The United Nations’ annually published Education Index is one of the main components of the widely used Human Development Index. An accurate portrayal of educational differences among the various countries of the world would be very beneficial. I have my suspicions, however, about the Education Index, which “is measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).” But does Kazakhstan really belong in a higher educational category than Switzerland, Singapore, and Japan? Does Costa Rica really belong in the same category as Bolivia and Paraguay? Such findings rest on the premise that all countries are able, and willing, to gather and publish accurate data on such issues, which is not necessarily the case. The index fails to capture, moreover, educational intensity. I think that it is safe to assume that Japanese students in secondary school on average work more intensively than those in Greece, Uruguay, and the United States.

The Wikipedia map of the index is also problematic. The key, for example, uses the wrong color for the highest category, which I highlight by placing a square of that color on the United States. The highest and lowest color categories, moreover, are difficult to differentiate; the former is dark green and the latter dark red, but both look more “dark” than either red or green.

But despite such problems, the map does effectively portray some interesting patterns. Note the low-education zone in the Sahel belt of Africa. Note as well that Pakistan, but not Afghanistan, also falls into the lowest color category. The high standing of Latin America relative to Africa and South Asia is also significant.

Pop music is usually the domain of young—sometimes even teenage—stars, but Russia’s latest pop music sensation is a band of nine women whose ages range from 44 to 86. Five of the band’s members are in their 70s. The group’s name “Buranovskie Babushki” translates as “Buranovo Grannies”, and eight of the nine members are indeed grandmothers. Perhaps even more surprising than their age is the fact that they come from the village of Buranovo in Russia’s internal republic of Udmurtia. The village, whose population is estimated at 658 residents, is located 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the republic’s capital of Izhevsk, a city famous for its weapon-producing factories.* The Republic, however, is also known for its centuries-old traditions, which represent a mixture of mythology, ancient religions, and ethnic rituals. In this region, as in the neighboring Mari-El, Christianity for centuries co-existed with shamanism and paganism. The Udmurt people are good at preserving their heritage, whether in religion, folk costumes, music, or language.

Buranovo Grannies perform in folk costumes, complete with birch bark shoes (in Russian, lapti) and traditional coin necklaces. They are reported to use these costumes in everyday life as well. The Grannies’ repertoire consists of Russian and Udmurtian folk songs and Udmurt-language renditions of songs by such famous Russian rock musicians as Boris Grebenschikov and Viktor Tsoi. They also give a new sound to Western rock and pop hit songs, ranging from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and “Let it be” to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, and from “Besame Mucho” to “Hotel California”. Most of their singing is done in the Udmurt language, which has the status of a co-official language in the republic, alongside Russian. However, due to the influx of Russian industrial workers who were moved to the Urals region with their weapons factories during World War II, the population of Udmurtia is now 58% Russian. The number of Udmurt speakers is even smaller, as less than 30% of the republic’s population speaks the national language. Many younger people, especially in cities, do not speak Udmurt since their parents think that fluency in Russian will improve their children’s educational and economic opportunities. This causes worries about the future survival of the language. Yet, in rural areas, Udmurt is spoken by a much higher proportion of ethnic Udmurts; it is also used as a language of instruction, at least in primary schools in rural areas. In addition, Udmurt has a niche in the media as well: every morning one can listen to the news and weather in Udmurt, and in the evenings watch Udmurt programs on TV. Folk songs too are a medium for transmitting the language from generation to generation: there seems to be a song for every occasion—be it a wedding, baptism, birth, or seeing a young man off to the army.

The Udmurt language is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Like other Finno-Ugric languages, Udmurt has agglutinative morphology, lacks gender distinction even in personal pronouns—that is, there is no difference between ‘he’ and ‘she’—and has 15 distinct cases, seven of which are the so-called locative cases, with meanings of the English prepositions ‘in’, ‘from’, ‘to’, etc. However, unlike other Finno-Ugric languages, Udmurt does not distinguish short and long vowels and does not have vowel harmony; moreover, it is characterized by stress falling on the last syllable of a word. Other un-Finno-Ugric features of Udmurt include a large number of loanwords from the neighboring Tatar language and Russian. Tatar has also influenced Udmurt sound system and grammar.

