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From the visionary bestselling author of The Second World and How to Run the World comes a bracing and authoritative guide to a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win.
Connectivity is the most revolutionary force of the twenty-first century. Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the world’s burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny.
In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets—a race China is now winning, having launched a wave of infrastructure investments to unite Eurasia around its new Silk Roads. The United States can only regain ground by fusing with its neighbors into a super-continental North American Union of shared resources and prosperity.
Connectography offers a unique and hopeful vision for the future. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the world’s ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together.
Praise for Connectography
“Incredible . . . With the world rapidly changing and urbanizing, [Khanna’s] proposals might be the best way to confront a radically different future.”—The Washington Post
“Clear and coherent . . . a well-researched account of how companies are weaving ever more complicated supply chains that pull the world together even as they squeeze out inefficiencies. . . . [He] has succeeded in demonstrating that the forces of globalization are winning.”—Adrian Woolridge, The Wall Street Journal
“Bold . . . With an eye for vivid details, Khanna has . . . produced an engaging geopolitical travelogue.”—Foreign Affairs
“For those who fear that the world is becoming too inward-looking, Connectography is a refreshing, optimistic vision.”—The Economist
“Connectivity has become a basic human right, and gives everyone on the planet the opportunity to provide for their family and contribute to our shared future. Connectography charts the future of this connected world.”—Marc Andreessen, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz
“Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense
- Sales Rank: #15472 in Books
- Published on: 2016-04-19
- Released on: 2016-04-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.50" w x 6.40" l, 1.24 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 496 pages
Review
“Incredible . . . We don’t often question the typical world map that hangs on the walls of classrooms—a patchwork of yellow, pink and green that separates the world into more than two hundred nations. But Parag Khanna, a global strategist, says that this map is, essentially, obsolete. . . . With the world rapidly changing and urbanizing, [Khanna’s] proposals might be the best way to confront a radically different future.”—The Washington Post
“Clear and coherent . . . Khanna provides a rare account of the physical infrastructure of globalization. . . . Khanna also provides a well-researched account of how companies are weaving ever more complicated supply chains that pull the world together even as they squeeze out inefficiencies. . . . [He] has succeeded in demonstrating that the forces of globalization are winning the battle for connected space, building tunnels, bridges and pipelines at an astonishing pace.”—Adrian Woolridge, The Wall Street Journal
“Bold . . . With an eye for vivid details, Khanna has nevertheless produced an engaging geopolitical travelogue, unearthing the Internet cables, energy pipelines, and electrical grids that link regions together more closely than ever before and allow people to lead increasingly connected lives. In his view, connectivity is transforming conflict between states into competition for access to the world’s infrastructure of networks and markets.”—Foreign Affairs
“For those who fear that the world is becoming too inward-looking, Connectography is a refreshing, optimistic vision. . . . The most convincing point in the book concerns policy prescriptions. To become part of global supply chains, Mr. Khanna argues, it is essential to invest in infrastructure. China, in particular, has built a sprawling network of ports, canals and the like across the world to acquire and transport natural resources. By contrast, rich countries, especially America, now underfund capital goods, in an attempt to reduce public spending. This short-term skimping bodes ill for future growth.”—The Economist
“We desperately need enlightenment. For this reason alone, books such as Connectography should be welcomed.”—John Kornblum, Carnegie Europe
“Connectivity has become a basic human right, and gives everyone on the planet the opportunity to provide for their family and contribute to our shared future. Connectography charts the future of this connected world.”—Marc Andreessen, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz
“Connectography is ahead of the curve in seeing the battlefield of the future and the new kind of tug-of-war being waged on it. Parag Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense
“Khanna’s answer to what geography will mean in the twenty-first century is the most compelling I have seen. . . . The world is changing, and Khanna is surely right not only that supply chains and cyberspace are taking on lives of their own but also that in the best of all possible worlds, inclusive functional geography will replace exclusive political geography, and the state and war will wither away. . . . I think Khanna is right that this is where the post-1989 trends seem to be taking us. . . . Connectography is one of the most stimulating and enjoyable books on the ongoing transformation of geography that anyone could ask for.”—Ian Morris, Stratfor
