« […]
Geography can reveal as much
about a government's aims as its secret councils. More than ideology
or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place
on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and
natural resources. With upheaval in the Middle East and a tumultuous
political transition in China, look to geography to make sense of it
all. […]
Technology has collapsed
distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it has
increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale scholar
Paul Bracken observes, the "finite size of the earth" is
now itself a force for instability […]
Counterintuitive though it may seem,
the way to grasp what is happening in this world of instantaneous
news is to rediscover something basic: the spatial representation of
humanity's divisions, possibilities and—most important—constraints.
The map leads us to the right sorts of questions.
Why
does President Vladimir Putin covet buffer zones in Eastern Europe
and the Caucasus, just as the czars and commissars did before him?
Because Russia still constitutes a vast, continental space that is
unprotected by mountains and rivers. Putin's neo-imperialism is the
expression of a deep geographical insecurity.
[…]
Nor is it an accident that
Greece, in Europe's southeastern corner, is the most troubled member
of the EU. Greece is where the Balkans and the Mediterranean world
overlap. It was an underprivileged stepchild of Byzantine and then
Turkish despotism, and the consequences of this unhappy geographic
fate echo to this day in the form of rampant tax evasion, a
fundamental lack of competitiveness, and paternalistic coffeehouse
politics. »
