. There is no preparing for the kind of par- oxysms that repeatedly devastate the interior of this remote region, and no way for most locals to leave before the next crisis arises. Nor can private initiatives mitigate the mayhem. That is why a growing number of specialists are calling for a significant expansion of inter- national intervention and peacekeeping capacities and more efficient diplomatic and logistical mechanisms to facilitate their operations
from this perspective the most significant developments are taking place in South America. These are revealed less by GNI than by other indicators, such as urbanization, female literacy (nearly 90 percent across the realm), fast-declining population growth now barely above the world average, and reductions in the number of people living in extreme poverty. The dozen countries clustered on the continent, led by Brazil, appear poised to further narrow the gap between this cor- ner of the periphery and the global core. Potent developments in parts of Southeast and East Asia confirm that the global periphery is in transition there as well, although no South American country is as poor as East Timor and none as rich as Singapore, signaling far wider and persistent divergence in a crucial corner of the world
As noted in chapter 1, the world in the broadest geographic sense may be divided into a prosperous and exclusive core and a periphery where conditions range from acceptable to abject, but all countries and societies have core–periphery dichotomies. It is a matter of scale: the United States has its own eastern megalopolitan core and its remote periphery, including Mississippi, but Mississippi in turn has its mod- ern and commercial Gulf Coast and its interior rural “Deep South.” Chile calls its heartland the nucleo central, a world apart from its mountain and desert periphery. Bangladesh epitomizes the global periphery, but the megacity of Dhaka anchors a core that breaks the rural sameness dominating its cultural landscape.
Thus, while lowering national barriers and facilitating the workings of globalization, the EU experi- ment simultaneously strengthens local territorial attachments and constructs new mental maps. The notion of an independent Scotland, for example, might never have reached the level of support it has among Scots today had the United Kingdom not joined the EU; Scot- tish nationalism was energized by the prospect of the Scottish “coun- try” becoming a third-tier entity in the EU hierarchy when it was in effect a first-rank member, on a par with England and Wales, in the United Kingdom. Here, in other parts of Europe and, indeed, elsewhere in the globalizing world, the profiles of component parts of states have escalated, countering the trend globalization should promote.
Ours may be an era of globalization and worldly flattening, but we also witness the resurgence of another of humanity’s ancient predis- positions: the territorial imperative. The very Internet-enabled dis- semination of information driving the breakdown of barriers among globals also spreads ideas about power and autonomy among locals that arouse the kinds of nationalisms and ethnic aspirations economic globalization is supposed to mitigate
Today those colonies are no more, but the cities persist, and many of them are linked in a new framework of power defined by the processes of globalization. Urban geographers refer to such cit- ies as “world” cities because they form part of a global urban net- work that links them more efficiently internationally than locally. For example, London has stronger links to New York than it has to Leicester or Liverpool; Miami interacts more with São Paulo than with Jacksonville or Orlando.
The city is humanity’s most enduring symbol of power. States and empires rise and fall, armies conquer and collapse, ideologies come and go, but the world’s great cities endure. If there is a force that can vanquish a city, it is natural, not artificial. Ancient cities that anchored early states in Southwest, South, and East Asia fell victim to climate change as deserts encroached on their hinterlands. Modern cities on low ground at the water’s edge would not survive the sea-level rise that could accompany sustained global warming. But no political upheaval or economic breakdown would end the life of a major city—not even destruction by atomic bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt because the advantages and opportunities offered by their sites and situations were unaltered by the catastrophes that struck them. Silk route terminal Chang’an morphed into Xian and Tenochtitlan became Mexico City because their locational benefits, sites, and regional net- works outlasted their violent transitions. Not for nothing is Rome known as the Eternal City
Dramatic media pictures of desperate would-be mobals clinging to overcrowded boats, climbing over border fences, or running across unguarded wasteland confirm statistical data: males are in the van- guard of unregulated as well as legal transnational migration. Less graphic photography of the average business-class section of a 747 flying from Los Angeles to Hong Kong would reveal that most of the comfortable globals en route are male as well. But scrutinize a daytime picture of an African or Asian village, and you are likely to notice that among the locals, women outnumber men, whether working in the fields, carrying water or firewood, preparing food, or tending children. If the Earth seems flat, this is far more so for males than for females.
