One person's utopia is another's dystopia: A world map of five superstates.
Geopolitical dreams
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1926.
Image: public domain
If the geopolitical dreams of a 20th-century Austro-Japanese aristocrat had come true, this is what the map of the world would have looked like: dominated by no more than five super-states.
Now mostly obscure, count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) is remembered mainly as the hero and villain (respectively) of the two fringes of the never-ending debate about European integration.
And that's a shame, because Coudenhove-Kalergi cuts quite an intriguing figure. Not only is he the one who proposed Beethoven's Ode to Joy as Europe's anthem, he also served as inspiration for Victor Laszlo, the fictional resistance hero in Casablanca.
On his father's side, Richard was the scion of an Austrian noble family with roots in Flanders and Greece and branches all over the rest of Europe. His mother, Mitsuko Aoyama, came from a wealthy Japanese family of merchants and landowners.
Pan-European Union
Original flag of the Pan-European Union. The current flag includes the twelve stars of the European Union. Co-founded by Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1922, the PEU is still in existence: its current president is former French MP and MEP Alain Terrenoire. Its HQ is in Munich.
Image: Ssolbergj, CC BY-SA 3.0
In 1922, Coudenhove-Kalergi co-founded the Pan-European Union, together with Austrian Archduke Otto von Habsburg. A year later, he published the manifesto Pan-Europa, and in 1924 he founded an eponymous journal, which ran until 1938. In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as its president, which he would remain until his death.
The motivation for the count's Pan-Europeanism was the threat of "world hegemony by Russia". The only way to prevent that was to supersede Europe's various nationalisms. The Pan-European superstate as envisioned by Coudenhove-Kalergi was a curious mix of social democracy and Christian conservatism – a "social aristocracy of the spirit". In response, Leon Trotsky, then Soviet commissar, in 1923 called for a "Soviet United States of Europe".
Five superstates
As in 1984 (and post Brexit), the UK in Coudenhove-Kalergi's system is not a part of the continental European superstate.
Image: public domain
The original framework for Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europeanism was a global polity of no more than five superstates, as shown on this map taken from one of his early works:
- Pan-Europe: uniting all European countries, minus the Russian and British empires. Pan-Europe also includes the French, Italian, Portuguese, Belgian, and Dutch colonial possessions, with a foothold in the Americas, half of Africa, and substantial parts of South East Asia.
- Pan-America: all of the Americas, with one major exception: Canada – controlled by the Brits. Minor exceptions include all the other bits controlled by the British and European empires. Pan-America also includes the Philippines, U.S.-administered at the time of publication.
- The British Commonwealth: basically, the British Empire at its height. Great Britain and Ireland, Canada and British Guyana, Africa from Cape to Cairo (and Nigeria, plus other territories in West Africa), the Arabian peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand.
- The Russian Empire: almost at its greatest extent. Ukraine is under the sway of Moscow, as are the Caucasian and Central Asian areas that are currently independent. But the Baltics are part of Pan-Europe.
- The smallest, but probably most populous of the five empires is East-Asia: uniting Japan, Korea and China, and also including Nepal.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
A map of the world in 1984. George Orwell may have been inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi's rather more utopian map.
Image: public domain
The map is also a bit scary: A globe dominated by an 'oligopoly' of just five states suggests governments that are far removed from their citizens.
It's a small leap from this world map to the one that informs 1984. In fact, George Orwell may have been inspired for his dystopian geography by the count's utopian vision: One of the three superstates on Orwell's imaginary map is in fact called 'Eastasia'. Another one, 'Eurasia', could be identified with another iteration of Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, without the colonial empires but including Russia.
In his later work, Coudenhove-Kalergi seems to have abandoned the global dimension of his agglomerative vision, concentrating more on unity within Europe.
His Pan-Europeanism may have been directed against the threat of the extreme left, that didn't make it popular with the extreme right. Hitler denounced the count (and his ideas) as those of a "rootless, cosmopolitan and elitist half-breed." The Nazis considered Pan-Europeanism a Masonic plot.
Fleeing into American exile after Austria's Anschluss (1938), Coudenhove-Kalergi spent the war continuing to make the case for European unity. At one point, however, he also proposed to form and head an Austrian government in exile – a suggestion that was ignored by Roosevelt and Churchill.
