Category: Europe

Europe

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Brandenberg

Brandenburg

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by approximately one thousandth of the world population – around eight million people.

The millisphere of Brandenburg (the Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region: six million people) came to my attention when Holly (born and raised in Whanganui) bailed from Berlin and repatriated to Whanganui.

“Why did you leave Berlin?” I had asked her. “After the baby was born everything changed”. Instead of the party scene that drew young people from all over the world lockdown with a newborn wasn’t as much fun; besides, “poor but sexy” Berlin was rapidly gentrifying and even before Covid the young international set were heading for cheaper cities like Leipzig, Warsaw and Lubyanka in Europe and Mexico City and Sao Paulo in the Americas.

In the middle ages Berlin was on the east/west trade route roughly where Europe divided from Frankish to Slavic. In the sixteenth century Berlin went Lutheran and half of the population was killed during the Thirty Years War (1618-48) which started as a conflict between German protestants and catholics.

Berlin became the Prussian capital, German states unified and Berlin became the capital of the “German Empire” and in the twentieth century Prussia was subsumed into Adolf Hitler’s “Third Reich”.

Under the Nazis “the mother of all airports” was built at Tempelhof, outside Berlin. Hitler’s architect Albert Speer’s megalomaniac vision for the “world city of Germania” was made manifest at Tempelhof. Pre WWII Tempelhof was the world’s busiest airport. With huge arc shaped hangers it has been described as the “one of the really great buildings of the modern age”. Tempelhof ceased operating in 2008 and today is used as a recreation zone and recently a refugee camp for Syrians.

During the Cold War West Berlin found itself an island in Soviet Russian controlled territory and when the communists closed all land access West Germany was faced with the choice of abandoning Berlin or supplying it by air. Tempelhof became the destination for the Berlin Airlift and by 1954 was the 3rd busiest in Europe. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 spelled the end of Tempelhof which was replaced with a modern airport with longer runways at Brandenburg.

During the cold war West Berlin suffered economically from regional isolation and from 1979-81 self organised squatter communities occupied abandoned apartment blocks. Starting with DIY reconnections of water and electricity, then knocking out walls and reconfiguring architecture, by 1981 there were 168 houses occupied creating a large and vibrant counterculture scene – and conflict with authority. Evictions were met with protests but some 77 squats secured contracts to occupy.

In 1988, a year before the fall of the wall, squatters occupied a piece of bare land which was technically in East Berlin but the wall had been built in the wrong place and in 1989-90 “black living” moved into East Berlin proper. Because people were excluded the east/west border had become a nature corridor.

Since German reunification the capital moved from Bonn back to Berlin. Property speculators piled in to take advantage of the boom and worked with police to evict the squatters “keeping Berlin weird” and gentrified the old apartment blocks. Berlin, like many western cities, now suffers from the lack of affordable housing and in 2017 prices increased faster than any “world city’.

Brandenburg is low lying and flat with chains of lakes and forests that make it very beautiful. The villages and towns in the old East Germany have retained a lot of their heritage values. Berlin itself is a very livable “Green” city of parks and bike paths. Berlin is a “low emission zone” and a green sticker is required to drive a car into the city. Berlin is also the most multicultural German city and is the largest Turkish city outside Turkey.

Post Covid people like Holly are making do with places like Whanganui to congregate. I heard one describe Whanganui as a “a sublimbly pretty town which hasn’t had the heritage knocked out of it, is two-and-a-half hours from Wellington, has an airline to Auckland that gives you Tim Tams, has an art scene and an independent bookshop; it’s a place where you can manage a work life balance with ease.”

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Denmark

Denmark

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

Technically Denmark (2020 population 5.4 million) includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands but in a previous millisphere I had lumped them in with Iceland, Finland, Alaska and the indigenous people living within the Arctic Circle to make up the millisphere I called “North Pole”.

Previous to WWII Iceland had belonged to Denmark but had turned itself over to the then neutral USA in 1941 and is now independent. Today the Faroes and Greenland enjoy a degree of autonomy from Denmark.

Home to IKEA, Lego, Carlsberg beer and Maersk shipping containers Denmark is a Nordic Lutheran welfare state well known for its socially liberal views and in recent times has been embroiled in a global debate on free speech.