“Khanna’s content in genuinely innovative. He connects old dots in new ways, quite literally. He asks us to remap the world in terms of its connections rather than its borders. Connective infrastructure trumps separatist nationalism. The economics of supply lines moves into the foreground as politics and ideology fade into the background. . . . He is such a good writer—a master of the ringing cadence. . . . [Connectography includes] dozens of stunning maps.”—Jay Ogilvy, Stratfor
“To get where you want to go, it helps to have a good map. In Connectography, Parag Khanna surveys the economic, political, and technological landscape and lays out the case for why ‘competitive connectivity’—with cities and supply chains as the vital nodes—is the true arms race of the twenty-first century. This bold reframing is an exciting addition to our ongoing debate about geopolitics and the future of globalization.”—Dominic Barton, global managing director, McKinsey & Company
“This is probably the most global book ever written. It is intensely specific while remaining broad and wide. Its takeaway is that infrastructure is destiny: Follow the supply lines outlined in this book to see where the future flows.”—Kevin Kelly, co-founder, Wired
“Parag Khanna takes our knowledge of connectivity into virgin territory, providing an entire atlas on how old and new connections are reshaping our physical, social, and mental worlds. This is a deep and highly informative reflection on the meaning of a rapidly developing borderless world. Connectography proves why the past is no longer prologue to the future. There’s no better guide than Parag Khanna to show us all the possibilities of this new hyperconnected world.”—Mathew Burrows, director, Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and former counselor, U.S. National Intelligence Council
“Reading Connectography is a real adventure. The expert knowledge of Parag Khanna has produced a comprehensive and fascinating book anchored in geography but extending to every field that connects people around the globe. His deep analysis of communications, logistics, and many other globally critical areas is remarkable. The book is full of fascinating insights that we normally would not notice, and his writing reflects his extensive travel experience. His recommended sites and tools for mapping are the most comprehensive that I’ve ever seen. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in business, science, arts, or any other field.”—Mark Mobius, executive chairman, Templeton Emerging Markets Group
“Connectography gives the reader an amazing new perspective on human society, bypassing the timeworn categories and frameworks we usually use. It shows us a view of our world as a living thing that really exists: the flows of people, ideas, and materials that constitute our constantly evolving reality. Connectography is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the future of humanity.”—Sandy Pentland, professor, MIT Media Lab
“Khanna’s new book is a brilliant exploration of supply-chain geopolitics and how the intersection of technology with geography is reshaping the global political economy. It is an intellectual tour de force that sparkles with original insights, stimulating assertions, little-known facts, and well-researched predictions. Highly rewarding reading for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary world order and why China’s ‘one belt, one road’ project is a winning strategy that outflanks the United States’ ‘rebalance to Asia’ by integrating all of Eurasia’s economies under Chinese auspices.”—Chas W. Freeman, Jr., chairman, U.S. China Policy Foundation, and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia
“Khanna imagines a near-future in which infrastructural and economic connections supersede traditional geopolitical coordinates as the primary means of navigating our world. He makes a persuasive case: Connectography is as compelling and richly expressive as the ancient maps from which it draws its inspiration.”—Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and CEO, WPP
“From Lagos, Mumbai, Dubai, and Singapore to the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Arctic, and the Gobi desert steppe, Parag Khanna’s latest book provides an invaluable guide to the volatile, confusing worlds of early twenty-first-century geopolitics. A provocative remapping of contemporary capitalism based on planetary mega-infrastructures, intercontinental corridors of connectivity, and transnational supply chains rather than traditional political borders.”—Neil Brenner, director, Urban Theory Lab, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
“In high style, Parag Khanna reimagines the world through the lens of globally connected supply-chain networks. It is a world still fraught with perils—old and new—but one ever more likely to nurture peace and sustain progress.”—Professor John Arquilla, United States Naval Postgraduate School
“Today’s world has multiple geographies that do not fit the old geopolitics of states. In Connectography, Parag Khanna gives us not only new techniques for mapping but a whole new map—different, useful, and mesmerizing.”—Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
