This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity.”  Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. 

Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilizational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilizations, and on respect for these civilizations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. 

Civilizational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. 

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In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialized slavery based on race. The result was institutionalized racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial “missions civilisatrices”, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilizing the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete.

The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognized by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilization” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke.” 

In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the Tatar surnames of some of the greatest Russian noble families, like the Sheremetievs and Kochubeys.  

The test was not race, but readiness to adopt the civilization, language, and, in the case of the Muslim and Russian empires, religion of the empire. The originally “alien” ethnic origins of writers like Ivan Turgenev (with his Tatar roots) in Russia have never affected their status as great national cultural icons. Given time — and the Iranians and Chinese had millennia — whole populations could merge into the imperial people. Thus a large majority of “Han Chinese” south of the Yangtse River are, in fact, of non-Chinese “tribal” origin. 

Or as a Russian friend exclaimed when I first explained America’s racial “one-drop” rule to her, “That’s ridiculous! By that standard, every Russian is actually a Mongolian!” Indeed, the quasi-racist charge that Russians are racially and culturally mixed with Asiatics and therefore “not really European” has always helped to fuel Western prejudice against Russia. British visitors to Russian-ruled Central Asia in the later 19th century were appalled by the levels of corruption — and also by the ease of intercourse between Russians and “natives”.

What are the lessons — positive and negative — of these imperial traditions for our increasingly multiracial societies today? The first is that equality of racial origin in the elites has never said anything at all about the social and economic position of the mass of the population, whatever their race or ethnicity. The second is that social stability depends upon the integration of new populations by providing them with tolerable lives and equal rights before the law; and this process depends, in turn, on there being rights and a rule of law to start with. 

Caracalla, who reigned AD 211-217. was one of the nastier Roman emperors. Even so, he was responsible for extending Roman citizenship to all free-born men in the empire. A great sign of progress in a brief moment of liberalism? Not exactly. His chief motive, according to the historical consensus, was to increase the tax base. It may have been the right direction, but it did nothing to slow growing tax evasion by the elites, and the intensifying slide of the mass of the empire’s population into immiseration and exploitation. 

By the fifth century, this had reached a point at which many preferred to be ruled by the “barbarians.” Equally importantly, the “Antonine Constitution” granting universal citizenship was part of the process whereby the last vestiges of the Roman republican tradition and its legal rights were extinguished and replaced by the absolutist, quasi-sacred monarchy of the later empire: “equality in misery” as the old Russian saying has it. A multiracial elite is very nice, but it is even nicer when it is not ruling over a population of impoverished multiracial serfs. 

Above all, the history of the great Eurasian land empires raises the question of whether our societies can maintain the combination of material success, elite ethics, and civilizational attraction that made the “barbarians” respect the empires and enabled those empires to assimilate not only their subjects, but even in some cases their conquerors. This is in large part a question of maintaining — or rather, restoring — widely spread economic opportunities and prosperity for citizens of all races; but it is much more than that besides. 

The success of ancient Rome also depended upon the ethics and values known as Romanita, emphasizing such virtues as loyalty, discipline and fortitude. Chinese states repeatedly failed and were repeatedly put back together by ruling elites united and strengthened by the values imparted by the different strands of Chinese cultural tradition. Core to both was a deep sense of loyalty to the inherited idea of the state, leading to duty to the actually existing state. When contemporary critics say — rightly — that present Western cultures think too much about rights at the expense of duties, they should remember what happened to ancient Rome when the elites lost their sense of duty. How can immigrants develop a sense of loyalty to Britain or America, if those countries’ elites themselves have lost it? 

When it comes to assimilating immigrants, Western civilization is being undermined from several directions at once. Capitalist demand for wage arbitrage and a “reserve army of labor,” legitimized politically by a fanatically utopian and historically illiterate Left, is producing a nativist reaction in much of the older ethnic population. Some of President Trump’s restrictions on immigration are thus a necessary corrective. 

But by abandoning the universalist values of American “credal nationalism” in favor of a chauvinist version of US identity, Trump threatens to wreck America’s version of Romanita, and destroy the cultural and ideological elements that made the successful assimilation of immigrants possible. In Europe, the populist Right’s growing insistence on the Christian basis of national identity worked well for the great universalist religious empires of the past but is unlikely to do so in an irreligious contemporary Europe, where the strongest religious allegiances are found among Muslim immigrant communities.

