| Title | : | The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679751238 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679751236 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 496 |
| Publication | : | First published February 1, 1996 |
The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy Reviews
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To quote a Chinese curse, we live in interesting times. Within our lifetime the population of the world has doubled or tripled, and many regions are already badly overcrowded. There is no room left for it to double again, something has to give. The West enjoys a measure of stability and prosperity, but much of the less fortunate "third world" lives on the brink, its population still rising and its quality of life still dropping. Where is this leading us? How do people live in those countries, right now?
The way to find out is to go and observe, and Kaplan has done just that. "The Ends of the Earth" is a rapidly-moving travelogue, from chaotic Sierra Leone and West Africa to Egypt, then Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran, Uzbekistan and its sister republics in Central Asia, to the tip of China, then over the Karakoram highway to Pakistan, India, Thailand and Laos, ending in Cambodia. Wherever Kaplan went, he listened to the pulse of society, with special attention to the diversity of cultures and traditions. His preferred mode of travel seems to have been rickety local buses, and he has developed a knack for picking friends and guides: a young Azeri photographer, an Uzbek student, an Iranian businessman whose permanent 3-day growth of beard mourns the death of a martyr 1300 years ago, a 70-year old Indian naturalist, volunteer doctors in Cambodia, African truck drivers, and many more.
Kaplan is no mere adventurer. His scholarly homework is solid--the bibliography covers more than 30 pages, and footnotes are extensive--and his journeys had a serious purpose. He wanted to find out what was happening in those societies, and what their future might be.
As one might expect, he witnessed widespread poverty, but then most people in the countries he visited were always poor. Most inhabitants of Europe and North America used to be poor, too, before the industrial revolution brought employment to their cities and raised the standard of living, helping stem the population growth. But there is not much hope of that happening soon in most of the countries visited by Kaplan. The huge cities of the Third World, cities like Cairo, Istanbul and Karachi, are surrounded by sprawling shantytowns and have too little industry to sustain them. Those are cities of 10 millions, each growing madly as more and still more people flee the countryside to live in urban shanties.
Why do they do so? Because, as Kaplan discovers, life on the land can be worse than life in those shantytowns. For too many people, moving to the city is a step up. Yet the trend cannot possibly go on much further. Already, governments are unable to cope with it, already violence exists between ethnic and cultural group in those cities. What is to be done? In Cambodia rebels forced city people back to the land, in a reign of terror and genocide which devastated that country's society. Kaplan finds that the memories of that nightmare endure, and so do the rebels, holding out in forests and distant regions. He argues convincingly that the only way to social health is to improve life on the land, to make the villages attractive once more.
With a few exceptions (Thailand being one) governments are of little help in this process. It is the people living on the land, Kaplan feels, who must take charge of their own environment. In India he visits the Rishi valley, whose inhabitants have on their own initiative raised literacy, lowered the birth rate and preserved the environment. But as he listens to the valley's people, he realizes that they owe their success to the well-established culture of India. The Rishi prescription is not likely to work in Africa's tribal cultures. West Africa, in particular, is in desperate straits, drifting towards complete disarray, Liberia-style. Its straight boundaries are artificial, a legacy of colonial maps: they ignore tribal boundaries, and are in turn ignored by the tribes.
The map of the future, Kaplan suggests, will be drawn along ethnic lines. In the Moslem world, diverse nations of Turkic descent are drawing together--Azeris of the Caucasus and northern Iran, Uzbeks and Uighurs of Central Asia, a web stretching from Europe to China. He discovers that Turkish Islam differs from Arab Islam, is mellower, more tolerant, marked by the Sufi tradition and the legacy of Rumi the mystic. Iran's Shiite Islam is different too: outwardly aggressive, still hurting from its defeat in the struggle among the heirs of Mohammed, but inwardly flexible and compromising. The death edict on Salman Rushdie still stands, and Ba'hais are still persecuted, but Kaplan feels they are the last vestiges of a dwindling revolution, whose leaders have already reversed their stand on birth control in the face of reality. Iran, he claims, is no longer ruled by extreme militants, but by "bazaaris," wily merchants who cheat and lie to get their way, but who also bend to face reality. He believes that the day will come when Iran and the US will yet draw together.