Buranovo Grannies won the national Eurovision selection contest and represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where they won second place with their hit “Party for Everyone”. The group said that their goal is to raise money to build a church in Buranovo. Their dream will now come true as the head of the republic Aleksandr Volkov now promised to give a million roubles for the church, in addition to the funds that the band has raised. The foundation of the new church has been laid in preparation for the triumphal return of the Grannies from Baku.

The Grannies are not the first musical sensation to hail from Udmurtia as Russia’s great composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born there in 1840.

Udmurtia is also noted for having a high proportion of red-haired inhabitants, perhaps the highest in the world. As a result, the republic holds an annual Redheads’ Festival every September in which both people and animals with red hair are celebrated. Red hair is honored at the festival in part because redheads are sometimes disparaged in Russia, a form of prejudice that some sources associate with anti-Semitism. In Britain, a more pervasive if less focused form of bigotry against redheads—“gingerism”—is viewed by some as variety of racism. “Ginger,” the British slang term for redheads, is often now viewed as unacceptably pejorative. As Australian singer-comedian Tim Michin puts it, “Only a ginger can call another ginger ‘Ginger.’”

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*It was in Izhevsk in 1947 that a Russian engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov invented AK-47, the sub‑machine gun named after him.

In 2010, the Stuxnet worm made global headlines as it attacked the Iranian nuclear program. Described by the Wikipedia as “the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems,” Stuxnet was identified by the Belarussian antivirus software vendor, VirusBlokAda. Currently, a vastly larger and more powerful malware program called Flame (or sKyWIper) is infecting computers in Iran and neighboring countries. Flame, recently identified by the Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, is so sophisticated that it might have been present, undetected, for years. According to a recent article in Wired, Flame’s “complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.” The Wired article goes on to state that Flame is “designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them, including documents, recorded conversations and keystrokes. It also opens a backdoor to infected systems to allow the attackers to tweak the toolkit and add new functionality.” According to another recent article, Flame has hit at least 600 computer systems thus far.

Speculations about the origin of Flame focus mostly on Israel and the United States. The fact that it is so large— 20 megabytes—has led to some interesting observations. One commentator on the Wired site (Lan8) joked about “Bloatware for malware, I LOVE it! Probably written in Redmond [home of Microsoft]. I wonder if you get a trial version of Warcraft with it?” Yet the same observer goes on more seriously to speculate that:

 [I]t’s the American version of the Israeli Stuxnet/DuQu … It seems to me that all the various components that do all the nifty little spy tricks seems like an American approach to spying (“give me everything you’ve got on….”) rather than the lean mean spying machine that was Stuxnet/DuQu, a more targeted and specific Russian/Israeli approach to similar ends.

The Euro notwithstanding, sovereignty and currency ideally correspond: each independent county is generally associated with its own form of money. Yet in actuality, non-correspondence abounds. Many sovereign states use the currency of other countries, and quite a few dependent territories and non-recognized states print their own bills. Timor Leste, Panama, Ecuador, and the Federated States of Micronesia all use the US Dollar. The Euro, likewise, is used by several counties that do not even belong to the European Union, including Andorra, Montenegro, and Monaco. China, in contrast, is a single sovereign state with three currencies: the Chinese Renminbi, the Hong Kong Dollar, and the Macau Pataca. Many British dependencies maintain their own currencies that are exchangeable with the UK pound at par value, such as Gibraltar, but the British Virgin islands simply uses the U.S. dollar. Seven independent Caribbean counties share the East Caribbean dollar, which is pegged to the US dollar. In West Africa, eight independent countries use the West African CFA franc, which is of equal value to the Central African CFA franc, used by six other independent African countries. Both currencies are pegged to the Euro.

