ABSTRACT
This book covers vast amounts of territory by design. Our goal from the outset was to revisit Eurasia as a geographical place and as an analytical category, in large part because we felt that there was much more to Eurasia—spatially, temporally, culturally, politically, economically, materially—than past treatments encompassed. At the conclusion of the book we believe the authors have convincingly illustrated, individually and collectively, some of the ways in which Eurasian geography can be conceptualized and operationalized. There are also pitfalls in such an approach that does not buy into the political and cultural hubris of Eurasia being anything that was once “Soviet” (Gleason 2010; Diener this volume), or into the popular discursive shorthand of the unscripted, political voids or proxy battlegrounds between the major powers of the world’s largest landmass. We have little doubt that our decision to place the Chinese–Vietnamese borderlands (Chapter 2) into tacit conversation with Europe’s designs on Caspian and Russian energy (Chapter 6) will strike some as a bridge too far. Part of the allure of the term Eurasia is its ambiguity, and to suggest that Eurasia is anything between Shanghai and Lisbon risks pushing this portmanteau word, standing as much for musky geopolitical intrigue as for geographical precision, further into the realm of meaninglessness. Cartographers as well as geographers struggle with and succumb to drawing delineations. A suggestive green line in the National Geographic Atlas of the World (National Geographic Society Cartographic Division 1981) page on “Asia and Adjacent Areas” snakes from the Arctic Ocean along the Urals, bisects the Caspian and Black Sea, and finally embraces Turkey in its definition.