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Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, there is the need for a “great tradition,” a cultural core capable of assimilating other cultures. It has been said that “a language is a dialect with an army,” but it would be more accurate to say that a language is a dialect with a literature. Languages with a strong literary core have played a key role in preserving national identities and the idea of the state, for centuries or even millennia during which the state itself has vanished. This role has been most powerful when the literature is integral to a codified religion, as in the Jewish diaspora, or bound up with philosophies of state, as in China.

In the Middle Ages, the legends of King Arthur and his knights were called “The Matter of Britain,” as the legends of Charlemagne were called “The Matter of France.” In Persian-speaking lands, the Shah-Nameh (and the miniature art it generated) helped to preserve an idea of Iranian identity during long periods in which Iran was fragmented. The same was true of the “Knight in the Panther’s Skin” in the Georgian lands. 

The frantic attempts of late 19th century nationalist writers to “rediscover” and write down “national” myths — like Lacplesis in Latvia, transformed from a mythical half-bear into a “historical” national hero fighting the German medieval crusaders — has attracted a good deal of justified mockery. But these revisionists were onto something: national pride can bring us together. 

These are, however, specifically national and ethnic (or pseudo-ethnic) myths, rather than a literary corpus that can attract other peoples. Modern Russia has possessed, rather than one national myth, the corpus of great 19th-century Russian novelists and poets, whose work has been central to Russian civilizational identity. Being secular in form (if religiously-influenced), this core body of work has attracted many people of non-Russian ethnic origin to the Russian tradition.

Britain and France — and the United States, in a more complex and diffuse way — also possess such immensely prestigious inherited modern literatures, that exercised a powerful effect on colonial subjects who were educated in English and French.

For Britain and France to maintain the influence of their literary traditions within their domestic societies, however, requires a sufficiently large literate class interested in preserving them and reworking them for present and future generations. Quite apart from the apparent desire of much of Western academia to destroy this tradition, can such classes survive the era of AI and an atomized mass media? And when they do try to rework the classics, can institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company in its present debased form carry a great tradition forward? All too often, the RSC’s “adaptation” looks more like woke Procrustean torture, and by the time they have finished stretching Shakespeare and cutting bits off there is not enough left to see him at all, let alone sense his part in a great tradition. Or can the Smithsonian in America, with its present insistence on curatorial self-flagellation over the misdeeds of the past, now transmit an American tradition?

I hope that the picture I have drawn is too gloomy, and that our sea-faring societies will find the cultural and political strength to adjust successfully to new populations in the way that the Eurasian land empires did. Should we fail, we can derive some thin comfort from the fact that all states come to an end, and that in the end, perhaps the best they can hope for is to leave a good-looking cultural corpse to help fertilize the civilizations of the future.

Over time, a weakened Russia will likely be a harbinger of chaos across its periphery. Empires since antiquity have provided a solution to chaos. But empires, as they collapse, leave chaos in their wake. History has provided no solution to this conundrum.

The pattern is usually the same. An imperial hegemon cobbles together a domain of many ethnic groups, forcing them to lay down their arms against each other. An empire may last hundreds of years and yet build nothing except a tenuous inter-ethnic truce. This has been the story of the Russian Empire and its shadow zones in the Caucasus, the Balkans, stretches of Central and Eastern Europe, not to mention stretches of Siberia and the Far East. But as the hegemon weakens, fights for control of territory between one group and another commence.

The case of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus is the most telling. Stalin put this ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan for the same reason he burdened other Soviet republics with large ethnic minorities: to make it impossible for any of them to secede from the Soviet Union without inter-ethnic war tearing them apart. Fighting between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis (Azeri Turks) began following the weakening of the Soviet Union in the late-Eighties under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, leaving the Armenians in control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since then, Armenia has looked to Russia as a patron who could not only keep the regional peace, but also keep their ethnic compatriots in place.

