That Conspiracy of Cartographers

Angry old white men, retired and on Medicare, and drawing Social Security, and getting a pension check each month, from back in the days when there were such things as fixed pensions – and the company hadn’t cheated and used up all the pension funds on absurd acquisitions, or to fund day-today-operations when they screwed up, or to buy the CEO a third yacht – are supposed to want their country back. Maybe so, but some of us don’t remember the fifties fondly.

Those days were conformist and stultifying. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis couldn’t come soon enough, but they came along eventually, as did the sixties. Perry Como and Doris Day became dinosaurs and we all moved on. That was fine. Few of us wanted the fifties back – Joe McCarthy and people building bomb shelters in the back yards, and lynchings persisting in the South – and few of us want public schools to go back to the old ways, mindless rote-learning of what just wasn’t so. Back then they taught Civics – this is how our government works – but it clearly didn’t work that way, and it still doesn’t. Money talks – nothing else does – and it was the same way with Geography. Sure, it was cool to know where all the countries were, and the odd names of their capitals, and how they dress and what neat stuff they exported – but no one mentioned many of them were kind of imaginary. A lot of those troublesome countries in the Middle East were created out of thin air at the end of the First World War, with the Western powers meeting to draw arbitrary lines here and there – this would be Syria and that would be Iraq and that would be Iran and so on, because the Ottoman Empire was finally no more and there was a lot of oil out there.

That sort of thing happens a lot. After all, Czechoslovakia had been thought up in late May, 1918, in Pittsburgh. No, really – the Pittsburgh Agreement was a memorandum of understanding between members of Czech and Slovak expatriate communities here, setting up a country there, in a quiet corner of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was a letter of intent that Masaryk took back to central Europe, and that was that. They had a country, and that country quickly developed its own national pride – but then Hitler grabbed the Sudetenland in 1938, saying all the German speakers there meant that part of Czechoslovakia was really part of Germany, no matter what had been decided in Pittsburgh and what was in the simple but authoritative geography books at West View Junior High – and on New Year’s Day, 1993, Czechoslovakia was dissolved, by mutual agreement. They gave up. The Slovaks got their own country, as did the Czechs. Czechoslovakia had lasted seventy-five years, and then it was gone.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Israel declared itself a country early on May 14, 1948, and the United States formally recognized Israel as a nation by the end of the day, and most of the neighboring fake nations in the Middle East to this day say Israel is fake too, or at least far more fake then they are, but then there may be a Palestinian nation one day, or not. Let’s see what everyone makes up.

That was the problem with the Ozzie and Harriet fifties. The culture told you everything was just so, and had always been just so, and would always be just so. The wildly popular television show Father Knows Best wasn’t even slightly ironic, and teachers made you memorize just how things were and would always be, and made sure you could parrot back to them those certainties. That was comforting in its way, but deceptive. No one told you that everyone’s faking it most of the time, making it up as they go along. They told you about that later, sneaking it in when they finally made you read Shakespeare. There was that bit from As You Like It – “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts” and so on. Everyone is faking it, and Macbeth was rather unhappy about that:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

No one told you that in junior high – no one told you that all the important certainties you had to memorize were a bit idiotic and wouldn’t amount to much. Father doesn’t know best. He’s faking it too, and Tom Stoppard explored this in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Shakespeare’s Hamlet turned inside out, the tale told from the point of view of those two minor characters that don’t really matter much at all and die early on. They eventually find themselves on a boat taking Hamlet to England, because the new king finds Hamlet a pain in the ass and they’re carrying a message to give the English king, telling him to kill Hamlet, as a favor or as a professional courtesy or something. Hamlet knows this and switches letters, for one telling the king to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern know this too. It’s just that they can’t figure out what they can do about it. They’re on their way to England. They’re going to die. The best option seems denial:

Rosencrantz: I don’t believe in it anyway.

Guildenstern: What?

Rosencrantz: England.

Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

That must be it, and Stoppard was just the guy to write that exchange. He was born Tomáš Straussler in 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, but as both his parents were non-observant Jews, they got the hell out of there before the Nazis rolled in. They moved to Singapore, but then the Japanese rolled in there too, so he and his brother and their mother were sent on to Australia. His father stayed in Singapore and got himself killed, and in 1941, when Stoppard was five, the mother and brothers were evacuated to Darjeeling, in India, where he attended an American school there and became Tom, not Tomáš – and then, in 1945, his mother married British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and in 1946 the family left for England. That makes Stoppard a British playwright, who’s faking it, because he knows all of geography is no more than a conspiracy of cartographers. He was, after all, born in a pop-up country that recently disappeared, entirely.

So, let’s talk about the Ukraine and Crimea. Are those real countries, or is this whole crisis just a conspiracy of cartographers out to mess with us? That might be, but even if they try to do their best, they do have a problem:

The U.S. and other Western governments may doggedly refuse to recognize Crimea’s annexation by Russia, but one prominent American mapmaker will.

“We map de facto, in other words we map the world as it is, not as people would like it to be,” Juan José Valdés, the National Geographic’s geographer and director of editorial and research for National Geographic Maps, tells U.S. News.

“As you can only surmise, sometimes our maps are not received in a positive light by some individuals who want to see the world in a different light,” Valdés says.

The issue is thorny:

The magazine’s editorial, legal and cartographic leadership met Tuesday morning to discuss how to map Crimea’s political status. The stakeholders drafted a new policy document after deciding to temporarily indicate Crimea on maps as Ukrainian territory with a shading to indicate special status – similar to how the Gaza Strip and West Bank are shown. The regional capital Simferopol will be marked with a special administrative symbol.

The National Geographic will show the peninsula as part of Russia after the Duma officially votes for annexation. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty Tuesday to annex Crimea, and the Russian parliament is expected to ratify the move later this week.

When the parliamentary vote happens “the document will be revised to indicate that the change has officially occurred and Crimea is officially part of Russia, then we will identify Crimea with the Russian boundary tint and the administrative capital will revert back to a standard administrative capital symbol,” Valdés says.

So that’s that. Crimea is part of Russia, as the maps will show, or not:

Rand McNally, a leading producer of educational atlases and maps, will not be updating materials displayed in classrooms nationwide.

“We take our direction from the State Department,” says company spokeswoman Amy Krouse.

Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama have declared Crimea’s referendum on secession – approved by around 97 percent of voters Sunday – as illegal and invalid because it was conducted in violation of Ukraine’s constitution. They also say Russia is violating international law by occupying the region.

What goes in the junior high geography books and on the maps on the classroom walls now? Rand McNally has cornered that market, and they side with our State Department and with John McCain and so on, but that may not matter. No one teaches Geography much these days. All that stuff is on the web now. Kids can find out what they need to know, if they even care, with a few clicks, but even there things aren’t clear:

Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia allowing user edits, is likely to be a battleground. A map on the Wikipedia’s English-language entry for Russia Tuesday morning showed Crimea’s annexation. The map was later replaced with one showing Crimea outside of Russia.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Google Maps showed Crimea as part of Ukraine.

The current conspiracy of cartographers isn’t going well. Rosencrantz might have been onto something. He decided not to believe in England, and his position wasn’t all that absurd, in theory. It applies to Crimea, as part of Russia. Believe in it, or don’t, or apply logic:

U.S. lawmakers may seem united in opposition to Crimea’s Sunday vote to secede from Ukraine, but a small minority in Congress says residents of the Black Sea peninsula have a right to join Russia if they wish.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., a supporter of both the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo’s 2008 unilateral declaration of independence – which the U.S. government recognizes – says American policy on Crimea reeks of hypocrisy.

“Starting with our own American Revolution, groups of people have declared themselves, rightfully, to be under a different government or a government of their choosing,” he tells U.S. News. “People forget that’s what our Declaration of Independence is all about.”