It is a book rich in encounters, in history, cultural insights and profound reflections. One is reminded of the "grand tour" of classical Italy and Spain, undertaken by wealthy Europeans 200 years ago to expand their outlook and education. Kaplan's tour makes more sense for today, though I would hesitate recommending such a difficult and perhaps dangerous journey to anyone. Read this book instead: it will give you enough of the true flavor of those countries, and plenty to think about.
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Despite disagreeing with some of his politics, I generally really enjoy Robert Kaplan's travel books. At their best, they are like a historical tour of the world that gives both a grounding in contemporary politics and a taste of what daily life is like for millions of people in far-flung places. So with that in mind I was really disappointed by this lame and superficial tour across West Africa and the Near East, which has not held up well over time.
The book seems to be about some coming anarchy that is about envelop the planet. While there has been some anarchy and there may likely be more to come, it is decidedly not what Kaplan was predicting. In this book he is obsessed with tropical disease and crime, which are not the great threats that we are thinking of today. While many of his predictions turned out to be wrong, that is one of the hazards of making predictions in the first place. As such, it is forgivable. What is a lot harder to forgive however is his unbearably cliched writing and revival of some of the most cringeworthy orientalism of the past century. Kaplan comes across as a stereotype of the arrogant Western travel writer, who apparently has the power to glean centuries of history from a side-eye glance a random bystander gives him on the street of a foreign city. The book is laden with these unbearable digressions in every indistinguishably "dust-choked, hot, smoggy" shantytown that he has the misfortune of visiting. Worse still, Kaplan's tangents are not even based on any deep or insightful information. They're the same shallow cliches and obvious history that you'd immediately think of if you quickly needed something to say about a place. Huge segments of the book are basically filler to try to make the writer seem urbane. Generally they do not succeed at this.
Reading this two decades after publishing, and with full accounting for changes in social mores, I also have to conclude that the portions of the book on West Africa are flatly racist. He went there and had a bad time, which is understandable. He describes his distaste for the places that he goes in visceral detail. What's mystifying however is his gratuitous conflation of conditions in places like Sierra Leone with modern American racial politics and crime. At one point he literally describes the slave trade as a "process by which the problems of West Africa could one day become [America's] own." Its amazing to hear an obviously smart person draw such a ridiculous connection, but such are the power of pre-9/11 era prejudices. His obsession with "crime" in America and everywhere he goes in general feels like a time capsule from a previous generation's neurosis.
I don't see the point of visiting and writing places that you clearly dislike. Its unenjoyable for both the author and the reader. I learn a lot from Kaplan's books and often enjoy them, so I'm disappointed at how uninspired and even ignorant this one was. It is mildly redeemed by the decent if unremarkable segment on Iran and some of the nice turns of phrase here and there. But there are far better guides to all these countries that have been written in the intervening years. -
Kaplan takes us on an epic odyssey across the world, where he not only describes the wonders of the exotic lands where he travels, but also the cultural, political, economic and social components of each place he steps foot. Even though it was written in the beginning of the 90s' , The Ends of Earth continues to have lots of relevance in today's international scenario. The War between Azerbaijan and Armenia mirrors the one of 1994, he predicts the Arab Springs in Egypt as he saw the growing social tensions across the Middle East, and he accurately forecasts today's China's increasing oppression against the Uyghur Community in Xinjiang. I totally recommend this book for anyone that wants to travel and explore the world now that it is not as easy to sett of on a journey
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This is a depressing book.
A journey through parts of Africa, the Mideast and Asia, it chronicles the depths to which many of the world's peoples, nations, and their environments have sunk, with little to give hope for their renewal or survival.
Some of the intertwined causes: poverty, tyrannical governments, depletion and destruction of resources (the Soviet Union gets lots of points here for "ecocide" as the author terms it), overpopulation, joblessness, loss of family and cultural ties, ethnic strife, the arbitrary creation of national borders without consideration of the peoples involved, Western colonialism and interference...and other related issues, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Written 15 years ago, much of what Kaplan saw has only disintegrated further. The United States is a tiny island of relative calm and prosperity, and it's obvious the the methods our government is using to try to control and change these chaotic situations is doomed to not only fail, but isolate us still further.
Does Kaplan see any hope? A few glimmers.
