Poetry, Potted history and Geopolitics - "In Europe's Shadow"

The search for books which (try to) capture the soul of a country is an increasingly fascinating endeavour for me. Such books cannot be contrived novels or dry histories – the few exemplars I come across are generally travelogues containing a mixture of encounters (with contemporary or historical figures) and feel for landscapes and cultural contexts……

Until now none of the english-language books on Romania (one of the dozen or so countries I’ve lived in over the past 26 years) has been able to do the country justice – although there are a couple of very impressive histories (Boia's Romania - Borderland of Europe; and Djuvara's A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians); two very challenging takes on its post 1989 politics (by Tom Gallagher) -Theft of a nation – Romania since Communism and Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong; and two travelogues - one from the indefatigable Irish writer, Dervla Murphy - Transylvania and Beyond (1992) - as she ventured into a country whose borders were open for the first time for 50 years; and a delightful 1998 book produced by a Frenchman (with photos by an Italian) – and accessible on google - The Romanian Rhapsody; an overlooked corner of Europe by D. Fernandez and F Ferranti (2000)

But Robert D. Kaplan’s In Europe’s shadow: two Cold Wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond (2016) now slips into top place of a unique annotated list I prepared 2 years ago of books which anyone seriously interested in Romania needs at least to know about. You’ll find that list in Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey

He reveals in the Prologue that his first foray into the country was in the 1970s as a bemused backpacker in central europe; but that in 1981, as a 29-year old with few career opportunities, he spotted a hole in the western media coverage of south-eastern europe and took a flight to Bucharest in what seemed then a forlorn hope of whipping up some media interest in the area…..  

A good review captures the poetry of the book very well - 

Kaplan’s writing is like the places he visits. It’s a terrain, a concentrated expression of a particular part of the world as he sees it, a very personal account though steeped in broad historical knowledge and familiarity with a wide range of sources. Kaplan’s sentences are like streets that lead us around a place we come to know through his eyes, either only through his eyes if it’s a place few people know (such as Romania)…….

It’s not a question of whether he’s got it right or wrong (Does the landscape really look as he describes it? Is his history of a town or a local population or a people accurate?).
 There is no right or wrong in this kind of writing. What we get is Kaplan’s view of the world and what matters is whether it compels our attention, becomes memorable and integrated into our own understanding. After all, we all know so little of it first-hand. Maybe one day we’ll go here or there, or at least in the neighbourhood, and we’ll know if it looks and feels familiar.

Kaplan is not a tourist, he’s a traveller. He doesn’t look, he sees. He’s not a visitor going from monuments to battlefields but one who lives his travels, immersing himself in every new surroundings, picking up—what makes us envious—new friends and colleagues that continue with him through decades.

This is the fourth Kaplan book I’ve read. As he explain in this Youtube presentation his latest book is a new departure with previous books (covering Asia, the middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean) giving horizontal slices to regions but this one being a “vertical” take on one country to which he has returned frequently in his life and by which he is clearly moved… 

There can’t be many Americans who know as many Romanians or as well as Kaplan, who is, so far as an outsider can get, inside as well as outside Romanian society and politics. And there may be no American who is so much simultaneously a travel writer and a geopolitical analyst, and happy to be so. When he discovered Romania in 1981 during the Ceausescu Communist years, “I felt that I was finally beginning to do what I always was meant to.” Kaplan, in other words, became not just a travel writer or a serious scholar. He had a vocation. 

"In Europe’s shadow" amounts to a kind of historical anthropology plus geopolitics, a deep study of a particular country and people. The point is to understand Romania itself and to use it as a way to apprehend Europe’s complex past. Romanian history involves the West and East, the geography between Western Europe and Greater Russia, more precisely the web of historical patterns and contemporary geopolitics between Central Europe and Eastern Europe. It’s a story that continues to be relevant today………………..

Those familiar with Kaplan’s work know that he’s as much a travel writer in the grand style as a geopolitical Realist whose studies of international relations and political leadership are also in the grand style, stretching intellectually over centuries and continuities of ideas.

