Monthly Archives: May 2021

The Power of Geography: 10 maps that reveal the future of our world, by Tim Marshall

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Summary: a further compelling lesson on geopolitics from Tim Marshall who highlights some of the challenges – and opportunities – that humanity will face in the coming decades

The Power of Geography is a follow up to Marshall’s magisterial introduction to geopolitics, Prisoners of Geography.

In this volume he focuses on some emerging issues, including how we as human beings will explore space. He also discerns potential for conflict arising in important parts of the world, such as the Sahel and Ethiopia. These places are often little understood to outsiders. But issues arising there are likely to have a huge bearing on the course of human events in the coming years as ancient national aspirations, global warming and competition for water forces political choices that will ripple out across the planet.

I regretted that Prisoners of Geography had no discussion of Britain and Ireland. This book does have a discussion of the UK, currently a leading contender for the title of most bizarrely deluded country in the world.

It has earned this unenviable accolade by deciding to make policy for itself with almost no discernible consideration of geography. Brexit, the fevered wet dream of a few disaster capitalists and frothing xenophobes, has now become the guiding principle of UK policy. Marshall pays little attention to the disastrous impact of this policy on Irish peace, which was built on the foundations of the UK’s and Ireland’s common European Union membership. But he does note how it has added impetus to the Scottish desire for independence. This consequence of Brexit would, Marshall observes, likely cause greater damage to the UK’s international standing than Brexit itself.

If that happens it would be a deserved fate. Over the past half decade the UK seems to have embraced a vision in which international rule of law should not apply to it. Hence its legal commitments are today hardly worth the paper they are written on. Such rogue states are not deserving of respect.

Of course, Marshall has a much broader perspective in this book than the repercussions of Brexit. His discussions also encompass Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Spain, Greece and even Australia. Each chapter is filled with fascinating historical and geographic detail and a clear perspective on their geopolitical implications. It is an outstanding companion to Prisoners of Geography and an essential book for anyone interested in current affairs and the issues that may confront us in the coming years.

Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis, by Gerald Hanley

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Summary: An exquisite book about an unusual aspect of the Second World War in a part of the world that is still little known and understood

Warriors is Gerald Hanley’s account of his experiences during the Second World War when he was posted to Somalia as an officer with the King’s African Rifles. Somali friends have described it to me as the best book about Somalia written by a foreigner.

Hanley was not a typical British officer. An Irish Catholic from Liverpool, he was politically anti-colonialist, and so had an instinctive sympathy for those on the receiving end of the British Imperial project. He seems also to have had a particular fascination with Somalia and the Somalis. He appreciated their fierce individualism, and perhaps had some sense of kinship with them: the stories he tells, of their raiding, their magic and their poetry, has, for me, echoes of the Ulster cycle of legends from Iron Age Ireland.

Later Hanley led Somalis in battle in Burma. He remembered how the Somalis appreciated the Japanese there. They were a rarity: an enemy that the Somalis could go hand to hand with who would not run away. 

The troops of the King’s African Rifles were from many parts of Africa and many different cultures and communities. But they were united by the common usage of “army Swahili” as their medium of communication.

Hanley reflects at one point that this common language and the experience of common purpose and mutual dependence that war brought gave him a glimpse of a community that the British Empire could have been. But of course, he was also aware that the very moment he discerned this possibility it was already too late. Such a vision was already fatally undermined by the British Empire’s original sins of theft, racism and subjugation.

But it’s a reflection that I was reminded of this week when the Scottish elections delivered a decisive mandate for a new independence referendum. In response English politicians and commentators again made assertions that Britain is “better together”. But it is far too late for this hollow argument after half a decade of concerted campaigning and government intent on proving that the UK is a singularly English project in which the hopes and fears of subordinate nations simply don’t matter. English contempt for Irish peace, for the Scots, and indeed for the rest of Europe, apart from Putin’s Russia, is hardly any foundation for a community of equals.

So, fifty years after the first publication of Warriors, the UK looks as doomed as the British Empire. That’s also probably a good thing.