About the Author
Parag Khanna is a global strategist, world traveler, and bestselling author. He is a CNN Global Contributor and a Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Khanna is the co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization and author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance and The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation and Brookings Institution, advised the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and worked in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to U.S. Special Operations Forces. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He serves on numerous governmental and corporate advisory boards and is a councilor of the American Geographical Society, a trustee of the New Cities Foundation, and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
From Borders to Bridges
A Journey Around
the World
Let’s take a journey around the world—without ever getting on a plane. If we get an early start in Edinburgh, Scotland, we’ll arrive at London Euston station around noon, stroll quickly past the British Library, and have a quick lunch at the masterfully renovated Victorian-era St. Pancras station, from which we’ll board the Eurostar train, travel under the Dover Strait to Paris, followed by a high-speed TGV to Munich and a German ICE to Budapest. An overnight train along the Danube River brings us to Bucharest, Romania, and another overnight along the Black Sea to Istanbul. Where once a creaky ferry was the fastest way to cross from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Strait, today we can glide over one or the other suspension bridge or continue by train through the newly opened Marmaray tunnel and onward to Iran. We could also catch the revived Hejaz Railway through southeastern Turkey, stopping in Damascus and Amman before continuing to Medina or across Israel and the Sinai to Cairo, from which we might ultimately descend through Africa all the way to Cape Town on a sturdy upgrade of the “Red Line” British colonialists began in the late nineteenth century. From Tehran, we’ll head eastward on a new Chinese-built railway through the rugged Asian steppe, cross Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan’s commercial hub of Almaty. Several times per week, we can cross into China’s largest province of Xinjiang to its capital, Urumqi, and onward via Xi’an to Beijing.
Back in Paris, we might have opted for an overnight sleeper to Moscow, from which we could catch the fabled Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok—and carry on to Pyongyang and Seoul—or branch off a bit earlier toward Beijing, via either Manchuria or Mongolia. Either way, if we opt for the tropical route, we’ll speed southward along the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network into mountainous Yunnan and its capital, Kunming. From there, we can cross directly into Laos and take in Vientiane before crossing into Thailand toward Bangkok, or take a coastal route along the South China Sea via Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and through Phnom Penh in Cambodia to Bangkok. Now the options narrow with the geography: we speed on down the Malay Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, the southernmost point on mainland Asia.
But water hasn’t stopped us so far, so let’s continue by train through a tunnel under the strategic Strait of Malacca onto Indonesia’s largest island of Sumatra, then over the Sunda Strait bridge to reach the capital, Jakarta, on Java, the world’s most populous island with more than 150 million people. Just a bit farther and we’re on the beaches of Bali, from which we can catch a cruise ship to Australia. If we choose the fastest routes and don’t miss any connections, we will have traversed the entire Eurasian landmass—Scotland to Singapore, and then some—in about a week.
And yet we’re only halfway done. Instead of the Antipodes, from Beijing we should actually head north through Vladivostok and eastern Siberia. If you fancy sushi, we could take a bridge to Sakhalin Island and pass through a 45-kilometer tunnel to Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, passing seamlessly southward across Japan’s major islands on high-speed Shinkansen trains. When we reach Kyushu, we’ll loop back through a 120-kilometer undersea tunnel to Busan, zipping northward through the Korean peninsula back toward Siberia to continue our next 13,000-kilometer segment that takes us parallel to the volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula and through a 200-kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait that emerges in Alaska and takes us to Fairbanks. From there, of course, it’s straight south to Juneau and Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. California, Texas, Illinois, and New York all want more Acela Express high-speed rail (though it’s planned to hit only about two hundred kilometers per hour, about half as fast as the Japanese). Still, we’ll make it from Pacific to Atlantic across the Lower 48 in two days. All that’s left is to catch a zippy but smooth hovercraft to London, followed by any of the more than twenty daily trains headed to Edinburgh. A journey around the world—as promised.