One country, Zimbabwe, seems to have given up on the idea of any “official” currency, whether foreign or domestic. Currently, the South African rand, Botswana pula, pound sterling, euro, and the United States dollar are all in use. In the future, Zimbabwe may reintroduce the Zimbabwean dollar, discontinued in 2009, but only if its economy stabilizes. This currency was destroyed by hyperinflation, which resulted in several episodes of redenomination. As the Wikipedia explains, “The third redenomination produced the “fourth dollar” (ZWL) which was worth 1 trillion ZWR (third dollar) and 10 septillion “first dollar” ZWD, so overall the ratio of the redenominations was 10³ × 10¹⁰ × 10¹² = 10²⁵.”

On May 24, debates in Ukraine’s Parliament, the Rada, turned physical after members of opposition parties blocked access to the podium for the ruling Regions party lawmakers who sought to defend a language law, as can be seen from this video. The law had been proposed by the pro-Russian Regions party, under pressure from Moscow. The party’s head, President Viktor Yanukovych, whose mother tongue is Russian, promised to elevate Russian to the status of the second state language during his campaign for the presidency in 2009. However, he did not press the issue after coming to power in February 2010. Since then, Moscow has reproached Yanukovych for not delivering on his election promise and has complained that the language rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine are being violated.

According to the draft of the law, Russian-speaking children would be allowed to receive all their basic schooling in their home language. Also, people in areas where Russian predominates would no longer have to demonstrate a strong command of Ukrainian to work in regional administration. If passed, this law would entrench Russian as a “regional language”, which, according to opponents of the law, would eventually lead to Ukrainian disappearing from use. However, Russian is already a de facto regional language, as it clearly dominates in the Donbass mining area near the eastern border with Russia—which happens to be Yanukovych’s power base—as well as in the southeast and the Crimea. Ukrainian—currently, the sole state language, in accordance with the country’s constitution—predominates in the centre and in the west. The rift between Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking regions correlates very closely with voting patterns (see the map posted above). As can be seen from this map, during the 2010 Presidential Election, Russian-speaking areas voted for Yanukovych, whereas Ukrainian-speaking regions gave their votes to Yulia Timoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party. A similar split was observed during Legislative Election of 2006 and 2007, when Russian-speaking areas voted predominantly for the Regions’ Party, whereas Ukrainian-speaking areas gave their votes to the Timoshenko Bloc and “Our Ukraine” party. In fact, the split has been established as early as the 2004 Presidential Election, when Viktor Yanukovych received support mostly from the same areas in the south-east, while the Ukrainian-speaking zone voted overwhelmingly for Viktor Yushchenko. Given this entrenched language-voting correlation, it is no surprise that opposition parties view the proposed language law as a cynical move by the Regions Party to win back disenchanted voters at the forthcoming parliamentary election in October and to mobilize Moscow’s support by keeping Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Ukraine is not the only post-Soviet country where proposed changes to the linguistic status quo provoke an emotional debate. In February 2012, Latvia held a referendum on the issue of making Russian a second official language. As noted in an earlier GeoCurrents post, the election attracted a large turnout, more than 70 percent of the electorate. The proposition was decisively defeated, gaining only about a quarter of the vote, chiefly in the urban areas of the country and in the largely Russian-speaking southeastern region. One significant difference between the Ukrainian and Latvian situations, however, is that in Latvia knowledge of the national language is a prerequisite for citizenship, whereas Ukraine imposes no such requirement. As a result, in Latvia Russian-speakers with no knowledge of the national language cannot vote, whereas in Ukraine they can. It is, therefore, more likely that the new language policy will be adopted in Ukraine, the recent outburst of “unparliamentary behavior” notwithstanding.

The GeoCurrents series on Siberia concludes by looking first to the future and then into the distant past: the preceding post examined the possible consequences of global warming on the region, while the present one turns to much earlier times, exploring the position of Siberia in human prehistory and especially its crucial role in the peopling of the Americas.

