miles
to reach each other, now there are overlapping ranges of missiles.
Geography does not disappear in this scenario, it just becomes, as we shall see,
even more critical.
To look at the argument in another way, let me return to Morgenthau.
Morgenthau writes that the very imperial expansion into relatively empty
geographical spaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Africa,
Eurasia, and western North America, deflected great power politics into the
periphery of the earth, thereby reducing conflict. For example, the more attention
Russia, France, and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung territories
in imperial fashion, the less attention
they paid to one another, and the more
peaceful, in a sense, the world was.
24
But by the late nineteenth century, the
consolidation of the great nation-states and empires of the West was
consummated, and territorial gains could only be made at the expense of one
another.
25
Morgenthau sums up:
As the balance of power—with its main weight now in three
continents—becomes worldwide, the dichotomy between the circle of
the great power and its center, on the one hand, and its periphery and
the empty spaces beyond, on the other, must of necessity disappear.
The periphery of the balance of power now coincides with the confines
of the earth.
26
Whereas Morgenthau’s vision, written during the tense, early Cold War years,
spells danger, that of his
university colleague McNeill, written in a later, more
stable phase of the Cold War, spells hope:
The Han in ancient China … put a quietus upon the disorders of the
warring states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure which
endured, with occasional breakdown and modest amendment, almost
to our own day. The warring states of the twentieth century seem
headed for a similar resolution of their conflicts.
27
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly seems to have borne out
McNeill’s optimism. Yet the world is arguably
as dangerous today as it was
during the Cold War. For the map keeps closing in a multiplicity of ways. Take
China: Mao Zedong, at great cost to be sure, consolidated China as a modern
state, and China now rises economically (albeit at a slower pace) and militarily
as a great power, filling up the Eurasian chessboard even more than Morgenthau
could have imagined. Meanwhile, even the remotest parts of the world become
further urbanized, and while Spengler could see the decline of culture in the
desertion of the soil and agricultural life, sprawling and teeming urban
conglomerations are, as McNeill intuited, now leading to the metamorphosis of
religion
and identity in vigorous and, albeit, troubling ways:
28
Islam, for
example, becomes less of a traditional, soil-based religion and more of an
austere, in some cases ideological, faith, in order to regulate behavior in vast,
impersonal slum settings where extended family and kinsmen are less in
evidence. This leads to a Middle East of megacities and other urban
concentrations in the former countryside that,
while poor, are generally low in
crime, even as the offshoot is occasionally a destabilizing global terrorism.
Christianity, too, becomes, as a consequence of the stresses of suburban living in
the American South and West, more ideological, even as a loose form of
environmental paganism takes root in the cities of Europe, replacing traditional
nationalism, given that the super-state of the European Union has only abstract
meaning to all but the elite. Meanwhile, war is no longer, as in eighteenth-
century Europe, the “sport
of kings,” but an instrument of nationalist and
religious fanaticism, whether on a large scale as in the case of Nazi Germany, or
on a smaller scale as with al Qaeda.
29
Add to that the awful specter of nuclear
weapons in the hands of radicalized elites at both the state and substate level.
And in the midst of all these awkward, turbulent shifts, classical geography
again rears its head, shaping tensions among the West, Russia, Iran, India, China,
Korea, Japan, and so on, all of which we will need to explore in detail. McNeill’s
thesis of interactions across civilizations has never been truer than today. But it
would be a mistake to equate an emerging world culture with political stability:
because
space
—precisely because it is more crowded and therefore more
precious than ever before—still matters, and matters greatly.
Whereas McNeill’s scholarly eye scanned the entire earth, Marshall Hodgson’s
scope,
for our purposes, was narrower, encompassing the Greater Middle East.
Still, Hodgson, a passionate Quaker who died at forty-six, demonstrates a
prodigious ambition in his three-volume
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