A map of the world’s theaters of recurrent conflict suggests that the effects of landlocked location extend beyond economics and com- merce (figure 6.2). Although coastal states are as vulnerable to ethnic and cultural strife as landlocked states are, access facilitates remedia- tion, as was the case when a British-led coalition intervened in and ended a civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000 (earlier, failing Somalia’s coastal location had invited an intervention that was doomed by the dimensions and intractability of its problems). When a state is land- locked, regimes are able to act with greater impunity, and combatants can better avoid scrutiny. A civil war raged for more than three decades in the Southern Sudan, resulting in two million deaths and four million internal refugees; again, international involvement was deterred by the relative location of one of the world’s most land- locked arenas of conflict.
The Nigerian case is especially significant because it confirms that governance is crucial when it comes to resource windfalls. In many other economically poor but well-endowed countries, colonial powers laid out the facilitating infrastructure, created the system of resource exploitation, and turned the economy over to their local successors, who usually failed to sustain it
Global resource distribution is one key aspect of the mosaic of fate represented by the world’s boundary framework: some countries found themselves with riches ranging from diamonds to “black gold,” as oil is sometimes called, but oth- ers have very little in the way of saleable commodities. It would seem that the larger a country is, the better its chances of having a bigger share of the world’s resources, but it does not always work out that way. Mali is about 70 times as large as Kuwait, but Kuwait has a sizeable share of the world’s oil reserves while Mali has a little gold and some salt. Once again, geography, in the form of location, matters. Some countries lie astride rich mineralized zones. Others are less fortunate.
Paradoxically, economic development in the form of dams, arti- ficial lakes, irrigation schemes, and other water-control projects can actually worsen public health in the areas affected. Slow down or stop the rushing water in a creek or canyon, and you may expose local inhabitants and workers to diseases even as houses and jobs trans- form the economic landscape. Help shantytown residents who need taps and pumps store rainwater in cisterns and barrels, and you may multiply the mosquito population. Reports of such unintended consequences abound, from the colonial-era Jezira irrigation scheme in
This tenacious geography of cholera forms a stark reminder that the planet’s medical landscape is anything but even. Global business- people or tourists are no longer required to show a cholera vaccination certificate when they embark on a tropical journey, but those wanting it need only to call a clinic to be inoculated. In the unlikely event that a traveling global is infected in some tropical locale, medical interven- tion is available and affordable, and serious consequences are highly unlikely. But locals and mobals in the path of political violence or in the maelstrom of urbanization tend to face the risk without adequate access to remedies or preventive measures.
Ancient, persistent malaria and modern, virulent HIV/AIDS bracket a host of diseases of the tropics, and the species-richness gra- dient referred to in earlier chapters plays its role here as well. Low elevations in low latitudes harbor a far greater number and variety of vectors, from mosquitoes to snails and from flies to worms, than higher latitudes (and higher altitudes) do. Malaria is not a threat to a child born in Mongolia or Chile, Finland or New Zealand. It con- stitutes a mortal danger to hundreds of millions of locals in lowland tropical Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and equatorial areas else- where. The mortality figures do not begin to reflect the impact of malaria on populations vulnerable to it. Where malaria is endemic, survivors develop a degree of immunity but are often debilitated. For locals seen by global visitors as listless and lazy on their jobs, malaria may be the energy-sapping cause. And malaria is only one of many infectious diseases to which tropical populations are exposed. There is progress, but it remains slow and by no means universal. For hun- dreds of millions, birthplace and wellness remain closely linked
As it is, reli- gious fervor intensifies, worsening social divisions and countering progress toward the flatter world of globalization.
In Sri Lanka, whose population is 75 percent Buddhist, the majority confronts a mainly Hindu (Tamil) minority fighting for an independent state and a smaller Muslim minority caught in the middle. While the war is bitter and costly, it has never taken on pri- marily religious overtones, although Buddhist monks do engage in public demonstrations in support of the government side and play an increasingly obstructionist role in blocking government concessions to the Tamil rebels. In Thailand, where the overwhelming majority of the people adhere to Buddhism, a conflict has developed with the small Muslim minority in the southernmost provinces, on the border with (mainly Muslim) Malaysia. While the Islamic side proclaims this to be a case of religious oppression, the Thai government sees it as a matter of national security. Americans recall the self-immolation of Buddhist monks during the Indochina War; their protests were political, not religious, and their expectations were not of virgins in paradise, but of altered conduct on Earth. Their dramatic suicides were not aimed at American forces or innocent civilians. No attacks were launched against Vietnam’s Christian churches in the name of Buddhism.