Mainstream anthropological thought has long assumed that the first settlers of North and South America derived from Siberia, moving over the exposed land-bridge of “Beringia” during the last glacial episode and then spreading south once the continental glaciers began to recede. Alternative theories, however, have proposed additional migration streams originating from Europe or passing from eastern Asia through the north Pacific by watercraft. Genetic studies, however, strongly support the Siberian hypothesis. Y-chromosome DNA analysis, for example, reveals that a substantial majority of Native American men belong to the otherwise fairly rare haplogroup Q, which also happens to be common in Siberia, especially among some of the smaller indigenous groups.  Haplogroup Q reaches an astoundingly high 95 percent frequency among the Ket, but this could represent genetic drift, as the Ket population is very small (around 1,500).

The Y-DNA Haplogroup R1 is the second most important haplogroup among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Its frequency is highest in the Americas among the Algonquian peoples of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. Although rare in eastern Siberia, R1 is widespread among certain south-central Siberian groups. Whether haplogroup R1 among certain Native American groups came from south-central Siberia or is a result of recent European admixture remains uncertain.

The third major Y-DNA haplogroup found among Native Americans is haplogroup C, which is also relatively widespread in Siberia. Haplogroup C is even more common in the Pacific and among indigenous Australians; some scholars associate haplogroup C with the first out-of-Africa migration that took a coastal route along Southern Asia and into Southeast Asia and Australia some 50,000 years ago. However, American Indians (especially some Na-Dené-, Algonquian-, or Siouan-speaking populations), Siberians, and Central Asians share the more restricted C3 sub-haplogroup, while many Pacific groups have the C2 sub-haplogroup and Australians Aborigines the C4 sub-haplogroup.

Several relatively recent genetic studies seek to clarify the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and those of Siberia. A 2007 report, for example, located an American “north-to-south gradient of decreasing similarity to Siberians”: the closer the location of a given Amerindian group to Siberia, in other worlds, the closer the genetic connection. As specified by the authors, “Genetic similarity to Siberia is greatest for the Chipewyan population from northern Canada and for the more southerly Cree and Ojibwa populations. Detectable Siberian similarity is visible to a greater extent in Mesoamerican and Andean populations than in the populations from eastern South America.” The fact that western South American Indian populations have closer genetic affinities to Siberians than those of eastern South America is offered as evidence that the original human migration to South America occurred along the Pacific Coast. The greater linguistic diversity along the Pacific Coast further supports the theory that the initial peopling of the Americas proceeded north to south along a Pacific coastal route.

The movement down the Pacific Coast could have been relatively rapid. Another 2007 study, for example, found evidence that the ancestors of the Native Americans lived for many thousands of years in relative isolation in Beringia, during which time they experienced a number of genetic changes. Some of these people evidently migrated back into Siberia, where their genetic signatures can be seen today, especially among the Evenks and Selkups. The authors go on to argue that “after the Beringian standstill, the initial North to South migration [in the Americas] was likely a swift pioneering process, not a gradual diffusion, … [and] was followed by long-term isolation of local populations.” This long-term isolation further contributed to linguistic diversification in the Americas.

The initial peopling of the Americas from this ancestral Beringian population appears to have been only the first of three “Siberian” migrations to the Western Hemisphere. Linguistic and other lines of evidence have long suggested that the Na-Dené people (those who speak Athabascan and related languages) came in a second wave, perhaps around 8,000 BCE. Intriguingly, the Na-Dené languages have been linked to the Ket language of central Siberia by linguist Edward Vajda. This Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis remains controversial, although it has received stronger support than the wildly speculative “Dené–Caucasian” theory, proposed by Russian scholar Sergei Starostin, which posits a macro-family encompassing “the Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian [Ket] language families and the Basque and Burushaski languages.” Most linguist continue to treat Ket, Basque, and Burushaski as isolates; Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dené as separate language families; and North Caucasian as two (or even three) separate language families. Genetically, the Na-Dené show some particularities that also indicate that their “migration occurred from the Russian Far East after the initial Paleo-Indian colonization.” A third migration stream from Siberia to the Americas, that of the ancestors of the “Eskimo-Aleut” peoples, seems to date back to around 4,000 BCE, according to both linguistic and genetic evidence.

