Chapter 1 From Borders to Bridges A Journey Around the World Let''s take a journey around the world--without ever getting on a plane. If we get an early start in Edinburgh, Scotland, we''ll arrive at London Euston station around noon, stroll quickly past the British Library, and have a quick lunch at the masterfully renovated Victorian-era St. Pancras station, from which we''ll board the Eurostar train, travel under the Dover Strait to Paris, followed by a high-speed TGV to Munich and a German ICE to Budapest. An overnight train along the Danube River brings us to Bucharest, Romania, and another overnight along the Black Sea to Istanbul. Where once a creaky ferry was the fastest way to cross from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Strait, today we can glide over one or the other suspension bridge or continue by train through the newly opened Marmaray tunnel and onward to Iran. We could also catch the revived Hejaz Railway through southeastern Turkey, stopping in Damascus and Amman before continuing to Medina or across Israel and the Sinai to Cairo, from which we might ultimately descend through Africa all the way to Cape Town on a sturdy upgrade of the "Red Line" British colonialists began in the late nineteenth century. From Tehran, we''ll head eastward on a new Chinese-built railway through the rugged Asian steppe, cross Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan''s commercial hub of Almaty. Several times per week, we can cross into China''s largest province of Xinjiang to its capital, Urumqi, and onward via Xi''an to Beijing.
Back in Paris, we might have opted for an overnight sleeper to Moscow, from which we could catch the fabled Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok--and carry on to Pyongyang and Seoul--or branch off a bit earlier toward Beijing, via either Manchuria or Mongolia. Either way, if we opt for the tropical route, we''ll speed southward along the world''s most extensive high-speed rail network into mountainous Yunnan and its capital, Kunming. From there, we can cross directly into Laos and take in Vientiane before crossing into Thailand toward Bangkok, or take a coastal route along the South China Sea via Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and through Phnom Penh in Cambodia to Bangkok. Now the options narrow with the geography: we speed on down the Malay Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, the southernmost point on mainland Asia. But water hasn''t stopped us so far, so let''s continue by train through a tunnel under the strategic Strait of Malacca onto Indonesia''s largest island of Sumatra, then over the Sunda Strait bridge to reach the capital, Jakarta, on Java, the world''s most populous island with more than 150 million people. Just a bit farther and we''re on the beaches of Bali, from which we can catch a cruise ship to Australia. If we choose the fastest routes and don''t miss any connections, we will have traversed the entire Eurasian landmass--Scotland to Singapore, and then some--in about a week. And yet we''re only halfway done.
Instead of the Antipodes, from Beijing we should actually head north through Vladivostok and eastern Siberia. If you fancy sushi, we could take a bridge to Sakhalin Island and pass through a 45-kilometer tunnel to Japan''s northernmost Hokkaido Island, passing seamlessly southward across Japan''s major islands on high-speed Shinkansen trains. When we reach Kyushu, we''ll loop back through a 120-kilometer undersea tunnel to Busan, zipping northward through the Korean peninsula back toward Siberia to continue our next 13,000-kilometer segment that takes us parallel to the volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula and through a 200-kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait that emerges in Alaska and takes us to Fairbanks. From there, of course, it''s straight south to Juneau and Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. California, Texas, Illinois, and New York all want more Acela Express high-speed rail (though it''s planned to hit only about two hundred kilometers per hour, about half as fast as the Japanese). Still, we''ll make it from Pacific to Atlantic across the Lower 48 in two days. All that''s left is to catch a zippy but smooth hovercraft to London, followed by any of the more than twenty daily trains headed to Edinburgh. A journey around the world--as promised.
One could fly almost seamlessly along this itinerary, drive much of it too except for the oceans, and indeed eventually do it the old-fashioned way on iron railroads. Many of these routes already exist, and all of them will in due course. The more connections there are, the more options we have. "Geography is destiny," one of the most famous adages about the world, is becoming obsolete. Centuries-old arguments about how climate and culture condemn some societies to fail, or how small countries are forever trapped and subject to the whims of larger ones, are being overturned. Thanks to global transportation, communications, and energy infrastructures--highways, railways, airports, pipelines, electricity grids, Internet cables, and more--the future has a new maxim: "Connectivity is destiny." Seeing the world through the lens of connectivity generates new visions of how we organize ourselves as a species. Global infrastructures are morphing our world system from divisions to connections and from nations to nodes.
Infrastructure is like a nervous system connecting all parts of the planetary body; capital and code are the blood cells flowing through it. More connectivity creates a world beyond states, a global society greater than the sum of its parts. Much as the world evolved from vertically integrated empires to horizontally interdependent states, now it is graduating toward a global network civilization whose map of connective corridors will supersede traditional maps of national borders. Each continental zone is already becoming an internally integrated mega-region (North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Arabia, South Asia, East Asia) with increasingly free trade coupled with intense connectivity across their thriving city-states. At the same time, maps of connectivity are also better at revealing geopolitical dynamics among superpowers, city-states, stateless companies, and virtual communities of all kinds as they compete to capture resources, markets, and mind share. We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries--whose main purpose will be to protect supply chains rather than borders. Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century. Connectivity is nothing less than our path to collective salvation.
Competition over connectivity is by its nature less violent than international border conflicts, providing an escape hatch from historical cycles of great power conflict. Furthermore, connectivity has made previously unimaginable progress possible as resources and technologies move much more easily to where they are needed, while people can more quickly relocate to escape natural disasters or to cities for economic opportunity. Better connectivity allows societies to diversify where their imports come from and where their exports go. Connectivity is therefore how we make the most of our geography. The grand story of human civilization is more than just tragic cycles of war and peace or economic booms and busts. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward connectivity. Bridges to Everywhere The central fact of the age we live in is that every country, every market, every medium of communication, every natural resource is connected. --Simon Anholt, The Good Country Party Connectivity is the new meta-pattern of our age.
Like liberty or capitalism, it is a world-historical idea, one that gestates, spreads, and transforms over a long timescale and brings about epochal changes. Despite the acute unpredictability that afflicts our world today, we can be adequately certain of current mega-trends such as rapid urbanization and ubiquitous technology. Every day, for the first time in their lives, millions of people switch on mobile phones, log on to the Web, move into cities, or fly on an airplane. We go where opportunity and technology allow. Connectivity is thus more than a tool; it is an impulse . No matter which way we connect, we do so through infrastructure. While the word "infrastructure" is less than a century old, it represents nothing less than our physical capacity for global interaction. Engineering advances have made new infrastructures possible that were the dreams of previous generations.
Over a century ago, crucial geographic interventions such as the Suez and Panama Canals reshaped global navigation and trade. Since the nineteenth century, Ottoman sultans aspired to construct a tunnel that would connect Istanbul''s European and Asian sides. Now Turkey has both the Marmaray tunnel that opened in 2013 and freight railways and oil and gas pipelines that are strengthening its position as a key corridor between Europe and China. Turkey has been called the country where continents collide; now it is the country where continents connect. The early twentieth-century Japanese emperor Taisho also sought to link Honshu and northern Hokkaido Island, but only in the 1980s did it complete the Seikan Tunnel, which traverses fifty-four kilometers (including twenty-three kilometers under the seabed) and carries Shinkansen high-speed trains. Once the tunnels to Sakhalin and South Korea are complete, Japan won''t truly be an island anymore. We are in only an early phase of reengineering the planet to facilitate surging flows of people, commodities, goods, data, and capital. Indeed, the next wave of transcontin.