Pornography was legalised in 1969 and the Danes allowed “gender neutral” marriage before same sex marriage was adopted elsewhere. In 2009 the Danish royal family moved to “absolute primogeniture” – if the firstborn is a girl she becomes the new monarch, not her younger brother and in 2020 Denmark pushed Switzerland out of the top position on the world environmental performance index.

Recently I have come to know Frank, a Dane, who as a seventeen-year-old musician was involved with the anarchist commune of Christiania which started in 1971 as a hippie squat on 19 acres of abandoned army barracks. In defiance to the state laws they proposed a self governing society where “everyone held themselves responsible for the well being of the entire community” – which included drug addicts – and they made their own rules. Pusher Street, their “green light district”, became one of Copenhagen’s main tourist attractions. When international bands like Pink Floyd played Copenhagen the after concert party was at Christiania. “The music scene was magic,” Frank remembers.

Since the 2000s Christiania has come under increased state pressure. Police invaded in 2007 demolishing unpermitted houses and introduced a policy of zero tolerance. A police request for drug sales to be “less visible” was responded to by draping camouflage nets over the stalls. In 2016 a Bosnian, carrying the day’s takings, shot two police and a civilian during a police raid. The residents then voted to remove the drug stalls – but they sprang up again.

The process of “normalisation” in Christiania is ongoing. The Danish state refused to recognise the collective – only individuals they said – and they are still trying to force the 1000 odd residents, who are opposed to individual ownership, to buy the property they have occupied for over 40 years.

Denmark’s “worst international relations incident since WWII”, according to their Prime Minister, started when in 2005 the ring-wing Jylland-posten newspaper pushed the boundaries of free speech. Free speech was self evident in liberal Denmark, the paper opined, this piece of journalism was to be about self censorship. Danish cartoonists were approached to submit cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed. Some declined citing contractual obligations but twelve responded.

After publication all hell broke loose. Representations of the prophet Mohamed are considered blasphemous by most Moslems, let alone cartoons depicting him as a bomb wearing a turban. Imams and entire Moslem countries condemned Denmark for allowing the cartoons to be published and Danish exports to the Middle East dropped by 50%.

The incident sparked a global debate on free speech. The Danish government had lived without censorship since the Nazi occupation and held that free speech was one of their intrinsic values. There is a Danish tradition of satire they reiterated.

In the spirit of “journalist solidarity” the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, republished the cartoons in 2011. In 2015 two French Muslim brothers forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo killing twelve and wounding eleven and in 2016 another Muslim gunman attacked a meeting in Copenhagen organised to discuss free speech.

The Danish government has recently required that sermons given in a foreign language be translated and supplied to local authorities. Five percent of Danes are Muslim and fifty percent of them believe criticism of religion should be censored.

Jyllands-posten has just published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag but with yellow coronaviruses instead of stars. This time it is the Chinese who are outraged.

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Donbass

Donbass

Millisphere (abstract noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. A lens to examine human geography.

In 2014 Malaysia Air flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK-telar missile, near the village of Hrabove, in the Ukraine (population 44 million), killing all 298 crew and passengers (including 27 Australians and one New Zealander) – beating the precious record of 290 when the USS Vincennes shot down Dubai bound Iran Air IR655 in 1988, mistaking it for a missile.

Hrabove is in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast (population 4.6 million) near the border with the Luhansk Oblast (population 2.3 million). Both oblasts (regions) are claimed by Ukrainian-Russian separatists who refer to this entire region as “the Confederation of Novorossiya” (population 6.9 million and shrinking).

I call this millishere “Donbass”, a local term for the Donets River basin. The Donets flows southeast and across the border into Russia where it joins the River Don. The Donbass is a centre for coal mining and heavy industry.

Once the breadbasket of the USSR, Ukraine has a population that is shrinking at the rate of -0.6 percent per year; the fastest decline of all countries with negative population growth rates – Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan – as measured by the sum of all births and deaths and not including emigration and immigration.

During the  Second World War, seven million of Ukraine’s eight million Jews were captured and murdered by the Nazi German occupation forces. After the war half the survivors left, mostly for Israel, where three of Israel’s Prime Ministers have been Ukrainian Jews. Roseanne Barr, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Leon Trotsky, and Simon Wiesenthal were all Ukrainian Jews or their descendants.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the Ukraine has engaged in a difficult, and sometimes brutal, political and economic separation from Russia. Two decades of cronyism, corruption and censorship, including the murder of journalists, followed independence as gangs fought for control of state businesses, which included arms manufacturers.

Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, UK and Russia agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons (the then third largest stockpile) and transferring them to Russia.

The Ukraine is roughly three-quarters ethnic Ukrainian and around 30 percent (mostly in the east) speak Russian as their first language. Pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and backed by Putin, was followed as President by pro-EU Viktor Yushchenko, who suffered dioxin poisoning during the Orange Revolution. Then it was Yanukovych again which led to the pro-EU Maidan Square protests, during which 100 protesters were shot by government snipers, before Yanukovych fled his ostentatious, bad taste villa in Kiev for exile in Russia.

In 2010 Ukraine was the world’s ninth largest arms exporter – one above Israel. America and Russia were first and second. Since losing Donetsk in 2014 Ukraine has slipped to eleventh, being replaced by the Netherlands in the top ten and Israel has moved up to eighth place.

Donetsk city (metropolitan area over two million) is roughly 50/50 Russian/Ukrainian. Roughly one third of the residents of Donbass identify as Russian, one third Ukrainian and one third neither, calling themselves Slav, who can be either Ukrainian or Russian. Pre-2014 seventy percent of Ukraine’s arms exports were to Russia, a market Donbass arms manufacturers still supply.

The Dutch team investigating MH17 have traced the missile launcher that fired the BUK-telar to Kursk in Russia and they want to talk to Igor Girkin who claimed on social media to have shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft above Hrabove, before taking down the post the same day, and also Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov, who commanded the launcher.

With Russian paratroopers and American Paratroopers in the country and “alcoholics, dodgers, drug addicts and morons” on both sides manning dangerously heavy arms and the Ukrainian Mafia involved with the arms industry the people of the Ukraine find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan, whose paternal grandparents were Ukrainian, “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled. Fear to bring children into the world,” (Masters of War, 1963).

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TOCOSA – Corsica, Sardinia and Pisa (Tuscany)

Map Tocosa-2
Millisphere of TOCOSA – Tuscany, Corsican & Sardinia

Millisphere (noun) at discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the total world population. About seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

In February 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron visited the fractious French Mediterranean island of Corsica where nationalist, anti-French sentiments go back centuries. If Spain has Catalonia, France has independence movements in Brittany, Alsace, Provence and Corsica.

“France is playing with fire by rejecting Corsican demands for autonomy,” said newly elected Corsican Nationalist leader Gilles Simeoni, voicing local sentiment.

With a population of 330,000 Corsica doesn’t qualify as a millisphere. Combined with it’s Italian near neighbour, Sardinia (population 1.7 million), they make two million but don’t meet the 3.5 to 4 million cut-off.

Divided by the narrow Straits of Bonifacio they share an ancient history including being conquered by Rome. The fierce and rebellious inhabitants were not considered good slaves and the mountainous centre of the islands were avoided by the Romans.

Complex shifting alliances orbited around northern Italy and Pisa until Genoa sold Corsica to France to pay off debts in the eighteenth century. To this day the Corsican and Sardinian bourgeoisie send their children to be educated in Pisa and if more people are needed to form a millisphere it should be with Tuscany in Italy, not Provence in France.

Steamboats, Napoleon, jobs in the army, language, empire and prestige drew Corsica into France’s orbit in the nineteenth century. Taking advantage of the chaos of the French revolution Corsican soldier Napoleon Bonaparte (of Italian descent) quickly rose through the ranks of the French army, becoming first emperor of France and then king of Italy before being exiled to island of Elba (between Bastia in Corsica and the Italian mainland).

Bastia Hill, in Whanganui, is named after the town in northern Corsica where the Georgetti family came from and a friend of mine, and a Georgetti descendant, went there to check it out. “There would be men outside drinking coffee and there would always be one watching you,” he said sensing its reputation for banditry. Corsican number plates ensured avoiding road rage while driving in the continent he told me. “No one in their right mind would nut off at a Corsican.”

From the days of Carthage (near Tunis), before Christ, Sardinia in the south has had links with North Africa. Barbary pirates from Tunisia raided Sardinia for slaves until the late eighteenth century and today there is a weekly ferry from Cagliari in Sardinia to Tunis. In good weather a fast boat carrying illegal immigrants can cross from Algeria in one night.

