EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2000 by Jacob Heilbrunn

Kaplan writes that in the Near East democracy will be beside the point: "The fundamental issue will be the survival of the states themselves--by whatever means. The battle over Caspian pipelines, the coming conflict between Iran and Azerbaijan, the resurgence of Russia ruder a quasi-autocracy, instability in post-Assad Syria, chaos in Georgia, and stagnation in rural Romania and Bulgaria--if those two countries are left out of NATO--such might be tomorrow's headlines." Might.

Still, even if these conflicts do not materialize, Kaplan provides astute assessments of the new territory he has explored. His encounters are revealing. Bulgaria's head of state, President Petar Stoyanov, thanked him for taking the time to visit the country. "I was struck," says Kaplan, "by the president's certainty that almost any kind of publicity would be good for Bulgaria. The fear here was of being forgotten."

But Kaplan's perceptions of the countries he visits are rooted in something of an atavistic belief that they are prisoners of their past. Kaplan, you might say, believes that race and geography are destiny.

Here is Kaplan on the Near East: "Fundamentally, little had changed in regional politics since Herodotus and Thucydides. For Herodotus, the fault zones had been ethnic and cultural ... Thucydides later reduced Herodotus' chronicle of cultural dash to the steely confines of power politics."

More colorfully, here is Kaplan on crossing the border from Romania to Bulgaria by train: "The compartment was now jammed with people standing in the aisles: men with outlandish clothes, shaven heads and unshaven faces, and the most violent of expressions.... The middle-aged couple across from me cowered in fear as the train slowly crossed the wide Danube into Bulgaria."

No doubt Kaplan could respond that he is describing harsh realities that other writers are afraid to express in a politically correct age. But one wonders whether it isn't a little like ascribing primordial waits to Germany after World War II. The truth is that national characteristics are often invented after the fact, either as a state-building myth, as in the case of Serbia, or as a way to bludgeon the defeated enemy. Reducing subtle thinkers like Herodotus and Thucydides to ethnic or power politics may be rather unfair to them. The Greeks, after all, were not big on racial distinctions. Quite the contrary; the reason they resented the Jews was because they remained stubbornly independent, resisting the Greek ideal of the oekoumene, or universal civilization.

Today, it is the United States that carries the aspiration of a universal culture, and it seems to be working. McDonald's and the English language are making inroads everywhere. Neither Abernethy nor Kaplan speculates about the consequences for the U.S. But at the apex of American power, its population is largely indifferent to the country's power and prestige. For all the problems this presents for the foreign policy set, maybe it's a good sign. If the biggest difficulty Americans face is filling up an SUV, there may be no need for concern. Unless, of course, Kaplan turns out to be right about where the world is headed.