Prisoners of Geography

What the British have now is a collective memory of greatness. That memory is what persuades many people on the island that if something in the world needs to be done, then Britain should be among the countries which do it. The British remain within Europe, and yet outside it; it is an issue still to be settled.

Forty years after joining the EU, the British decided to hold a referendum on whether to remain a part of it. The majority voted Leave, but the result could well threaten the unity of the UK as it revealed divides across the union. In particular, the majority in Scotland voted to Remain, and so the Leave victory has once again raised the question of Scotland’s independence; on the other hand, the drive for Scottish independence may be impeded by the supposed difficulties of rejoining the EU. Brussels has already made it clear to Catalonia, in response to the crisis that started in 2017, that if it were to leave Spain, it might take more than a decade to become an EU member. If the same applied to Scotland, it would then be out of the UK and out of the EU – and for a small nation with limited resources that would be an uncomfortable position.

Catalonia is symptomatic of something that was subsumed during the heyday of the EU – the feelings of smaller nations, and even regions, within the nation states. With these areas having been ignored for decades, the nationalism on display in the Catalonian crisis took many Europeans by surprise. Catalonia does not want to leave the EU, nor does Scotland, but significant numbers of the electorates are prepared to risk that in order to leave a united Spain and a United Kingdom. The 2014 Scottish referendum on independence resulted in a 55.3 per cent vote against it, but the issue has not gone away – neither there nor in Catalonia.

The two main issues that caused the British to edge towards the exit door are related: sovereignty and immigration. Anti-EU opinion, backed by some EU waverers, has been fuelled by the amount and type of laws enacted by the EU, which the UK, as part of the membership deal, had to abide by. For example, headlines were made about foreign criminals convicted of serious crimes in the UK who cannot be deported because of rulings from the European Court of Justice.

At the same time, the wave of economic immigrants and refugees arriving in Europe from the Middle East and Africa has also driven anti-EU feeling as many of those migrants want to reach Britain, and it is believed they have been encouraged to so do by the EU countries through which they pass.

Prejudice against immigrants always rises during times of economic recession, such as recently suffered in Europe, and the effects have been seen right across the continent and resulted in the rise of right-wing political parties, all of which militate against pan-nationalism and thus weaken the fabric of the EU.

Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity, salt, but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave-taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.

Back in the great capital cities of London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon, the Europeans then took maps of the contours of Africa’s geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies. In between these lines they wrote words such as Middle Congo or Upper Volta and called them countries. These lines were more about how far which power’s explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves. Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them. From this they are making a modern home and, in some cases, vibrant, connected economies.

There are now fifty-six countries in Africa. Since the ‘winds of change’ of the independence movement blew through the mid twentieth century, some of the words between the lines have been altered – for example, Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe – but the borders are, surprisingly, mostly intact. However, many encompass the same divisions they did when first drawn, and those formal divisions are some of the many legacies colonialism bequeathed the continent.

Looking further ahead, as we continue to break out of the prison of our geography into the universe, the political struggles will persist in space, at least for the foreseeable future.

A human being first burst through the top layer of the stratosphere in 1961 when twenty-seven-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made it into space aboard Vostok 1. It is a sad reflection on humanity that the name of a fellow Russian called Kalashnikov is far better known.

Gagarin, Buzz Aldrin and many others are the descendants of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, pioneers who pushed the boundaries and who changed the world in ways they could not have imagined in their own lifetimes. Whether for better or worse is not the point; they discovered new opportunities and new spaces in which peoples would compete to make the most of what nature had put there. It will take generations, but in space, too, we will plant our flags, ‘conquer’ territory, claim ground and overcome the barriers the universe puts in our way.

There are now about 1,100 functioning satellites in space, and at least 2,000 non-functioning ones. The Russians and Americans launched approximately 2,400 of the total, about 100 have come from Japan and a similar number from China, followed by a host of other countries with far fewer. Below them are the space stations, where for the first time people live and work semi-permanently outside the confines of earth’s gravity. Further on, at least five American flags are thought to be still standing on the surface of the moon, and further still, much further, our machines have made it out past Mars and Jupiter, some heading way beyond what we can see and are trying to understand.

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When we are reaching for the stars, the challenges ahead are such that we will perhaps have to come together to meet them: to travel the universe not as Russians, Americans or Chinese but as representatives of humanity. But so fat, although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still imprisoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the ‘other’, and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.