa and the
with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let
Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its
limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.
It is time to understand "the environment" for what it is: the
Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world
national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The
politics as the Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to
political and strategic impact of surging populations,
the two Balkan wars and the First World War. Then the
spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water
threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations
depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in
based solely on tribe. Now the threat is more elemental:
critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and
nature unchecked. Africa's immediate future could be very
Bangladesh--developments that will prompt mass
bad. The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are
migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts--will be the
shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside
core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will
world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden
ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting
coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are
assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the
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twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short
strife, scarcer resources will place a great strain on many
supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central
peoples who never had much of a democratic or
Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could
institutional tradition to begin with. Over the next fifty years
erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water.
the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more
Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary
than nine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new
and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic
resource technologies and free-market development in the
case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and
global village, they fail to note that, as the National
historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton
Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the
adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign
population increase will be in the poorest regions of the
policy today in the shape of a doughnut--lots of peripheral
world, where governments now--just look at Africa--show
interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I will
little ability to function, let alone to implement even
argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will
marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously,
define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in
"Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability
Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post-Cold War
in today's environmental-social system, but as time passes
foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by
their analysis may become ever more compelling."
While a minority of the human population will be, as
Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F.
Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as
Kennan's famous article, signed "X," published in Foreign
to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and
Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued for a "firm
suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and
and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that was
ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois
imperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be
prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be
that our post-Cold War foreign policy will one day be seen
stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to
to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more
rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife
detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the
will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and
journal International Security. The article, published in the
space to survive in. In the developing world environmental
fall of 1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the
stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly
head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the
among totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending
University of Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold:
mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior
Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict."
cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as
Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than other analysts,
environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the
integrated two hitherto separate fields--military-conflict
potential social disruption will increase."
studies and the study of the physical environment.
Tad Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish
In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will
thirty-seven, he grew up amid the sylvan majesty of
often arise from scarcities of resources such as water,
Vancouver Island, attending private day schools. His
cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be
speech is calm, perfectly even, and crisply enunciated.
environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will
There is nothing in his background or manner that would
be environmentally induced praetorian regimes--or, as he
indicate a bent toward pessimism. A Canadian Anglican
puts it, "hard regimes." Countries with the highest
who spends his summers canoeing on the lakes of
probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to
northern Ontario, and who talks about the benign
Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened by a declining
mountains, black bears, and Douglas firs of his youth, he
resource base yet also have "a history of state [read
is the opposite of the intellectually severe neoconservative,
'military'] strength." Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil,
the kind at home with conflict scenarios. Nor is he an
and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has
environmentalist who opposes development. "My father
exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon
was a logger who thought about ecologically safe forestry
argues that such tendencies are likely to be superficial
before others," he says. "He logged, planted, logged, and
"epiphenomena" having nothing to do with long-term
planted. He got out of the business just as the issue was
processes that include soaring populations and shrinking
being polarized by environmentalists. They hate changed
raw materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity is more
ecosystems. But human beings, just by carrying seeds
around, change the natural world." As an only child whose playground was a virtually untouched wilderness and
Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have more,
seacoast, Homer-Dixon has a familiarity with the natural
not fewer, opportunities. In addition to engendering tribal
world that permits him to see a reality that most policy
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analysts--children of suburbia and city streets--are blind to.
fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the
"We need to bring nature back in," he argues. "We have to
economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the
stop separating politics from the physical world--the
Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying."
climate, public health, and the environment." Quoting
Referring to the environmental research of his colleague,
Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security
the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon
aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for
explains how the per capita availability of arable land in
too long we've been prisoners of 'social-social' theory,
interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that
which assumes there are only social causes for social and
the quality of that land has been destroyed by
political changes, rather than natural causes, too. This
deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions
social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial
the loss and contamination of water supplies, the
Revolution, which separated us from nature. But nature is
exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and
coming back with a vengeance, tied to population growth.
reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion
It will have incredible security implications.
by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale population
"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York
movements are under way, from inland China to coastal
City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the
China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge
air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America,
like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities
Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated
and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism
places, with their trade summitry and computer-information
and a weak tradition of central government--again as in
highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a
Africa. "We will probably see the center challenged and
fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy,
Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and
well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger,
affect power relationships, at which we now look.
part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Although both
parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.
