The Revenge of Geography (8 page)

So what to do? How do we split the difference between recognizing the importance of geography in shaping history and the danger of overemphasizing that very fact? We can take harbor, I think, in Raymond Aron’s notion of a “sober ethic rooted in the truth of ‘probabilistic determinism,’ ” because “human choice always operates within certain contours or restraints such as the inheritance of the past.”
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The key word is “probabilistic,” that is, in now concentrating on geography we adhere to a partial or hesitant determinism which recognizes obvious differences between groups and terrain, but does not oversimplify, and leaves many possibilities open. As English historian Norman Davies writes: “I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.”
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Liberal internationalists, who generally supported intervention in the Balkans but opposed it in Iraq, reflect this spirit of fine distinctions. They intuited, however vaguely, a principal fact of geography: whereas the former Yugoslavia lay at the most advanced, western extremity of the former Ottoman Empire, adjacent to Central Europe, Mesopotamia lay at its most chaotic, eastern reaches. And because that fact has affected political development up through the present, intervention in Iraq would prove to be a stretch.

So what might that modest fate, that hidden hand, have in store for us in the years to come? What can we learn from the map, to forewarn us of possible dangers? Let us review some of the effects of geography on the grand pattern of world history through the eyes of several great scholars of the twentieth century, and then look specifically at geography and human intervention through the eyes of a great man of antiquity. That will prepare us to probe the most time-tested and provocative geopolitical theories from the modern era, and see where they take us in describing the world to come.

During the middle to latter twentieth century, when Hans Morgenthau taught in the political science department at the University of Chicago, two other professors were also forging prodigious academic paths in the history department: William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The university was bursting with rigor and talent, and by concentrating on these three professors, I do not mean to slight others. Whereas Morgenthau defined realism for the present age, McNeill quite literally did so for the history of the world and Hodgson for the history of Islam, in massive works of Herodotean scope, in which geography is rarely far out of reach. The very audacity that McNeill and Hodgson showed in the choice of their subjects is to be admired in this current academic era, with its emphasis on narrow specialization—in truth, a necessity as the mass of knowledge steadily accumulates. But to read McNeill and Hodgson is almost to be wistful for a time not that long ago when scholars’ horizons were
seemingly limitless. Specialization has brought its own unique sort of flowering, but the academy could use more of what these two University of Chicago professors represent. Geography, they demonstrate, is in and of itself a means of thinking broadly.

William Hardy McNeill, born in British Columbia, was in his mid-forties when in 1963 he published
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
, a book which runs well over eight hundred pages. The overarching theme is to challenge the viewpoint of British historian Arnold Toynbee and German historian Oswald Spengler that separate civilizations pursued their destinies independently. Instead, McNeill argues that cultures and civilizations continually interacted, and it has been this interaction that has forged the core drama of world history. If the book is about anything, it is about the vast movements of peoples across the map.

To wit: a northerly movement brought the so-called Danubian cultivators into central and western Europe between 4500 and 4000
B.C
. Meanwhile, a southerly movement of pioneer herders and farmers crossed North Africa unto the Strait of Gibraltar, “to meet and mingle with the Danubian flood.” But the older hunting populations of Europe were not destroyed, McNeill writes; instead, there was a mixing of populations and cultures.
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Thus, the heart of the book commences.

Both these population movements, north and south of the Mediterranean, originated from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, where political instability was largely a function of geography. “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man,” writes the late British travel writer Freya Stark.
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Indeed, as McNeill indicates, Mesopotamia cut across one of history’s bloodiest migration routes. “As soon as the cities of the plain had been made to flourish,” the result of a gently sloping landscape in the lower part of the Tigris-Euphrates valley that carried irrigation water for miles, “they became tempting objects of plunder to
the barbarous peoples of the country round about.” Moreover, when most of the irrigable land of Mesopotamia came under cultivation, and the fields of one community came into contact with those of another, chronic war emerged, as there was no central authority to settle boundary disputes, or to apportion water in times of shortage. In the midst of this semi-chaos, conquerors like Sargon (2400
B.C
.) entered Mesopotamia from the margins of the cultivated zone. Though able to establish a centralized authority, the vanquishing soldiery, after a few generations, McNeill tells us, gave up the military life in favor of the “softer and more luxurious ways” of the towns. And so history began to repeat itself with the arrival of new conquerors.