One could fly almost seamlessly along this itinerary, drive much of it too except for the oceans, and indeed eventually do it the old-fashioned way on iron railroads. Many of these routes already exist, and all of them will in due course. The more connections there are, the more options we have.
“Geography is destiny,” one of the most famous adages about the world, is becoming obsolete. Centuries-old arguments about how climate and culture condemn some societies to fail, or how small countries are forever trapped and subject to the whims of larger ones, are being overturned. Thanks to global transportation, communications, and energy infrastructures—highways, railways, airports, pipelines, electricity grids, Internet cables, and more—the future has a new maxim: “Connectivity is destiny.”
Seeing the world through the lens of connectivity generates new visions of how we organize ourselves as a species. Global infrastructures are morphing our world system from divisions to connections and from nations to nodes. Infrastructure is like a nervous system connecting all parts of the planetary body; capital and code are the blood cells flowing through it. More connectivity creates a world beyond states, a global society greater than the sum of its parts. Much as the world evolved from vertically integrated empires to horizontally interdependent states, now it is graduating toward a global network civilization whose map of connective corridors will supersede traditional maps of national borders. Each continental zone is already becoming an internally integrated mega-region (North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Arabia, South Asia, East Asia) with increasingly free trade coupled with intense connectivity across their thriving city-states.
At the same time, maps of connectivity are also better at revealing geopolitical dynamics among superpowers, city-states, stateless companies, and virtual communities of all kinds as they compete to capture resources, markets, and mind share. We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries—whose main purpose will be to protect supply chains rather than borders. Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century.
Connectivity is nothing less than our path to collective salvation. Competition over connectivity is by its nature less violent than international border conflicts, providing an escape hatch from historical cycles of great power conflict. Furthermore, connectivity has made previously unimaginable progress possible as resources and technologies move much more easily to where they are needed, while people can more quickly relocate to escape natural disasters or to cities for economic opportunity. Better connectivity allows societies to diversify where their imports come from and where their exports go. Connectivity is therefore how we make the most of our geography. The grand story of human civilization is more than just tragic cycles of war and peace or economic booms and busts. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward connectivity.
Bridges to Everywhere
The central fact of the age we live in is that every country, every market, every medium of communication, every natural resource is connected.
—
Simon Anholt, The Good Country Party
Connectivity is the new meta-pattern of our age. Like liberty or capitalism, it is a world-historical idea, one that gestates, spreads, and transforms over a long timescale and brings about epochal changes. Despite the acute unpredictability that afflicts our world today, we can be adequately certain of current mega-trends such as rapid urbanization and ubiquitous technology. Every day, for the first time in their lives, millions of people switch on mobile phones, log on to the Web, move into cities, or fly on an airplane. We go where opportunity and technology allow. Connectivity is thus more than a tool; it is an impulse.
No matter which way we connect, we do so through infrastructure. While the word “infrastructure” is less than a century old, it represents nothing less than our physical capacity for global interaction. Engineering advances have made new infrastructures possible that were the dreams of previous generations. Over a century ago, crucial geographic interventions such as the Suez and Panama Canals reshaped global navigation and trade. Since the nineteenth century, Ottoman sultans aspired to construct a tunnel that would connect Istanbul’s European and Asian sides. Now Turkey has both the Marmaray tunnel that opened in 2013 and freight railways and oil and gas pipelines that are strengthening its position as a key corridor between Europe and China. Turkey has been called the country where continents collide; now it is the country where continents connect. The early twentieth-century Japanese emperor Taisho also sought to link Honshu and northern Hokkaido Island, but only in the 1980s did it complete the Seikan Tunnel, which traverses fifty-four kilometers (including twenty-three kilometers under the seabed) and carries Shinkansen high-speed trains. Once the tunnels to Sakhalin and South Korea are complete, Japan won’t truly be an island anymore.
