This book began with a war. When I was a teenager, an invasion swept across my country; close to a million people died in the years that followed, and two of them were my own brothers. Decades later, after living in several countries, learning several languages and meeting people of every walk of life, I came to one conclusion that has never left me.
What sets nations against each other
Wars are explained by borders, resources and ideology, and all of these matter. But beneath them runs something simpler: unfamiliarity and distance. When one people knows another only through headlines and rumour, the “other” becomes a shadow, easy to fear and easy to hate.
People who do not know one another are easily afraid of one another; and from fear to violence is no distance at all.The Global Rail Network · Part 7
The stranger in the next seat
Today, billions of people know the other only from behind a screen. A train does something no broadcast can: it draws that other out from behind the screen and seats them in the next chair. Over a shared meal in a dining car, a delay on a crowded platform, a photo of a grandchild passed across the aisle, the stranger becomes a person with a name.
Prejudice usually breaks when people meet, more than when they argue. Human beings who know one another fall upon one another with far greater difficulty.
Every traveller is an ambassador
When we travel, others see us not only as individuals but as a sample of our nation. Our good conduct becomes, in their minds, a favourable opinion of all our countrymen; our discourtesy, an unjust judgement on everyone at home. The traveller is an ambassador without credentials, whose effect is sometimes greater than any official envoy.
Every journey is a small meeting between two cultures, and every traveller is a bridge that, with each coming and going, brings down a little of the wall of estrangement. Over millions of journeys a day, peoples come to know one another face to face, without fear and prejudice in between.
A road built for meeting
Honest about the limits
Connection alone is no guarantee of peace, and I would not pretend otherwise. On the eve of the First World War, Britain and Germany were among each other’s largest trading partners, and that did not prevent the catastrophe. Nations can trade with one another and still fall out over land and resources.
What a network of acquaintance can do is raise the cost of war, reduce its pretexts, and dry up its roots: poverty, deprivation and the ignorance of nations about one another. Wars usually grow out of injustice and estrangement, and a shared road works against both.
A road that carries something precious
The Global Rail Network is a proposal of steel and concrete. But what it is meant to carry is far more valuable: acquaintance, exchange, respect, and at last, peace. Instead of building shelters for escape, it makes our shared home more flourishing, because there is no escape: this earth was made as one, for all of us.
If one day a child in a remote village boards a train that carries her out to meet the world, and if that train has reconciled peoples who until yesterday were afraid of one another, then the road will have been worth every kilometre.
Every bridge between two coasts is also a bridge between two peoples.