But sensing Russia’s growing weakness, the Azerbaijanis took back the enclave last year by force of arms. The President, Ilham Aliyev, provided assurances over the decades that he had no aggressive intentions. But, having built up his armed forces with money afforded by massive oil revenues, and sensing an opportunity provided by Russia’s distraction in Ukraine, he pounced. Next, Aliyev may send his soldiers across southern Armenia to link up with the ethnic-Azeri enclave of Nakhichevan, bordering Iran. Or, he will use the implicit threat of doing so to extract a corridor-of-sorts through negotiation.

Meanwhile, in the Balkans, violence flared not that long ago between masked Serbian gunmen in the north of Kosovo, home to a large Serbian minority, and Kosovar Albanian police. The Kosovars blame organised criminal elements supported by neighbouring Serbia for the attacks, while authorities in Belgrade struggled to deny their involvement.

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Throughout his time in power, the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vucic, has played a delicate game, serving in turns as an ethnic arsonist and quickly thereafter offering himself up to European interlocutors as a firefighter. But while he seems to have pulled off the same trick this time, Vucic, or someone even more extreme in his government, may judge that a Nagorno-Karabakh moment could be within reach for Serbia, and that it would be in their interest to more thoroughly stoke the flames of war in the region. And, should open conflict between “breakaway” Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro force the redrawing of borders once again in the Balkans, it’s not clear where that trend would stop.

All this may just be a prologue for trouble across the longitudes of the Russian empire and its shadow zones from Europe to Asia, a curtain-raiser for ugly unrest elsewhere. Just as Aliyev smelled the Kremlin’s relative weakness as he moved into Nagorno-Karabakh, others might act similarly, motivated as they are by separatist tendencies.

Indeed, small Albanian minorities are to be found in Serbia and Greece, with a much more significant number of ethnic Albanians clustered in the west and northwest of North Macedonia, bordering Albania itself. Demographically speaking, a greater Albania already exists glaringly on the map, and this is why the western Balkans are so ripe for Russian meddling, which is what declining empires do in order to throw their weight around.

A Russian attempt to further undermine the already weak state of Moldova could also ignite a few irredentist voices in Romania, who may ultimately want a union with this largely Romanian-speaking territory formerly known as Bessarabia. In Moldova, there is already measurable support for a greater Romania. At the same time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is fixated on the massive loss of territory in all directions inflicted on the Kingdom of Hungary by the post-First World War Treaty of Trianon. The greater Balkans remain a tinder box because of the ugly combination of official borders that don’t coincide with ethnic ones and economies that in many places have not enjoyed the stabilising effects of middle-class life.

The Russians have historically been a major player in the Balkans, and Putin is broadly backing Serbian irredentist claims across the region — in Kosovo and Bosnia — even as Belgrade tries to stay in the West’s good graces. Whereas Putin lacked the economic and military capability to protect the 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, threatened by an oil-rich Azerbaijan, it costs him little to stoke petty violence in the western Balkans as a way to keep the region on the boil and out of the arms of the European Union.

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While the greater Balkans remain fragile, and therefore susceptible to Russian mischief borne of bitterness, Russia itself, as it continues to be militarily and economically preoccupied with Ukraine, could be weakened in its Siberian and Far Eastern back-of-beyonds. This is where republics such as Buryatia and Tuva which have provided troops for the Ukraine war — who have died in proportionally much greater numbers than ethnic Russians from places such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg — could experience breakaway tendencies. Remember: we are dealing with a vast swath of the map that fundamentally lacks the social and political stability of the West and has been relatively stable only on account of an imperial straitjacket.

Disorder might not just spring up from local strongmen pursuing their narrow goals in upending longstanding imperial ethnic understandings. Russia itself may be tempted to overturn things. There is an assumption that the current battlefield stalemate inherently favours Moscow. But even if it does, it continues to drain resources from the Kremlin, making the system over time more militaristic and brittle. And history, from ancient Assyria to Prussia, has been clear that militarism signals the eventual demise of imperial rule.

In other words, an age of imperial decline is upon us. And while an era of new-found freedoms for all the peoples of the former Soviet empire may lie somewhere in the future, for the moment we are facing the greatest threat to world order since 1945. The First World War gave the 20th century its monstrous and tragic direction precisely because it went on for four long years, killing close to 20 million people. Had it ended in 1915 or 1916, Corporal Hitler would not have won his Iron Cross First Class (as he did in 1918) and the Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires might not have collapsed as they did, leaving a vast and unstable void that Hitler, the war hero, was able to ultimately fill. Every month that the Ukraine War drags on, and however well Russia appears to be surviving the war, the potential for unintended consequences grows. The only thing more frightening than a Putinesque Russia is a slowly crumbling Russia with its nuclear arsenal intact.