We are in only an early phase of reengineering the planet to facilitate surging flows of people, commodities, goods, data, and capital. Indeed, the next wave of transcontinental and intercontinental mega-infrastructures is even more ambitious: an interoceanic highway across the Amazon from São Paulo to Peru’s Pacific port of San Juan de Marcona, bridges connecting Arabia to Africa, a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska, polar submarine cables on the Arctic seabed from London to Tokyo, and electricity grids transferring Saharan solar power under the Mediterranean to Europe. Britain’s exclave of Gibraltar will be the mouth of a tunnel under the Mediterranean to Tangier in Morocco, from which a new high-speed rail extends down the coast to Casablanca. Even where continents are not physically attaching to each other, ports and airports are expanding to absorb the massive increase in cross-continental flows.
None of these mega-infrastructures are “bridges to nowhere.” Those that already exist have added trillions of dollars of value to the world economy. During the Industrial Revolution, it was the combination of higher productivity and trade that raised Britain’s and America’s growth rates to 1–2 percent for more than a century. As the Nobel laureate Michael Spence has argued, the internal growth of economies would never have reached today’s rates without the cross-border flows of resources, capital, and technology. Because only one-quarter of world trade is between countries that share a border, connectivity is the sine qua non for growth both within countries and across them. Connectivity itself—alongside demographics, capital markets, labor productivity, and technology—is thus a major source of momentum in the global economy. Think of the world like a watch whose battery is constantly charged through kinetic energy: The more you walk, the more power it has. For all the effort we expend calculating the value of national economies, therefore, it is time to devote as much attention to the value of connectivity between them.
There is no better investment than connectivity. Government spending on physical infrastructure—what is known as gross fixed capital formation—such as roads and bridges, and social infrastructure, such as medical care and education, is considered investment (rather than consumption) because it saves costs in the long run and generates widespread benefits for society. Large-scale spending on infrastructure was relatively low for most of the nineteenth century, accounting for about 5–7 percent of England’s GDP and peaking at 10 percent on the eve of World War I.1 The United States ramped up its infrastructure investment to almost 20 percent of GDP from the late nineteenth century through World War I, enabling it to double Britain’s growth rate and become the world’s largest economy. Even though the major American and Canadian canal and railroad companies went bankrupt at the turn of the twentieth century, they left the country with an extensive transportation network that enabled continental-scale commercial expansion right up to the present.
The influential British economist John Maynard Keynes strongly argued for such public works investment as a tool of creating jobs and boosting aggregate demand, policies adopted by President Roosevelt during the Depression. From World War II onward, fixed capital formation rose like a west-to-east wave from under 20 percent of GDP to over 30 percent. Germany’s 1950s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), Japan’s 1960s 9 percent growth rates, the “Asian Tigers” of the 1970s and 1980s (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and then China starting in the 1990s, where it topped 40 percent of GDP and powered sustained growth of close to 10 percent for the past three decades. China embraced Keynes like nobody’s business.
The past several decades prove beyond any doubt that connectivity is how regions move from economies valued in the billions to the trillions. Furthermore, infrastructure is a foundation of social mobility and economic resilience: Urban societies with ample transportation networks (such as southern China) rebounded much faster from the 2007–8 financial crisis, with people able to move efficiently to find work. Spain was among the hardest hit by the eurozone recession but thanks to its high-quality infrastructure is today Europe’s fastest-growing economy. As global debt surges to record levels while interest rates remain at historical lows, the world’s finances should be directed toward underwriting productive connectivity rather than ethereal derivatives.
For a massive country such as America to live up to its self-proclaimed destiny, it too must spend much more on connectivity. Historically, U.S. infrastructure spending has returned almost $2 for every $1 invested, but investment has been tailing off for decades. Today America’s clogged roads and tunnels cause wasteful congestion, its crumbling bridges cause accidents and delays, and its ailing ports and refineries lack both the efficiency and the capacity to meet global demand. Since the financial crisis, dozens of prominent economists including Yale’s Robert Shiller have advocated infrastructure-led investment as a way to create jobs and boost economic confidence. The American Society of Civil Engineers has called for $1.6 trillion in spending for an overhaul of America’s transportation system. Only now—and just before it is too late—is such a national overhaul near the top of America’s agenda with proposals for the creation of a national infrastructure bank.
