From Geography is Destiny (Ian Morris, 2022) pp13-5
The first act of Britain’s drama, which took the Hereford Map as its stage, gave way to the second between 1500 and 1700, because ships that could cross entire oceans dragged much of the world on to a new which Britain came to dominate. During Grandad’s lifetime stage, the second act, performed on Mackinder’s Map, gave way to a third for similar reasons. New technologies – telegraph lines and oil-fired engines, container ships and jet planes, satellites and the internet shrank space even more than sixteenth-century galleons had done. Just as had happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people responded by creating new organisations – the United Nations, World Trade Organization and, of course, European Union – to take advantage of the changed meanings of geography. Across the last hundred years the novel technologies and institutions have tied so much of the world together, making the stage so big and so crowded with actors, that Britain has been shoved out of the limelight. Some theorists like to say that our new, networked world no longer has centres and peripheries like the stages of the first two acts, but the third of my maps (Figure 0.5) suggests otherwise. This is a clever (if slightly disorienting) piece of cartography, allocating space to each nation in proportion to how much of the world’s wealth it generates* rather than the physical area it occupies. This Money Map shows that the planet now has three centres: in North America, Western Europe and East Asia. Rather than being king of the hill, as it was in Act II, Britain finds itself perched at the edge of one of the three modern mountains of money. Actors in Beijing, Brussels and Washington, DC, are the ones who matter most on this new stage. The English Channel and the oceans are still there, but are no longer moats defensive. They have been shrunk to insignificance by precision-guided missiles and almost instantaneous information flows.
If the rise of European and American mountains of money around 1900 twisted Mackinder’s Map out of shape, the rise of the Chinese mountain since 2000 burst its bounds altogether. “The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance’, Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, observed in 2012. ‘It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
Geography’s new meanings have overturned established ideas about identity, mobility, prosperity, security and sovereignty. The changes are roiling not just Britain but the entire West. For a quarter of a millennium the nations around the North Atlantic have been the world’s centre of gravity. Life was not easy for everyone in the West (my grandad, a steelworker, knew this well), but even so, it was easier – especially for white, middle-class men – than for anyone else. Only in the last thirty years has that really begun changing. Life remains easier in the West than for the rest, but not by as much as it used to be. Fifty years from now, it may no longer be easier at all. The West’s superiority no longer feels effortless. The world is more competitive; old ways of doing things cannot be relied on. No wonder Westerners are anxious.
In the 1930s, while the curtain was still coming down on Mackinder’s Map, the great British novelist George Orwell already worried that the end of empire would ‘reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes’. That didn’t happen: Britain still boasts the world’s sixth- or ninth-biggest economy (depending on how we count) and probably its fifth-strongest fleet (behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan), and is one of just nine nuclear powers. It has the second-largest haul of Nobel Prizes on the planet, and in 2018 the Soft Power 30 index ranked it number one in the world for its ability to achieve objectives through attraction and persuasion’. (It lost the top spot to France in 2019, having been made less appealing by interminable Brexit wrangling.) Britain remains a major actor, even if it no longer stands centre stage. The Royal Navy cannot defend the home islands’ shores or commerce. The empire is gone, most of Ireland is gone and in 2014 Scotland came within half a million votes of going too.
A generation after Orwell, the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, caused outrage by musing that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’. Two generations after Acheson, the search is still on. Should Britain be sheltering in the shadow of the American mountain? Or would it do better somewhere on the slopes below Brussels? Or climbing up towards Beijing? Alternatively, could it carve out an independent path between the three peaks? Or then again, could it collaborate with the old English-speaking Commonwealth to heap up a fourth hill of its own? Or try to play several of these roles at the same time? Or even write itself an entirely new role?
By 2016 Britons faced a burning question, but the one on the ballot that summer – Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ – was not it. Seen from a big-history perspective, the Brexit debate has simply been a distraction. The twenty-first century will be about Beijing, not Brussels. The real question is where Britain – and, for that matter, the rest of the West – will fit best on a world stage that is tilting eastwards.
Tgk1946's Blog 