Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” describes a final and absolute global disorder, but does not envision a redemptive recourse. As a performative discourse, the text is encoded with the potential for pre-emptive salvation on behalf of the First World before the ultimate closure of a redeemable future, as figured in the hologrammatic construction of the Last Map.
The symbolic structures of meaning laid over regions of the Third World by Kaplan is justified by and articulated through a vocabulary of biblical inevitability: “… we ignore this dying region at our risk” or confront the “shadowy tentacles” of the Last Map, its absent presence incarnated as the Beast of the apocalypse. He employs a violent discourse that evacuates the Third World of meaning in order to make redemption possible. Kaplan’s vocabulary maintains it as a site emptied of meaningfulness, coherence, integrality: “pre-modern formlessness,” an “ever-mutating representation of chaos”, “loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting”. The Third World as “chaos,” a gap, a chasm, an abyss, in its evacuation of meaningfulness and coherence, is subject to be filled with meaning, inscribed with the potential imposition of order.
Global North-South Divide Map
The distinction between a pre-emptive and redemptive project of statecraft points to Kaplan’s mode of performative, rather than descriptive, discourse. While Kaplan submits a vision of “apocalypse” in the form of a disclosure, a revelation, or an unveiling of the “coming anarchy,” the redemption at the end of the apocalyptic moment is absent in his text. The text is not concerned with radical transformation in the form of redemption inherent to apocalyptic processes.
As I mentioned in the first part of this discussion on Kaplan’s apocalyptic map, Kaplan delivers himself from the edge of “anarchy” to insert himself back on the threshold of responsibility wherein he jars his readers into vigilance: “… we ignore this dying region at our own risk”, shifting registers from anarchic globalization inevitability to Third-World accountability. In Giorgio Agamben’s essay on the function of messianic time “The Time That Is Left” he distinguishes between apocalyptic and messianic time as the stream of time before The End: “the messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.“ The shift in register from interminable apocalypse, figured in the Last Map, to a time that requires vigilance, projects the potential of a future before the Last Map sets in and time reaches its closure. Within Kaplan’s economy of salvation, filled with the urgency to “grasp and accomplish” during this “operational time”/Messianic time (per Agamben) redemption is projected outward: “Dying” West Africa is subject to salvation. The pre-emptive strikes of vigilant self-preservation against the emergence of the Last Map’s chaotic and “shadowy tentacles” necessitate the redemptive tendency of a universalizing democratic moral project.
St. Sever's Apocalypse Map
It is important to note that the apocalyptic and postapocalyptic is not about the end of time but it is rather a narrative of trauma, invested with an orientation toward looking back at the past, and aligns with the notion of the messianic as the time remaining or the remainder of time. Thus, both are bound by the logic of continuity, in which the end is never final. Residing within this traumatic mapping/un-mapping are gestures of a preemptive ordering statecraft that captures the future, apprehends the possibility of redemption with all its risks.
However, within Kaplan’s vision of the inevitability of globalization resides, rather than a prognosis of “disintegration”, the possibility of intervention—the Last Map as an anchor of interminably anarchy and an irredeemable structure outside of time has yet to set in.
In a 1994 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The Coming Anarchy” Robert Kaplan prophesizes that the social, political, and environmental degeneration put into motion by the “Third World” will inevitably have consequences on the “First World” in the coming century. Kaplan simultaneously envisions a “bifurcated world” populated by citizens of the West, “healthy, well-fed, and pampered by technology,” and citizens of the Third World, “poor, nasty brutish, and short” as well as an erosion of the boundaries between the two worlds. He argues that the collapse of Africa, as well as the rest of the Third World wherein he locates similar signs of “anarchy,” will precipitate the collapse of the West. According to Kaplan, once civil wars, tribalism, and disease permeate the disintegrating borders of nation-states, they will infect the West with a breakdown of security.