As for the focus on Romania, it “was my master key for the Balkans... the Poland of southeastern Europe in terms of size, demography, and geopolitical location...” In Europe’s shadow is a demanding book for the lay reader but it shows how, at one and the same time, Romania is distinctive and a key to a broader and deeper understanding of contemporary Europe.
Most of all, Kaplan’s work exemplifies rare intellectual, moral and political engagement with the political order—and disorder—of our world.

The bibliographical references are impressive – although what seems to be an exhaustive list curiously fails to mention the only 2 serious studies of contemporary Romanian politics (by Tom Gallagher) - choosing instead to focus on older texts of Eliade and Cioran.....
My charitable interpretation of this omission is that Kaplan is not all that interested in contemporary Romania - despite a conversation with the previous PM and President.  Readers might have expected more than his superficial impressions of new constructions; the brightness (or otherwise) of paint or the lawn upkeep of Bucharest's parks...and to find some allusions at least to the scale of political corruption and the apparent success in the last 2-3 years of the new judicial system in throwing politicians in jail.....
But geo-politics, it seems, sees such issues as fairly minor.......... 

Romanian's National Day

This blog has celebrated Romania’s National Day before - but today is special since it is exactly 100 years ago today that various groups came together in Alba Iulia (which was previously the heart of Hungarian Transylvania) to celebrate the unification of that significant part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and part of Banat) not only with what was (since 1877) already an independent Romania but also with Bessarabia, Moldova and North Dobrodjea. In one fell swoop the landmass of the country – which opted for the Western Allies only in 1916 - was tripled.

It’s therefore a suitable day to celebrate good writing about Romania. Let me start with an author, Robert Kaplan, who has established a nice little niche for himself as a traveller with a strong line in geo-politics – with The Revenge of History (2013) being its epitome.

I have just finished rereading his “In Europe’s Shadow” (2016) which is most decidedly not a travelogue but that rare and worthwhile endeavour – an attempt to penetrate a country’s soul borne of his forays over a period of 30 years after his first (and unusual) first port of call in 1981– selected simply because, for someone wanting to be a foreign journalist, it offered the distinction of having no competitors…

It’s a very individual if not poetic book which in which the country’s past casts the main shadow (despite the title) but one which is dealt with deftly – often through conversations with characters many of whom are long dead. Americans are not well known for their linguistic skills and I sense that Kaplan relied on translated texts for his early grasp of Romanian history – so Mircea Eliade’s little history of the country (written when he was an attache in Portugal with the Iron Guard regime) was an early companion for Kaplan. But also English writers such as Stephen Runciman and Lord Kinross (on the influence of the Ottoman empire), Macartney (Austro-Hungarian empire) and particularly John Julius Norwich (Byzantium) Since 1990 he has been able to access the histories of Vlad Georgescu, Lucian Boia, Keith Hitchens even Neagu Djuvara although his failure to mention Tom Gallagher's 2 books on the country proves the point I make below about his lack of interest in the contemporary scene.... 

Although he’s able to get access to Presidents (Iliescu and Basescu) and Prime Ministers (Ponta), it’s the long-term geopolitical threats represented by the borders, plains, armies and pipelines which interest him – and he is happiest when in the company of those who talk this language.

The comments of even a dilettante like Patapievici are preferable to any conversation about ordinary life – all we get on that score is a statement that “thanks to the influence of the EU, institutions are slowly becoming more transparent” (!!) 
For future editions of the book, I would recommend that he seeks out people such as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Sorin Ionitsa

Then there’s my own Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey (2014). This is my own tribute to the country whose summers I have enjoyed since 2007 and which I have known intermittently since winter 1991. It's actually more of a resource book for English-language visitors who want to know something of the country's history and culture. Its 120 pages contain various a couple of thousand hyperlinks and annexes which give further detail on its history, literature (or rather English texts focusing on the country), art....even cinema...