During the Algerian war for independence thousands of “Pied-noir” (European Algerians) were resettled in Sardinia where they found the locals less than welcoming. Around 100,000 boat people arrive from North Africa in Italy every year, 10.000 of them in Sardinia. Once again finding the locals less than welcoming these refugee then try to carry on to the Italian mainland and the larger capitalist cities of Western Europe.

The people of the rural villages of Sardinia, along with some Japanese in Okinawa, have the longest life expectancy in the world but because of emigration and a low birthrate some years the island’s population is actually shrinking and lacking the people to care for an aging population. Some North African immigrants would be useful for elder care.

Recently there was an incident with North African tourists on a Corsican beach. Some Corsican youths were photographing Muslim women swimming in “burkinis” when one their menfolk protested and stabbed a Corsican youth. Returning with the entire village the youths attacked the bathing tourists and torched their cars.

Corsica, which is included in the Provence, Alpes, Côte d’Azur European Union region, receives too many subsidies from Paris to want full independence but it now wants more autonomy, language recognition and the release of nationalist prisoners held on the French mainland.

Just as the steamboat changed geography in the nineteenth century cheap airfares have changed the twentieth century. Corsican grievances now include absentee holiday home owners form Europe pricing the locals out of the housing market.

DH Lawrence, when he visited Corsica, described it as “belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere.”

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Catalonia

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of roughly one 1000th of the total world population – a bit over seven million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

The state-aborted referendum on independence in Catalonia (population 7.5 million) puts the spotlight on yet another millisphere seeking to extract itself from the state it is part of.

It was in Catalonia that I forgave the Spanish gypsies …

In Andalusia, my travel companion had lost her plane-ticket and the contents of her purse to lightning-fast gypsy fingers. After that we went on alert whenever we ran into gypsies, but a few live performances by gypsy street musicians softened my heart.

In front of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, a gypsy woman with a baby on her hip was working a queue of tourists. We were leaving Spain, so I emptied my accumulated small change into her proffered McDonald’s carton. She returned the gesture with a high five – it felt like a blessing.

Catalonia – in the northeast corner of Spain and on the border with France – was incorporated into the Spanish empire in 1516 in the “dynastic union” of Castile and Aragon/Catalonia under emperor Charles V.

In the 17th century, Catalonia briefly revolted against Spain, siding with France in the Franco-Spanish war, and retained a degree of autonomy until 1716, when the Nuevo Plata decree abolished Catalan institutions.

By the 19th century, when Spain started losing its New World colonies and had to look for new income streams, it was Catalonia that led Spanish industrialisation. In the early 20th century, Catalan anarchist activists achieved the first eight-hour working day in Europe.

Franco’s fascist government put down the anarchists, banned any activities associated with Catalan nationalism and banned the use of the Catalan language, which is a Romance language somewhere between Spanish, French and Italian.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the Generalitat (regional government) was restored. In 1978 the Catalan Generalitat was granted control over culture, environment, communication, transport, public safety and local government. The Generalitat shares health, justice and education with Madrid.

In 2006 the Catalan Generalitat passed the “Statute of Autonomy” but it was declared “non-valid” by Spain’s constitutional court. When the Generalitat banned bullfighting, the constitutional court overturned it, ruling that bullfighting was a Spanish cultural tradition.
Madrid retains control over ports, airports, coasts, international borders, passports and ID, immigration, arms control and terrorism prevention.

Catalonia has its own police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, and the national police, the feared Guardia Civil who maintained political control in Franco’s time but were rarely seen in Catalonia … thousands of them were sent in to stop the Catalan independence referendum.

Catalonia is pretty evenly split between those seeking independence and those wanting to stay with Spain but they all agreed with having a referendum.

“If Scotland can have an independence referendum, why can’t we?” they all said.

“Occupation forces out,” they shouted when the Guardia Civil occupied the polling stations; and “No tine por” (“We are not afraid”), which is what the crowds in Barcelona chanted after the Islamist van attack on Las Ramblas last month.

My friend Johnny Keating was in Barcelona in the lead-up to the referendum last week.
Coming into the city from the north with his travel companion Sue behind him on a motorbike, he said the landscape was flat, hot and dry and the “ladies of the night”, sitting under red sun umbrellas and pointing their long legs out at the passing traffic, were a bit distracting.

Johnny said the locals were “pissed off” with the presence of the Guardia Civil in the free-spirited city that had given the world Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Johnny thought the European Union should be mediating.

The composer of the hymn of the United Nations, the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who is considered the pre-eminent cellist of the 20th century, said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men.”