This is all very reminiscent of the pattern described by the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and geographer Ibn Khaldun, who notes that while luxurious living strengthens the state initially by furthering its legitimacy, in succeeding generations it leads to decadence, with the process of collapse signaled by the rise of powerful provincial leaders, who then invade and form their own dynasties.
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Ultimately, the rise of civilization in ancient Iraq led to the most suffocating of tyrannies in order to stave off the disintegration from within: thus we have Tiglath-pileser (twelfth–eleventh centuries
B.C
.), Ashurnasirpal II (ninth century
B.C
.), Sennacherib (eighth–seventh centuries
B.C
.), and others, famous for their cruelty, megalomania, and mass deportations carried out in their name.
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It is a pattern that culminates in Saddam Hussein: that of a region prone to invasion and fragmentation that required through much of history significant levels of tyranny. But again, one should avoid too constricted a conclusion: for example, between 1921 and 1958, Iraq experienced a modestly well-functioning parliamentary system, which might have continued under slightly altered circumstances. McNeill, Khaldun, and Stark are speaking of historical and geographical tendencies only, and thus avoid the charge of determinism.
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Just as geography formed the basis for an extraordinary level of tyranny and bureaucracy in Mesopotamia, McNeill explains how it culminated in somewhat less oppressive rule in Egypt. “Deserts gave the land of Egypt clear-cut and easily defensible boundaries; while the
Nile provided it with a natural backbone and nervous system,” so that Mesopotamian levels of oppression weren’t necessary along the Nile. “Frontier defense,” he goes on, “against outlanders was scarcely a serious problem for the king of Egypt”: indeed, because of Egypt’s favorable situation vis-à-vis migration routes compared to Mesopotamia’s, infiltration by Libyans from the west and Asiatics from the east were relatively minor issues. Egypt was shut off from the south, where there is nothing but bare desert on either side of the river; while in the north there is the Mediterranean Sea. It is probable that for four thousand years Egyptians “never saw an invading host in their midst.”
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The Nile, moreover, was easily navigable, with the flow of the river carrying boats northward, even as the winds generally blowing from north to south carried boats, with the help of sail, southward. Thus was civilization able to dawn in Egypt. “By contrast,” McNeill writes, “Mesopotamian rulers could avail themselves of no ready-made natural instrument for securing their centralized authority, but had slowly and painfully to develop [oppressive] law and bureaucratic administration as an artificial substitute for the natural articulation which geography gave to Egypt.” Mesopotamia’s heavy-handed bureaucracy had further to deal with the capricious rate of flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was not the case with the Nile, and which complexified further the organization of the irrigation system.
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Even today, both Egypt and Iraq have had dictatorial regimes for long periods, but the fact that Iraq’s have been far worse is something that, in part, we can trace to antiquity, and to geography.

Beyond the Middle East were what McNeill calls the “peripheral” civilizations of India, Greece, and China, “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” which in the cases of the first two derived a good portion of their vitality from the cultures of the Indus River and Minoan Crete. But all three also drew from their interaction with barbarian invaders, even as they were partially protected from them by virtue of geography. For Greece and India on account of their northerly mountains were both “effectively sheltered from the direct impact of steppe cavalry.” China was even more isolated, by inhospitable
deserts, high peaks, and sheer distance, as thousands of miles separated the Yellow River valley, where Chinese civilization began, from the Middle East and Indian heartlands. The result was three utterly original civilizations, particularly that of the Chinese, that were able to develop separately from the increasingly cultural uniformity of the Greater Desert Middle East, which stretched from North Africa to Turkestan.
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McNeill explains that throughout antiquity the ebb and flow of the frontiers between Hellenic, Middle Eastern, and Indian civilizations made for a delicate cultural balance in Eurasia, which, later in the medieval centuries, would be undone by the inundation of steppe peoples from the north, notably the Mongols.
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It is largely through the Mongols that the Silk Route flourished, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bringing Eurasian civilizations from the Pacific to the Mediterranean into modest contact with one another. Nevertheless, China formed its own separate sphere geographically compared to the civilizations further west, with Tibet, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea all directing their gazes toward the Middle Kingdom, each forging in varying degrees its own civilization. And yet the severe limitations of a high desert environment “made anything more than a protocivilization impossible in Tibet and Mongolia,” McNeill writes. Tibetan Lamaists, “always conscious of the Indian Buddhist origins of their faith,” in effect opposed Sinification by appealing to the traditions of the rival civilization next door.
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History, according to McNeill, is a study in fluidity, in which things only seem secure and neatly geographically ordered: more crucially we are always in a state of smaller transitions and cultural interchanges.

While opposing Spengler, Toynbee, and later the “Clash of Civilizations” theory of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, in emphasizing the interaction of civilizations rather than their separateness, McNeill’s
The Rise of the West
, nevertheless, engages the reader with the whole notion of civilizations formed in large measure by geography, that rise from precisely definable landscapes, achieve their own identity, and then interact with other civilizations, in turn forming
new hybrids. In this way, history is woven.
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McNeill metaphorically describes the process:

Such erosion and borrowing terrifies the purity of the early-twentieth-century German Oswald Spengler, who writes of the “deep soil ties” that define the best of High Cultures: how the inner evolution of sacral practices and dogmas remain “spellbound in the place of their birth,” since, “whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.” High Culture, he goes on, begins in the “preurban countryside” and culminates with a “finale of materialism” in the “world-cities.” For this dark romantic, who can at once be turgid, hypnotic, profound, and, frankly, at times unintelligible in English translation, cosmopolitanism is the essence of rootlessness, because it is not tied to the land.
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