geopolitika vody, civilizacni toky
Water is a stream of geopolitical force through history | Aeon Essayshttps://aeon.co/essays/water-is-a-stream-of-geopolitical-force-through-historyA great river encircles the world. It rises in the heartland of the United States and carries more water than the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. One branch, its oldest, streams over the Atlantic, heading for Europe and the Middle East. Another crosses the Pacific, flowing towards China. Countless tributaries join along the way, draining the plains and forests of Latin America, Europe and Asia.
You probably have never heard of such a river, even though almost all of us draw from it. You cannot fish in it, float on it, drink from it. If you were to look, you would not find it: it is invisible. Yet there is no doubt that it flows.
The river starts anywhere water feeds agriculture. But from there, physical water vanishes, replaced by a flow of crops that carry only the memory of the water used to produce them. Crops then travel along the shipping lanes of the global trade system, eventually displacing the water that would have otherwise been used to grow them locally. Thus, water flows from source to destination ‘embedded’ in its products. It is a flow of ‘virtual water’, an idea first developed in the 1980s by the late geographer Tony Allan.
This great virtual river helps explain how nations exercise power over each other. It is far from a coincidence that its dominant source today is the waters of the Mississippi. Its current path was established when Franklin Roosevelt’s US replaced Britain as the world’s hegemon. The US began feeding an imploding, war-torn Europe with crops nourished by the rich waters of Old Man River, and the rest is history.
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All through the 20th century, trading the products of a country’s water resources was an act of power. When the US became the granary of the world, flooding food eastward, it also provoked a countercurrent of hard currency streaming back to pay for it, setting the stage for the Bretton Woods settlement.
Lenin and Stalin paid for Soviet industrialisation with cereal production of Ukrainian, Russian and Central Asian fields, irrigated by canals built by thousands of Gulag prisoners. In China, Mao may well have measured the targets of the Great Leap Forward in tons of steel, but planned to fund their pursuit by irrigating the plains of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.
Ibn Saud knew that oil might make him wealthy, but only water to irrigate Saudi Arabia would give him power, so the former paid for the latter. And the 1970s postcolonial competition for regional influence over water reached a peak when the pan-Arabism of Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser collided with Israel’s claims over the Jordan River, seeding conflicts that – from the Arab Spring to the Syrian crisis – have contributed to shaping the contemporary world.
Yet the geopolitical value of water ended up hidden from view. A thick layer of 20th-century industrialisation concealed the force of water behind countless dams and vast embankments, replumbing the planet and fooling people into believing that modernity had emancipated their life from concerns about water.
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The drying of the Colorado River, the decimation of the forests of the Amazon and Congo basins, the flood-ridden plains of the Rhine and Yellow rivers, the disappearing wetlands of the Murray-Darling River are all evidence that a vast agricultural trade system continues to transform the face of the planet. And water continues to be its blueprint.
You cannot see the great virtual river, even if it continues to grow. But, unseen, it still matters. It shapes the environment we all live in. It creates powerful dependencies between nations. Above all, it is an expression of power. You might not be able to see it, but its shadow stretches behind you in time.