In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic
The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water
Studies, published a thought-provoking article called "The
tables in the western United States. He will build dikes to
Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he argues, has been
save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from
moving during the course of this century from nation-state
rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast
conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I
of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt,
would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants
Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of
continue migrating to cities around the world--turning them
millions of people inland where there is no room for them,
into sprawling villages--national borders will mean less,
and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.
even as more power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these
Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in
uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real
his Toronto office. "The darker the map color, the worse
borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those
the degradation," he explains. The West African coast, the
of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences
Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central
among civilizations are not only real; they are basic,"
America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of
involving, among other things, history, language, and
degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water
religion. "Second. interactions between peoples of
problems. "The worst degradation is generally where the
different civilizations are increasing; these increasing
population is highest. The population is generally highest
interactions intensify civilization consciousness." Economic
where the soil is the best. So we're degrading earth's best
modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels
individual and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth noting, for example, that it
China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential
is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in
example of environmental degradation. Its current
India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal
economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's
violence between Hindus and Muslims. Consider that
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Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are ecological
bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are also,
time bombs--Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer
especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate
the worst air quality of any cities in the world--and it is
Turkish public opinion, revising their group identity,
apparent how surging populations, environmental
increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims being deserted
degradation, and ethnic conflict are deeply related.
by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of
Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu,
Muslim, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations: for
In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state
instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic
war at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a
Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central
powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first:
Asian cities, the West clashing with Asia. (Even in the
between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs
United States, African-Americans find themselves
and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians,
besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.) Whatever the
and Romanians) and the House of Islam. Yet in the
laws, refugees find a way to crash official borders, bringing
Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash
their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the
between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that
United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.
this very subdivision, not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West, including the
Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are
United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario.
vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal of Huntington's argument
As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West has proved
the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a
capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against
Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world
beyond suburbia, writes in the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, "The world of Islam divides and
True. However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is
subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus. are not
describing a world even more dangerous than the one
coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow
Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into
the interests of states. Where Huntington sees a
account Homer-Dixon's research on environmental
civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the
scarcity. Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown,
Iranian state has cast religious zeal. to the wind. in
crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors,
that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian
influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and
ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and
True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and
intersect in no discernible pattern--meaning there's no
Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance
easy-to-define threat. Kennan's world of one adversary
network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has
seems as distant as the world of Herodotus.
misidentified which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the
Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has
world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see their cultural
undergone immense change. But it is minor compared with
identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. The
what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of
Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter
the atlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet
are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the
empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military
same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic
confrontation are merely prologues to the really big
culture (secular and based on languages employing a
changes that lie ahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range
Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant
thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of
as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script)
the environment and the world is not following us. It is
across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
going in many directions. Do not assume that democratic
The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow
capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."
Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I
Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint of
want to take a closer look at the interaction of religion,
cultural and racial war. But, as Ajami observes,
culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural
Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple. Two months of
resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle East.
recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are developing a deep distrust,
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Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the
East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural
Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or "Golden
strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures
Mountain," is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder
can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will
blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack
be, relatively speaking, the future's winners. Those whose
were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and
cultures cannot will be the future's victims. Slums--in the
painfully toward heaven--the heaven of wealthier Turks
sociological sense--do not exist in Turkish cities. The
who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet
mortar between people and family groups is stronger here
have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's
than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity
striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted
have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone.
cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas
Turks, history's perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.
assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological
The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside
the heads of Golden Mountain's inhabitants. Think of an Ottoman military encampment on the eve of the
To see the twenty-first century truly, one's eyes must learn
destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. That is
a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly
Golden Mountain. "We brought the village here. But in the
stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting
village we worked harder--in the field, all day. So we
photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns.
couldn't fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan. Here we
There are far too many millions whose dreams are more
fast. Here we are more religious." Aishe Tanrikulu, along
vulgar, more real--whose raw energies and desires will
with half a dozen other women, was stuffing rice into vine
overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future
leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked me to join her
into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned
under the shade of a piece of sheet metal. Each of these
women had her hair covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering television for the first time. "We are
Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In
traditional, religious people. The programs offend us,"
Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden
Aishe said. Another woman complained about the schools.
Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had
Though her children had educational options unavailable
$1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in
in the village, they had to compete with wealthier, secular
traveler's checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden
Turks. "The kids from rich families with connections--they
Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one
get all the places." More opportunities, more tensions, in
house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder
block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home--order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I
My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one:
saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with
Tales From the Garbage Hills, a brutally realistic novel by
a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a
a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the shantytowns,
window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of
which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night").
mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were
"He listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water,
for work and for the cure of the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes. In the most
Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along
revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the
with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered
squatters are told "about a certain 'Ottoman Empire'.
cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One
that where they now lived there had once been an empire
man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a
of this name." This history "confounded" the squatters. It
secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim.
was the first they had heard of it. Though one of them
Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against
knew "that his grandfather and his dog died fighting the
persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are
Greeks," nationalism and an encompassing sense of
watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and
Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and
Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much
upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required
harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free
But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about
slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is
the armies of Turkish migrants that had come before their
the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A
own--namely, Seljuks and Ottomans? For these recently
culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle
urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the
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Arab world, India, and so many other places, the world is
development and urbanization on a fast track, making the
new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase. As Naipaul wrote of
culture shock more intense--fueled the 1978 Islamic
urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization, "They
Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world,
saw themselves at the beginning of things:
has little oil. Therefore its development and urbanization
unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the
have been more gradual. Islamists have been integrated
first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy
into the parliamentary system for decades. The tensions I
of community and self-help. For them the past was dead;
noticed in Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the
they had left it behind in the villages."
kind immigrants face the world over. While the world has focused on religious perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in
Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the
natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of whose capital city,
twenty-first century these new men and women, rushing
Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in
into the cities, are remaking civilizations and redefining
Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim
their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which
equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.
do not coincide with the borders of existing states.
Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another
In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980,
way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil,
44 percent of Turks lived in cities; in 1990 it was 61
but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water--the most
percent. By the year 2000 the figure is expected to be 67
important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey's
percent. Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of
Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major
gecekondu developments grow around Turkish cities. This
dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of
is the real political and demographic revolution in Turkey
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that
and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents usually don't
Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future
is controlled by Turks. The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are
Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal"
emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne
part of the social fabric, urban poverty is socially
Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").
destabilizing. As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized
Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's
peasants threatened with the loss of traditions in
Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were
pseudo-modern cities where their values are under attack,
built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a
where basic services like water and electricity are
predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and
unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically
companies in charge. On a recent visit my eyes took in the
unhealthy environment. The American ethnologist and
immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage
orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam
electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying
"has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of
sweep of giant humming transformers, the
millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished
poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding
environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period."
suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees. The
Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam's very
emerging power of the Turks was palpable.
militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared to fight. A political era driven
Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me
by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity,
that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites,
unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era
water has to be spread more evenly within the society.
divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam,
It is true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq
already the world's fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam
for up to eight months without the same water overflowing
is spreading in West Africa, it is being hobbled by
our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."
syncretization with animism: this makes new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes
Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from
for a weakened version of the faith, which is less effective
the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water
plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia--near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as
In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly
presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?
forging a consensus with modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually
invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom--because it put
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determinate, and therefore--in principle--countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an
Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of
accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains,
political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey,
"shaped the grammar" that would make possible such
an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled
questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone,
Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable.
and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion,
Turkey's borders were established not by colonial powers
one that until the twentieth century applied to countries
but in a war of independence, in the early 1920s. Kemal
covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is
Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building
the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing
myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by
ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the
artificially drawn borders, lack. That lack will leave many
industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in
Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will
the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder,
eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years.
consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is
Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.
