Imperialism addiction

 Since the end of the cold war, we witnessed a series of events in which revolutionary policy changes were justified with a recall to imperialism. We first experienced the Russian attacks on Georgia, followed by the ones on Ukraine and hybrid war fare. In the meantime, we saw the Brexit in which the longing for being the centre of power was stronger than the rationale of being part of a huge and nearby market. Recently we can add Trump and his MAGA policies in which the already enormous space of the United States is to be enlarged with Canada, Greenland and a decisive say in the whole Western Hemisphere. Even states with a neglectable number of people such as Isreal openly aim for a Greater Israel, again based on historical imperialistic justifications. These four actors do not hesitate to use violence to reach their ambitions, be it literally such as in the case of Russia and Isreal or through exertion such as the US and in a lesser form the UK and even France.

The arguments of imperialists are always the same, saving civilization is the most heard, combined with a need for resources for eternal economic growth.

The problem on the civilization argument is of course that imperial realms tend to wipe out diversity in cultures and thus limit the civilization they proclaim to save. Diversity allows civilization to adapt to new realities, often pushed by technological innovations. In Europe Estonia handles the digital economy different than Greece, for example, thus making useful experiences in the topic which later can be copied by a more conservative populace. The diversity of, in this case Europe, thus helps to have simultaneous experiments with new technology at limited scale. If we look at the reality of the US and Russia, two large realms, we see a constant attempt to crush the cultural diversity of the large area, leading to, for example, houses or infrastructure not apt for the local climate or landscape as is it always optimized for the practise in the economic centre. Americans in the warm south have eating habits of the north, too rich in calories and Russians drink too much both in summer and winter. If the American south was a separate country, it could have evolved to eating habits apt for the hot climate. These imperia do not have habits that help their periphery to flourish, and I think most Russians and Americans emotionally feel this when they visit another country with another climate and landscape than their economic centres. They just cannot survive and want to go back to their economic centre. The American interest in Greenland is therefore problematic, very few American can thrive in a cold and dark landscape, using sledges and canoes. They will feel miserable in Greenland and long for Florida, leading to people who come only to extract resources and return as soon as their wallet it permits. We see the same happening with the Russians that depopulate Siberia. Extreme climates require very specific cultures to be happy and make the territory thrive. Temperate climate big city people will fail in the desert, the artic or the high mountains, and if they can exercise power over those areas, they will make destructive decisions, leading to dams, mines or factory fishing. Local people might also build dams, mines, or fish, but at scale, not destroying their ancestral lands, since they feel linked to the land.

Imperialism was since the neo colonisation of the European Empires seen as mostly a negative force. It brought infrastructure, schooling and a health system but mostly after whipping out the existing infrastructure, belief system and education of the territories it proclaimed. The new imperialists seem to be unaware of the past negative experience and take criticism more as a negative element leading to the demise of their respective empires.

In Geography we study the optimal size of a country as function of opportunities its geography provides. The problem is that many aspects of the economy might lead to a different size or administrative optimal model, while military arguments might break through it in a disruptive manner. The military geography focusses on seas, swamps, mountains and deserts as natural barriers, thus diminishing the cost of defence, although this with modern warfare seems to be less relevant.

If we optimize for agriculture then we need the scale for the mechanised input, a tractor factory, manure factory, fertile soil, sunlight and heat and water supply. Since the fertile soil, sunlight and water supply cannot be relocated we can map the agricultural regions of the world. Multiply this by its surface to understand whether a manure and tractor factory can function competitive, and you have the size of an independent agricultural production system. The selling of the goods might also benefit from a certain market size, but in an open world market the competiveness of the agricultural produce would make up for it. It is the best real-life test whether the agricultural region is of the optimal geographical size.

Apart from a realistic defensive capacity and abundant agricultural production, self governing makes sense also with other human ambitions at play. It is useful if the various people on a territory can talk to each other, share cultural traits that are compatible with each other and can work together, also by defining projects for the future. Measuring whether these conditions are met can be through immigration statistics, statistics on violence in society and being able to live a long life. Also statistics on the population pyramid, the confidence of people to start and raise a family are amongst these and currently often quoted by right wing politicians in the last years. One could say that if one of these statistics produces an outlier, in both positive as well as negative sense, then the region is highly intertwined with another region and de facto not self governing. If we look at prosperous megacities, often a result from past or still present empires, such as New York, Moscow, Being, Paris, London or Madrid, then we can explain such cities not without understanding the inflow of people from far away regions, that helped to make the city flourish. Empirical heartlands not only take resources from the periphery, but they also take in people from the deprived regions of the empire. Countries like Italy and Germany, that only in the second half of the 19th century unified, are characterized by a lot of medium size cities and a capital of reasonable size compared to those. Implying that the territory of these countries is inhabited fully, thus making the exploitation of the county more even. The prosperity differences between Italy and Germany, versus old empirical countries such as France, Spain and the United Kingdom, can be in part explained by the uneven usage of the territory of the latter three. The French heartland between Orleans and Lyon is virtually empty, in Spain only the coast and the region around Madrid is developed and in the United Kingdom, the North and West of the country are as empty as Norway. Not being able to govern your territory ultimately leads to migration of aspiring young people to the power centre, and if the latter is only one city, then over time the periphery will be void of people with talent to lead and govern.

