An Atlas is a collection of Maps. The map shown above is Peter's Projection of what the world really looks like to scale.

Map detailing Internet usage - 2001

The new international currency is information . The left admit it - independent book publisher Seven Stories Press (home to several Chomsky pamphlets) proudly stamps the moniker "arm yourself with information" on the covers of its books. The right know it too. AOL published the details of 23 million searches run on the Google search engine by 650,000 of its customers during March, April and May of this year. Several weeks ago, Maureen Govern, AOL's chief technology officer, resigned, due to the ensuing mess.   Elsewhere, SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the Belgian co-op responsible for processing money transfers on behalf of the world's banks, has handed over the details of around 4.5 million British financial transactions to the CIA since 9/11 in an effort to combat terrorism, potentially in breach of British and EU law.  

In an age of information, it follows that the way information is transmitted is just as important as the information itself - to some the Internet has opened up the world, rendering traditional frontiers obsolete and bringing the world closer together, perhaps even allowing one to speak of a "global village", as Marshall McLuhan put it.

This map demonstrates how misguided this sentiment is. Access to information via the Internet remains concentrated in the hands of the developed world, data flowing with the most frequency between the three poles of the "triad" formed by North America, Europe and Japan. One forgets Marshall McLuhan and thinks instead of Olivier Dollfus, who dismisses McLuhan's "global village" and speaks of a "global metropolitan archipelago", with its poles of prosperity and its entirely marginalised territories.

So, given the importance of information to today's world, and the obvious digital divide which exists, one might think that the above map merits inclusion in an atlas of the contemporary world, in that it highlights the international inequalities of information accessibility. However, what it doesn't show is that there is internal digital divide which currently exists within the triad. Let's take the example of the United States. In the US:

42% of white families compared to 31% of African-American families

62% of families in which there is a member with a university qualification compared to 17% of families with no graduate member.

68% of families who earn more than $75,000 per annum compared to 21% of those who earn less than $30,000 Have access to the Internet.

[Note – PIB stands for Produit Intérieur Brut, French for GDP]

The map above shows the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per habitant per country. GDP is defined as the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given time period (in the case of this map , the year 2002). It  is occasionally cited as an indication of the standard of living in a particular country or region, the GDP per habitant being the total GDP divided by the number of habitants.

The map above is based on the “Clash of Civilisations” theory of Samuel Huntington. Huntington proposes that the future sources of conflict in the world will be neither ideological nor economic but cultural. Conflict will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations, of which, according to Huntington, there are eight – Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African. He considers a civilisation to be a cultural entity, “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.”

He argues that a conflict between cultures will dominate global politics - “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future”. He also examined the historical sources of conflict – for 150 years after the emergence of the modern international system starting with the Peace of Westphalia, conflicts in the Western world were between monarchs. From this process was created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution until the end of WWI the principal lines of conflict were between nations. As a result of the Russian revolution “the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies” – first between communism, fascism and liberal democracy (WWII) and then between communism and liberal democracy (the Cold War). For Huntington, the fall of the Berlin War and the collapse of the Soviet Union do not signal the “end of history “ as purported by Francis Fukuyama; rather he suggests that “international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centrepiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilisations and among non-Western civilisations.”

Supporters of the above view cite 9/11, the Afghan war and the recent Muhammad cartoons-scandal as evidence both of civilisational conflict between the West and Islam and of the prescience of Huntington’s article, first published in 1993, and later expanded into a full book. To number the criticisms directed against the theory is impossible here, but those interested should examine “The Clash of Ignorance” by the late Edward Said, one of the better-known essays articulating the difficulties with the Clash of Civilisations theory. However, one or two points can be made from a cartographical point of view in relation to the above map which is based on the civilisational fault lines proposed by Huntington. For one, the map simplifies the Islamic world quite severely by failing to take into account the fact that the Islamic world is severely fractured from an ethnic point of view, with Kurds, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Pakistanis and Indonesians having different outlooks, culturally at least. Another example is the fact that the “Chinese” civilisation in the above map includes South Korea, while Japan forms an entirely new civilisation, thus indicating that the differences between Japan and China are far greater than those between South Korea and China, which is not necessarily the case.

[The 10 principal commercial exchanges]

If, as Woody Allen put it, cocaine is God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money, then the triad formed by North America, Western Europe and (in this case) Asia should be snowed in by the proverbial blizzard. If “power” can be divided into two categories for the purposes of describing the “contemporary” world, economic and military, then the map below shows the current occupants of the economic driving seat quite clearly.

Between them, the 3 poles of the triad account for:

- 80% of international commerce
- 70% of international production
- 90% of financial operations

The world spends more than $90 million every hour on its military.In 2004 the US Dept. of Defence spent $437.111 billion – the US military budget is larger than those of the next 20 highest spending countries put together, and these maps show that it is nearly 10 times greater than that of the UK, who currently occupy 2nd place. The US military budget is more than 33 times the combined budgets of the seven “rogue states” – Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Interestingly enough the US still owes the United Nations over $1 billion in unpaid dues.

