From: Jim Blaut
Subject: shatter belts
Date: 12 Dec. 1997
I don't share Tom Hall's enthusiasm for the essay by Marc Gilbert about
ASEAN and Southeast Asia. It seems to be the typical geobabble of the
Secuurity Studies crowd. Gilbert in essence assures his [Pentagon?] readers
that the Association of South East Asian Nations, ASEAN, is just a loose
jumble of minor and unimportant states, of no threat to anybody and really
of no geopolitical significance. (I oversimplfy just a tiny bit.)
Gilbert's argument is supposed to rest in a Great Underlying Principle, the
idea of the "shatter belt." to wit:
"The imperatives behind
the informality, flexibility and gradualism that characterizes
ASEAN's approach to security and defense issues in the 80s and 90s
are little understood in the West. These imperatives are, however,
illuminated by the "shatterbelt" paradigm familiar to students of
world history. This paradigm makes ASEAN's current defense posture
more intelligible. It also reveals the architecture upon which all
security issues in the region have and, for the foreseeable future,
will depend.
The shatterbelt is a region of the earth that stretches from
Southeast Asia across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush to Afghanistan,
then across to the Caucuses on to Anatolia and the Balkans. The
human terrain of this belt is complex, as it encompasses land which
has served both as corridor for human migration and a terminus.
Waves of ethnic groups have settled there without wholly displacing
their predecessors, thus insuring that between each there will be
legacies of both prolonged conflict and co-existence. This pattern
of settlement is further complicated by the belt's positioning
along fracture lines separating the world's most powerful and
dynamic urban civilizations. Each of the belt's human populations
owe much to these civilizations, but their identities depend on
defining themselves as unique from them. Experience has taught
that shatterbelt states are too internally divided and too geo-
politically or economically weak for each alone to sustain their
absolute independence at all times against the hegemonic ambitions
of these civilizations. As a result, the art of survival in the
shatterbelt has most often depended upon not proud defiance, but
artful compromise, not on bold initiatives, but measured "small
steps," not sustained unilateral action, but bilateral or
multilateral agreements brokered between internal factions,
regional partners and/or extra-regional powers. States in the
shatterbelt have experienced periods of great achievement when
observing these imperatives and utter misery when they have not."
I gather that Tom is enamored of this concept because it seems to be so
worldsystemsy. It isn't that. Applied to SE Asia it is a discredited
colonial-era notion. Applied on a larger scale (Eurasia) it is meaningless.
Gilbert defines "the shatter belt" as a zone stretching from SE Asia
through the Himalayas and Afghanistant to the Caucasus and the Balkans. It
is possible that someone has previously used the concept in this grand
manner, but I've never heard this and it is silly. The classical idea of
the shatter belt was the notion that countries between Germany/Austria,
Russia, and Turkey, constantly or alternately squeezed and pushed by the
these imperial powers, were shattered into small, weak states which kept
breaking up under the lateral pressures. The shatter belt was not limited
to the Balkans in Europe (as Gilbert says): it was a contnuous zone from
Finland and the Baltic states to Albania and Greece.
During the colonial era, the shatter-belt concept was applied (by British,
French, and Dutch scholars, I believe) to Southeast Asia. The basic idea
was that SE Asian cultures and states were not really important in a
historical sense, autonomus in a cultural sense, or potentially powerful
today. Why? Because they formed a shatter belt between India, on trhe one
side, and China, on the other, and the basic charatcer of SE Asian
societies resulted from the influence and pressure of one or the other of
these two adjoining civilization. You can see how this devlaued the
history and civilization of the region's societies. In the Dutch East
Indies and Malaya, for instance, it was argued (by some scholars) that the
basic culture was not autochthonous but was Indian.
The shartter-belt idea applied to SE Asia doesn't take account of the fact
that these are great societies, influenced from the outside, as all
societies are, but hardly shattered fragments, pushed hither and yon by
China and India. For one thing, most of the region was never really
conquered by China or by India: most of the influence here was that of
missionaries, merchants, settlers, etc. For another thing, the culture and
art of these societies is ancient and as great as that of any other culture
in the world. But most importantly, these political entities are, and
generally have been through much of history, states with HUGE populations,
large territories, and true power -- hardly shattered fragments.
I don't recall hearing the shater-belt concept applied to SE Asia during
the past 30-odd years: perhaps I'm wrong. But applied to SEA it is useless
-- rather, it is dangerous, because it allows these silly Strategtic
Studies people and their friends to assure everybody that the SE Asian
states are weak and, on a world-system level, unimportant.
To claim to discern a shatter belt that runs from SE Asia through the
Himalayas and the Caucasus to the Balkans is just bad geography. Therre is
no common historical, cultural, or geographicl character to all or most
parts of this region. Maybe the Caucasus is a shatter belt. Probably
Eastern Europe is a shatter belt. But scholars should avoid the temprtation
to expain everything in terms of great Unfderlying Principles
unless theere is evidence that such priunciples are not just intellectual
fantasies.
Cheers.