For India’s locals as well as mobals, the country’s current economic rise spells hope. Jobs for which Indians used to leave the country are now arriving in the automobile factories of Chennai and the super- markets of Delhi (Luce, 2006). So strong is the need for Indian engi- neers that salary gaps between local and overseas jobs are shrinking. The burgeoning telecommunications industries may not pay anything like their American or European counterparts, but mobals preferring not to emigrate have made Bangaluru (Bangalore) the high-tech capital of India. And here’s evidence of the flattening world for globals: recent American college graduates are arriving in India for cor- porate training, having spurned U.S. jobs in favor of experience in the periphery and a future in an Indian high-tech firm. Still, before we jump to conclusions regarding India’s own flattening, consider this: the internal migration stream from India’s mostly poverty-stricken countryside to its job-producing cities is just one-tenth the size of China’s. In India’s 600,000 villages, hundreds of millions of locals begin their lives malnourished, impoverished, and without the educa- tion that would give them the chance to escape from deprivation and indoctrination. In 2008, nearly half of all of India’s children under five remain underfed and an estimated 250 million citizens survive on less than one dollar per day. For them, the factories of Chennai and the office parks of Bangaluru might as well be on Mars.
The contest between Islam and other faiths takes many forms in vari- ous regions of the world, and Europe is only one part of what is in effect a global stage for it. Even as Islam’s sectarian divisions gener- ate intra-Islamic conflicts ranging from political quarrels to deathly violence, and states, tribes, and clans in the Islamic world have long and continuing histories of internecine strife, Islamist movements confront Roman Catholics in the Philippines, Chinese secularists in Xinjiang, Buddhists in Thailand, Russian rule in the Transcaucasus, Indian control over Kashmir, Ethiopian power in the Horn of Africa, and other adversaries from Sudan to Sulawesi. Muslim mobals are arriving in countries far from the Muslim world—in Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Australia—and minarets rise in Lima, Buffalo, Vienna, Seoul, Saigon. There was a time when Islam diffused chiefly by con- tiguous expansion. Now it is spreading by relocation as well.
Furthermore, Iran sponsors and funds the terrorist organization Hizbullah, which, in Lebanon, has carved out a veritable state-within-a-state that proved capable of prolonged combat with Israel in 2006.
The Pacific Rim economic boom that transformed the eastern littoral of Han China in one generation could, in all likelihood, not have happened the way it did had China been in the grip of a strong religious hierarchy. In this sense East Asia was indeed “flat”—inter- nal mobals and external globals could meet in the common quest for economic advantage, facilitated by political decree, without having to deal with monks, mullahs, or ministers. None of the major players on this field had religious baggage heavy enough to slow the reforms. China’s geomancers had a field day in the burgeoning cities on and near the Pacific coast, but renascent Confucianism had no impact on the economic boom. American companies and Japanese investors knew better than to add religious issues to the commercial stew. None of the many minority locals who took jobs in the mushrooming cities was impelled by religious fervor to demand social change. What hap- pened on the western Pacific Rim is often referred to as a miracle, but the miracle was more than just economic.
During modern periods of adaptation and invention, the Japanese borrowed and adopted knowledge and skills from the British and the Americans (driving on the left is a legacy of the former), but Eng- lish usage made only the slightest inroads. Japanese remained the language of technology and modernization, even after the American military conquest and Japan’s subsequent resurrection. What the Jap- anese proved is that you can have globalization without Anglicization. Although Japan’s governing and technological elites are bilingual, and English is a school subject, Japan’s universities, research institutions, and global corporations conduct their discourse mainly in Japanese. Currently, less than one percent of Japanese claim fluency in Eng- lish (according to an estimate in Ethnologue, 2007), far fewer than in any of the original EU countries (figure 2.3). If this is the case, not many more than 100,000 Japanese, in a population of 127 million, are bilingual in English. Yet Japan is one of the most powerful forces of globalization, its economy among the largest in the world
Where does this leave the locals, the people who are born into an ethnolinguistic area untouched by a connective regional language and remote from the official one? In countries where the official language is ex-colonial, capability in that language is the sine qua non for membership in the governing, administrative, or commer- cial elite. Starting life in a remote village and being taught in a local, indigenous language without early exposure to the language of this political and social elite puts locals at an immediate and usually last- ing disadvantage
Such dwindling of cultural variegation might be seen not only as a consequence, but also as a benefit of globalization. With fewer mutu- ally unintelligible tongues, wouldn’t the world’s peoples understand each other better? The evidence for this proposition is weak. Conflicts certainly break out between peoples speaking different languages, but speaking the same (or a mutually comprehensible) language does not seem to avert or even ameliorate hostilities. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland have spoken the same language for centuries, as did communists and nationalists in post-Qing China, and Sunni and Shia in post-Saddam Iraq. Humans have a way of finding reasons to engage in violent conflict, and a universal language probably would not alter that predisposition. A linguistically “flat” world would not be likely to be a more peaceable or a fairer one.