As mentioned above, some Y-DNA markers show a closer connection between Native Americans and the indigenous inhabitants of south-central Siberian than those of the northern or eastern parts of the region. The same is true for certain mitochondrial DNA markers, which show descent along the maternal line. A major study published earlier this year specifically indicates strong genetic linkages between American Indians and the indigenous inhabitants of the southern Altai Mountains, a rugged area situated near the intersection of southern Siberia, western Mongolia, and eastern Kazakhstan. As the authors argue, “The Altai region of southern Siberia has played a critical role in the peopling of northern Asia as an entry point into Siberia and a possible homeland for ancestral Native Americans.”

The genetic linkage between Native Americans and the peoples of the Altai Mountains may seem surprising, as the Altai Range is located far from Beringia. But as has been explored in previous GeoCurrents posts, mountains often act as refuges, places where old patterns, cultural and genetic, are able to persist. In more open landscapes, mass movements of people are more easily able to introduce new elements and rearrange preexisting configurations. Relatively isolated mountain valleys, such as those of the Altai, were often largely bypassed by such movements.

Yet such isolation was rarely if ever absolute. Turkic languages, for example, eventually spread through the Altai Range, displacing languages of other families. Some scholars have suggested that the Turkic linguistic family itself originated in the Altai region, and the linkage of the region to the putative language family* that includes Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic is reflected in its very name: Altaic. The Altai Mountains may even have played a role in the history of the Indo-European language family. In the Bronze Age (circa 1500 BCE), horse-riding nomads originating near the Altai seem to have spread their burial sites over a huge region extending from Finland to Mongolia. Although this so-called Seima-Turbino Phenomenon is still widely regarded as a cultural enigma, some scholars have argued that its carriers were Indo-European speakers. A 2009 Human Genetics article further contends that in “the Bronze and Iron Ages, south Siberia was a region of overwhelmingly predominate European settlement,” inhabited by “blue (or green-) eyed, fair-skinned, and light-haired people.” Perhaps that was the case across much of the lowland belt of south-central Siberia, but a different situation would probably have obtained in the hidden valleys of the Altai Mountains.

*As discussed in a previous GeoCurrents post, “Altaic” is probably not a genuine language family derived from descent from a common ancestral tongue.

The International Olympic Committee has been petitioned to hold a minute of silence at the London Olympics opening ceremony on July 27 to remember the eleven Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics. But so far the IOC rejected the idea: “We do not foresee any commemoration during the opening ceremony of the London Games,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said. He added that “the IOC has officially paid tribute to the memory of the athletes on several occasions”; yet, the record shows that the IOC has never held an official public commemoration.

In September 1972, eight members of Yasser Arafat’s notorious Black September terrorist group broke into the athletes village in Munich and attacked the Israeli team. Two of the athletes were immediately killed and nine were taken hostage, only to be executed by the Palestinian terrorists when the German police bungled a rescue attempt after a 20-hour standoff (a German policeman, as well as five of the terrorists were killed as well). The unfolding horror was covered by the international media. Willi Daume, president of the Munich Olympics Organizing Committee asked the IOC to cancel the remainder of the Munich Games out of respect for the murdered Israelis. But the then IOC President Avery Brundage refused, insisting that “the Games must go on”. And so they did.

