Connecting the World Through Infrastructure

This article was originally published at Stratfor.com. 

Editor's Note: The Global Affairs column is curated by Stratfor's editorial board, a diverse group of thinkers whose expertise inspires rigorous and innovative thought in our analyses. Though their opinions are their own, they inform and sometimes even challenge our beliefs. We welcome that challenge, and we hope our readers do too.

By Jay Ogilvy

Parag Khanna contributed a column to this space earlier this month. His column was excerpted from his book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, published April 19. Containing so much more than one piece could relay, the publication of Khanna's book excites me, and in this week's Global Affairs I'd like to share my enthusiasm and the reasons for it.

Khanna's content in genuinely innovative. He connects old dots in new ways, quite literally. He asks us to remap the world in terms of its connections rather than its borders. Connective infrastructure trumps separatist nationalism. The economics of supply lines moves into the foreground as politics and ideology fade into the background.

Channeling Khanna requires a form as innovative as his content. Because he is such a good writer — a master of the ringing cadence — I'll experiment in this column with a form that's different from the usual book review. Rather than trying to digest Khanna's thinking through the filter of my own pallid prose, I'll simply cut and paste his more vivid prose at some length.

My work consists not so much in interpreting Khanna as in distilling the essence of his argument. Through a process of successive titrations, I've compressed his 400 pages in a ratio that runs roughly 50-to-1 to save you, the reader, the effort of reading all 400 pages. Or, if you are as thrilled as I am by what you read here, perhaps you will be moved to buy his book and absorb its full impact. If you do, you'll see dozens of stunning maps we cannot reproduce here.

In any case, please let us know whether you find this format to your liking.

"Geography matters intensely, but it does not follow that borders do. We should never confuse geography, which is paramount, with po­litical geography, which is transient. Unfortunately, maps today present natural or political geography — or both — as permanent constraints. Yet there is nothing more numbing than unyielding cir­cular logic: Something must be because it is. Reading maps is not like reading palms, as if each line presents an immutable destiny. I am a deep believer in the profound influence of geography but not in its caricature as a monolithic and immovable force. Geography may be the most fundamental thing we see, but understanding cause and effect requires complex thinking about the interplay of demo­graphics and politics, ecology and technology. It is precisely the great geographic thinkers such as Sir Halford Mackinder who a cen­tury ago urged statesmen to appreciate geography and factor it into their strategies but not to become slaves to it. Geographic determin­ism runs no deeper than blind faith in religion...

Mega-infrastructures overcome the hurdles of both natural and political geography, and mapping them reveals that the era of orga­nizing the world according to political space (how we legally subdi­vide the globe) is giving way to organizing it according to functional space (how we actually use it). In this new era, the de jure world of political borders is giving way to the de facto world of functional connections. Borders tell us who is divided from whom by political geography. Infrastructure tells us who is connected to whom via functional geography. As the lines that connect us supersede the borders that divide us, functional geography is becoming more im­portant than political geography...

Yet today many scholars still hold political boundaries to be the most fundamental man-made lines on the map out of a bias toward territory as the basis of power, the state as the unit of po­litical organization, an assumption that only governments can order life within those states, and a belief that national identity is the primary source of people's loyalty. The march of connectivity will bring all these beliefs to collapse. Forces such as devolution (the fragmentation of authority toward provinces), urbanization (the growing size and power of cities), dilution (the genetic blending of populations through mass migration), mega-infrastructures (new pipelines, railways, and canals that morph geography), and digital connectivity (enabling new forms of community) will demand that we produce maps far more complex..."

The map above is from Connectography, titled "Supply Chains Are Becoming More Diverse and Complex."

"It is time for geopolitics to have its own complexity revolution. To make sense of today's world, we must simultaneously grapple with accumulating forces beyond seventeenth-century sovereignty such as eighteenth-century enlightenment, nineteenth-century im­perialism, twentieth-century capitalism, and twenty-first-century technology. A young, urban, mobile, and technologically saturated world is far better explained through the concepts of uncertainty, gravity, relationality, and leverage than the centuries-old logic of an­archy, sovereignty, territoriality, nationalism, and military primacy...

