Volume
2, February 2005
ISSN 1552-5112
an international and interdisciplinary journal
of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
A Coloring–book
Theory of Modern War*
After all, in the post-modern world what nation is
truly sovereign?
A child of a certain age and outlook fills in each
color in a coloring book right to the edge of its area, then puts a different
color in the adjacent area. Cartographers who draw so-called “political” (as opposed to topographic) maps are just as
anal and careful. One color per country. Cartographers are not the ones,
however, who decide where countries’ boundaries will be, or at least not by
themselves, so the fact that they produce maps that are entirely filled in with
solid patches of pastel colors comes not from the cartographers’ own inventions
but from the reactions of “statesmen” looking at maps, and like little
children, insisting that they be entirely colored in. **
At least that is what statesmen of the modern era have
invariably done. Examine a world map. There are no blank spots on land (except
for frozen Antarctica); every sand-filled desert, every wind-swept mountain
top, every desolate island, or muddy swamp or impenetrable rainforest is
colored pink or green or brown or beige — one of the limited range of colors
the map-makers tend to use. It is all colored in because at one time, someone
looking at an earlier map noticed an area not sufficiently filled in with the
color of his (very rarely, her) own nation and was offended, offended deeply
enough to send expeditions to claim the territory or armed men to occupy and
attack it. (One period of map-filling in was the so-called “race for the
colonies” that filled in the maps of Africa, South–east Asia, Micronesia and
Polynesia in the late nineteenth century.)
Having your own color already on the map doesn’t
invariably work, but it often does, especially if that same color is shown in
the same place on your neighbor’s map. It also helps if both these maps are
colored much as a child’s coloring book picture would be. If many areas of
different color are right next to one another, then yet one more colored area
looks ok. But suppose an area is like a balloon, all by itself against the sky.
On the child’s drawing, it should all be one color. Similarly, if the area in
question is an island in the sea, the coloring-book habit demands that it too
should all be one color. Thus, of all the thousands of islands of all sizes in
the world, only one, Borneo, manages to have three colors (that is, parts of
three nations — Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei). Those islands with two colors,
usually divided with a straight line across the middle, can be counted on the
fingers of one hand: Hispaniola, divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti;
New Guinea, shared between Indonesia and Papua-New Guinea; East Timor,
(reluctantly) shared by Indonesia, again, and East Timor; and an island without
any straight lines, known as Ireland, (again most reluctantly) divided between
Eire and the United Kingdom. Every child knows a blob by itself should be only
one color, so that little corner of Ireland just must belong to Eire; those who wear the green just see red when
they look at the spot of orange on the otherwise uni-colored blob. They are
oh-so willing to fight, or have been until they found themselves sharing
membership in the post-modern European Union, that anti-empire that reluctantly
takes admission applications and considers them for years, rather than invading
to change map colors as in the good old days of modern warfare.
Likewise, if an area is filled in with one color
except for a few spots, the spots must be filled with the same color as well.
The exceptions —blobs in the midst of other solid colors — are also very
scarce: two in Italy (San Marino and Vatican City); two in South Africa
(Lesotho and Swaziland); and that’s it. Another map no-no is to have a country
separated into two or more parts by another country (as East and West Pakistan
were before the former separated off as Bangladesh). The only current
exceptions are the present and former superpower countries: the US with Alaska,
drivable to, only across Canada; and Russia, with the little territory of
Kaliningrad, which got separated off when the Baltic nations marched out of the
then Soviet Union in 1991.
My argument is that this distribution of colors on
the map has a logic of its own, a logic that then, with great difficulty has to
be carried out by soldiers and eventually diplomats on the ground. This logic
makes no functional sense apart from map-reading. Modern nation states are
presumed to have an ethnic unity, but they don’t, really. The island of New
Guinea is not divided into two ethnic groups down the middle, but rather into
hundreds that have developed in more or less the same spots for thousands of
years. The line on the map probably cuts right through some of them. And ethnic
territories in pre-modern society, such as pre-colonial Australia, quite
generally overlap rather than being spread out like sharply separated Crayola
colors on a neat child’s picture.
What about the thought that a modern society, at
least, needs efficiently to control a distinct territory so that it can handle
its police powers, its transportation system, its voting rights, and the like?
A country like Lesotho is at the mercy of the country that surrounds it, so it
might as well join that country, or so the argument would run. The argument
simply fails to work; plenty of countries, including for instance Eire,
Denmark, and Bhutan, are largely at the mercy of one single neighboring country
(the UK, Germany, and India respectively) in terms of convenient access to
transport and goods, etc. That doesn’t prevent them from being independent
despite the inconvenience. India could
easily swallow Bhutan, but would face international opprobrium; if there were a
similar-sized blob entirely surrounded by one color on the map, the opprobrium
would be less. Otherwise there would many more such polka-dot countries around.
I alluded above to the necessity that neighboring
countries agree on the colored blotches, like two children sharing one
coloring-book page. Generations of Argentinian schoolchildren were shown maps
with the neighboring islands, which were labeled the Malvinas, colored as part
of Argentina. For British schoolchildren, these same nearly worthless islands
were the Falklands, inhabited by a couple of thousand sheepherders, and colored
the color of the now mostly vanished British Empire. When the inept but brutal
Argentinian junta of the 1980s was in need of a way to enlarge its popularity,
nothing seemed easier than “rescuing” the Malvinas for the mother blob. The
actual worth of this place to Britain was so little it had already turned over
to Argentina the task of supplying the islanders with needed provisions. But
when Argentina suddenly occupied that place on the map, Maggie Thatcher needed
some popularity herself, and in the words of a New York Post headline writer, the “Empire Str[uck] Back.” The blob
on British maps retained its pinkness, the Buenos Aires junta fell in disgrace,
and everyone proceeded to forget about the sheepherders once again.
Another place where maps don’t coincide is in Israel
and Palestine. Israelis are continually bothered that, on what they refer to as
the West Bank, Palestinian schoolchildren learn from maps in which there is no
Israel; meanwhile, Palestinians and others are scandalized that Israeli settler
militants teach their children with maps that show Israel extending all the way
from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Major wars in the past two centuries arose because
of widely divergent views of what maps should be. World War I began because
Serbs and Austrians disagreed on the correct place to divide the colors, as did
French and Germans, Italians and Austrians, and so on. Before WWII, Hitler
convinced himself that the world map would look better if the so-called
heartland of the so-called world island (Europe, Asia and Africa) were all one
solid German color. (On a smaller scale, he wanted to revert to maps in which
the German color extended into what had become part of France, and similarly
with Poland.)
If everyone would just read from the same map…..
What would happen? Maybe a wider peace would emerge,
in which, as in today’s Europe, everyone could be citizens wherever they
happened to be, and maps would suddenly cease to represent much of importance.
After all, in the post-modern world what nation is truly sovereign? What ethnic
group is confined to its own borders? Who isn’t partly in Diaspora? What
country actually controls all the services its citizens need and demand?
Maps may be of diminishing importance. Just as
published maps in color only became widespread in the 19th century,
widespread videos and Internet messages showing people living their lives far
away now can induce sympathy or at times perhaps the opposite without concern
for boundaries. If pre-modern war tended to mean raiding parties for theft,
tribute, slave or women, and much less often changing map or actual territorial
boundaries, so post-modern war seems to take the new form of attention grabbing
as often as land grabbing. Al Qaeda terrorists may be the foremost
practitioners of this in a directly violent way; the point is to get the
world’s attention as much as to achieve any other aim. Interestingly, once al
Qaeda managed to capture so much attention with the gruesome World Trade Center
attack, it has turned out that Osama bin Laden may now get almost the same
attention just by issuing a short video of himself looking rather like Saruman
in the movie of Lord of the Rings.
This point brings up an interesting question. Wars
in the modern era were fought with real violence according to their effect on
representations of land areas (that is, maps). If so, cannot mere
representations of violence such as war-movies, action movies and video games —
which potentially capture as much or more attention across the world than
terrorist acts — be considered genuine warfare? (I am taking it for granted
here that the point of post-modern war is chiefly to capture what is now most
valuable —namely attention; this is an argument I have touched on elsewhere# and hope to explain more fully in a longer work in
progress.) If violence, whether terrorist or otherwise is only one means to
achieve the same effects, then non-violent forms of “war’ would presumably be
far more “cost-effective” as a rule.
At various times during the modern-war regime it was
announced that new technological inventions including the machine gun and the
atomic bomb made war unthinkable and therefore un-fightable. Now it may turn
out that special effects of various kinds are a far more potent technological
development for this end.
Volume
2, February 2005
ISSN 1552-5112
an international and interdisciplinary journal
of postmodern cultural sound, text and image