It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on
Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in
urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere
the United Nations but in various geographic and travel
are also missing--as are the considerable territories
publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite
controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling
touring which colonialism made possible) that still report
with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was
on and photograph the world according to "country."
northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish
Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are not
guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus
controlled by a local mafia--to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa--led me to develop a healthy
According to the map, the great hydropower complex
skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create
emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey.
a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending
Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is
the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.
populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's 20 million Kurds live in "Turkey." The Kurds are
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries,
predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only
each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with
with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former
which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of
Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in
modernism, specifically of European colonialism.
northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has
Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the
already exposed the fictitious nature of that supposed
rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the
death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War--an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and
On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred
the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern
to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on
science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm
the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations,
to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific
Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in
techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new
West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling
national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces
abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on
without transition zones between them. "Frontier" is itself a
both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a
modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as
moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled
European nations carved out far-flung domains at the
in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War
same time that print technology was making the
will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among
reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its
existing states. No longer will these states be so firmly
own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look
propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the
Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the
In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of
effect, as the natural selector--the ultimate reality check.
Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled
They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt
colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a
states that do not offer them adequate breathing space,
"totalizing classificatory grid. It was bounded,
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Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their
process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress
growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the
amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam. In that realm, the
most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the
violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be
verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million
Kurds within Turkey threaten that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the
The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far
future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the
more relevant to the kind of map that will explain our future
recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
world. The Kurds suggest a geographic reality that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. The issue in Turkey is
America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue,
not simply a matter of giving autonomy or even
coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one,
independence to Kurds in the southeast. This isn't the
is a function of its own domestic and ethnic obsessions,
Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely
not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform the
subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off from
Middle East. The diplomatic process involving Israelis and
Georgia, and so on. Federalism is not the answer. Kurds
Palestinians will, I believe, have little effect on the early-
are found everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty
and mid-twenty-first-century map of the region. Israel, with
districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey's problem is that
a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on
its Anatolian land mass is the home of two cultures and
high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch
languages, Turkish and Kurdish. Identity in Turkey, as in
limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that is
India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle
an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity. Like
than conventional cartography can display.
prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel
is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads
To appreciate fully the political and cartographic
across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into
implications of postmodernism--an epoch of themeless
the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent.
juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of
Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born
nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass
since 1970--youths with little historical memory of
pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and
anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts
anarchic regionalisms--it is necessary to consider, finally,
at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. The
most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991. Today
"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend
seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining
themselves, enemies who are awake!" Andre Malraux
gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current
wrote in Man's Fate. I cannot think of a more suitable
growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will
battle cry for many combatants in the early decades of the
double. These states, like most African ones, will be
twenty-first century. The intense savagery of the fighting in
ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies.
such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia, the
The Middle East analyst Christine M. Helms explains,
Caucasus, and Sri Lanka--to say nothing of what obtains
"Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political
in American inner cities--indicates something very
"disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism.
troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo,
. or reformulating it. Alternative solutions are not
concerned with issues like middle-class entitlements and
contemplated. They have simply opted for the political
the future of interactive cable television, lack the stomach
paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with
to contemplate. It is this: a large number of people on this
planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a
Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of
Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political reality. As state
"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or 'what
control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental
they sleep for,'" writes Martin van Creveld, a military
and demographic stress, "hard" Islamic city-states or
historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in The
shantytown-states are likely to emerge. The fiction that the
Transformation of War, "so fighting in many ways is not a
impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean,
means but an end. Throughout history, for every person
controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara,
who has expressed his horror of war there is another who
cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace
found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that
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are vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later
culmination in the Thirty Years' War.
spent a lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his exploits." When I asked Pentagon officials about the
Van Creveld writes, "In all these struggles political, social,
nature of war in the twenty-first century, the answer I
economic, and religious motives were hopelessly
frequently got was "Read Van Creveld." The top brass are
entangled. Since this was an age when armies consisted
enamored of this historian not because his writings justify
of mercenaries, all were also attended by swarms of
their existence but, rather, the opposite: Van Creveld
military entrepreneurs. Many of them paid little but lip
warns them that huge state military machines like the
service to the organizations for whom they had contracted
Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and that
to fight. Instead, they robbed the countryside on their own
something far more terrible awaits us.
The degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation of War
"Given such conditions, any fine distinctions. between
complements Homer-Dixon's work on the environment,
armies on the one hand and peoples on the other were
Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash, my own
bound to break down. Engulfed by war, civilians suffered
realizations in traveling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more
than sixty countries, and America's sobering comeuppances in intractable-culture zones like Haiti and
Back then, in other words, there was no "politics" as we
Somalia is startling. The book begins by demolishing the
have come to understand the term, just as there is less
notion that men don't like to fight. "By compelling the
and less "politics" today in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia,
senses to focus themselves on the here and now," Van
Sri Lanka, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, among other
Creveld writes, war "can cause a man to take his leave of
them." As anybody who has had experience with Chetniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia, Tontons Macoutes in
Because, as Van Creveld notes, the radius of trust within
Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone can tell you, in places
tribal societies is narrowed to one's immediate family and
where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and
guerrilla comrades, truces arranged with one Bosnian
where there has always been mass poverty, people find
commander, say, may be broken immediately by another
liberation in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I
Bosnian commander. The plethora of short-lived
vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worrying about
ceasefires in the Balkans and the Caucasus constitute
mines and ambushes frees you from worrying about
proof that we are no longer in a world where the old rules
mundane details of daily existence. If my own experience
of state warfare apply. More evidence is provided by the
is too subjective, there is a wealth of data showing the
destruction of medieval monuments in the Croatian port of
sheer frequency of war, especially in the developing world
Dubrovnik: when cultures, rather than states, fight, then
since the Second World War. Physical aggression is a part
cultural and religious monuments are weapons of war,
of being human. Only when people attain a certain
economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that 95 percent of the
Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a
earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of
specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as
the globe, the question is not whether there will be war
Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will
(there will be a lot of it) but what kind of war. And who will
mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic
identity and control will mean more. "From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that
Debunking the great military strategist Carl von
religious. fanaticisms will play a larger role in the
Clausewitz, Van Creveld, who may be the most original
motivation of armed conflict" in the West than at any time
thinker on war since that early-nineteenth-century
"for the last 300 years," Van Creveld writes. This is why
Prussian, writes, "Clausewitz's ideas. were wholly
analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring
rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648, war had been
religious cults. Vlahos says, "An ideology that challenges
waged overwhelmingly by states." But, as Van Creveld
us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or
explains, the period of nation-states and, therefore, of
Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that
state conflict is now ending, and with it the clear "threefold
fit old threat markings." Van Creveld concludes, "Armed
division into government, army, and people" which
conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in
state-directed wars enforce. Thus, to see the future, the
space. It will have more in common with the struggles of
first step is to look back to the past immediately prior to the
primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war."
birth of modernism--the wars in medieval Europe which
While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new
began during the Reformation and reached their
book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of
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primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van
mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are
Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior
all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding
societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource
obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the
scarcity and planetary overcrowding.
Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide
low-intensity conflict is not a superficial "back to the future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used toward
In Geography and the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a
primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince
professor at University College, Dublin, recalls the work of
Johnson didn't just cut off the ears of President Samuel
an early-nineteenth-century German geographer, Carl
Doe before Doe was tortured to death in 1990--Johnson
Ritter, whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity"
made a video of it, which has circulated throughout West
based on regionalism and a constant, living flow of forms.