And, in Bucharest’s French bookshop, I have just come across a nice set of little stories - “Chroniques de Roumanie”; Richard Edwards (2017)

Lest We Forget

1. Tony Bliar and George W Bush walk free - while Julian Assange has languished for 11 years first in asylum and, for the past 3 years, in a British jail for exposing the evils perpetrated particularly by the Americans over this period.

I was deeply moved last week by the testimonies of the witnesses to the Belmarsh Tribunal about his imprisonment which gave the lie to the US assertion that he had endangered the lives of agents. The Chairman was able to testify that he had been with Assange the days Assange spent redacting no less than 10,000 names. If you want gripping television, I would beseech you to watch the proceedings. And be very scared!

2. In September 2021, 30 former US officials went on the record to reveal a CIA plot to “kill or kidnap” Assange in London. In case of Assange leaving the embassy, the article noted, “US officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.” These assurances most likely came from the Home Office.

The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government. The Australian journalist has been in the UK Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potentia 175-year sentence after the UK High Court green-lighted his extradition to the US in December 2021. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case. But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on “Operation Pelican” to put an end to his stay in the Ecuador embassy. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions. The then home secretary Priti Patel ordered Assange’s extradition to the US in June. The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated.

3. On the decision to go to war 20 years ago in Iraq, let Chris Hedges be my first witness

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq. “I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.” Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine. “I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle Eas cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

4. Lawrence Freedman is a UK Emeritus Professor of Military history. That means he has been a fully tenured academic for most of his life – and was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry set up in 2009 by Gordon Brown to investigate the run-up to the war, the military action and its aftermath, to establish how decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that, in a similar situation in future, the British government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. It took the Inquiry seven years to report.

I have some respect for Freedman – not least for the superb book he wrote recently "Strategy – a history" (of all sorts) - but he should be ashamed of his expectation of payment for the substack column he runs with his son Sam

5. And here's an up-to-date report about what the West has done to Iraq

another attempt

The table in the penultimate post didn't work - hopefully this one will

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein  (Can) Charles Handy Bryan Magee	Victor Serge (Belgium) Kenneth Roy Masha Gessen (RU)	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy IR Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali  (Pak/UK)
Biographers	Mark Greif  US Mark Lilla  US Perry Anderson US Jill Lepore US	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron  (France) Michael Pollan  USA
Oriana Fallaci (It)   Joseph Epstein (US)             Clive James	Francois Bondy (Switzerland) Claude Roy  (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones     Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Hu/UK Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan  (US) Geert Mak  (Neth) John Hooper John Pilger (Aust) Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
	David Goodhart Susan George (US)

 

 

 

 

 

Bryan Magee in context

I’ve been captivated these last couple of days by the autobiographies of Bryan Magee (1930-2019) who is remembered here and celebrated on this video. Unusually. two of the autobiographies cover his early years; a third (published in 2018) starts as he makes his way in the world and a fourth is effectively an intellectual biography – “Confessions of a Philosopher” (1997). All are powerfully written – doubts and conflicts evoked almost from the opening pages and a start intellectual honesty pervades the pages

He was a household name from his television broadcasts about philosophy which were captured in the book of his interviews with such thinkers as Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, AJ Ayer and JP Stern which came out in 1987 The Great Philosophers – an intro to Western Philosophers 

I need writing which makes me look at the world in a different way. Rather slowly I’ve grown to understand that clarity and elegance of language is needed for this task. Essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970. James Meek is exceptional for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it. 

Somehow academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events or places – but also according to their source of income, testing if you like a thesis about the rigidities of the academic base.

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. 

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein  (Can) Charles Handy Bryan Magee	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy Masha Gessen (RU)	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali  (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif  USA Mark Lilla  USA Perry Anderson USA Jill Lepore  USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron  (France) Michael Pollan  USA
Journal newspaper             Television	Oriana Fallaci (It)   Joseph Epstein (US)             Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy  (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones  Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Hu/UK Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan  (US) Geert Mak  (Neth) John Hooper John Pilger (Aust) Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)