The same is true across the world: The gap between the supply and the demand for infrastructure has never been greater. As the world population climbs toward eight billion people, it has been living off the infrastructure stock meant for a world of three billion. But only infrastructure and all the industries that benefit from it can collectively create the estimated 300 million jobs needed in the coming two decades as populations grow and urbanize. The World Bank argues that infrastructure is the “missing link” in achieving the Milennium Development Goals related to poverty, health, education, and other objectives, and infrastructure has been formally included in the latest Sustainable Development Goals ratified in 2015.3 The transition beyond export-led growth toward higher value-added services and consumption begins with infrastructure investment.
We are finally witnessing a massive global commitment to infrastructure. Cities and highways, pipelines and ports, bridges and tunnels, telecom towers and Internet cables, electricity grids and sewage systems, and other fixed assets command about $3 trillion per year in global spending, well over the $1.75 trillion spent annually on defense, and the gap is growing. Infrastructure outlays are projected to rise to $9 trillion per year by 2025 (with Asia leading the way).
The global connectivity revolution has begun. Already we have installed a far greater volume of lines connecting people than dividing them: Our infrastructural matrix today includes approximately 64 million kilometers of highways, 2 million kilometers of pipelines, 1.2 million kilometers of railways, and 750,000 kilometers of undersea Internet cables that connect our many key population and economic centers. By contrast, we have only 250,000 kilometers of international borders. By some estimates, mankind will build more infrastructures in the next forty years alone than it has in the past four thousand. The interstate puzzle thus gives way to a lattice of infrastructure circuitry. The world is starting to look a lot like the Internet.
Seeing Is Believing
Astronauts in low Earth orbit (about 215 kilometers high) have snapped stunning pictures of our majestic planet. They’ve captured natural features like oceans, mountains, ice caps, and glaciers, and even caught glimpses of man-made structures. It turns out that the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt are rather difficult to discern without high-performance zoom lenses, but more modern engineering such as megacities, ultra-long bridges, and straight desert highways are easy to spot. The Kennecott copper mine in Utah and the Mir diamond mine in Siberia stretch several kilometers across, making their stepped terrace structure noticeable as well. The two hundred square kilometers of greenhouses in AlmerÃa in southern Spain, where up to half of Europe’s annual demand for fresh fruits and vegetables is grown, is unmistakable, especially as sunlight reflects off their plastic roofs.
What about borders? How many of those are physically robust enough to see? Many political borders are formed by natural environmental features, reminding us of nature’s fundamental role in shaping human settlement and cultural differentiation. The border between North and South Korea is best seen when the sun goes down, when the bright lights of the South contrast with the darkness of the North. The most visible border between any two large countries is undoubtedly between India and Pakistan. Stretching diagonally for twenty-nine hundred kilometers from the Arabian Sea to Kashmir, it also stands out from space at night due to the 150,000 floodlights that form a bright orange blaze.
The maps hanging in our classrooms and offices would lead us to believe that all borders were as robust as the Indo-Pakistani border. Yet North America’s two major borders mask the deeper reality of growing connectivity. The three-thousand-kilometer U.S.-Mexico border crosses beaches and deserts and along the Rio Grande River but also between cities that have the same name on either side such as Nogales, Naco, and Tecate. Even with haphazardly patrolled security fencing on the American side, it is still the most frequently traversed border in the world, with over 350 million legal crossings annually (more than the entire population of the United States). The U.S.-Canada border that stretches from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean is the world’s longest at almost nine thousand kilometers, but 300,000 people and over $1 billion in daily trade traverse the almost twenty major border crossings.
There are many places where borders are stiffening: Israel’s security barrier, the fifteen-kilometer Évros River fence in Greece, and the two-hundred-kilometer Bulgarian barbed-wire fence aimed at curbing illegal immigrants, among others. And yet all of these borders—and even more unfriendly ones—remain porous. And indeed, almost all such fences are terribly costly and ineffective responses to problems that borders cannot solve.