Traditionally Catalans follow their own “Seny” philosophy (called “the wisdom of sensibleness”) – that, their language and banning bullfighting make Barcelona different from Madrid.

■When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.

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New Zealand

Millisphere (noun): A discrete region of approximately one-thousandth of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

I have previously sketched out the millisphere of Te Moananui (population 8 million) which includes Aotearoa and all the other islands of the Pacific but, following the above rules, New Zealand (population 4.7 million) qualifies as a millisphere by itself – a millisphere simply being a lens for examining human geography and it is allowable to change the focus.

The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman called these islands “Nieuw-Zeeland” when his party of explorers laid eyes on them in 1642 – and we have been spelling it wrongly ever since. A century-and-a-half later, Captain Cook redrew the map.

In November this year, Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom will open in a repurposed Mitre-10 in Foxton. Located next to the replica Dutch windmill, Te Awahou will tell the story of the contribution to this country of 160,000 Dutch New Zealanders (and our ancestors).

Lockwood homes, Rembrandt suits, Vogels bread and the Royal Gala apple are some Dutch contributions and we are reputed to have introduced cafe culture to New Zealand.

The English have traditionally found the baldly direct Dutch way of communicating a little unsettling. “You won’t die wondering,” is what they say about the Dutch; as well as being notoriously tight.

Last weekend’s general election provides another lens through which to examine the human geography of “Nieuw-Zeeland”.

Candidates from all parties portrayed a country with a housing crisis, polluted rivers and child poverty – and naturally they were the ones to fix it. Not exactly the happy, green and clean image that we market to the world.

Though New Zealand winters are mild compared with the Netherlands, post-war Dutch immigrants complained that they had never been so cold as their first winter in a traditional NZ timber bungalow. One was expected to put on woolly socks and jumpers and soldier on.

We are only now learning that poor-quality housing leads to poor health. There are ways to build inexpensive warm dry houses (passive solar mass, small rooms and simple things like curtains) but the NZ building regulations often stand in the way.

Ironically, because of the leaky (and rotting) building crisis, caused by the mainstream building industry, it has become virtually impossible for the homeowner to legally do any building work on their own property.

Education and empowerment are ways out of the housing crisis – not the government and the building industry.

We could build our way out of the housing crisis but, at the moment, on the outskirts of Auckland we are building speculator suburban slums when we should be rebuilding well-designed higher density homes in the inner city.

Cleaning up our rivers is also possible. In recent times the regional councils have marginally improved land-use practices while at the same time doubling dairy herd numbers.

Many Dutch immigrants went into intensive agriculture like dairy and poultry. In the Netherlands, cows are kept inside barns but there are animal rights regulations requiring farmers to let their cows outside for some fresh air and severe regulations about what to do with the manure.

New Zealand dairy farmers were caught by the recent dairy price downturn but in the Netherlands it was worse because farmers there had just borrowed millions of euros to install robots to milk their cows to stay ahead of their competitors.

Last weekend’s election saw the tide go out for the minor parties. All that is left of United Future is the faint smell of stale fart and the Maori Party sank below the waves.

“There will be consequences,” said Winston Peters after the Greens called him a racist, and the Greens are dreaming if they think they can be part of a Labour/NZ First/Green coalition. The Greens lost support because both National and Labour appropriated their policies.

“If other parties take Green policy, that’s winning,” said former Green co-leader Russel Norman.

The Greens only option now is to work with National, and their bottom line should be the legalisation of “personal” cannabis. When I was in the Netherlands last, the government was gathering tax from the “coffee shops”, and most Dutch people had never heard of methamphetamine.

*When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians Club.

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Yorkshire/Humberside

Millisphere: a discrete region of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population – around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

Choosing the millisphere of Yorkshire highlighted for me the arrogance of attempting to describe a region the writer has never been to. It would be easy to trot out the oft quoted trope: “A Yorkshireman is a Scot with all charity wrung out of him” or to list some famous people from “God’s Own Country” but I was looking for something deeper.

Yorkshire Captain James Cook constructed an early link to the millisphere of Te Moananui (covering the Pacific) by putting up the Union Jack for the United Kingdom but also from Yorkshire are: Jeremy Clarkson, Joe Cocker, Mark Dawson, Judi Dench, Guy Fawkes, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Frankie Howard, Henry Moore, Michael Palin, Diana Rigg, Jimmy Savile, Harold Wilson and Ernie Wise, to name a few.