Ironically, Kaplan’s apocalyptic projections of nation-state obsolescence and the ensuing disorder function as a means of ordering and disciplining his vision of Third-World chaos and its inevitable destructive influence on the First World. Despite the title of the article’s last section, “The Last Map,” in which Kaplan re-maps the future of geopolitics through a final but “ever-mutating representation of chaos” in the figure of the hologram, his dystopic imagery of lasting “upheaval” in which “foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts” simultaneously opens up the horizons of apocalyptic discourse for a pre-emptive and a redemptive project of statecraft.
Kaplan’s description of the Last Map offers no outlet or salvation once it is animated by Third-World collapse, representing an everlasting apocalyptic moment. While Kaplan submits a vision of “apocalypse” in the form of a disclosure, a revelation, or an unveiling of the “coming anarchy,” the redemption at the end of the apocalyptic moment is absent in his article. He is not concerned with radical transformation in the form of redemption inherent to apocalyptic processes. Rather than providing an apocalyptic optic of the “coming anarchy,” the Last Map’s “redemptive” function resides in the “post-apocalypse,” which, rather than revealing an orientation toward the eschatological-apocalyptic “sharp moment of death” as well as the glorious re-birth that it prefigures, lingers on “the interminable duration of dying”. The post-apocalyptic moment is oriented toward the past, toward trauma, and perpetually backward-looking, thus the Last Map is invested with a binding, irrevocable regret. According to Kaplan, once the future of Third-World collapse is complete, the horizon of expectations for the entire world will suffer a closure in the form of the Last Map.
Kaplan suggests that his Last Map of the new-world disorder, although “protean” and “ever-mutating” in its conception, represents the interminable apocalypse. He does not submit an apocalyptic narrative attempting to reach the closure of a world of securely bounded nation-states (as Kaplan knows it) before opening up the horizon to sequentiality, but rather “this future map,” in its “mutation,” keeps reproducing itself as the Last Map. There will be no deferred project of salvation, no other map framing the “dimensions” of “redemption,” a world of securely bounded nation-states, following the Last Map in the future. The time for that will have come and gone. Having established the parameters of the future map, Kaplan’s travelogue returns to the more manageable present, wherein he warns, “…we ignore this dying region [West Africa] at our own risk”.
A discussion of “risk” reveals a shift to a preoccupation with conceptualizing possible futures, rather than being doomed to repeat the same one, in order to avoid undesirable futures. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck conceives of the notion of the modern “risk society” in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, in which he asserts that an awareness of the dangers confronting society at the local and global level has accelerated with modernity, and has created along with risk an alarmist need for development of strategies to confront these dangers. Whereas the Last Map promises eternal peril, the closure of a future, and a suspension in a “timeless time,” the concept of risk in the present represents the space between security and destruction, wherein the perception of risk enables the opening of the horizon for mobilizing, galvanizing, “galloping,” around the potential for new opportunities.
Kaplan’s attempt to chart global space in the article’s transition from the Last Map to a discussion of risk reveals the attempt on his part to present a constative discourse by describing the “coming anarchy,” as the magnetic field to which the world will inevitably succumb. At the same time that he presents the inevitability of anarchic globalization, he not only provides the instability effects through a theatrically threatening hologrammatic construction of but through the terror of the “whip” of risk discourse and development, he performatively delivers himself from the edge of “anarchy” to insert himself back on the threshold of responsibility wherein he jars his readers into vigilance: “… we ignore this dying region at our own risk”, shifting registers from anarchic globalization inevitability to Third-World accountability.
Alexandria is not unique as a “world-city” or a globalizing one, with a busy development project harkening to the past, one would think. In fact, look at the excessive development projects in Los Angeles or Las Vegas that privilege or romanticize the past. But in Alexandria’s case, it is actually itself the site of the cultural imaginaries of the Mediterranean cosmopolis, which makes it unique in the sense of re-inventing itself as a development city based on its own lineage.
