OH, EAST is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. Perhaps that was true when an Iron Curtain ran down the middle of Europe, and Mao Zedong’s China had turned disastrously inward. But now? This week leaders of the European Union and China met at a summit in Beijing to praise “EU-China connectivity”. It is more than an empty phrase, even if European leaders, distracted by political and migrant crises at home, are less clear-sighted about its implications than are their Chinese counterparts. China has hugely ambitious plans to connect the commercial worlds of Europe and East Asia via infrastructure links that will knit the vast—and till now seemingly inchoate—land mass of Eurasia together. But Chinese efforts are only the most notable of many modernising impulses that are beginning to mesh Eurasia into something resembling a whole.
In a stack of recent books and papers, a growing number of strategists argue that the emergence of a cohering Eurasia is the key feature of a new...Continue reading
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