The families of the 11 murdered Israeli athletes, led by Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano (the widows of fencing coach Andre Spitzer and weightlifter Yossef Romano, respectively) have requested a minute of silence at the opening ceremony of each Olympics since the 1976 Montreal Games, to convey respect and to promote peace. But each time their request has been turned down by the IOC. This year, the 40th anniversary of the Munich Massacre, Ankie and Ilana have started an internet petition, noting that a minute of silence “is a fitting tribute for athletes who lost their lives on the Olympic stage. Moreover, [it will] “clearly say to the world that what happened in 1972 can never happen again”. The petition was expected to gain no more than 10,000 signatures by the opening day of the London games, but with more than two months left, the petition has already gathered more than 46,000 signatures from around the world. The campaign spilled into other social media as well: a Facebook page has been created urging people to sign the petition, and a Twitter trend started under the hashtag #justoneminute. Also, for the first time the Munich Massacre widows’ fight has now been taken up by Israeli officials. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon made a formal request to the IOC to hold a minute’s silence to commemorate the slain Israeli athletes in order “to send an unequivocal and public message to the world that the IOC stands against hatred and violence”. But Israel’s request was denied.

The “Just one minute” campaign appears to be gathering public support around the world. In the U.S., House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has released a statement, and Congressman Eliot Engel and Congresswoman Nita Lowey have introduced a House Resolution, calling on the IOC to commemorate the Munich 11 during the London Games opening ceremony. The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League also had called on the IOC to approve the minute of silence. A similar motion to hold a minute’s silence in the House of Commons has been filed in the British Parliament by Bob Blackman, the MP for Harrow East. It is reported to be backed by 20 MPs from across the political spectrum. Parliament is likely to hold the minute of silence on the 40th anniversary of the massacre in September, rather than during the London Games themselves, as it is not sitting then.

The 2012 Olympics will last seventeen days, which amounts to 24,480 minutes. Whether one of them will be dedicated to “to building a peaceful and better world by educating young people through sport practiced without discrimination”, as the Olympic charter claims, remains to be seen.

Angola is an economically booming, oil-rich country noted for its low levels of human development, authoritarian government, deep disparities of wealth, and high levels of corruption. Peaceful opposition to the government has recently been mounting, inspired in part by several politically active rap musician, most notably Hexplosivo Mental (Jeremias Augusto) and Carbono Casimiro. Earlier this week, a number of anti-government activists, including Hexplosivo Mental, “were attacked, beaten and some hospitalised during a meeting in the Angolan capital Luanda, prompting Amnesty International to call for a full and impartial investigation into the incident.”

The Portuguese-language website maintained by the rap-associated activist group, Central 7311, forwards a broadly democratic message, framing Angola as both a “country of the future” and a “country of fear.” Its manifesto denounces Angola’s “communist and autocratic … cult of personality,” while demanding a free press, freedom of expression, the separation of powers, and an autonomous legal system in which no one is above the law.

Angola’s economy has become highly globalized in recent years. Relations with China are particularly close: Angola is one of China’s top suppliers of oil, and China is currently “rebuilding of the Benguela Railway, a 840-mile transcontinental railway that links the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola with rail networks in the DR Congo and Zambia.” But China is by no means the only foreign country interested in Angolan resources. Argentina, for example, is currently negotiating with Angola for an “oil for food” pact (Angola’s once-significant agricultural sector is now almost moribund). Economic ties with Portugal are also close—and growing closer, due to the old colonial connection, the use of a common language, and Portugal’s current economic crisis. As reported in a recent Spiegel Online article:

With the help of the state oil company Sonangol’s petrodollars, the former enslaved nation is going on a shopping spree in Portugal. The Angolan elites, many with ties to President José Eduardo dos Santos, in power for the last 32 years, are buying up Portuguese government-owned companies that have to be privatized quickly. Portugal’s conservative prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, spent his childhood in Angola, where his father was a doctor. This connection has prompted Coelho to advocate closer relations between the two countries, “their citizens and their companies.” Now Angolans are buying up shares in Portuguese media companies and they are purchasing prime property along the Atlantic beaches as well as luxury real estate in Lisbon and designer clothing. They are also snapping up workers. Close to 150,000 Portuguese have already obtained visas for Angola.