The Yorkshire anarchist philosopher, poet and art critic, Sir Herbert Read, once said: “poetry is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.” The millisphere is concerned the geographical “truths” – a region’s distinctive character and its relationship with other millispheres.

The EU administrative region of Yorkshire/Humber (pop 5.3m) covers most of the historic county of Yorkshire. York comes from the Viking word for town and it was the last English kingdom to be incorporated into the United Kingdom. The Wars of the Roses are symbolically contested to this day with the football match between Leeds United (white/York) and Manchester United (red/Lancaster).

In the 1980s thousands of miners and police faced off for bare-knuckle battles before Margaret Thatcher closed down the Yorkshire coal mines. At the time geographer Doreen Massey (Manchester Open University) in Geography Matters pointed out that poor regions tend to be blamed for their own poverty. “Northern regions are told to stand on their own feet while in the south, around London, the government subsidises development,” she said citing London’s Canary Wharf development and the channel tunnel.

During the 2008 “Global Financial Crisis” (GFC) British bankers unloaded (pound symbol) 1.3 trillion worth of derivatives that, at the time, they referred to as “crap” and “vomit. In the process every British man, woman and child handed over (pound symbol) 19,721 to the bankers. Like South Canterbury Finance in New Zealand, the robbers got bailed out and paid out by the government, the rest got austerity. It was the working class and middle class who paid, leaving seven million Britons in “precarious” employment; setting baby-boomers against millennials and the metropolitan elite against everyone else.

In the recent Brexit referendum Yorkshire/Humber voted to leave – London voted to stay. Since the GFC a regionalist party has emerged in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire Party (originally titled “Yorkshire First”) got only 1% of the votes in 2014 and 5% in the 2017 parliamentary elections, which is insignificant in a first-past-the-post system; their platform is “If Scotland can have their own parliament, why not Yorkshire?”

Sir Herbert Read believed that “the poet is necessarily an anarchist and that he must oppose all organised conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.” Read was also an advocate for the importance of art in education.

Like Read, film director Francis Lee is the son of a Yorkshire farmer. Currently screening in cinemas around the county, Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country has won first prize at Sundance and at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

Described as Yorkshire’s Brokeback Mountain because it depicts a love affair between two men, it also depicts the Yorkshire Landscape. “I want to see the landscape’s effect on the characters, rather than the landscape,” Lee said.

To illustrate the difference between rural Britain and metropolitan London Lee recalled being youngest family member (with the smallest hands) on a pig farm. “My mother talks about me with one hand up a pig’s vagina pulling out piglets and the other hand holding a bacon butty.” You don’t do that in the city.

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London

“Citizens of nowhere,” the millisphere of London post-Brexit.

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

Two of our friends who live and work in London were visiting Wanganui last week and I was interested to quiz them about London post-Brexit.

London, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted in the 2016 referendum to stay in the EU, while almost all the rest of the UK voted to leave.

“I remember the night it happened, it was so negative and depressing,” said Jocelyn who teaches at the Camberwell School of Art. “ At work the next morning the students were in tears, I had to take them all out for a cup of tea, it cost me a lot of money,” she recalled.

Change would be dramatic she thought, for example, in terms of fees, her EU students would now be seen as “foreign students” not “home students” anymore. “It will take a lot of intellectual effort to untangle from all sorts of areas.”

Of the 8.5 million people living in Greater London almost one million of them are from the EU and don’t have British passports.

“We are living through the death-knell of Great Britain,” said Celia who once worked at Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery and now works at the Tate Modern. “It’s going to be pretty tough, I think they will lose Scotland in the end.”

“London is a very tolerant city, and very mixed, on the number twelve, which is my bus, they’d think I was the only English person, and I’m not,” Jocelyn observed. “My co-worker is Greek with two children born in London, but didn’t have a British passport, which costs a thousand pounds, therefore she couldn’t vote in the referendum, people are already getting letters telling them to prepare to go home.”

London’s status as a global financial hub can no longer be guaranteed.

HSBC is planning to move a thousand workers to Paris over the next two years and Lloyds of London has announced setting up a new European base to retain privileged access to the single European market. On the other hand Google, Apple, Facebook and Snapchat are setting up offices in

London.