"Democracy...seemed an effort that should begin with the economic development and the establishment of schools". And he does find a few places where this process is beginning. Life must have some stability, people need to be rooted somewhere, and resources need to be conserved and renewed. But he believes this cannot be "imposed", the people themselves must take control of their lives and environment, and not all solutions will be the same.
It seems a tall order.
One thing he notes time and again is how "nations" and borders are breaking down into more cultural and ethnic entities. And that the future map of the world, in order to survive, may have to be much different than it is today.
He also concludes that the history of the earth has had "many wearisome centuries of violence and chaos" and that "the great ages of virtue are few and far between".
The most important issue that stood out to me is ecological destruction which is tied in with overpopulation. Water is a big problem (as it is here in some areas of the US), but it's often tied in with the destuction of forests...well it's all connected. Al Gore is right: it's really world ecology, the world needs to work together in order for the Earth to remain habitable for the long-term.
One more note: much world news I would previously glide over now has a face for me, having traveled there via Kaplan's book. Although my sense of geography still needs a lot of work... -
If ever there was a travel writer determined to discourage travel, it is Kaplan. Yes, he warns you right from the beginning about his plans to visit the more remote and economically distressed areas, as he covers countries in West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Indochina. What is generally a compilation of travel essays, it often morphs into a wearying monologue on the tragic results and predicted apocalypse of overpopulation, crumbling and corrupt government, and bad architecture. Okay, yeah. . .where there are poor, life is hard. I get it. And I applaud him for looking beyond the touristy zones to peek at the crumbling infrastructure and shoddy lifestyles, into the bleak cesspool of discontent, poverty and eventual upheaval. Often he strays from travel writing to delve into history and international politics, lecturing the reader on domestic discord (often ethnic) and policy blunders, often economic or ecological (such as the impact of dam building). Surprisingly, he decided not to visit the violent favelas of Brazil. West Africa is seen as a land of roadblocks and greed (it seems that almost everywhere the police obtain their pay by fleecing travelers and the home populations at will and without any oversight). Kaplan almost seems to wish for strong authoritarian governments. He lauds the value of the often despised middlemen (Lebanese, Copt, etc.) who often seem to actually run the economies, much to the chagrin of the natives. Although some of the material is dated, it is often interesting, if not tiring. He tends to repeat his ideas, words and descriptions (machine woven rugs, hard angles). I guess there is value in hearing an authoritative voice describe areas that most people would not want to go to and probably shouldn't. I prefer Robert Young Pelton or Michael Palin. Still, I learned quite a bit and enjoyed some of the commentary by people he met: "They have been narrowly educated. And narrowly educated people cause the worst sorts of upheavals." Well, that's true for South Carolina and Alabama too. I now need to find some crisply run beach resort so that I can get some rest.
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☆☆☆☆☆--Robert D. Kaplan's 1996 ENDS OF THE EARTH is his best work, a true "tour de force" as he backpacks, budget airlines and jeeps his ways from Tehran to Kazakhstan to Thailand. the scope and reach of his travels--Iran itself being worth the price of admission--earns him full accolades as he dares to go where nobody else does and reaches into host culture as well as his vast readings in order to deliver the precise balance of ethnic, class, cultural, and national conflict that characterizes each unstable, even anarchic region. what other American in 1996 was obsessed with the Uzbeks? it was a time of Amazon.com and other dot-com fortunes. who else in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union foresaw ethnic and tribal rivalries suddenly springing to life again after the ruthless but dampening force of Soviet communism had withered away? only Kaplan, and history, as they said, was written...
Kaplan's skill lies in his ear for words, as well as the vast pre-reading which informs his work. reading his book is like traveling to Samarkand or Urumqi itself, where the various ethnic tribes and national irrendentist movements lay bare to the professional ethnologist and political thinker. Kaplan, who eventually became probably the very best of the embedded journalists in the second Iraq war, vividly characterizes the souks and streets of central Asia--as well as the simmering tensions underlying an ostensibly peaceful scene. Dzungar, Turcomen or Chiang-Mai regionalist--each becomes in turn the subject of a well-informed analysis in flowery, analytical prose.
a Central Asia grand tour in a book, and increasingly important as Central Asia itself becomes the pivot point of our anarchic world. -
Excellent book that I would recommend to any traveler. The author, Mr Kaplan, is incredibly well-read and well-spoken. