For every conflict, every porous border crossed by refugees, every suffering or rioting people, every threatening and aggressive regime, for every new technology, there is a red line that shouldn’t be crossed. Someone traced it, but others try constantly to contest and violate it.The latest book by Federico Rampini, Red Lines. Men, Borders, Empires: Geographical Maps that Recount our World is based on this assumption and, through its pages, the Italian writer and journalist analyzes the roots of conflicts in our contemporary world, from the US to the Chinese empire, from Europe to Africa.
Correspondent from New York for La Repubblica since 2009, journalist and university professor in Brussels, Paris, San Francisco, Milan and Beijing, Rampini has recently presented his book at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles and San Francisco with the support of an audiovisual performance involving sounds, lights and map projections. “Maps are an essential part of this book and they are tools I built to interpret the world, not just to describe it,” Rampini tells us. “They reveal what emerges from ancient history, to better understand the present. Everything the world wants to tell us is explained in the drawings. Our destiny is written in the maps, and in their history.”
So these red lines have not only a geographical, but also a political and economic value…
Yes. A list of the topics I write about in the book demonstrates the intertwining of the geographic and territorial dimension with geo-economics and geopolitics. I start from the compulsory question of our times: is the American Empire going to end? If so, will we die Chinese, under yet another hegemony? Germany is at the center of my exploration of Europe: the continuous changes in German maps has a lot to say about the future. Migrations-wise and identity-wise Italy, slowly, but steadily eaten away by the Mediterranean, has long become a laboratory of national-populism. Russia is a prisoner of an ancient paradox: it is never “too big” to feel safe and thus it exports insecurity to neighboring countries. More money and less freedom, on the other hand, is the theme prevailing in Southeast Asia.
You say that geography and history as we studied them in school are no longer enough. Why?
In part, because the world has changed compared to the already obsolete images of our school textbooks. Many “red lines,” national borders or cultural boundaries, age at a very fast pace. And then, school didn’t teach us to go deeper, to penetrate the hidden meaning of maps, to match landscape with the history of civilizations and with the laws regulating the evolution of peoples and empires. The ties weighting upon us, the way our past conditions us, external pressure coming from neighboring countries, the escape routes we create to build a better future: we need intelligent maps to guide us, to understand where we are now, and where we’re going tomorrow.
We travel more. We understand less. It sounds like a paradox, but it is not. Why is the world so confusing for us in a period in time in which we have every kind of communication available? Is the world more complex or do we have less reading ability?
Nowadays, we say the experience of traveling is not as it used to be: too fast, too easy, it’s a path that slides on us, without teaching us anything. Back in the days of our great-grandparents the journey was difficult and tiring, but it was also a slow succession of imperceptible changes in the landscapes, both geographical and human. It was a long learning process of the physiognomy of valleys and plains, hills and mountains, coasts and seas, of the anthropology of faces and traditions of the world’s human tribes. It was an accumulation of sensations, a sedimentation of memories, perhaps entrusted to fountain pen-written journals.
Today it’s all fast: planes and high-speed trains travel astounding distances while we’re glued to our smartphone’s screens. We get off on a new continent and we haven’t the faintest idea of the territories we’ve crossed, of the peoples and the stories we ignored by darting at 300 kilometers per hour on land, or flying over 800 kilometers per hour and ten thousand meters of altitude. Let’s not surrender to the dictatorship of superficiality. Even a flight can be a wonderful lesson of geography, concentrated in a few hours.
You have lived in China and the United States for a long time, facing two different forms of capitalism, one technological and one dictatorial. Which of the two will win?
I am not a prophet, I am not a guru, and I let the duty of prediction to others. But before China can impose itself as a new global leader it must get some “soft power,” that is, cultural hegemony. America was also a factory of ideas and dreams. It exported values, even if it sometimes betrayed them. The Chinese authoritarian regime has serious limitations on that level. I have yet to understand what the “Chinese dream” is, although I have lived five years in that country.
Does the Trump-Bannon-Salvini political triangle represent the crisis of the great democratic ideas or is the beginning of new scenarios?
In my opinion, there is no real Trump-Bannon-Salvini triangle. There is no populist international, because the typical strength of these leaders is chaos. What unites them is a common consensus factor: the great disappointment of the working class, who felt betrayed by the left. The elites promised that globalization and multi-ethnic society were to give us a paradise. For some large sections of our society, it turned out to be hell.
Is religious intolerance, particularly Islamic, also a threat to the American melting pot?
It is a threat also because a certain “politically correct” ideology, multiculturalism, has stopped defending specific universal Western values, and no longer dares to ask immigrants to adhere to our most precious principles.
There is a chapter dedicated to Italy which is called the globalization of Prosecco: Italy has always exported culture but now, it exports Prosecco. Is it a step forward or backward?
A section of my travel diary is about Italy as seen by “the rest of the world.” It helps understand that we are, in our own way, a world power without knowing it. Another invisible red line contains the globalization of tastes and consumptions on which we have impressed an unprecedented influence. Behind the success of gastronomy, fashion and tourism, a holistic model emerges and it exerts a planetary charm. The image of Italians is better than you think; often, however, Made in Italy does not enrich us, it is seized by foreign multinationals.
Italians migrating to America in the early 1900s were fleeing from poverty, nowadays we see more qualified young people arriving in the US. Do you think it is an even more worrying phenomenon?
I like going back to California – where I moved from Italy almost twenty years ago, before Pechino and New York – also because the Italian community renews itself constantly here. I don’t believe that young, talented expatriates feel like victims; they often feel they have a leg in America and one in Italy, and they look for opportunities to “give back” to their country a part of the rich experience they have been enjoying here. Of course, the reasons that led them to emigrate are worrying, and I’m not just referring to the “usual culprits” like bureaucracy, tax authorities, and lack of funds for research. Often, at the first place among the factors that drive us to leave Italy, is nepotism, the culture of recommendation.
The Mediterranean has been the center of commerce until the discovery of America. Then the centrality has passed on to the Atlantic. Will the future be in the Pacific?
The present is already in the Pacific, who lives in California has no doubts about it.
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