Eric Walberg - Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

The term Great Game was coined in the nineteenth century to describe the rivalry between Russia and Britain. Britain sent spies disguised as surveyors and traders to Afghanistan and Turkestan and, several times, armies to keep the Russians at bay. The ill-fated Anglo-Afghan war of 183942 was precipitated by fears that the Russians were encroaching on British interests in India after Russia established a diplomatic and trade presence in Afghanistan. Already by the nineteenth century there was no such thing as neutral territory. The entire world was now a gigantic playing field for the major industrial powers, and Eurasia was the center of this playing field.

Persian empire and the Ottoman Caliphate, comprising the Persian, Turkic and Arab worlds, peoples that are mostly Muslim.

Eurasia contrasts geopolitically with the north-south American hemisphere which since the days of the Monroe Doctrine has been securely under the hegemony of the US. The Monroe Doctrine is the most enduring of geopolitical declarations, promoting the idea of national and continental self-sufficiency and the drive for hegemony by the dominant power as much for supremacy as for economic interest. Americas geography prevents any rival from challenging this state of affairs, unlike the much vaster Eurasia, stretching both east-west and north-south, containing more than 80 per cent of the worlds population, with many rivals contending for hegemony.

This study of the geopolitics of Eurasia begins with the US joining in the competition in the early twentieth century, when Britain, as the dominant world power, was laying out its colonial game plan for the region at the expense of the other imperial powers.

The term geopolitics refers to the use of politics in controlling territories, where certain geographical positions are more strategic than others, for resources, historical and socio-political reasons. It is usually associated with the early twentieth century geographer and politician, Halford Mackinder, though he thought the term misleading, too romantic, and leading to false comparisons. one dominated not by Britain but by Germany in cooperation with Russia, and opposed to Anglo-American power. The rimland Britain relied on naval power to contain the heartland powers, namely Germany.

Friedrich Ratzel noted in Lebensraum (1901) that Eurasian land borders in the massive expanse of Eurasia are arbitrary and can be changed to meet the increasing needs of the (in the view of Haushofer and Ratzel, German) population and industry. Ratzel theorized that states are organic and growing, artificial constructs, that the land and people form a spiritual bond, and that a healthy nations borders are bound to expand. This was the Monroe Doctrine and the concurrent Manifest Destiny writ large for the Eurasian continent.

The two components of Eurasia which are the focus here the Middle East and Central Asia constitute the legendary Silk Road, composed of various routes for cultural, commercial and technological exchange between traders, merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, soldiers and nomads from China, India, Tibet, Persia and Mediterranean countries, dating from the third century BC and deriving its name from the lucrative Chinese silk trade.

With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, its central routes, apart from China, were united in opposition to the Christian/ pagan/ Jewish West as the Islamic Caliphate of the Ummayads, centered in Damascus, and later the Abbasids in Baghdad, uniting the vast distances under the banner of Islam. The Mongols, originally shamanists who later converted to Islam, swept down through Eurasia in the 13th14th centuries, briefly uniting it with China. The Muslim Temurids again united it in the 14th- 15th centuries. Over time these proto-empires disintegrated into tribal fiefdoms in the east and the Ottoman Caliphate in the west, but without developing the western-style ethnic nationalisms, nation states or the economic system of capitalism.

The Middle East was united under the Ottomans starting in the fourteenth century, while Turkestan (Central Asia) and the Silk Route went into decline after the Temurids, due to the rise of western seafaring commerce and thereafter of western empires linked to the East by ocean transport.

Russia annexed most of Turkestan through the 17th19th centuries, beginning with Kazakhstan and the Caucasus. British rivalry in what became known as the Great Game resulted in several attempts by Britain to subdue Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, culminating in an agreement with Russia in the 1890s where Afghanistan would remain neutral territory. In 1907 Russian foreign minister Count Alexander Izvolsky and British ambassador Sir Arthur Nicholson signed a secret treaty in St Petersburg in which both countries defined their imperial interests in Central Asia. The Russian government accepted that Afghanistan lay in the British sphere of influence. In turn, London pledged never to challenge the Tsars rule over the rest of Central Asia. China asserted its claim over east Turkestan (Xinjiang province) in 1877. This established the spheres of influence that have endured more or less until today.

The decline in the Middle East was slower, linked as it was more directly with the West through commerce. During the nineteenth century imperial game, what I call here Great Game I (GGI), Britain kept Afghanistan, Iran and the Ottoman Caliphate as nominally independent political formations, though in compliance with British interests. The former were carefully monitored by Britain, while in the latter, the weakened Ottoman rule had turned the caliphate into a useful neutral actor allowing the various imperial powers to pursue trade in the region without resorting to war.

This situation changed radically with WWI. The war was a disaster for all the European imperial powers, and the Russian revolution in 1917 was a declaration of war against the imperialist system itself. This marked the beginning of what is called here Great Game II (GGII) the Cold War between imperialism and communism, where the US united its former imperial rivals, Britain, Germany, France, et al to fight the anti-empire forces, though this game did not take center stage till the end of WWII. The period from 1917 to WWII can be called the endgame of GGI.

In the Middle East, cynical British plans to carve up the Ottoman Caliphate after WWI were exposed when the Russian communists immediately published British diplomatic correspondence with Tsar Nicholas II, much as WikiLeaks exposed diplomatic mendacity in 2010. Britain went ahead anyway in 1918 to carve up the caliphate, as a political compromise in the region with rival interests of France, Germany and imperial Russia was no longer necessary. Apart from the Turkish Anatolian heartland, the caliphate was divided into quasicolonies mandates with a radical plan to create a Jewish state in the Palestinian heartland.