Africa. In December of 1992, when plotters of a failed coup
The map of the future, to the extent that a map is even
against the Strasser regime in Sierra Leone had their ears
possible, will represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's
cut off at Freetown's Hamilton Beach prior to being killed, it
vision. Imagine cartography in three dimensions, as if in a
was seen by many to be a copycat execution. Considering,
hologram. In this hologram would be the overlapping
as I've explained earlier, that the Strasser regime is not
sediments of group and other identities atop the merely
really a government and that Sierra Leone is not really a
two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the
nation-state, listen closely to Van Creveld: "Once the legal
remaining nations, themselves confused in places by
monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is
shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the
wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war
power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security
and crime will break down much as is already the case
agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving
today in. Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or
"centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many of these
layers would be in motion. Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on a flat space would be a shifting pattern of buffer
If crime and war become indistinguishable, then "national
entities, like the Kurdish and Azeri buffer entities between
defense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept.
Turkey and Iran, the Turkic Uighur buffer entity between
As crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of
Central Asia and Inner China (itself distinct from coastal
state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect
China), and the Latino buffer entity replacing a precise
their citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to
U.S.-Mexican border. To this protean cartographic
Van Creveld, "develop into low-intensity conflict by
hologram one must add other factors, such as migrations
coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political
of populations, explosions of birth rates, vectors of
lines." As small-scale violence multiplies at home and
disease. Henceforward the map of the world will never be
abroad, state armies will continue to shrink, being
static. This future map--in a sense, the "Last Map"--will be
gradually replaced by a booming private security business,
an ever-mutating representation of chaos.
as in West Africa, and by urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who may be better equipped than
The Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is
municipal police forces to grant physical protection to local
happening. For different reasons, both India and Pakistan
are increasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy in these places is less and less relevant to the
Future wars will be those of communal survival,
larger issue of governability. In India's case the question
aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental
arises, Is one unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the best
scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it
available mechanism for promoting the lives of 866 million
will be hard for states and local governments to protect
people of diverse languages, religions, and ethnic groups?
their own citizens physically. This is how many states will
ultimately die. As state power fades--and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention
when the Indian population was much less than half as
other states--peoples and cultures around the world will be
large and nation-building idealism was still strong, the
thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses,
argument for democracy was more impressive than it is
with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.
now. Given that in 2025 India's population could be close
Whereas the distant future will probably see the
to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a shrinking
emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming
natural-resource base, including dramatically declining
decades will see us more aware of our differences than of
water levels, and that communal violence and urbanization
our similarities. To the average person, political values will
are spiraling upward, it is difficult to imagine that the Indian
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state will survive the next century. India's oft-trumpeted
Egypt could be where climatic upheaval--to say nothing of
Green Revolution has been achieved by overworking its
the more immediate threat of increasing population--will
croplands and depleting its watershed. Norman Myers, a
incite religious upheaval in truly biblical fashion. Natural
British development consultant, worries that Indians have
catastrophes, such as the October, 1992, Cairo
"been feeding themselves today by borrowing against their
earthquake, in which the government failed to deliver relief
aid and slum residents were in many instances helped by their local mosques, can only strengthen the position of
Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of Africa,
Islamic factions. In a statement about greenhouse
the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It
warming which could refer to any of a variety of natural
was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the
catastrophes, the environmental expert Jessica Tuchman
subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims
Matthews warns that many of us underestimate the extent
outside Pakistan than within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan
to which political systems, in affluent societies as well as in
is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent
places like Egypt, "depend on the underpinning of natural
conflict with one another. While the Western media gushes
systems." She adds, "The fact that one can move with
over the fact that the country has a woman Prime Minister,
ease from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about the
Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming a subcontinental
consequences of Vermont acquiring Miami's climate."
version of Lagos. In eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a sense of a cohesive national identity. With as
Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive the
much as 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive
next century in exactly its present form. Because America
irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly
is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has always been
population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the
more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies
amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will
like Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article
plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more and more
published in The National Interest in 1992, explains that
desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin
whereas nation-state societies tend to be built around a
intensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindu
mass-conscription army and a standardized public school
strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.
