Hemispheres of influence

When Marco Rubio tells the 62nd Munich Security Conference: "our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe", he is being uncharacteristically gracious but also disingenuous.

In using 'Western Hemisphere' as a synonym for The Americas he betrays a narrowly skewed US perspective. No great surprise, I suppose, coming from the US Secretary of State, especially under the current 'America First' administration, but drawing arbitrary lines on maps is, and always has been, extremely problematic. To pull it off convincingly requires hegemonic power such as that exercised by the British Empire at its height or by the United States and Soviet Union after World War Two. 

That world no longer exists and the US - along with the rest of the world - knows it. What follows, though, is quite literally up for grabs. Hence Rubio trying, somewhat desperately, to pitch the Trump White House's Monroe Doctrine-inspired outlook to its European 'allies' (what has it come to when that word has to be qualified by inverted commas?) by overtly excluding China, Russia and Iran from the party, dividing the globe through the poles rather than round the equator.

Because most Europeans, I suspect, see themselves as living in the Northern Hemisphere which, although rarely considered strictly geographically, in fact includes all of North and Central America, the northern part of South America, Europe, almost all of Asia and two-thirds of Africa. Thus it not only includes China, Russia and Iran but also 90% of the global population. 

The Western Hemisphere, on the other hand, properly includes all those countries west of the Prime (Greenwich) Meridian, so not only North, Central and part of South America and the Caribbean, but also most of Great Britain, the island of Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), a sliver of Western France, a great chunk of West Africa, the Canary Islands, Azores. Madeira, Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. However, it emphatically excludes the rest of Continental Europe - including Munich where Rubio was opining today. 

He is clearly talking out of his atlas.

Popular posts from this blog

The rain in Spain

Storm Berenice dumped a load of water on Madrid earlier today and the timing could hardly have been more apposite. Celebrations were being held to mark Fiesta Nacional España (Spanish National Day), with a full military parade attended by King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, Leonora, Princess of Asturias, the Prime Minister and a host of politicians. Unfortunately, it rained on their parade. In British terms the ceremony is a cross between Trooping the Colour and Remembrance Sunday, with full royal and military panoply, but is much more problematic than either of those occasions. The British equivalents are not without their controversies, of course, but the Spanish event, a relatively modern successor (2019) to the original Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Day) held to mark the arrival of Columbus in the Americas on 12 October 1492, carries with it a lot of colonial baggage. Columbus Day is still marked in the USA but, with civic statues of Christopher Columbus increasingly becoming the focus...
Read more

The eagle has landed

The Syrian Arab Republic has just unveiled its new national logo, a golden eagle surmounted by three stars. Just before Christmas ( 2024 - A year to forget, 13/12/24) I pondered the chances for a post-Assad Syria. "Is it possible" I wrote "that, between them, [President] Sharaa and [Prime Minister] Bashir will preside over a national 'truth and reconciliation' process rather than the murderous vengeance that usually follows such upheavals? After the appalling brutality of the Assad regime, and with so many simmering ethnoreligious tensions, it is hard to see how a functioning state, founded on the rule of law, could realistically emerge out of the chaos." Well, seven months on, the emergence of a new symbol for the fledgling state, embodying the aspirations of its pre-Assad past while signposting an inclusive post-Assad future, must give rise to cautious optimism. According to the Arab News report of the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) press release: "th...
Read more

Myth take

In an essay for the openDemocracy newsletter on the future of Ukraine, Aman Sethi discusses national.myths. As he puts it, "we are all shaped by our myths, but we needn’t be bound to them. We are all born into our respective national identities, but we can each choose to reinterpret what they mean to us". On the 50th anniversary of the death of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, modern Spain is doing precisely that; re-examining its post-Franco settlement, with strong challenges emerging from the left to the prevailing narrative of a successful parliamentary democracy guaranteed by a constitutional monarchy - a myth if ever there was one. While the United Kingdom is clearly not experiencing the same kind of existential crisis facing Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression, or dealing with the troubled legacy of a forty-year fascist regime like Spain, it is nevertheless in the throes of a crisis of identity. It could be argued that this is merely the latest iteration of...
Read more