icy analysts - children of suburbia and city streets - are blind to.

"We need to bring nature back in," he argues.  "We have to stop separating politics from the physical world - the climate, public health, and the environment."  Quoting Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for too long we've been prisoners of 'social-social' theory, which assumes there are only social causes for social and political changes, rather than natural causes, too.  This social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, which separated us from nature.  But nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied to population growth.  It will have incredible security implications.

"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live.  Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways.  Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."

We are entering a bifurcated world.  Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology.  The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.

The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western United States.  He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.

Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office.  "The darker the map color, the worse the degradation," he explains.  The West African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water problems.  "The worst degradation is generally where the population is highest.  The population is generally highest where the soil is the best.  So we're degrading earth's best soil."

China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation.  Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems.  "China's fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power.  It means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim.  The disparity with inland China is intensifying."  Referring to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization.  He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control.  Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government - again as in Africa.  "We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.

Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships, at which we now look.

Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors

In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking article called "The Clash of Civilizations?"  The world, he argues, has been moving during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict.  I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world - turning them into sprawling villages - national borders will mean less, even as more power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups.  In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe.  Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other things, history, language, and religion.  "Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness."  Economic modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state.  It is worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims.  Consider that Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs - Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world - and it is apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict are deeply related.

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Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Muslim, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian cities, the West clashing with Asia.  (Even in the United States, African-Americans find themselves besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.)  Whatever the laws, refugees find a way to crash official borders, bringing their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.

Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack.  In a rebuttal of Huntington's argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs,

"The world of Islam divides and subdivides.  The battle lines in the Caucasus . . . are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines.  The lines follow the interests of states.  Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia."

True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus.  But that is only because he has misidentified which cultural war is occurring there.  A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race.  The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915.  Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus.  The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians.

Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint of cultural and racial war.  But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple.  Two months of recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish public opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims being deserted by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.

In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first: between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the House of Islam.  Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash between Turkic and Iranian civilizations.  Ajami asserts that this very subdivision, not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario.  As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West has proved capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against another.

True.  However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is describing a world even more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into account Homer-Dixon's research on environmental scarcity.  Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla

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conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern - meaning there's no easy-to-define threat.  Kennan's world of one adversary seems as distant as the world of Herodotus.

Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change.  But it is minor compared with what is yet to come.  The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.  The crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead.  Michael Vlahos, a long-range thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of the environment and the world is not following us.  It is going in many directions.  Do not assume that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."

Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I want to take a closer look at the interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle East.

The Past Is Dead

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama.  Altindag, or "Golden Mountain," is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven - the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city.  Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood.  For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.

To see the twenty-first century truly, one's eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics.  One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns.  There are far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real - whose raw energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something frighteningly new.  But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider.  In Turkey it is the opposite.  The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt.  I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the other, yet I felt no fear.  Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood.  The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving.  Inside was a home - order, that is, bespeaking dignity.  I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove.  Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too.  Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea.  One man sipped beer.  Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim.  Yet there is little problem of alcoholism.  Crime against persons is infinitesimal.  Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made.  A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again.  Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses.  Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speak-

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ing, the future's winners.  Those whose cultures cannot will be the future's victims.  Slums - in the sociological sense - do not exist in Turkish cities.  The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa.  Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone.  Turks, history's perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of Golden Mountain's inhabitants.  Think of an Ottoman military encampment on the eve of the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453.  That is Golden Mountain.  "We brought the village here.  But in the village we worked harder - in the field, all day.  So we couldn't fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan.  Here we fast.  Here we are more religious."  Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen other women, was stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl.  She asked me to join her under the shade of a piece of sheet metal.  Each of these women had her hair covered by a kerchief.  In the city they were encountering television for the first time.  "We are traditional, religious people.  The programs offend us," Aishe said.  Another woman complained about the schools.  Though her children had educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with wealthier, secular Turks.  "The kids from rich families with connections - they get all the places."  More opportunities, more tensions, in other words.

My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage Hills, a brutally realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night").  "He listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water, for work and for the cure of the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes.  In the most revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the squatters are told "about a certain 'Ottoman Empire' . . . that where they now lived there had once been an empire of this name."  This history "confounded" the squatters.  It was the first they had heard of it.  Though one of them knew "that his grandfather and his dog died fighting the Greeks," nationalism and an encompassing sense of Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required to have a notion of "Turkey."