Eurasian Union
Cover of a 1934 book by Coudenhove-Kalergi, showing another vision on Pan-Europe: without Europe's colonies, including the territory of the entire Soviet Union.
Image: public domain.
After the war, it was others who led Europe towards greater integration, although Churchill lauded the count's Pan-European Union for its work in a speech in 1946 in Zürich. Coudenhove-Kalergi was instrumental in founding the European Parliamentary Union in 1947 and in 1950 was the very first recipient of the annual Charlemagne Prize, awarded by the city of Aachen for work in the service of European unification.
Coudenhove-Kalergi's grave, near Gstaad, carries the epitaph: Pionnier des États-Unis d'Europe. For all its simplicity, that sounds a bit grandiose – he was not directly involved in founding the EU or any of its precursors – not to say premature: today's European Union is not (yet) the dreaded monolithic superstate evoked by the epithet 'United States of Europe'.
Nonetheless, proponents of (further) European integration happily praise the count's life-long devotion to the cause. Streets and squares throughout Europe – although admittedly never the longest or largest ones – carry his name.
On the other hand, opponents of European integration from the nationalist and identitarian camp denounce the so-called Kalergi Plan, a plot to use immigration to dilute Europe's 'whiteness', supposedly penned by the "cosmopolitan" count. It's a hoax on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unfortunately also by token of its continued currency among those fringe groups.
Strange Maps #1002
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Golden sunset illuminates a row of moai statues on Easter Island.
In the popular imagination, the story of Easter Island has long centered on stone. About 900 monolithic statues, or "moai", have been identified on Easter Island, a remote 63-square-mile triangle in the Pacific Ocean whose native name is Rapa Nui. The statues — haunting, hollow-eyed faces — were crafted from massive blocks of volcanic rock by the Rapa Nui people, who settled on the island around 1200 CE.
But for archaeologists and anthropologists, the story of Rapa Nui has often centered on trees, rats, and climate. These are the key factors, some researchers have proposed, that led to ecological catastrophe on the island and, consequently, population collapse.
One popular narrative holds that the growing Rapa Nui population cut down so many of the island's tall palm trees that they depleted their food and logistical resources and inadvertently killed off plant and animal species. Meanwhile, Polynesian rats, which were carried to the island via boat and had multiplied exponentially over generations, contributed to deforestation by eating seeds and plants. Compounding the island's problems were changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which led to drier conditions.
Facing dire circumstances, the natives probably resorted to eating rats. They might have also turned to eating each other, suggested the author Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, in which he states that Rapa Nui is the "clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."
Busting the Easter Island collapse myth
But the popular narrative about Easter Island could be mostly false. New research suggests that these narratives connecting environmental devastation to population decline aren't accurate. The study, published in Nature Communications, found that while the Rapa Nui people did suffer environmental and climatic changes, they didn't suddenly dwindle in number but rather maintained "stable and sustainable communities on the island" up until the point they encountered Europeans.
To estimate changes in population over time, the researchers tested four demographic models, three of which accounted for variables like climate change or deforestation or both. Their models also incorporated about 200 radiocarbon-dated archaeological samples, which serve as a good "proxy for estimating relative population sizes."
Moai statueskovgabor79 via Adobe Stock
Radiocarbon dating and statistical modeling always come with uncertainties. To minimize analytical uncertainty, the researchers used a form of statistical modeling called Approximate Bayesian Computation. The researchers wrote:
"[Approximate Bayesian Computation] is a flexible and powerful modeling approach originally developed in population genetics, but recently applied in archeology, including paleodemographic research. We demonstrate how ABC can be used to directly integrate independent paleoenvironmental variables into demographic models and perform multi-model comparisons."
The results produced by all four models showed that the Rapa Nui population enjoyed steady growth until the first contact with Europeans in 1722, after which the population seemed to either plateau or decline over subsequent decades. These models suggest that, contrary to previous hypotheses about how the overexploitation of resources led to demographic collapse, deforestation and climatic changes on the island were prolonged processes that didn't have catastrophic effects on the population.
