The Geography, History, and Future of World Power

Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt)

Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Globe. Global. Globalization. In three simple steps we can move from a once incredible description of the shape of the world, to a measure of comprehensiveness that covers a once limitless world, and finally to a familiar process through which the once infinitely diverse peoples, natures, and places of the world are being both brought together and refashioned into a new whole. Each of these three words is a way of looking at and talking about the world, each is useful and carries a great amount of truth. But as Michael Klare's Resource Wars, and the essays collected in Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver's Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System show in their own powerful and important way, the differences between places matter when it comes to understanding history and our future.

At first sight, the importance of geography may not seem worth repeating. But a sense of place is not always easy to maintain in our global age, where we are enjoined daily to think globally, and reminded that we live in a global village, where what we do, make, buy, sell, invest, eat, drink, read, watch, surf, and otherwise consume is all made possible by a system of global trade, and as we force on ourselves the most dramatic global climate changes in perhaps 10,000 years. To see the world at the global level means seeing nothing smaller; but it is in the small, local, almost accidental details that history has its beginnings, and its being.

Consider, for example, how events in a tiny place over a period of barely five years shaped five hundred years of history and made our world what it is. In January 1492, the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic rulers of Castille, conquered the last Muslim settlement in Spain (Muslims had ruled Spain for over seven hundred years by then), expelling them and then throwing out the Jews. Flushed with victory, the new rulers agreed to support Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to find a westward route to India, and, as Columbus put it, "to see those princes and peoples and lands ... and the manner which should be used to bring about their conversion to our holy faith."

While Columbus went west looking for India and found the Americas, Ferdinand and Isabella's neighbor King Manuel I of Portugal sent a fleet of ships to find an eastward sea route to India, and in May 1498, having sailed around the southern tip of Africa, Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut, the most important trading city in Southern India.

These three events laid the basis for the next five hundred years, as Europeans fought for and fought over the rest of the world; the Spanish and Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, then the British and the French, with even the Belgians, the Italians, and the Germans getting in on the action. European empires emerged to rule the rest of the world, with collection of tribute giving way to colonial patterns of production and international trade, backed by armed force, to feed a new European political and economic order. A new social form was born, a violent, exclusionary form of the nation-state, based on a sense of identity and exercise of power that divided humankind into "people" and "natives," and further divided both on the basis of differences in language, religion, and territory.

The basis for the colonial endeavor was the search for material resources and wealth to support and strengthen the elites, economies, and armies of Europe. Colonialism and its wars are thankfully over, but, as Michael T. Klare shows in Resource Wars, struggles to control resources seen as valuable by elites within militarily powerful societies are an important basis for politics now and in the future. This time the resources are not gold and silver, spices and slaves, as they were in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries--but oil and, increasingly, natural gas and water. Using maps and tables, Klare identifies clearly the geography of these resources, showing the places that matter and making it clear why it is worth keeping a good atlas by your side when reading the newspaper.

On the map of oil and gas fields, production, and reserves, it is the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, and South China Sea that are the continents, twentieth and twenty-first century stand-ins for India, the Americas, and Africa. It is these places that are typically seen as the sites of contest for control over oil. But invert the map for a moment, as Klare does, and ask who uses the oil, who wants it, and why. The United States consumes about one quarter of all the oil used each year in the world, Western Europe is not far behind, followed at a distance by Japan, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the East Asian industrial countries. Each of them consumes more oil, mainly for transportation, heating, and electricity production, than the two and a quarter billion people of China and India combined (i.e. one third of all the people in the world).

As Klare shows, none of the oil consuming societies seem ever to have had enough oil of their own. The wars over oil in the Persian Gulf are familiar, and a dark portent for the future of the region and for other oil rich areas. Klare details the role of Britain in the early years of the twentieth century and, starting in 1943, the United States, in establishing control over the oil in this region. The goal was to ensure that Western companies would control the exploration, drilling, production, and distribution of the oil and ensure it would flow out at a price the West wanted to pay. To this end, difficult governments were overthrown, sympathetic tyrants supported, all kinds of wars fought. Seen this way, the 1990 Gulf War was both a culmination of a hundred years of history and a sign of things to come.