But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about the armies of Turkish migrants that had come before their own - namely, Seljuks and Ottomans?  For these recently urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world, India, and so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase.  As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization, "They saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help.  For them the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages."

Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the twenty-first century these new men and women, rushing into the cities, are remaking civilizations and redefining their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which do not coincide with the borders of existing states.

In Turkey several things are happening at once.  In 1980, 44 percent of Turks lived in cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent.  By the year 2000 the figure is expected to be 67 percent.  Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of gecekondu developments grow around Turkish cities.  This is the real political and demographic revolution in Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents usually don't write about it.

Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal" part of the social fabric, urban poverty is socially destabilizing.  As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with the loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their values are under attack, where basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment.  The American ethnologist and orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period."  Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden.  It is the one religion that is prepared to fight.  A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam, already the world's fastest-growing religion.  (Though Islam is spreading in West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)

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In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly forging a consensus with modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually invisible in Africa).  In Iran the oil boom - because it put development and urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more intense - fueled the 1978 Islamic Revolution.  But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has little oil.  Therefore its development and urbanization have been more gradual.  Islamists have been integrated into the parliamentary system for decades.  The tensions I noticed in Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the kind immigrants face the world over.  While the world has focused on religious perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.

Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians.  Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water - the most important fluid of the twenty-first century.  Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks.  The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").

Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge.  On a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees.  The emerging power of the Turks was palpable.

Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within the society. . . . It is true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."

Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia - near the site of the Ataturk Dam.  But will the nation-state of Turkey, as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?

I very much doubt it.

The Lies of Mapmakers

Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable.  Turkey's borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in the early 1920s.  Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by artificially drawn borders, lack.  That lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years.  Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.

It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps.  Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing - as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias.  Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled

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by a local mafia - to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa - led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.

Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism.  Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War - an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science.  People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define.  The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them.  Frontier is itself a modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind.  And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.

In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore - in principle - countable."  To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's ledger books.  Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.  The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area.  Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world.  Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."

Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring

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which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to "country."  Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are not innocent of the tendency.

According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey.  Forget the map.  This southeastern region of Turkey is populated almost completely by Kurds.  About half of the world's 20 million Kurds live in "Turkey."  The Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union.  The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitious nature of that supposed nation-state.

On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is.  Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian.  Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds.  In such a moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing states.  No longer will these states be so firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union.  Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector - the ultimate reality check.  They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.

Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million Kurds within Turkey threaten that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and ethnic obsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform the Middle East.  The diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians will, I believe, have little effect on the early- and mid-twenty-first-century map of the region.  Israel, with a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity.  Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism.  Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent.  Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970 - youths with little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars.  The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991.  Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double.  These states, like most African ones, will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies.  The Middle East analyst Christine M. Helms explains,

"Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political "disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism . . . or reformulating it.  Alternative solutions are not contemplated.  They have simply opted for the political paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with which they are familiar - Islam."

Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political reality.  As state control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demographic stress, "hard" Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely to emerge.  The fiction that the impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever.  Whatever the outcome of the peace process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam.  In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of the coming era.

The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far more relevant to the kind of map that will explain our future world.  The Kurds suggest a geographic reality that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space.  The issue in Turkey is not simply a matter of giving autonomy or even independence to

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Kurds in the southeast.  This isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on.  Federalism is not the answer.  Kurds are found everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara.  Turkey's problem is that its Anatolian land mass is the home of two cultures and languages, Turkish and Kurdish.  Identity in Turkey, as in India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle than conventional cartography can display.

A New Kind of War

To appreciate fully the political and cartographic implications of postmodernism - an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms - it is necessary to consider, finally, the whole question of war.

"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!"  Andre Malraux wrote in Man's Fate.  I cannot think of a more suitable battle cry for many combatants in the early decades of the twenty-first century.  The intense savagery of the fighting in such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia, the Caucasus, and Sri Lanka - to say nothing of what obtains in American inner cities - indicates something very troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo, concerned with issues like middle-class entitlements and the future of interactive cable television, lack the stomach to contemplate.  It is this: a large number of people on this planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down.