Supply chains are the greatest blessing and the greatest curse for civilization. They are an escape from the prison of geogra­phy, creating economic opportunities where none existed, bringing ideas, technologies, and business practices to places that lack the advantages of good climate and soil or other propitious variables. As the Princeton economist and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton lu­cidly captures in The Great Escape, billions of people have joined the global marketplace by building connectivity despite "bad" geog­raphy and institutions. It is no longer foreordained that tropical countries will suffer unproductive agriculture and labor, nor that landlocked countries must underperform: Singapore and Malaysia are thriving modern economies near the equator, while Rwanda, Botswana, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia are landlocked countries en­joying unprecedented growth and development. A country cannot change where it is, but connectivity offers an alternative to the des­tiny of geography...

Many of the largest developing countries in the world are far more fragmented than they appear on our maps precisely be­cause they lack the essential infrastructure that promotes unity. Just four of them — Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and India — represent ap­proximately two billion people, yet each performs as far less than the sum of its parts because many of its parts are barely connected. In such countries, the gradient of governability often diminishes drastically with distance from the main capital city...

Diasporas are a leading harbinger of a world moving from verti­cal to horizontal authorities, communities that occupy mind share if not territory. These are not nation-states but relational states: Nei­ther their physical footprint nor their number of members matters as much as their capacity to act across the virtual and real worlds...

The taxon­omy of influential actors is expanding to include terrorist net­works, hacker units, and religious fundamentalist groups who define themselves by what they do rather than where they are.

Global connectivity gradually undermines national roots and augments or replaces them with a range of transnational bonds and identities. Imagine a world where people are loyal to cities and sup­ply chains rather than nations, value credit cards and digital curren­cies over citizenship, and seek community in cyberspace rather than country. As John Arquilla, an expert on emerging patterns of war­fare at the Naval Postgraduate School, has observed, such networks are now taking on nations the way nations took on empires...

Self-determination is a sign not of backward tribalism but of mature evolution: Remember that territorial nations are not our "natural" unit; people and societies are. We should not despair that secessionism is a moral failure, even if it recognizes innate tribal tendencies. A devolved world of local democracies is preferable to a world of large pseudo-democracies. Let the tribes win.

And yet the more nations there are, the smaller they are. Today almost 150 countries have populations of fewer than ten million people. They are more like city-regions than robust states. How could they possibly survive without connectedness? They have au­tonomy but not autarky: Basic agriculture and a modest army won't cut it in the twenty-first century. Even the extreme scenario of mapping hundreds — if not thousands — of autonomous cities and provinces would give the impression that political frictions have tri­umphed when in fact the opposite is true. That is why we must map the networks among them to truly appreciate the emergence of a connected world. Fragmentation is thus not the antithesis of global­ization but its handmaiden...

The devolution-aggregation dynamic is thus a dialectic in the sense that the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel truly meant: progression through opposites toward transcendence. Devolution-aggregation is how the world comes together by falling apart. Aggregation is the next phase of history beyond political division. Every region of the world is proceeding through this accordion of fragmentation and unification...

Despite the World Bank's legacy of financing postwar reconstruction, in the 1960s it shifted its aid focus away from infrastructure, leaving basic irrigation, transportation, and electrification systems underdeveloped. China has stepped in as a new and symbiotic partner. China is therefore not "buying the world" per se but building it in exchange for natural resources...

Africa will graduate from supplier to market only if it fur­ther builds out road networks China has begun, trains more youth in infrastructure management from ports to railways, and spends resource revenues on sustainable development. Supply chains, then, are where Western demands for good governance and Asia's de­mand for resources come together. Chinese connectivity makes Western political goals possible...

Thousands of years of history have witnessed large-scale mobi­lizations of armies for territorial conquest and self-defense. Today's world too is full of tension, strife, and hostility: cross-border inva­sions, nuclear standoffs, terrorist insurgencies, collapsing states, and tragic civil conflicts. But even this significant violence, with all of its casualties, neither defines nor dominates the nature of compe­tition across the world. In fact, very few societies are at war today, either internally or externally. But all societies are caught in the global tug-of-war.

Tug-of-war is where geopolitics and geoeconomics come to­gether. War among states is declining while war over supply chains is rising. Tug-of-war, however, is fought not over territory but over flows — of money, goods, resources, technology, knowledge, and tal­ent. These flows are like the rope in tug-of-war: We compete over them, yet they connect us. The global tug-of-war is about pulling the world's supply chains toward oneself, to be the largest producer of resources and goods and gain the maximum share of value from transactions.

In supply chain geopolitics, the notion of discrete geographic blocs becomes untenably twisted, displaced by the physical glue of infrastructures and the institutional glue of treaties...

Supply chain mastery is the original driver of geopolitical status — preceding military might. Both nineteenth-century Amer­ica and twenty-first-century China were supply chain superpowers before they became military ones. They achieved continental domi­nance, industrialized heavily through import substitution, and be­came the world's largest economies prior to asserting themselves militarily...

Controlling the supply chain is immeasurably more useful than controlling any traditional battle­field.

The strategic goal of a supply chain world is not domination, which brings obligation, but leverage, which generates value. Geo­politics now operates on both chessboard and web. On the chess­board, the United States extends its security umbrella to Europeans, Arabs, and Asians in the hopes that they will peacefully integrate regionally and avoid wars with Russia, Iran, or China, respectively. On the web, the United States needs industrial, financial, and commercial connectedness to other key global nodes to build its economic strength at home. If the United States can recognize the primacy of supply chain geopolitics, it would be less likely to under­take costly military interventions that can do more harm than good...

[A] supply chain world is a post-ideological landscape. Russia no longer ex­ports communism; America scarcely proffers democracy; China has abandoned Maoism for hyper-capitalist consumerism. From Africa to Asia — the lion's share of the world's population — it's all busi­ness, all the time... Today it is not ideology but the promise of privileged access to resources and infrastructure that shapes geostrategic maneuvering...

Traditional alliances have been replaced with dalliances, ephem­eral partnerships based on supply-demand complementarities... It is thus a mistake to identify alliance groups as cultural communities. The webs of relations in a post-ideological supply chain world make rigid alliances impossible as each member makes constant cost-benefit calculations about participating in "collec­tive" activities...

One hundred years ago, there was barely an international energy market and no international oil or gas pipelines; today there are hundreds. Whether between allies or across suspicious neighbors, they are fixed bonds whose flows matter to all countries along the route. Pipelines reconnect feuding siblings and introduce tug-of-war dynamics where otherwise war itself would be the main option. The more pipelines that directly connect Russia to Europe, the more Russia will ensure supply to meet European demand with no reason to choke it off. Eventually, Russia's internal weaknesses and depen­dence on foreign investment will bring it back on the path of open­ing to the West, while its fuller role as a global supply state for energy and agriculture, and as a transit corridor across Eurasia, will comprehensively benefit the five billion people on the superconti­nent. Buying Russia will prove a more successful strategy than con­taining it...

There is no precedent for the current wave of highways, pipe­lines, and railways forming east-west axes of logistical efficiency. Unlike the nineteenth-century "Great Game" era when Britain and Russia sought to demarcate Central Asian territory, China merely wants to steer the direction of its energy flows. Instead of the ma­jority of its oil and gas flowing north and west through Russia, new pipelines from Kazakhstan's and Turkmenistan's gas fields on the Caspian Sea direct resources east to China's Tarim basin. Xi Jin­ping's latest moniker, "Silk Road Economic Belt," portends the re­gion's transformation into a collection of midsize urban nodes anchoring transport and energy corridors. Each road, bridge, tun­nel, railway, and pipeline rewrites the functional code of the coun­tries it crosses, while new energy grids and irrigation systems turn their resource mismatches into pragmatic swaps. China's strategy isn't to formally occupy these countries but to ease passage across them. It wins the new Great Game by building the new Silk Roads...