Reading group, Cambridge, 2001 © Linda Haas

The Caspian Sea, bordered by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan, is the site of possibly 200 billion barrels of oil (about one third of what may still be in the Persian Gulf) and even more abundant natural gas. Now that the region is free from the grip of the Soviet Union, as Klare reports, new capabilities to intervene in this still largely undeveloped hydrocarbon El Dorado are being developed: in 1997, five hundred US paratroopers took part in the longest airborne military operation ever, by flying from North Carolina to Kazakhstan and parachuted down as participants in a war game. Russia, the only big military power in the region, has put in place its own capacity for intervening. As in the Persian Gulf, the people and governments of the other countries bordering the Caspian may be the first casualties.

It is China and Japan that will likely battle it out over the oil and gas in the South China Sea. But other states in the region are not far behind in arming themselves and beginning to seize tiny islands here and there, such as the Spratlys, to establish territorial rights. It is worth keeping in mind that if it comes to war, while the battleground may be the Spratlys, the causes (as in many European wars) will include establishing who is the boss in the neighborhood.

While oil and gas are what give the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, and the South China Sea value in the present arrangement of industrial production and consumption, they are not the only resources that states and elites fight over. As oil is the basis of modern transportation, water is a key input into many industries, not least the high tech, fertilizer, pesticide, and energy industries, as well as the capital-intensive food production industry that calls itself agriculture. Klare maps the possible conflicts over access to the waters of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus, as each state tries to dam its part of these shared rivers for irrigation and electricity. As they push their people across the desert of poverty and human misery that is daily life for so many in the third world, towards a promised land that flows with Coca Cola, these governments pay no heed that they have no continents to exploit, that there is not enough water, and that even if there were the planet could not take the strain.

While Michael Klare scans the globe pointing at the numerous places where our structures of production and consumption and the capacity to exercise military, political and cultural power combine to incite violent conflict, Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver have brought together in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System a set of important essays that try to explore the dynamics of how the world's political and economic system got to be the way it is, and where it is going. They look in particular at the last two great transformations: the 18th century shift from Dutch to British hegemony in the world system, and from British to US hegemony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At a time when many see the US as triumphant after the Cold war, as a hyper-power that straddles the world, Arrighi and Silver and their contributors identify good reasons why our age is one that may be better seen as marking the growing crisis and decline of US authority in the world and a coming breakdown of the world system it has so powerfully shaped.

The four essays in Chaos and Governance are rich and provocative in their efforts to identify the forces that were at work in previous hegemonic transitions and how these throw some light on our own time. Each takes a different theme and explores how it played in these transitions; there is the role of trade and capital, the relationship between government and business, the domestic social changes that take place as a result of hegemony and serve to support it and undermine it, and lastly the presence of other powers with different civilizations in the world system.

By looking at how world-system change takes place, and how profound such changes have been, Arrighi and Silver offer a powerful alternative perspective to much of contemporary US scholarship. Based on their analysis, they offer five propositions for the future and these are such that to the careful reader the newspaper will not be the same again.

The first proposition is that we are in a hegemonic crisis, and the present global economic expansion (read globalization) is precarious and temporary and may end catastrophically. There are many signs already pointing to this.

Second, military and financial capabilities are splitting, with the US concentrating military power in its hands while its financial power is bleeding away to other states, which are catching up and in some sectors cases have passed the US in key economic areas.

Third, transnational corporations are undermining the power of states and are more able than ever to shape policy for their own ends.

Fourth, new social conflicts are likely as the promise of a global New Deal is not realized for the billions of poor in the third world, and as women and minorities strive for a more equitable role for themselves in the developed world.

Fifth, among the most profound difficulties we shall face is how the West will deal with China and the economic, political, and economic region immediately surrounding it which has become the workshop and cash-box of the world.

The final question Arrighi and Silver pose is what we can call "the American Question": shall the US, buoyed by its victory in the Cold War, seek to use its military-technological edge to try to stave off the larger decline of its authority by replacing it with an old fashioned imperial domination, or will it reach out to seek a new global commonwealth with a fair and equal place for all? Both are possible, and a choice will have to be made.

--Zia Mian is a physicist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University.

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