Warnings about the impending “decline of the West,” which date back at least to 1918*, have grown increasingly common in recent years—as have works debunking such predictions. The most recent entry in the latter category is an article in the current edition of Foreign Policy by Bruce Jones and Thomas Wright entitled “Meet the GUTS,” the wordy subtitle of which reads, “The West Isn’t Declining. Here Are Four World Powers Enjoying an Astonishing Renaissance.” Although Jones and Wright make some cogent points about differential economic growth and political clout, their spatial framing of the issue is pure fantasy, based on the redefinition of basic concepts of world geography to fit their strained arguments.

The newly coined term “GUTS” refers to the four countries that are supposedly leading the Western “renaissance”: Germany, the United States, Turkey and South Korea. Whether these states are actually experiencing a sustained resurgence that will refashion international relations is highly debatable: Germany is beset with the Euro-zone crisis, the U.S. remains economically troubled and hamstrung by political gridlock, mounting inflation threatens to undermine Turkey’s recent boom, and South Korea, with one of the world’s lowest birthrates, faces an impending demographic implosion. But regardless of their economic standings, how can Turkey and especially South Korea be so casually classified as “Western” countries? South Korea, after all, lies at the eastern extremity of the Eurasian continent, the landmass that gave rise to the supposed global division separating “the West” from “the East.”

The longitudinal divide that yielded “the West” and “the East” has a long and complex history, as analyzed at some length in The Myth of Continents. In simplified terms, the idea traces back to the division of the Roman Empire under Constantine, and was reinforced by the much later split with Christianity between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Western tradition (Roman Catholicism and later Protestantism as well). In the modern era, the geographical focus of the West grew less stable, but it generally remained focused on Western Europe and its North American offshoot. The idea of the “East,” in contrast, separated into two separate concepts, that of a cultural East (or “Orient”), largely coincident with “Asian Civilizations,” and that of the geopolitical East, which tended to focus on Russia. During the Cold War, geopolitical framing usually prevailed, pitting a Soviet-dominated East against a West defined around the NATO alliance. During this period, industrialized East Asian allies of the U.S., especially Japan, were occasionally associated with the West, but their far-eastern locations, along with their non-Western cultural and historical backgrounds, usually kept them out of the so-called Western World. The “Western Civilization” courses that once formed a mainstay of U.S. college education, for example, had no room for Japanese or Korean history.

With the end of the Cold War such geographical framing ceased to be appropriate, and as a result the concept of the geopolitical East, much like the closely related idea of the “Second World,” essentially disappeared. Yet Cold-War thinking still undergirds Jones and Wright’s definition of “the West.” South Korea is a Western country, they tell us, because it is “one of America’s oldest and most reliable allies.” By the same token, Turkey’s NATO membership, along with its basically democratic governance, is viewed as placing it firmly within the Western camp.

But if Jones and Wright define the West on strategic, geopolitical grounds, how do they frame its rival, the region of the world that it is supposedly competing with? Here they focus on the “rise of the BRICs,” which has been associated with the “supposed decline of the Western powers.” But the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—are tied together by nothing beyond the facts that they are large and have experienced significant economic growth over the past decade. India and China are actually regional rivals, and democratically governed India has been building close economic and military ties with “the West” in recent years. Brazil, moreover, is much more easily construed as a “Western” country than is South Korea if one moves beyond narrow strategic considerations.

Regardless of what “the West” is pitted against, it is highly questionable whether the region, as defined by Jones and Wright, has any real coherence. I suspect that few Koreans would place their country within the Western World, and that many more would take offence at any such notion. In Turkey the issue can be assessed more directly. When the country was under authoritarian rule, it certainly inclined toward Western Europe and the United States, but under democratic rule the Turkish electorate has essentially rejected the notion that Turkey is a fundamentally Western country. Public opinion polling, moreover, shows that most Turks view the United States and Western Europe in unfavorable terms, in part because of the deep cultural and social divisions that separate their country from “the West.”