For countries to get on the global economic map as productive hubs rather than failed states, no investment is more important than basic infrastructure. Infrastructure is not just a road; it's a trampo­line. As the former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin has pointed out, one unit of infrastructure spending unlocks more con­sumption than one unit of income...

There is no worse corruption than the oppressive inefficiency of so­cieties where basic mobility is hampered by nonexistent infrastruc­ture. It's like life without the wheel. Yet three-quarters of the world population — whether urban or rural — lacks basic infrastructure and utilities. In 2013, a rupture along a 250-kilometer water pipeline supplying half of Dakar's water forced many of its three million people to spend their days lining up at wells and water trucks. More than half of all Africans lack electricity, and 60 percent of South Asians lack sanitation. One-third of the global population still lives in deep poverty — including half the world's children — with the next two billion people coming from developing countries with inade­quate health and education services. McKinsey estimates an $11 trillion shortfall in investments in basic housing.

So desperate is their lack of physical and institutional founda­tions that we should seriously consider whether the biggest problem with state building is the state itself. It is not foreordained that all states eventually achieve territorial sovereignty and political stabil­ity. In many postcolonial regions, the supply chain world is taking root far more quickly than competent governance. Instead of taking today's political geography as sacred, therefore, we should get the functional geography right first, stabilizing and connecting urban areas inside and beyond their national boundaries to better align people, resources, and markets. This means city building should be seen as the path to state building — not a by-product of it...

Prosperity isn't sustainable without connectedness. Even in New York City, the urbanist Mitchell Moss has argued, "it's far more important to have a MetroCard than a college degree." Transportation and communication are the true pathways to social mobility.

Supply chains offer a remedy to the disorderly reality of failing states. They empower anchor cities of once destitute nations such as Rwanda and Myanmar to get a foothold in the world economy...

Supply chains were once thought of as spurring a race to the bottom; now it is clear they are how countries race to the top. Even China and India needed to open to foreign investment to attract supply chains, stimulate reforms, and generate the capital necessary to spread development. As the Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Edmund Phelps have pointed out, foreign firms pay higher wages, bring in new technology, and boost worker skills and productivity. They inject dynamism and capitalize on people's resourcefulness...

The fact that so much infrastructure (such as utilities and afford­able housing) and access to markets come from the private sector has engendered a new dynamic between capital and labor, govern­ments and markets. This should not mean that we are heading toward a privatized world where those who have purchased welfare care nothing for public goods. Rather, it is an opportunity for governments to leverage these new models to deliver welfare to those they have left behind. The Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a steady decline of trust in government in the West and a steady rise of trust in business worldwide. Respondents desire a new mode of gover­nance in which public and private leaders are more accountable to the people — mainly by being more efficient at delivering jobs and welfare. As states come to depend more on corporations, the dis­tinction between public and private, customer and citizen, melts away. When national citizenship provides little benefit, supply chain citizenship can matter much more.

Luring supply chains in is the fastest way out of stagnation. In­deed, hitching countries to the globalization train is no longer a strategy any serious activist or watchdog NGO group opposes. Codes of conduct and certification schemes help to monitor facto­ries, timber harvesting, or diamond mining, but they are not a sub­stitute for the foreign investment that harnesses resources and employs the workforce in the first place. Even in markets rife with labor abuses, Business for Social Responsibility and Human Rights Watch don't advocate boycotts but rather roll up their sleeves and work directly with companies to improve standards through train­ing programs and safer technologies. Supply chains were not de­signed as a system of justice but have become a crucial vehicle for the delivery of rights.

The supply chain has thus become a circuit of belonging...

Connectivity is the platform for fuller societal development. IT is the fastest-growing and most dynamic sector of the global econ­omy. New technologies have always given rise to entire new indus­tries as their infrastructures are installed and then deployed widely. Since the Industrial Revolution, canals, railways, electricity, high­ways, telecoms, and the Internet have all followed this pattern, each enabling what the London School of Economics economist Carlota Perez calls a "quantum leap in productivity and quality across all industries."... The technology philosophers Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen argue that such "informational development" — the capacity to advance one's own dignity through access to information — has become a fundamental right both for personal empowerment and for economic productivity...