Sadiq Khan, the Moslem mayor of London, at Davos this year, has warned that a “hard Brexit” won’t necessarily benefit European financial centres like Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt but rather will benefit global centres like Hong Kong, Singapore and New York.

Journalists living in “university, internet and travel bubbles” and looking at the UK through a “London lens” didn’t see Brexit coming. Elite Londoners saw themselves as “citizens of the world.” British nationalists called them “citizens of nowhere.”

Brexit has unearthed a polarisation in the UK along the lines of age, education, class and geography. Between those who were able to move freely and embraced globalisation versus those dissatisfied with the political establishment and saw the future with fear and alienation. Between those caught up in lower wages and rising house prices since the 2008 financial crisis versus the financial elite who mostly came out of crisis richer than when they went in.

Jocelyn and Celia still maintain a home in Castlecliff and call Whanganui a “relaxed and lovely” place. For all its faults they still find London “staggering” with “layers and layers and layers of meaning and opportunity” for those working in the arts.

What attracts them to London is that it is open and tolerant, that there is interaction across diverse communities, and continues to attract the “Dick Whittingtons” of the world, although, these days, young New Zealanders are more likely to do their OE in Berlin (where it is cheaper to live) than in Earls Court, where their parents did their OE.

They are concerned with the rise of the right and nationalism and xenophobia in the UK. “The frightening thing is that Teresa May looks like Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump,” they agreed.

“One of the pleasures of living in London is taking the train out into the surrounding countryside to look at the stunning English landscape,” said Jocelyn. “A landscape maintained with EU subsidies,” added Celia, and they both laughed.

London, which has traditionally been open to foreign immigrants, which needs them both to do the work that the British won’t do, as well as for skilled workers in the finance, technology and pharmaceutical sectors, voted to remain in the EU. On the other hand regional Britain where immigrants generally don’t go, voted to cut the ties with the EU and send foreign workers back home.

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Helvetia

In this rapidly overpopulating planet it helps to put the geo-political focus on population instead of focusing, as the media so often does, on celebrities, the nation state, warfare and the global economy. For this I use the lens of the “millisphere” (a region with roughly one thousandth of the world’s population).

As my millisphere analysis of “Palestine” showed, this model can confront nationalism and religion and sometimes meets head-on deeply held beliefs about the nature of the state and god.

Our friends Ross and Marie (ex communards from the Ahu Ahu Ohu) have just returned from visiting “Helvetia” – the old name for Switzerland. With a population of 8.4 million, it is a state that also qualifies as a millisphere.

Ross described it as a “beautiful country, like the Southern Alps on steroids, and very ordered.” As a timber miller and a greenie, Ross was surprised by the number of small sawmills and impressed with the management of their selectively logged mountain forests and the high alpine pastures.

They stayed in a typical village, “bigger than Waverley but smaller than Hawera”. High tech wood burners heating the houses are so efficient that “all you see is a little plume of steam and the air in the valleys is sparkling clean”. This winter the lakes froze over for the first time in decades.

Helvetia is ranked first for protecting the environment and the Swiss are reputedly top recyclers. Switzerland is the world’s wealthiest country per head of population and has the most dense rail network in the EU, 100 percent of which is electrified.

Helvetia has a long history of armed neutrality. There is compulsory military service and all reservists are issued with a gun from age 18 until 34. Referenda to disband the military in 1989 and 2001 were firmly defeated.

Switzerland was the birthplace of the Red Cross and Albert Einstein. It is where LSD, Velcro and the World Wide Web were invented and is the home of Nestle, Novatis, Credit Suisse, FIFA, the IOC and the ILO.

Their GST is 33 percent (compared with 15 percent in NZ). Food and housing are expensive and unemployment is very low, as is their tax rate. Last year a referendum on introducing UBI (universal basic income) was defeated.

Their constitution is that of a federation of “cantons” which, technically, have not handed over power to the centre and they are famous for “direct democracy” and have a referendum for nearly everything. Helvetia has an upper house of representatives from the cantons and a lower house elected from the general population.

In 1920 the League of Nations was formed in Geneva, which, after New York, has the United Nations’ second largest office and is home to the WHO, UNHRC and the WTO; but it was only in 2002 that the Swiss finally decided, by referendum, to become a full member of the UN, on condition that they are exempt from military requirements.

The Swiss were foundation members of the European Free Trade Association but have consistently voted not to join the EU and to retain their own currency. Through bilateral treaties they have minimal trade barriers to the EU and in 2009 joined the Schengen Zone, which allows for free movement across European borders.