We are truly living in times that defy simple analysis. We have to be able to imagine the unimaginable. Who could have conceived of nearly two years of trench warfare in Ukraine before it actually happened? Russia’s brutal invasion, replete with vast human rights violations, was met by a Ukrainian populace clearly unwilling to bow down before their former imperial masters. This left the United States with little choice but to come to their aid. After all, the United States may not conceive of itself as an empire, but since 1945 it has been in an imperial-like situation, given its global power.

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Yet the Ukraine War, by forcing Russia to lean increasingly on China for support, has fused the conflict zones of Europe and Asia, so that there is now a single Eurasian battleground in a more claustrophobic and crowded world. For its part, China, another former empire, is facing a historic economic crisis that could at some future moment ignite a social crisis, even as Xi Jinping’s regime distracts its population by stoking imperial grievances over its determination to capture Taiwan.

For all the similarities it might have to an empire, the United States certainly cannot ultimately provide order in former imperial hinterlands. It lacks the geographical proximity and the instinctive cultural-historical knowledge to do so. And as the last few decades have bitterly shown, “liberal democracy” is not something that can be quickly and effortlessly implemented in troubled, unstable regions. At best, it’s a rough blueprint for decades of peacetime nation-building.

As a result, US policy needs to be delicately balanced. The US military and economic support of Ukraine must ultimately find a way to continue, whatever Congress does. Completely abandoning Ukraine to Russia would only further whet Russia’s imperial ambitions, even as the material basis for its empire’s continued existence continues to degrade.

At the same time, however, we should not want the war to grind on indefinitely. We should aim to leave Russia chastened but not collapsed, since that would lead to second- and third-order effects from Europe to China even more serious than those I have just laid out. Indeed, we face no choice but to manage the interlocking wars and crises afflicting the Eurasian land mass — for, ultimately, they can’t be fixed.

That requires a map, but what kind? The infamous Mercator Projection presents a highly distorted view of our planet. Land in the northerly latitudes is massively stretched out – Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Europe and Russia all appear much bigger than they actually are. To get an idea of how distorted a map is, compare the size of Greenland with that of Saudi Arabia. In reality, the two territories are almost identical in area. On a Mercator Projection, however, the cold place appears to be several times bigger than the hot place.

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Of course, there’s no way of displaying the surface of a sphere onto a rectangle without distortion. Using a globe instead of map avoids that problem. Suddenly you notice things that most world maps obscure. Africa, for instance is really, really big – twice the size of the Russian Federation (which itself is absurdly large – stretching from the borders of the EU almost all the way to Alaska.)

But even an accurate representation of size and distance is misleading. Population, much more than territory, is what makes somewhere ‘big’. Elie Wiesel once said that “we must see in every person a universe”. In that respect even the smallest human settlement is immeasurably bigger than a vast and empty desert.

It’s worth looking at a map that resizes each country according to its population. Suddenly one sees a new view of the world – dominated, of course, by China and India, while thinly populated Russia and Canada shrink away.

But even this exercise is misleading because it doesn’t account for variations of population density within countries. If it did then London would be as big as Scotland and Wales combined. Furthermore, it’s not just the number of people who count, but the number of interactions between them. That’s why cities tend to be more productive per person than smaller settlements, because proximity facilitates interaction.

Of course, there’s more than one way of overcoming the tyranny of distance. Along the all-important dimension of human experience, transport links shorten and thicken the connections between the people and places at either end.

That’s why one of the most important, but under-reported, stories in the world today is China’s Belt and Road Initiative – a programme of infrastructure investments that spans the entire Eurasian continent plus Africa. Without moving a single border these links are redrawing the real map of the world – not so much by extending China’s reach, but by shrinking the effective distance between it and its ostensibly far-flung partners in global trade and geopolitics.

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The really scary thing is that the Western powers act as if it isn’t happening. It’s an argument made in the New York Times, by Robert D Kaplan.