For example, evidence suggests that the Rapa Nui people built productive gardens on deforested land and mulched them with nutrient-rich stone. As for climate change, the researchers pointed to recent studies suggesting that the natives adapted to drier conditions by turning to coastal groundwater sources.
Upending a long-standing narrative
Although the study offers evidence of a robust population prior to European contact, the researchers could not determine which of the four demographic models was most correct, nor did they account for other factors that likely affected the island's population, like warfare. The researchers also did not explore what effect, if any, European contact had on the population.
But overall, the study casts serious doubts on the popular narrative that environmental changes drove down the native population. To be sure, there are dark chapters in the history of Rapa Nui, including civil war, slave raids, and statue destruction; reports suggest that between 1722 and 1774 many of the island's statues were toppled or neglected, likely due to internal conflicts among the natives.
Still, the study suggests that the story of early Rapa Nui is less about environmental destruction than it is about resilience.
The researchers conclude that "despite extreme isolation, marginal ecological conditions, and a series of environmental changes, Rapa Nui people found solutions that enabled them to successfully thrive on the island for at least 500 years prior to the arrival of Europeans."
Multiple studies have shown that as well as trees being a fantastic way to store carbon dioxide, they offer other benefits, such as a cooling effect in cities, the ability to reduce flood risk and boost biodiversity, among other things.
Our new study in Nature Geoscience shows that trees could also affect rainfall patterns.
We used measurements of rainfall across Europe to investigate what effect forests have on rainfall totals. We know that forests mostly increase local and downwind rainfall in the summer and winter, but the magnitude of this effect varies across regions and seasons.
To identify a realistic reforestation strategy we used the global reforestation potential map. In the area we looked at in our research (most of Europe), 14.4% of the land surface was considered suitable for reforestation, an area larger than France.
Much of Europe could be reforested (green = areas with realistic reforestation potential) ('Global Reforestation Potential Map' Griscom et al (2017), CC BY-SA)
We then compared the effect of turning all that land into forest to the precipitation changes in a future scenario in which the world faces intermediate levels of climate change, based on current predictions. While the climate scenario projects wetter winters and drier summers, the inclusion of reforestation could enhance European summertime rainfall by an average of 7.6%, potentially offsetting some of the drying that climate change is projected to cause. However, we also found reforestation may exacerbate the increase in winter rainfall.
In the UK and Ireland for example, where around 37% of the land area has the potential for reforestation, we estimate that reforestation on this scale would increase precipitation by an average of 0.74 mm/day (24%) in winter and 0.48 mm/day (19%) during summer.
Several factors potentially contribute to this. Forests typically have a higher surface “roughness" than agricultural land. This creates more turbulence over the trees and slows the movement of heavy clouds causing them to rain over and downwind of the forests. The same is true of urban areas too – increased surface roughness from buildings can amplify the precipitation over cities and downwind of cities. And forests typically evaporate more water than agricultural land, particularly during the summer season, which likely means more rain.
These findings demonstrate the relevance of land management in the assessment of climate change pathways. Many countries are considering how changes to land cover could contribute to their climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
For instance the recently published climate change risk assessment from the UK government's Climate Change Committee advisory body highlights that the gap has widened between the level of risk we face and the level of adaptation underway. Intervention measures are therefore urgently needed but require careful consideration. The new report points out that we must avoid poor planning being “locked-in".
Reforestation in particular needs careful planning, as trees need decades to grow, and as they interact in such a complex way with multiple aspects of the environment. For example, while we may see increased rainfall from forestation, we may also see decreased runoff and water availability, since trees typically evaporate more water than crops or grass.
The species of tree we plant also needs to be carefully considered – will it be able to cope with higher temperatures? Will the type of tree be resilient to the invasive species and pathogens projected to increase with climate change? If not, then we have wasted our time and money.
Policy makers therefore need to thoroughly and carefully assess any kind of nature-based solution before embarking on a scheme that may provide no long term benefit. It is all about making sure that we are putting the right intervention in the right place, at the right time.
Elizabeth Lewis, Lecturer in Computational Hydrology, Newcastle University; Edouard Davin, Senior Scientist, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Ronny Meier, PostDoc, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