Researching this column I talked to Sandra and Azian, both from Switzerland and now residents of Whanganui. I put it to them that “Helvetia” was an exemplar as far a well-run millisphere went.

Neutrality in an increasingly connected world was like balancing the Yin and the Yang Sandra thought; on the one hand maintaining independence and on the other being a global player. Like the USA, UK and Europe, Switzerland is experiencing rising xenophobia and nationalism.

Between 2012 and 2013 Switzerland took in 30,000 refugees. For a country with twice the population as New Zealand they take forty times as many refugees! Twenty percent of the Swiss population are immigrants but in 2014 a referendum to restrict the numbers of new immigrants was narrowly passed.

Switzerland has taken many Tibetan refugees form Northern India, settling then in the high plateau, and the Dalai Lama regularly visits this Tibetan enclave.

Azian thought that their high standard of living wasn’t as green as it appeared on the surface. Selling second hand cars to Poland “isn’t recycling” and the quest for material goods just made the Swiss unhappy and grumpy. “Too much all for one,” she concluded, referring to the Swiss motto: “all for one and one for all.”

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Swessex

In the 1960s and eccentric English aristocrat, Alexander Thynn, the seventh Marquess of Bath, proposed that the world should consist of a thousand roughly equal population states.

Alexander’s father had been wounded in North Africa in World War II, and his father had only become the previous sixth marquess because his older brother had been killed in the Belgium trenches in World War I. Empires cause wars young Alexander reasoned – better to dismantle empires.

At the time New Zealand along with 70 other states such as Austria, Cuba, Israel and Laos – fell into that order of magnitude. Let’s call them millispheres – a state inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the total world population.

Since then another 20 states have joined the list of millispheres. Newly independent states such as Belarus, Turkmenistan, Bosnia and Croatia have appeared after the sundering of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, while Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Newly independent colonies such as Papua New Guinea have become millispheres. Most recently South Sudan voted to become one, while Syria is trying to break up and to illustrate the marquess’ original observation, the main suppliers of military hardware to that conflict are the United States, Russia and China.

In India there are aspirant millispheres such as Bodoland and Gorkhaland, and there is the Chin state in Burma, and the millisphere of Kashmir straddling the India-Pakistan border.

Indonesia, after the fall of Suharto, devolved political and economic powers to their regions, many roughly the size of millispheres, to placate independence campaigns in regions such  as Banda Aceh.

China, on its periphery, has aspirant millispheres such as Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang and in Europe there are independence movements in the Basque country, Catalonia and Flanders.

In all, the geo-political trend since World War II indicates the move to a world of “millispheres” along the Marquess of Bath’s lines. Even the United States is not immune. In June 2016 when a 52-48 majority in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, using the hashtag #Brexit, there was renewed interest that Texas formalise efforts to secede from the United States, using the hashtag #Texit.

The UK, after their historic Brexit vote, faces renewed calls for Scotland’s independence. During Scotland’s recent vote on whether to leave the UK and form an independent Scotland but still be in the EU, the “Yes” faction believed Scotland should take back responsibility, secure funds from North Sea oil and stop building nuclear weapons, and use their resources and finances to create jobs, with more equal wages and a fairer social system.

Meanwhile the “No to independence” faction ran a campaign of fear. Scotland can’t make its way in on its own, they  said, adding that independence created an unsure economic future with doubtful benefits for the individual.

They theorised that it was doubtful whether the UK would remain in the EU (which came to pass). The pro-uk bloc followed the military line that in a dangerous world it is better to have strong partners and nuclear weapons.

Should the Marquess of Bath’s prediction of a world of one thousand independent “millispheres” come to pass, what would this mean for the UK?

It would mean an independent Scotland and Wales, and Northern Ireland would have no option but to join with the rest of Ireland. The millisphere of the Greater London urban area would probably continue as one of the great global financial centres and to the north there would be another largely urban millisphere centred on Manchester, with the rest of England divided into four or five rural/urban millispheres.

To the southwest of London there would be the millisphere of “Swessex” (Wessex and the Southwest) where the Marquess of Bath, now in his 80s, still lives.

The disintegration of the world’s superpower states and the creation of more millispheres probably wouldn’t mark the end of the world, and it might just put and end to war.

In the meantime the millisphere is merely another lens to examine human geography.