The routes of urban development and cultural development are often tied to cultural translatability to Europe ever since Egypt’s participation in the Euro-Med partnership, whose Euro-Med Heritage projects, among others, implies its participation in translatability and exchangeability of cultural industry on “both sides of the shore” – of Africa and Europe. This “trans-culture,” signified by many of the Euro-Med cultural projects (post-Barcelona Declaration) in Alexandria and its productions, are “translated” to be readable on both “sides of the Mediterranean shore”. In one sense, this readability of Mediterranean culture can be used to examine what this attempt at “cosmopolitanism” means when referring to the Mediterranean city, such as Alexandria. It is not difficult to assess that the urban models starting from the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s were not only about transformation of territory organization but the transformation of Egyptian society. The EU-Med collaboration to make North & South cultures on both sides of the Mediterranean has also impacted the process of revitalized Mediterranean urbanization. South-South cultural translatability, or lack thereof, in such projects needs to be analyzed, as well. The city in literature requires an examination of intellectual and cultural history – via analysis of writers, intellectuals, and cultural producers on the “rebuilding” of Alexandria, materially and symbolically. The ways of producing cosmopolitanism and the urban lived experience and space of the cosmpolis can be seen through the intellectual labor of the people who live in these cities, whether by a mediascape, technoscape, commodity/materialscape.
Although resurgence of claims to Mediterranean urban identity has been criticized, Alexandria is a mirror territory of transformations taking place in the world today: globalization, migrations, borders, citizenship, network-society, and communications. Since the 1990s, the revival of interest in Alexandria’s modern cosmopolitan past has been demonstrated by both urban renovation projects and Egyptian literature. The interconnectedness of these productions is revealed by how the urban space of the Mediterranean and its literature are influenced by each other. The modern cosmopolitan era of Alexandria is inextricable from the literature that molds and communicates its image. Naguib Mahfouz wrote Miramar to show the Mediterranean city rapidly transforming since the Egyptian revolution. Edward al-Kharrat, Alexandrian native, has written more extensively in his novels on “Mediterranean” Alexandria. The scholar Samia Mehrez has demonstrated through her scholarly analyses the interconnectedness between the dissemination of literary and cultural productions and urbanism in Egypt. But this state-governed resurgence is ongoing and the cultural productions and their criticism remains in development.
Many cultural productions are emerging from Egypt addressing the role of Alexandria as a re-emergent Mediterranean city. Alexandria’s landscape has incited and evoked a myriad of histories and mythologies. Michel Foucault has written: “Alexandria, which is our birthplace, has mapped out this circle for all Western language: to write was to return, to come back to the beginning to grasp again the first instance”. I argue these histories and mythologies have influenced the western imagination – both inside and outside of Egypt, which, considering Alexandria’s diverse Arab, African, and European historical urban make-up, is explicit – but I also argue that this influence on the western imagination is distinct from Egypt.
Alexandria has its renewed position as a Mediterranean port city through an interconnected production of urban, cultural, and literary projects. From its originary narratives to its contemporary nostalgic ones, Alexandria has fit the mold of the ideal Mediterranean city: a cosmopolis, urban contact zone for diverse cultures and people.
A number of images and metaphors of the city organize the research. But in Egypt, as within other nations with highly globalizing cities, these models and images overlap: for example, Alexandria can be represented as ethnic city, divided city, deindustrialized city, and global city. For instance, the ethnic city has encouraged discussion of assimilation and the development of ethnic politics, and the global city has focused attention on the unique roles of cities in the development of transnational cultures. As a nation with the fifth highest number of migrants in the world as well as one with projects presumably returning to its transnational heritage, Egypt offers an opportunity to study a city ideologically optimizing its past transcultural heritage and lineage through a future-oriented development of the city. By future-oriented, I mean that Alexandria is slated currently for a host of development projects to return it to its culturally prized position in the cultural imagination, Western and Egyptian.