If borders are meant to separate territories and societies, then why are ever more populations clustering along them? It is a particular irony that our maps show mostly political borders rather than border demographics and economics, which are the embodiment of the anti-border nature of many border regions. Most of Canada’s population lives near the U.S. border and benefits from proximity to the American market. Since 2010, both the Mexican and the U.S. populations on their border have grown by 20 percent.
Even more ironic: The best place to see how connectivity fundamentally changes relations from hostility to cooperation is borders. The thriving business between India and Pakistan and many other pairs of antagonists is a reminder that borders are rarely the solid lines we see on maps but rather porous filters for exchange. In these and dozens of other cases, we increasingly work around our borders—and build straight across them—more than we bow to them. Ultimately, from the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall—and eventually the Cypriot Green Line and the Korean demilitarized zone—forces far more powerful than these barriers prevail. As Alexandra Novosseloff has written, “A wall ends its life as a tourist attraction.”
In today’s world, territorial boundaries don’t even really capture the geography of borders: Airports may be far inland but contain borders within them, while cyber-security forces patrol technology infrastructures that stretch far across borders. Even if political borders remain physically robust, the world has still become more borderless as countries eliminate extraneous visa requirements, currencies are exchangeable in real time at ATMs, content from almost anywhere can be accessed online, and the cost of phone calls drops to zero due to Skype and Viber. The more societies trade and communicate—and depend on each other for food, water, and energy—the less we can pretend that borders are the most important lines on the map.
The absence of the full panoply of man-made infrastructure on our maps gives the impression that borders trump other means of portraying human geography. But today the reverse is true: Borders matter only where they matter; other lines matter more most of the time. Hardly anywhere are they a more significant factor in the fate of nations than what crosses them. We are building a new world order—literally.
Most helpful customer reviews
95 of 98 people found the following review helpful.
6-Star Utterly Brilliant Survey and Strategy
By Robert David STEELE Vivas
The author of this book has done something no one else has done – I say this as the reviewer of over 2,000 non-fiction books at Amazon across 98 categories. For the first time, in one book, we have a very clear map of what is happening where in the way of economic and social development; a startlingly diplomatic but no less crushing indictment of nation-state and militaries; and a truly inspiring game plan for what we should all be demanding from countries, cities, commonwealths, communities, and companies, in the way of future investments guided by a strategy for creating a prosperous world at peace.
This is a nuanced deeply stimulating book that makes it clear that China’s grand strategy of building infrastructure has beaten the US strategy of threatening everyone with a dysfunctional military that crushes hope and destroys wealth everywhere it goes; that connectivity (cell phones, the Internet, roads, high-speed rail, tunnels, bridges, and ferries) is the accelerator for wealth creation by the five billion poor that most Western states and corporations ignore; and it provides to me more surprises, more factoids I did not know, more insights – than any five to ten other books I have read over time.
At one point it occurred to me that in some ways the author is our generation’s successor to Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, and Robert Kaplan, combined. I really am deeply impressed, in part because the author’s insights come from years of crisscrossing the world and touch reality in a hands-on manner not achieved by any diplomatic, intelligence, commercial, media, or academic network in existence today; and in part because the book comes with 38 glorious color maps that are each alone worth the price of the book [an appendix points to 38 web sites that supplement the book and are a discovery journey of their own].
This is the best book – the deepest and the most useful – the author has produced to date. This is a book that should be read by every prime minister, president, senator, organizational chief – and by those who aspire to such positions. Many people publish content – few publish context – this book has both.
I have over ten pages of notes – below are just 4 quotes and 10 insights from among the hundred or so I took notes on – and strongly recommend this books for all libraries, all war colleges, all university overview courses on civilization and its malcontents.
QUOTE (175): “America’s nominal power is unsurpassed, but subtract for deterrence, distance, and competence, and its effective power is less formidable than appears on paper.”
QUOTE (199): “Eurasia represents two-thirds of the world’s population, economy, and trade, and that is before it genuinely fuses together into a connected mega-continent through voluminous durable infrastructures that will smooth and speed commerce.”
QUOTE (225): “No amount of ‘soft power’ can substitute for cutting a fair deal.”
