Are we witnessing the recasting of the Middle East as the nexus of East and West? Henceforth it will simply be The Middle or perhaps even The Centre...
The Israeli Prime Minister and government dream of the Middle East as an obligatory point of passage that connects Europe and India, two old centres. This is depicted as a land bridge between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. But standing in the way are those who might also benefit and even contribute to this recasting of the Middle East as a neoliberal, planetary middle: Iran and all those who share a different histories and visions of the region that are not attuned to global trade and power dynamics but are often local, agrarian or coastal communities who have scraped a living for centuries.
Geostrategy
This vision is shared by American geostrategists, but its benefit to India, Saudi Arabia, China and others is perhaps what has induced them to remain muted in their protests about the violence and death inflicted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on neighbouring countries and areas, such as Lebanon and Gaza to mention only the two most recent. Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to these “common interests” in a speech to the UN General Assembly (22 Sept 2023) where he displayed a map of the New Middle East of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Emirates (UAE) and Sudan (where UAE is supplying arms in another parallel war): a broadened new Levant astride the Red Sea. As he drew a line from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, he said: “We’ll build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, to Europe. This is an extraordinary change, a monumental change, another pivot of history....”
Becoming the pivot, the Middle looks beyond finite oil resources and possibly reverses the relationship between the old and new centres of civilization, between the Levant and Europe. Where the Middle East was once a periphery and protectorate of European and Ottoman powers it would become a new centre point. This is much more than a strategy to maintain employment or win an election, it is a long-term historic strategy to shape a world to benefit one’s own and exclude others. It might be plotted as a regional expansion of the centrality Dubai has developed for air routes between southern Asia and Europe and Africa. However, the inducement for Europe and the United States, in particular, is the hope of maintaining control of trade and energy flows on which they depend. This is threatened by change both in terms of specific contenders such as China, but also in terms of alternative worldviews which cast and spatialise regions differently and to different advantages. But, while confident of the power of financial centres and their elites to maintain control, will witless American supporters of the promised people and promised land eventually regret handing over their own global centrality? Initiative and control over the direction and pace of events is clearly no longer controlled by those in Washington or New York or Los Angeles.
Competing strategies and tactics
A competing vision, for example, is China’s “One Belt One Road” strategy to reorganize trade around itself as the Centre. This has involved developing a set of dependent economic satellite countries through which political and military influence could be exercised. By offering to construct and develop infrastructure in countries peripheral to the West, such as Sri Lanka, in some cases gaining control through punitive financing terms, the Chinese state has sought to employ its citizens, make beneficial investments, and extend its reputation as a modernizing force to populations globally. Will we see more of, for example, a Chinese concept of a family and clan-based approach to prospering in this situation? This has been to distribute family relations across sectors, including in the police, medicine, government and intelligence into order to have access to and trade information to manoeuvre between the constraints of state policy, inspection and enforcement. What are the local tactics for a multipolar world?
Geopolitical Spatialisations: The Levantine Middle
Our world is changing. My argument is that we are witnesses to a series of violent attempts to respatialise the globe. I have previously argued that this is the case for the Putin invasion of Ukraine which seeks to impose a nostalgic Russian imperial geography on post-Soviet states such as Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Baltic states. In speeches before, and in the Israel-American-Arab response to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, we observe an opportunistic expansion of the conflict aimed at dominating the region. The effect is to rescript, recast and respatialise the Middle East as a new Middle, a global nexus of economic relations. This responds to attempts to counterbalance Chinese proposals to become the new Asia-Pacific hegemon and socioeconomic hub.
Three competing strategic spatialisation projects involve changing outlooks, rights, values and institutions. They appear first as speeches, maps and drawing new lines, but they imply violence, physical disruption, winners and losers. They alter the relation between citizens and their power over governments, segment territory between sectarian groups, and are correlated with changes in the relationship between the global and local. However, these are false “spatial fixes.” The true common crisis is not geopolitical spatialisation but climate warming. This environmental spatialisation will continue to make Asian and African equatorial regions inhospitable or uninhabitable for humans and drive mass migrations which will trouble any geopolitical arrangements achieved in the next decades.About the author: Professor Rob Shields is H.M. Tory Chair cross appointed to Human Geography EAS/Sociology at the University of Alberta
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