Population

Popular science currently holds that life began 150,000 years ago in Africa, all living humans being linked to a “mitochondrial Eve”. A group of hunter-gatherers left the relative comfort of their home continent 50,000 years ago and expanded into Eurasia. Since then man has not stopped moving, exploring, colonising and spreading, and this map shows population density dispersal around the world.

[agglomérations = Groups of towns]

Urban Population

A major phenomenon of the last 50 years is the emergence of a network of megalopolises, a megalopolis being a long chain of continuous metropolitan areas, a major urban system on a global or regional scale. The term was first put forward in the late 1950’s by the American Jean Gottman - if a metropolis is defined simply as a “major city” (in terms of population, economic and political importance etc) then a megalopolis is a conurbation that unites several metropolises, the suburbs of which expand such that they end up joining together. For Gottman the best example of this is the megalopolis constituted by Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia and the Baltimore-Washington conurbation on the East Coast of the US (“Boswash”). Another example is the 40 million people strong megalopolis made up by Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Campinas in Brazil.

If, as Aristotle argued, man is a social animal by nature, then distance must be viewed as an obstacle to social interaction – such is the theory of French geographer Jacques Lévy. Lévy argues that as one cannot “produce” society when separated from his fellow man, he must overcome this problem using one of three methods:

1. movement – one moves from A to B to communicate with another
2. telecommunications – one exchanges information from A to B without moving
3. copresence – one unites A and B in the same spot, the town being the perfect example

These maps demonstrates that, despite the attractions of options 1 and 2 above, man has elected to follow suggestion number 3 in a bid to further his aims of society building.

In 1800 the percentage of the world’s population living in towns was just 2%. Since then the growth of an urban population has not ceased to accelerate – in 2007, for the first time in history, over half the world’s population will be town-dwellers. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this trend is going to slow down.

WATER

L’eau salubre = Clean water

To see the extent to which the world’s wealth, both in terms of economy and of standard of living, is disproportionately divided, one can give the classic example of access to water; the source of all life, without which there would be no contemporary world to make an atlas of. It is also likely to be a source of great political tension in the future, especially in the middle-east and in the Mediterranean countries and islands.

25% of the world’s armed conflicts of recent years have involved a struggle for natural resources. Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda have been plundering the mineral resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998, with over 3 million people killed in the process. If present trends continue one in three of the world’s population will be affected by a water shortage by 2025. The 1929 Nile Water Agreement and the 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile give Sudan and Egypt extensive rights over the Nile’s waters despite the fact that it flows through 10 countries, countries in which 50% of the population live below the poverty line. In 2002 Israel threatened action due to Lebanon’s attempts to divert water from a river which feeds the Jordan, adding flesh to the bone of the then-Egyptian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s statement in 1985 that “the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics”.

The standard method of measuring well being is the Human Development Index (HDI), developed in 1990 by the economist Mahbub ul Haq and adopted as an indicator by the United Nations Development Programme in 1994. Countries receive a score ranging from 0 (minimum) to 1 (maximum) based on 3 things:

1. Knowledge (adult literacy rate and combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio) (1/3)
2. Life expectancy at birth (1/3)
3. Standard of living (GDP per capita at purchasing power parity in US$) (1/3)

In the last ten years the HDI of all countries has increased, with the exception of post-Soviet states and sub-Saharan Africa, where the situation has actually gotten worse, the decline in the former due to increasingly poorer standards of economics and education, and in the latter mainly due to the spread of HIV/AIDS. A score under 0.5 indicates very low development, and 30 of the 32 countries in this group are in Africa. The ten countries with the lowest score are in Africa, Niger occupying last place (Norway has been the champion for the last 5 years). Therefore, with the evolutionary map above in mind, we arrive at the 2002 map, which has barely changed over the last 4 years.

This shows that there is not just a simple North/South divide – rather there is a Third World of several Souths at different levels of development. However one can still see the extent to which there is a concentration of high HDI scores in the usual countries – North America and Western Europe, with Australia, Argentina, Japan, Iceland, Chile and Uruguay all scoring highly as well.

Note: For the sections on military spending and
potential conflict over water I found much information
in the excellent 50 Facts That Should Change The World
by Jessica Williams, published by Icon Books.

Bibliography:
50 Facts That Should Change The World by Jessica Williams, Icon Books
Atlas der Globalisierung, Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris 2003
Atlas de la mondiaslisation, Durand, Martin, Placidi, Tornquist-Chesnier. PSNIEP 2006
Geopolitique, Yves Lacoste, Larousse 2006