CONFESSIONS OF A MAP-MAKER
By Philippe Rekacewicz

Le Monde Diplomatique, France
April 10 2006

Earlier this year, Le Monde diplomatique published the second edition
of its atlas (1), and the United Nations Environmental Programme, in
partnership with the paper, published a translation of the part of it
that focuses on environmental issues (2). It’s a difficult business
being a mapmaker. Maps, as mere visual representations of the idea
of the world, are just as subject to diplomacy, border disputes and
international struggles as real geopolitical territory.

In 2002 I was at a meeting in Prague at the end of an international
economic forum on the management of water resources in Eurasia. The
Azerbaijani delegate suddenly spoke: “This is not acceptable. Mr
Chairman, I refuse to continue if our work is to be based on the
document you have just submitted.” He had just spotted a map of the
Caucasus which suggested that Nagorno-Karabakh, the cause of a war
between Azerbaijan and Armenia, was a part of Armenia. For Baku,
it is occupied territory and an integral part of Azerbaijan. Any
other representation is unacceptable. The chair proposed a break in
proceedings so that the offending document could be removed. But the
Armenian delegate protested and the meeting degenerated into a slanging
match. Only hours later, after the offending borders had been blanked
out and the maps reprinted, was it possible for work to resume.

The name of the sea separating South Korea and Japan has been a source
of friction for years. Korea calls it the East Sea, Japan the Sea of
Japan. The websites of both foreign ministries (3) draw attention to
detailed files on the background to the dispute. To avoid trouble,
and endless letters from embassies, cartographers often leave out the
name altogether. (Which only goes to show that long-term pressure may
pay.) Rather than risk censorship, or the loss of valuable contracts,
many publishers prefer to remove anything that might upset readers. At
the end of the 1990s the World Bank asked its map department to stop
publishing maps of such sensitive areas as Kashmir.

You have to understand that geographical maps are not the same thing
as territory. At best they are only a representation of reality on
the ground. Maps merely reveal what map-makers or their superiors
want to show. They inevitably present a truncated, partial, even
deliberately misleading picture of reality.

Readers may be taken in by the final form of a map, with its mass
of details and neat precision. Merely being printed gives maps
some authority, and they often bear the seal of governments or
international bodies. But even the most detailed topographical maps
demand considerable imaginative thought and painstaking design, each
item being carefully chosen, some highlighted, others disappearing
altogether. The individual or organisation producing a map is
responsible for selecting objects and events, as well as deciding
how they are visually represented. Their work demands imagination
and creativity, but there is also scope for lies and manipulation.

At the beginning of the 1990s the disappearance of the Iron Curtain
gave map-makers a superb opportunity for an unusual field test. We
ventured into the border zone, in former East Germany, in the same
state of mind as 16th- or 17th-century explorers entering uncharted
territory. The only information we had came from topographic maps
so distorted as to bear almost no relation to the terrain. Along a
strip of land 10-20km wide, all the key geographical features – roads,
villages and major infrastructure – had been erased from the maps.

The authorities had made it very difficult for strangers to find
their way. They had also clearly marked the edge of their empire.

These circumstances drew our attention to grey areas, which are all
too common in map-making. Maps may mislead the reader by omission,
offering a truncated view of reality. Map-makers are always forced
to choose, selecting the geographical features that will appear. But
such decisions often depend on how much they know and on their overall
worldview. And maps, when used for political ends, may deliberately
distort reality. Seemingly inoffensive charts may prove highly
effective tools in a propaganda war, enabling governments and big
corporations to disseminate their ideological claims.

Governments are extremely secretive about their cartographic activities
and the satellite images on which they are now based. They classify as
top secret any document of strategic, economic or military value. In
the 1980s certain Gulf states used to subcontract the printing of
maps to France’s National Geographical Institute.

They demanded that the printing presses be covered with sheets and
watched over by armed guards. All the test runs and offcuts had to
be pulped.

We map-makers must make a point of demolishing the illusion that
there can be an official, universally accepted representation of the
world’s political divisions. There is no such thing as the right map
showing the approved version of a country. Finding the relevant form
of cartographic expression is a constant challenge. Each approach has
its own truth, backed by a rationale, but there are no rules nor is
there a supreme authority to which to turn in search of easy answers.

No one has the final word on what are only intellectual constructs,
inspired by a culture, history and geography. If necessary the UN,
constantly buffeted by conflicting forces, is the public body best
placed to suggest a fair solution.

Maps are also pictures, the creation and production of which owes
a great deal to art. More exactly, to quote Jean-Claude Groshens
(4), they are “at the meeting point between art and science”, works
made of colour, form and movement, yet containing exact quantitative
and qualitative data. But as we marvel at the elegant masterpieces
produced by ancient cartographers, we should not forget that their
true political purpose was to provide monarchs with a representation
of the land over which they ruled.

Our cultural environment conditions us to interpret colours in a
certain way. We expect to find threatening forces portrayed with
dramatic hues. We may recall the colours used in maps during the cold
war: red for the baddies, blue for the goodies. According to Michel
Pastoureau, blue is “calm, peaceful, the favourite colour of all
western countries because it is neither aggressive nor transgressive”
(5). Yet Nato is far from being peaceful. Colours are misleading.

Green, for instance, does not represent the same thing in Norway
(environmental protection), Saudi Arabia (Islam) or Ireland, where
as the dominant colour of the national flag it rallies people of
Irish descent all over the world. Look at maps of Africa produced in
Europe and you will see they make considerable use of yellow ochre
and dark green, to represent the continent’s dry dusty savannah and
its dense equatorial forest. But it is apparent from a brief tour of
the markets of Ouagadougou or Bamako that Africa’s true colours are
much more vivid.

A primary schoolteacher in Chad, obliged to use textbooks imported
from France, once complained to me: “There is something wrong. The
maps are so pallid. It’s almost as if they were sick.”

Maps may claim to be works of art, providing they do not restrict
themselves to representing geographical features but also express
people’s perception of human society and the ways we organise the
space we occupy. To achieve this, map-makers must both watch from the
sidelines and join in the game. They must be observers, economists,
demographers, earth scientists, geographers and artists, enabling them
to build, or rather invent, their worlds. They must conceive and draw
a carefully balanced mixture of the world as they see it and as they
would like it to be.