A Disintegrating U.S.? Critics Come Unglued

One possible explanation for how Panarin's hypothesis is being eagerly lapped up in Russia is that the Kremlin is projecting its own insecurities onto the United States.

"What may be clouding Mr. Panarin's crystal ball is the mistaken belief that U.S. citizens view themselves in the same way that residents of the old Soviet Union viewed that state," e-mails Thomas J. Baerwald, an investigator in a project called "Beyond Borders" and past president of the Association of American Geographers.

Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, four Soviet and five American geographers started "Beyond Borders" to map within the Soviet empire the human values that endure -- those that have taken centuries to produce and are not likely to change precipitously. Their approach was based on the idea that all countries have underlying patterns of pasts, futures, loyalties, industries, climates, resources and politics. These functional cultural regions, in turn, frequently are far more significant than the arbitrary boundaries and surveyors' mistakes that usually make up politically defined borders.

To take one former Soviet example: The European gateway of St. Petersburg, across from Scandinavia, is profoundly different from all those Muslim "-stans" north and east of Iran, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, that declared their independence from the Soviet Union the first chance they got.

Those departures still burn some Russians who hate the loss of empire. Perhaps they would like to shed crocodile tears at the idea that history might repeat itself near the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the Soviet Union broke apart, 14 independent countries emerged in addition to Russia. Quite a few of them instantly and desperately turned to Europe for their futures, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine -- not to mention all those Warsaw Pact places from Poland to the late Czechoslovakia. Might it warm a few cockles in Moscow to think that Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey or New Hampshire could go the same way?

Oh, and be still my Kremlin heart: those shooting wars in the Caucuses, in Chechnya and Georgia? If only those would erupt in the Rockies!

"I really see Panarin's argument as Russia looking in the mirror and projecting that onto the United States. 'Here they speak Spanish. Of course this can't hold together. Of course this will fall apart when the economy tanks,' " says Kathleen Braden of Seattle Pacific University, another member of the "Beyond Borders" team.

"The Russian mentality is, 'There are ethnic borders, and they won't go away. The only thing that keeps this melting pot together is money.' There's also a sense of 'Our empire broke up; why shouldn't theirs?' "

"We constantly were corrected when we tried to use the term 'Soviets' as a catch-all phrase for residents of the U.S.S.R.," Baerwald says. "People firmly told us that they were Russians or Lithuanians or Estonians or Ukrainians or other terms that identified a region or subregion that described their own geographical identity. In contrast, if you ask U.S. residents what term describes who they are, an enormous majority will reply 'I am an American.' Even in those places where regional loyalties are especially strong, such as Texas, loyalties to the U.S. are far greater than they are to states or regions.

"I suspect this would be true even had the U.S. not had the powerful reinforcement of national identity that followed in the wake of 9/11. But one can compare the way that U.S. citizens have dealt with the Iraqi war in comparison with the way the nation was torn by an equally unpopular war in Vietnam four decades earlier, and sense that there is a very strong belief among a very large percentage of Americans that while we may have problems and differences, the best way to attain a positive future is to remain solid as a united nation."

We can hope that Igor Panarin is offered the opportunity for a long road trip in these parts, either before or after his 2010 deadline for the end of the federal empire.