That boundary framework, drawn in ignorance of much of the world’s natural-resource base and with often deliberate disregard for cultural geographies, encumbered the world and its modern states with inequal- ities and obstacles unforeseen by its designers. A good atlas map—or better yet, a globe—reveals some of these disparities, ranging from sheer size and relative location (more than 10 percent of the world’s countries are landlocked) to distance from, or proximity to, the mainstreams of international interaction. More specialized maps indicate how the rou- lette of partition favored some states and disadvantaged others in terms of raw materials, natural environments, and opportunities.
With a population approaching seven billion and international migrant numbers hovering (in 2008) around 200 million, our planet thus is not as amenable to movement as its purported flatness implies.
Rural-to-urban migration is a global phenomenon involving far more internal than international migrants, and truly international cities (such as New York and London) are far outnumbered by burgeoning megacities growing mainly through domestic aggregation (Tokyo, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos).
But the 2006 UN Report on Migra- tion underscores how comparatively limited the global migration flow remains. From 1990 to 2005, the number of migrants in the world rose from 155 million to 191 million, well below 3 percent of the planet’s population. Even where migration is facilitated rather than obstructed, notably within the expanding European Union, the percentage of work- ers crossing international borders remains remarkably low. Again, the overwhelming majority of our planet’s inhabitants still live out their lives within the countries and communities in which they were born. These locals far outnumber the mobals—even when the richer coun- tries of the global core need the latter in growing numbers.
Aside from where ocean water already bounded living space, as in Japan, Iceland, New Zealand, and numerous Pacific islands, the irreg- ular grid of “national” boundaries familiar to us today was superim- posed on the inhabited world comparatively recently. In effect, it is the product of the last five centuries, although the notion of bound- ary making is much older than that. Roman and Chinese wall build- ers tried to demarcate and fortify imperial borders and limit human movements, but the world was not parceled out among competing powers until the colonial era. (Interestingly, among the many thou- sands of islands, including hundreds of large and consequential ones, fewer than a dozen were divided by “national” boundaries.) But when that boundary framework was installed, subject to modifications that are still going on, societies were compartmentalized and faced their environmental and economic challenges with new constraints. No longer could peoples who had severely damaged their natural envi- ronments move elsewhere and leave the consequences behind. No longer did open frontiers beckon those who chafed under the yoke of oppressors. Millions have perished at walls, fences, moats, and river- banks in our newly compartmentalized world.
Many millions of legal immigrants have entered the global core and continue to do so. Even as national economies in the global core are thriving, dwindling populations and changing labor needs will require immigration to offset demographic losses. The “Western Wall” around the global core reflects a regional desire to control the influx, though growing inequalities between core and periphery are likely to determine otherwise. But that is the future. At present, in the broadest sense, the economic, cultural, and political geographies of core and periphery evince contrasts that far outweigh similarities. On average, being born in the core confers certainties and opportuni- ties unattainable in the periphery. The exceptions are too few; the dis- parities grow wider. Geography and destiny are tightly intertwined.
Formal apartheid may no longer disfigure the South African state, but in the world at large the incentives that gave rise to the system increasingly mark the cultural landscape, from gated communities in affluent suburbs to fenced boundaries between rich and poor coun- tries. In South Africa, wealth was concentrated in a necklace of cities that anchored the interior and dominated the coast; poverty prevailed in the horseshoe of “Bantustans” that encircled the urban core and provided raw materials and labor for the globally linked economy. In the world today, wealth is concentrated in a highly urbanized and strongly globalized region extending from Europe through North America to East Asia and Australia, a region often referred to by economic geographers as the global core. The worst global poverty persists in the periphery—in Africa and Asia (figure 1.1). As the map shows, virtually all the cities in the world with the highest quality- of-life indexes lie in this demographically slow-growing core, whereas the burgeoning, chaotic megacities lie in the faster-growing periph- ery. Certainly the world is “flattest” in the wealthy core, roughest in the periphery