There is also a moral case for returning migration to its origins as a supply-demand system rather than one oppressively and ineffi­ciently managed by nations and borders. Migration restrictions are among the powerful factors perpetuating the punitive effects of the accident of birth. The global division of labor that can bring human civilization to a higher stage depends on freer movement of people. People should have the right to define their identity as freely and widely as possible, constrained only by the willingness of commu­nities to accept them. Mobility thus ought to be one of the para­mount human rights of the twenty-first century.

In generations past, people moved. Now they circulate. Migra­tion today is more than permanent, one-directional relocation; it is a constant flux of multidimensional flows...

Global reinsurance giants such as Swiss Re and Zurich Insurance insist that clients build sustainability into their supply chains or risk having their policies canceled. These are the pillars of an emergent "regulatory capitalism" that mixes government sanction and financial pressure to raise supply chain standards...

There is a false dichotomy between national societies as an or­ganic ethical community versus what Harvard's Michael Sandel calls a "market society" that neglects community bonds. Rather than waiting for governments to provide justice, dignity, and oppor­tunity, people are forming new associations — professional, com­mercial, virtual — not as a substitute for local social capital, but as an essential new kind of global social capital.

Global connectedness is thus an opportunity to evolve both our cartography and our morality. We should make the most of sup­ply chains rather than just letting them make the most of us. A world remapped according to connections rather than divisions holds the potential to advance a shift from "us-them" mentalities toward a broader human "we" identity. There is no good reason to turn back... The shift from political to func­tional maps helps us overcome rigid moralities that deliver neither justice nor efficiency and adopt a more utilitarian mentality by which governments don't so much own the world as manage parts of it within a global network civilization...

We are building this global society without a global leader. Global order is no longer something that can be dictated or controlled from the top down. Globalization is itself the order. Power has made one full rotation around the world in the past millennium, from the late Song dynasty through the Turkic Mongols and Arab caliphates to European colonial empires to the American colossus. But whereas Pax Americana replaced Pax Britannica — with America becoming the world's policeman and lender of last resort over two genera­tions — a Pax Sinica is not likely to replace U.S. dominance in the same linear fashion. Instead, the past decade's hype of the East sur­passing the West, China replacing America, and the Pacific displac­ing the Atlantic is giving way to a multi-civilizational and multipolar world in which continents and regions deepen their internal integra­tion while expanding their global linkages. Latin Americans, Afri­cans, Arabs, Indians, and Asians all want a world in which they can multi-align and trade in all directions, not be subject to either American or Chinese diktats. They will play the great powers off each other more than they will accept unilateral impositions. They all believe — correctly — that connectivity rather than hegemony is the path to global stability. Supply and demand will shape how re­gions and powers interact. If America offers military support and technology, China provides infrastructure and export markets, Eu­rope sends aid and governance advisers, and corporate supply chains smooth the flow of connections, this is the closest geopolitics comes to stars aligning...

Globalization's advance is the only antidote to the logic of superpower-centric rivalries — replacing war with tug-of-war. Mak­ing the world safe for supply chains eventually makes the world a safer place...

We expend huge effort to measure the value of activity within borders; it is time to devote equal effort to the benefits of connectiv­ity across them.

There are no greater stakes than in the question of moving from a nations-borders world to a flow-friction world. We need a more borderless world because we can't afford destructive territorial con­flict, because correcting the mismatch of people and resources can unlock incredible human and economic potential, because so few states provide sufficient welfare for their citizens, and because so many billions have yet to fully benefit from globalization. Borders are not the antidote to risk and uncertainty; more connections are. But if we want to enjoy the benefits of a borderless world, we have to build it first. Our fate hangs in the balance."

From the book, CONNECTOGRAPHY: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, by Parag Khanna. Copyright © 2016 by Parag Khanna. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.