Lest one accuse Jones and Wright of being too optimistic about “Western” prospects, that admit that “the West is also hobbled by four countries that have yet to recover from the financial crisis: Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.” Including Japan in the West is of course as problematic as including South Korea. And placing Britain in the same economic category as Italy and Japan betrays a distressingly short-term sense of economic trajectories. But perhaps we can be relieved that the authors did not frame the lagging foursome as the “BIFJs,” as they think that acronyms have real significance, concluding their article with the observation that, “Perhaps these rising powers need an acronym if they are to be taken seriously. Is it time for the BRICS to meet the GUTS of the West?”

Between the rising GUTS and the languishing “BIFJs,” Jones and Wright locate a single intermediate Western country, Australia. They admit that Australia has done very well economically in recent years, caution that it “has not had the impact of a rising power,” yet go on to state that its “geographical position, close security relationship with the United States, and vast energy supplies means it is likely to become more influential in global politics”—seemingly implying that the GUTS may soon become the GUTAS. But what of Canada, a significantly more populous and economically powerful country than Australia? As is so often the case in U.S. publications, Canada simply goes unmentioned.

*1918 was the year in which the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (or Decline of the West) was published.

Fior D’Italia, a legendary Italian restaurant, has been serving diners since 1886 in a number of locations in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, known as the city’s Little Italy. But it took its final orders from customers on May 21, 2012. The restaurant survived several disasters, including the Great Quake of 1906. The day after the earthquake the restaurant “reopened” with great kettles of soup in a tent in order to feed the public. The restaurant operated out of the tent for about a year while San Francisco was rebuilt. As the city grew, the restaurant also expanded until it could seat 750 and serve 1500 meals a day. It became a center of cultural and social events for the city and the Italian community, as many banquets, parties, business events, and weddings took place at this restaurant. But in 2005 another disaster struck: a fire forced the owners, chef Gianni Audieri and his wife Trudy, to move the restaurant to another location. The general economic downturn starting in 2008, as well as locals’ increasingly cosmopolitan tastes, prompted the owners to shut operations down for good.

Fior D’Italia claimed to be the oldest Italian restaurant in the U.S., which is perhaps surprising, given that most Americans of Italian ancestry now live on the East Coast (see map). Midwest, Florida, and California have smaller Italian communities. However, “the Italians immigrated to California 50 years earlier than they did back east”, said Gianni Audieri to reporters. While most Italian immigrants came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920 and settled in the large cities of the East Coast, a sizeable number of Italians came to California during the gold and silver rushes, where they were drawn to by work opportunities in mining, railroad construction, lumbering, and agriculture. It was in San Francisco that the first Columbus Day celebration was organized by Italian Americans in 1869. Among notable San Franciscans of Italian descent is Amadeo Giannini, who founded the Bank of Italy in 1904 in an effort to cater to Italian immigrants denied service by other banks; later it became the Bank of America.

With little ongoing immigration from Italy, fewer and fewer Americans speak Italian although as many as 17.8 million Americans claim Italian ancestry. According to the 1990 U.S. census, 1.3 million Americans claimed to speak Italian at home, but by the 2000 census this number was down to 1 million and by 2005 to 800,000. Together with Yiddish, Italian is the fastest shrinking Heritage Language in the U.S. The highest concentration of Italian speakers live in New York, where over 220,000 people or 28% of the state’s population claim to speak Italian at home. New Jersey is a distant second with 89,000 or 11% of its population speaking Italian, followed by California (66,000 or 8%), Pennsylvania (55,000 or 7%), and Florida (52,000 or 6.5%). Sizeable Italian-speaking communities also live in Massachusetts, Illinois, and Connecticut.

With Fior D’Italia closing, the oldest Italian restaurants are Ralphs in Philadelphia, opened by the Dispigno family in 1900, and Barbetta in New York City, founded in 1906 by Sebastiano Maioglio. While Barbetta is a few years younger than Ralphs, it has a triple title of the oldest restaurant in New York that is still owned by the family that founded it, the oldest Italian restaurant in New York, and the oldest restaurant in New York’s Theatre District.