Europe (the UK included) is now so self-obsessed that we barely noticed that America almost went to war with Iran last month. The US, unlike Europe, has the means to project power around the world, but it uses it foolishly. In the last decade the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq greatly strengthened Iran; and now in this decade confrontation with Iran is strengthening China.

In siding with the Saudis against the Iranians, the Americans think they’re intervening in a regional conflict. What they’ve missed, however, is China’s global strategy.

Using our western categories of ‘Middle East’ and ‘Far East’, we easily think of China as a Pacific power for removed from events around the Persian Gulf. But look at the map: only one country separates China from Iran – Pakistan, a Chinese ally:

“In the southwestern corner of Pakistan, close to the Iranian border, China has completed a state-of-the-art container port at Gwadar, which Beijing hopes will eventually link up with roads, railways and pipelines to western China. And from Gwadar, the Chinese can monitor shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

“In other words, China is already in the Middle East.”

Belt and Road infrastructure across the Central Asian states provides further links between China and Iran. The latter, as the bridge between China’s immediate sphere of influence and the Middle East is therefore of great strategic significance:

“Iran is at the very center of 21st-century geopolitics. It dominates Central Asian trade routes and sits at the hydrocarbon nexus of the Indian Ocean, with a coastline of over 1,500 miles stretching from Iraq to Pakistan. Iran is the key to China’s plans, just as China’s plans are key to Eurasia’s destiny.”

Kaplan says that, together, China and Iran make an “unbeatable combination in Eurasia”.

Iran, however, is not completely in the Chinese camp. For instance it cooperates closely with India – an important counterweight to Chinese power in Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Kaplan warns the US government against its “myopic war-by-choice strategy with Iran” and its obsession with “the Persian Gulf as a small, distinct region”. He argues that the Chinese “see the larger, more fluid geographical picture” and notes America’s lack of a “big idea” to provide any positive competition.

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As to what that big idea might be, I don’t see the US launching its own Belt and Road Initiative. It has enough trouble updating its own infrastructure, let alone anyone else’s.

A more promising avenue would be real ambition on the development of low carbon, decentralised energy and other green technologies. To reduce competition for unevenly distributed resources like fossil fuels and water would go a long way to defusing the ‘great games’ of the 21st century.

Not on UnHerd, though. From an introduction to the project itself, to the international challenge of raising the trillions of dollars required to finance it, to the significance of the Eurasian landmass, we’ve tried to explore the issue from every angle.

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One question we haven’t yet asked, however, is: why bother?

Yes, the world’s biggest infrastructure network is primarily intended to transport the output of the world’s biggest exporter – but don’t we have ships and planes for that? Increasing exports may require more ports and airports, but why build land links across 10,000 kilometers of Eurasia? It’s all a bit Genghis Khan, isn’t it?

An excellent article by Richard Pomfret for Vox EU provides a lot of the answers. It explains the value of the ‘Eurasian landbridge’ i.e. the direct rail freight services that have been established in this decade between China and Europe:

“At current transport costs, auto components and laptops/printers fit into an intermediate category of goods for which a rail link between China and Europe offers a useful niche; the goods are too bulky for air transport, but the firms want faster and more reliable delivery than intercontinental maritime transport can provide and are prepared to pay for the time-saving that rail transport offers over maritime transport.”

It’s worth adding that sea routes from China to Europe and the Middle East run through some highly sensitive pinch points. For instance, there’s the Straits of Hormuz (between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula), the Suez Canal, of course, and the Bab el-Mandeb. That last one is the entrance to the Red Sea between Yemen and the Horn of Africa – and translates as the ‘Gate of Grief’. Reassuring!

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese would like some alternatives to those dire straits – hence the new focus on the overland routes.

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The new era of regular rail-freight services from China to Europe began in 2011, with the inauguration of the Chongqing to Duisburg route:

“Since 2011 the number of trips along the Landbridge has mushroomed to 6,235 by December 2017, and over half of those were in 2017.”