QUOTE (287): “Guangzhou’s first lesson is the importance of administrative harmony. … The second lesson from the delta region’s evolution is leveraging openness.”
INSIGHTS:
3/4 of the world’s population lacks basic infrastructure and utilities – this is the center of gravity going forward.
China has 2,000 commercial maritime vessels compared to 200 for the USA at the same time that Chinese high-speed rail is the 21st century alternative to air and road travel around the world.
China also has multiple sucking chest wounds, including the loss of half its rivers such that its population has one fifth the per capita water compared to the rest of the world; buildings that last fifteen years instead of thirty-five.
Devolution (smaller sovereignty/control zones) is inherently both democratic and efficient – we are migrating from sovereign space to admin space, in which hybrid governance where all non-government players have equal voice and vote) removes friction and increases flow.
Global warming is good for Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Russia – the Arctic is the next frontier, and ideally will be kept demilitarized - a priority championed by Norway.
Iran is the most connected nation in the Middle East.
Muslim violence in the Middle East is politically fostered and neither inherent in Islam nor ideological.
Russia, for lack of infrastructure, is losing swaths of its previously controlled territory, citizens, and resources to Europe in the East and China in the West; Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Russia are all under-performing for lack of investment in infrastructure (communications and transportation).
Special Economic Zones (SEZ) represent the unbundling and remixing of territory and resources, the relative demise of the nation-state in the face of superior agility at the city-state level.
Systemic change happens every couple of centuries – we are on the cusp of a global systemic revolution that will change every paradigm from economics to governance to lifestyle.
I have one caveat about this book, easily corrected in future printings and translations. The book comes with the most incomplete index I have ever encountered in a book of this quality and depth. If the book as a whole is a six-star work, the index is at best a 2 and barely so.
Readers interested in going into depth on any particular threat or policy (e.g. poverty as a threat or water as a policy) can find my 2000+ summary reviews online sorted by category at Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog.
Below are ten books I recommend as supporting complements to this great work.
Transforming the Dream: Ecologism and the Shaping of an Alternative American Vision
The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet)
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
The Lessons of History
Homeland Earth : A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences)
A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It
World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It
Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
God and Science: Coming Full Circle?
Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure
ROBERT David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A lot of anecdotes and stories, but not very deep
By Michael T.
Parag Khanna’s Connectography follows the rise of global supply chains and argues economic links between cities are supplanting national and subnational borders as the most relevant way to organize the global economy. He traces supply chains’ impact on development, culture, and ideas. The premise is persuasive, but Khanna is the Tom Friedman of our generation, writing with an entertaining urgency where absolutely everything is new, emerging, and without precedent. Like Friedman’s writing, this book is a vomit of self-important stories (“at a breakfast in Davos with the President of Mongolia…”) and anecdotes of a changing world that sometimes conflict and sometimes defy further scrutiny (a rail link under the Bering Sea is “planned”? Really?), each of which makes you wonder how much of the rest of the book is similarly over-hyped. I did appreciate the diversity of anecdotes such that almost every country in the world at least gets a mention along with a number of local economic issues rarely covered in the US. The urgency of the writing does make the reading fun and fly by without too much thought. It’s good for a geopolitical/economic beach read but don’t expect too much else besides punditry.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
How to Rediscover Our Planet through the Prism of Functional Maps
By Serge J. Van Steenkiste
Parag Khanna argues with much eloquence that the world should strive toward what he calls the Pax Urbanica. By 2030, over 70% of the world’s population will live in cities that are mostly located within fifty miles of the sea. The author speculates that these coastal cities would gain significantly more from supply chain connectivity than from imperial hegemony. The wealth of information that Mr. Khanna marshals for his enterprise will not leave even the most blasé readers indifferent. To his credit, he illustrates this emerging world with superb functional maps that could replace, or at least, complement the existing political maps, instruments of propaganda by excellence. These maps alone are worth buying the book under review. Hopefully, most of the humanity will increasingly embrace this world of connectivity and flows instead of falling back on convenient, opportunistic divisions.
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