system, "multicultural regimes" feature a high-tech, all-volunteer army (and, I would add, private schools that
"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart," Homer-Dixon
teach competing values), operating in a culture in which
predicts. "Their secular governments have less and less
the international media and entertainment industry has
legitimacy as well as less management ability over people
more influence than the "national political class." In other
and resources." Rather than one bold line dividing the
words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been
subcontinent into two parts, the future will likely see a lot of
educated along similar lines, where people take their cue
thinner lines and smaller parts, with the ethnic entities of
from national leaders, and where everyone (every male, at
Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually replacing Pakistan in
least) has gone through the crucible of military service,
the space between the Central Asian plateau and the heart
making patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his
immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Saul Bellow states, "The country took us over. It was a country
None of this even takes into account climatic change,
then, not a collection of 'cultures.'"
which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode the capacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance,
During the Second World War and the decade following it,
receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon
the United States reached its apogee as a classic
cycle, which planetary warming could disrupt.
nation-state. During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation.
Not only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last
The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity,
Map be in constant motion, but its two-dimensional base
educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and
may change too. The National Academy of Sciences
various kinds. William Irwin Thompson, in Passages About
reports that "as many as one billion people, or 20 per cent
Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, writes,
of the world's population, live on lands likely to be
"The educational system that had worked on the Jews or
inundated or dramatically changed by rising waters.
the Irish could no longer work on the blacks; and when
Low-lying countries in the developing world such as Egypt
Jewish teachers in New York tried to take black children
and Bangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas
away from their parents exactly in the way they had been
extensive and densely populated, will be hardest hit.
taken from theirs, they were shocked to encounter a
Where the rivers are dammed, as in the case of the Nile,
the effects. will be especially severe."
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Issues like West Africa could yet emerge as a new kind of
flight to set out for New York. Once we were in New York,
foreign-policy issue, further eroding America's domestic
despite the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy
peace. The spectacle of several West African nations
Airport held up disembarkation by conducting quick
collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial
interrogations of the aircraft's passengers--this was in
stereotypes here at home. That is another reason why
addition to all the normal immigration and customs
Africa matters. We must not kid ourselves: the sensitivity
procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling, disease,
factor is higher than ever. The Washington, D.C., public
and other factors had contributed to the toughest security
school system is already experimenting with an Afrocentric
procedures I have ever encountered when returning from
curriculum. Summits between African leaders and
prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyanna-ish prognostications about multiparty
Then, for the first time in over a month, I spotted
elections in Africa that do not factor in crime, surging birth
businesspeople with attache cases and laptop computers.
rates, and resource depletion. The Congressional Black
When I had left New York for Abidjan, all the
Caucus was among those urging U.S. involvement in
businesspeople were boarding planes for Seoul and
Somalia and in Haiti. At the Los Angeles Times minority
Tokyo, which departed from gates near Air Afrique's. The
staffers have protested against, among other things, what
only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief
they allege to be the racist tone of the newspaper's Africa
workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within
coverage, allegations that the editor of the "World Report"
West Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West
section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that Africa
Africa from the outside world are in various ways
should be viewed through the same rigorous analytical
But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this
Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional
dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was
late-twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an
falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo,
age of cultural and racial clash, when national defense is
covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future
increasingly local, Africa's distress will exert a destabilizing
was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The
same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was
This and many other factors will make the United States
approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc
less of a nation than it is today, even as it gains territory
shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news
following the peaceful dissolution of Canada. Quebec,
wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right below.
based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and
-------------------- Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor of
Francophone ethnicity, could yet turn out to be North
The Atlantic Monthly. His article in this issue (February,
America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It
1994) will be expanded into a book he is writing for
may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal
Random House, with support from the U.S. Institute of
peoples may lop off northern parts of the province.)
Peace and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"Patriotism" will become increasingly regional as people in Alberta and Montana discover that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Ottawa or Washington, and Spanish-speakers in the Southwest discover a greater commonality with Mexico City. (The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau, a book about the continent's regionalization, is more relevant now than when it was published, in 1981.) As Washington's influence wanes, and with it the traditional symbols of American patriotism, North Americans will take psychological refuge in their insulated communities and cultures.
Returning from West Africa last fall was an illuminating ordeal. After leaving Abidjan, my Air Afrique flight landed in Dakar, Senegal, where all passengers had to disembark in order to go through another security check, this one demanded by U.S. authorities before they would permit the
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