We may not like it, but we should accept it:

Rohrabacher says the U.S. should recognize the results of the referendum. About 97 percent of the population voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, from which the region was administratively transferred in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty Tuesday to annex Crimea, which with Russian parliament is expected to ratify.

Although he’s displeased with the ballot’s wording, the lack of international observers and the presence of Russian troops, Rohrabacher says there’s no doubt the vote accurately reflects regional sentiment…

So there you have it. Crimea was part of Russia for over a hundred years, but only part of Ukraine since 1954, an afterthought that Nikita Khrushchev probably shouldn’t have thought:

Crimea became part of Russia’s Taurida Governorate and was the site of much of the fighting in the Crimean War (1853–1856) between Russia on one side, and France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia on the other… On 18 October 1921, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was created as part of the Russian SFSR, which then became part of the Soviet Union… On 19 February 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The transfer of the Crimean Oblast to Ukraine has been described as a “symbolic gesture” marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Russian Empire. The General Secretary of the Communist Party in Soviet Union at the time was Ukrainian native Nikita Khrushchev.

Let’s see – Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire for over three hundred years, and now that the Russian Empire is long gone, and the Soviet Union too, they want to be on their own, and align themselves with Europe. They were given Crimea, in 1954, pretty much on a whim, and they want the western nations to help them keep it, even if the folks there wish it were 1953 and not 1954 all over again. And we’re in this fight for some reason. Don’t ask.

This can make you feel like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – bit players off to the side as bewildering events swirl around them, events that have nothing to do with them, really, but bit players who also know something bad is going to happen and they’re probably going to die, because… well, they’re not sure why. That’s funny in the Stoppard play, by the way. Absurdist black comedy is like that.

The matter, however, may be settled:

Bowing to the reality of the Russian military occupation of Crimea a day after Russia announced it was annexing the disputed peninsula, the Ukrainian government said on Wednesday that it had drawn up plans to evacuate all of its military personnel and their families and was prepared to relocate as many as 25,000 of them to mainland Ukraine.

Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and sailors have been trapped on bases and other installations here for more than two weeks, surrounded by heavily armed Russian forces and loosely organized local militia.

While the provisional government in Kiev has insisted that Russia’s annexation of Crimea is illegal and has appealed to international supporters for help, the evacuation announcement by the head of the national security council, Andriy Parubiy, effectively amounted to a surrender of Crimea, at least from a military standpoint.

It came hours after militiamen, backed by Russian forces, seized the headquarters of the Ukrainian Navy in Sevastopol and detained its commander, in what appeared to be the start of a concerted effort to oust the Ukrainian armed forces from outposts throughout the peninsula.

False alarm, folks – Nikita Khrushchev made a mistake. It’s been fixed and things are sorting themselves out:

In Kiev, the provisional government said that it would quit the Commonwealth of Independence States, the group of former Soviet republics, and that it was considering imposing visa requirements on Russian citizens – a step that would potentially create huge inconveniences for Ukrainians as well, in the likely event that Russia reciprocated.

Russia did not flinch. Outside Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin opened a meeting of senior government ministers by demanding updates on the transportation and infrastructure in Crimea. Mr. Putin ordered that the government move swiftly to begin construction of a bridge that would provide an overland link for cars and trains directly between Crimea and Russia. At present, no such link exists.

National Geographic’s geographer and director of editorial and research for National Geographic Maps got it right. Rand McNally will have to join the conspiracy. There will be a flame-war on Wikipedia – angry postings back and forth – but this is done, or it isn’t:

The takeover of the base proceeded as anger intensified in the West over Russia’s move to annex Crimea, with calls for Russia’s expulsion from important international bodies like the G-8 grouping of leading economic powers. At the same time, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. continued his effort to reassure American allies in the Baltic region, once part of the Soviet Union, that the United States would protect them from any aggression by Russia.

