Watch: 2,000 years of European history in less than a minute
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Version 0 of 1. The video shows the shifting borders of Europe over the span of 2000 years — from the rise of ancient Rome to Europe as it was after the crumbling of empires and the fall of the Soviet Union. It was published on YouTube this week by the New Scientist, in conjunction with a piece in the magazine's latest issue on the inadequacy of traditional nation-states in a world where borders, real and metaphorical, are fast collapsing. (It's behind a paywall.) Various political units — baronies, kingdoms, tribal conglomerations, empires — emerge, grow and get snuffed out. The video draws its source material from the database at EurAtlas.com. Of course, what's represented isn't the most accurate rendition of Europe's complex political geography: Certain kingdoms get lumped into other larger ones at various moments; blank spaces on the map speak to the absence of historical sources, not to the absence of political organization. What it communicates very effectively, though, is how fleeting our present political map is. Nation-states present themselves as inviolable and eternal things; their sovereignty and territorial integrity are treated as sacred principles on the international stage. But only a few of them have been around for more than 100 years. What's to guarantee their preservation a century from now? There's been copious hand-wringing over the decline of the Pax Americana and the liberal world order and what it means for contemporary geopolitics. It may seem wonky too dwell on such concerns, but the crisis in Ukraine, in one sense, represents a shifting of a paradigm. Russia’s unilateral annexation of Ukrainian territory this year has drawn comparisons to the land grabs that preceded World War II: a moment of existential catastrophe for the continent. But as the video shows, the territory that is now Ukraine has undergone all sorts of transformations -- from being the province of Turkic tribes to a remote outpost of the Byzantine empire to lands administered by the Poles, Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia. There's nothing new about shifting facts on the ground. |