In Europe we find also several self-governing islands as well as islands that are part of a country, sometimes with some autonomy and sometimes just part of the main country. Such differences can help us to understand in how far self governing helps to make the island prosper. The Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and Italian islands tend to have autonomy, while the French, United Kingdom and Greek have this to a lesser extent. We also have independent island states such as Ireland, Iceland, Malta and Cyprus, but all having very distinct geographies and history. For all the big islands in Europe we can observe that young people tend to go to the mainland for studies, even if that implies to move to another country. The islands tend to attract pensioners or people who aspire a quieter pace of live. Both groups will not make the island economy flourish in the classical and exploitive sense. Islands with limited self-governing power, such as Corsica or Crete see this ‘replacement’ phenomena stronger than Sardinia or Mallorca. Aspiring economic ideas are virtually absent in these dependent islands and rarely some new experiment economic idea arises. Self governing islands like Iceland or Cyprus, on the contrary, can develop policies to attire certain industries or specialize on being a tax-haven for a certain sector of the global (banking) economy. These tricks do not help to make their landscapes and the resources therein, flourish, the limited scale of logistics will still hinder this, unless a quality niche product is found or subsidized such as bananas in the Canary Islands or port from Madeira.

On the continent the logistic curse has a lesser impact, and governments can create the road and railway infrastructure to make their territory logistically competitive. Germany, Poland and France even have an extensive inland waterway system which is the most competitive way to transport heavy or bulk goods, thus largely explaining their competitive edge on hosting industries depending on this.

In summary we can conclude that building an empire tend to result in loss of efficiency to exploit, or better, write use, the territory in its optimal manner. An empire risks to create mega-cities, populated by people disconnected from nature and the production of food. These people tend to make harmful decisions, if in power, for regions of which they do not understand the natural and cultural boundaries. The size of a self-governing area can subsequently be defined of an area large enough to produce food, not making one fully dependent on imports (making the self-governing subject to be manipulated), having logistics allowing to move people and goods within half a day between the various regions of the territory and having enough people to provide all types of education, for arts to medicine, to physics and manual professions, in order to keep the youth within a half day travel from their families and interested to develop their region of birth. The delineation of the territories is best done using natural and/or language borders, although the latter can be overcome if the culture of all parties is not presuming to be ‘better’ than the neighbouring culture. On the natural boundaries it must be mentioned that rivers tend to be barriers that can bring people and their goods together, also the catchment of a river system, the watershed, requires collaborative management. Therefore, natural barriers are limited to mountain ranges, big lakes, swamps and natural forests. Access to a seaport is equally important, although a region can flourish without producing goods for the world market and paying a bit more for imports, if specialized high-value goods are produced. In that sense the optimal size of a self-governing territory is manipulatable by economic policies and traditions itself.

What is important is to keep in mind is that imperialism ultimately leads to impoverishment of the periphery and therefore to gradual decline of the imperium. Being nostalgic to an empire is therefore a deathly disease, because the downfall of the empire, mostly through a dramatic period of lawlessness is build in in this method to govern societies. Free collaboration can lead to large regions in the world in which people and/or goods can move freely, the freedom giving each self-governing territory the possibility to fine-tune is laws and treaties to avoid young talent to migrate and families to break up. The size of the territory thus depends on the resources we can exploit, sustainably, otherwise the territory can be free only for the time the resource is available. The amount of people living in the territory is another important threshold. Big disequilibria in this might provoke intimidation, extorsion and ultimately war. Therefore, we must agree worldwide on a maximum. A minimum is more problematic as island states or states with otherwise an exceptional geography such as high mountains might lead to a very small number of people governing themselves, again since outsiders have no clue on how to manage such extreme geographies. The maximum we can point to how much young people are needed to make a full schooling system function. We can infer this number with the number of young students fleeing small countries to learn specific professions. Professions such a in medicine and infrastructure engineering should be provided by a self-governing territory, otherwise too many essential young people will go abroad and start their families there, thus leaving the territory in the grip of foreign hands for essential functions. Making the self-governing aspect subject to outsider’s leverage. One can think of a maximum of around 5 million people, as countries such as Denmark or Finland tend to function well regarding keeping their youth in the country. Note that this maximum is problematic, as many megacities already surpass this threshold. With the population decrease, that occurs mainly in such areas, as family life is disrupted in such places, we can try to reshape these mega-cities over time. A policy of active repopulation of the hinterland in existing cities to a maximum of 300.000 inhabitants could shape the long-term future of these unliveable places. The future of Megacities in a world where self governance of territories is the main objective is problematic. They are likely to become relicts of a violent past.

Two ultimate questions remain, first then whether such free unions of self-governing territories can build pyramids, cathedrals, airplanes, invent vaccines or direct missiles to space. Whether humankind can excel without a shining metropolis. And the other question is whether war within the union or between unions is excluded. Intelligence, ambition and wisdom are not bound to geographical optimalizations, if they were then Einstein should not be born in Switzerland and Mandela and Gandhi could not evolve in South Africa. The historical world empires did not give us a statistical relevant increase of human capacity within their realms. Talent might thrive on scale but is not created by it. So, if the unions of the world can provoke scale for certain ambitions, then those ambitions can be realised.