Did Putin simply fix the Nikita Khrushchev mistake, or is he up to something else? Maybe he wants all of the Ukraine, and maybe the Baltic States too – and maybe selected Russian neighborhoods in Brooklyn too. And wasn’t Anastasia in Paris way back when? When the last tsar was no more, Paris did fill with Russians, and their grandchildren are still there. Try the garden tea room at the Intercontinental Hotel just south of Place Vendôme any weekday afternnon around four – you’ll find them there, chattering away in Russian. Putin knows this. We’re all worried.

At Politico, Adi Ignatius turns to a 2007 interview that might offer a clue about this Putin guy:

Putin argued then, as now, that the United States was on dangerous ground in its approach toward Ukraine. “The United States somehow decided that part of the political elite in Ukraine is pro-American and part is pro-Russian, and they decided to support the ones they considered pro-American,” he said. “We believe this is a mistake.”

He gave voice to the motivation that drives him now in Ukraine (beyond, of course, the possibility of extending Russian influence and perhaps territory). The breakup of the Soviet Union, in his view, was hasty and ill-conceived, and it cut off many ethnic Russians from mother Russia. He seemed to be testing an argument for the irredentist push Russia is now pursuing in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. “What did the collapse of the Soviet Union mean?” he asked. “Twenty-five million Soviet citizens who were ethnic Russians found themselves beyond the borders of new Russia. Nobody gave a thought to them. Is it not a tragedy?”

Hey, all he wants to do is help lonely and isolated people, abandoned in this cruel world, but at Slate, Lucian Kim argues this this is nonsense:

Convinced that the new authorities in Kiev will finally pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, Putin is hacking off as much of the country as he thinks he can get away with. He doesn’t want to re-create the Soviet Union as much as form a ring of buffer territories to ward off Western influence from the Russian heartland. For Putin, it’s the beginning of the endgame for his regime’s survival.

Ah, he’s paranoid, or at least he is seeing his world crumble around him, and at World Affairs Journal, Michael Totten makes that specific as this is really all about NATO:

What he most fears is that Ukraine might join NATO, removing yet another buffer state between himself and the West and kyboshing his plans for the Eurasian Union, a euphemism for a 21st century Russian empire. (Does anyone seriously believe Kazakhstan will be an equal partner with Moscow?)

Keeping his former Ukrainian vassal out of NATO will be easy now even if a militant anti-Russian firebrand comes to power in Kiev. The Crimean referendum – whether it was free and fair or rigged is no matter – creates a disputed territory conflict that will never be resolved in Ukraine’s favor. It will freeze and fester indefinitely. There isn’t a chance that NATO would accept a member that has a disputed territory conflict with Russia. No chance at all. Ukraine is as isolated as it could possibly be from the West without getting re-absorbed into Russia entirely.

Putin did the same thing to Georgia in 2008 when he lopped off the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and he did it for the same reason.

Ah, he’s a VERY clever man, and we’re not that clever over here. In fact, in Foreign Policy, Andrew Foxall, rejecting Putin’s argument that he’s just caring for isolated Russians abandoned in the cruel world, argues we may be in our own pickle here:

While Western governments and pundits are correct to dismiss Putin’s pretenses for invading Ukraine, they are wrong to presume his Ukrainian opponents are necessarily in the right. The uncomfortable truth is that a sizable portion of Kiev’s current government – and the protesters who brought it to power – are, indeed, fascists. If Western governments hope to steer Ukraine clear from the most unsavory characters in Moscow and Kiev, they will need to wage a two-pronged diplomatic offensive: against Putin’s propaganda and, at the same time, against Ukraine’s resurgent far-right.

That’s a tall order, especially for secondary characters, at best, characters that really aren’t necessary to the plot at all. And thus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on toward England, not quite clueless, but powerless, knowing something very bad is going to happen to them, and wondering about that conspiracy of cartographers. Geography always was problematic, no matter what they said back in junior high long ago.