That said, we’re only at the beginning of things :

“In 2016, 42,000 containers passed through Kazakhstan, a big increase over the 2,000 in 2011, but they would fit on four container freighters that can pass through the Suez Canal. “

Pomfret notes that there’s been relatively little investment in the landbridge. Establishing the China-Europe routes has so far been a matter of negotiating transit agreements between the relevant governments so that services can run on existing track. Then there’s a few technical matters to sort out:

“At Khorgos, on the Kazakhstan-China border, the transfer for a 40+ container train can be done in 47 minutes. This investment has contributed to shaving the time (e.g. Chongqing-Duisburg took 16 days in 2011 and 12 days in 2017), but most of the time-saving is associated with better logistics and prioritising the profitable service.”

Twelve days, by the way, is three times faster than the equivalent maritime route.

Now imagine what billions of dollars of investment could achieve. New tracks, proliferating routes, more services, longer trains, faster journey times and the inevitable automation of just about everything currently done by hand.

The full exporting power of the Chinese economy will be soon he arriving at a platform near you. Just don’t expect anyone to apologise for any inconvenience.

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By Juliet Samuel

Back in the real world, we speak of Europe and Asia as if they were separate continents. However, that too is a work of fantasy. On a map without borders what you see is one continent, not two.

The border between Europe and Asia is arbitrary. One section runs north-south along the Urals, a lengthy but far from insuperable barrier to east-west travel. After the mountains peter out, we switch to the Ural river. That takes us to the Caspian and then the mountains of the Caucasus (but not at their highest ridge line). Moving west, we cross the Black Sea and arrive at the Bosphorus – a line of separation so meagre that it’s not only the same country on both sides, but also the same city (Istanbul).

Is there a more meaningful distinction between Europe and Asia?

Europe was once identified with Christendom. These days, the former seems embarrassed with that old association, while the latter stretches far beyond its former limits. If there aren’t already more practicing Christians in China than Europe, there soon will be.

So what does that leave?

Democracy? Nope, plenty of that in Asia now.

Ancestry? Not when the closely related peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean are divided between three continents.

What about economics and trade? Not anymore, says Bruno Maçães in the Guardian:

“Europe is disappearing. Not because – as you often hear – we are returning to a world of small nations, proud and sovereign, but because Europe is being replaced by a much vaster and more interesting geographic unit: Eurasia, the combination of the two continents of Europe and Asia, stretching from Lisbon to Shanghai or Jakarta. The rise of Asia forces us to place the continents on the same level, no longer separated by different levels of historical development. New connecting infrastructure, trade and the permeability of borders are drawing the whole of Eurasia together.”

As also mentioned in a previous UnPacked, Maçães believes that Brexit Britain needs to embrace the Eurasian future:

“…the UK could yet become one of the most important hinges holding the supercontinent together… Britain can be a driver of economic growth in India, Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia – and greatly benefit from it. With Japan, it can establish privileged partnerships in the development of robotics, AI and self-driving vehicles.

“…While Germany and China head to an inevitable clash about who will lead the next industrial revolution, Britain is in possession of that elusive gold dust that Asian manufacturing powerhouses will be missing for a long time: cutting-edge services and finance.”

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How Brexit Britain could help China build a new world

By Peter Franklin

It is sometimes hoped – or feared – that Britain outside of the EU will become like Singapore. In this context, the south east Asian republic is a shorthand for barely-regulated, low tax, hyper-capitalism. As well as misrepresenting the real Singapore, such a vision of the future is not what Britain voted for.

Maçães, however, draws out the true lesson of Singapore’s history as an independent state:

“…Singapore was quickly able to replace access to the Malaysian hinterland with trade and investment links with more distant markets. Just as Singapore became an Asian country more deeply connected with Europe and the United States than with its Asian neighbours, Britain could in just a couple of decades vastly expand its links with four of the five largest economies of the 21st century: China, Japan, India and Indonesia.”

It’s a provocative thesis, but if the nations and businesses of Eurasia are to draw closer together, then it’s unlikely to be within the protectionist trade barriers of the European Union. The other big Eurasian powers including China, Japan, Russia and India also have their protectionist tendencies – and some nationalist ones too.

The United Kingdom, however, could provide a very different environment, not so much neutral territory, as an open venue for economic, scientific and cultural exchange.

Maçães asks if “a new Eurasian capital [is] being born on the shores of the Thames?” It’s a good question – and the answer will depend on Britain’s willingness to seize the opportunity.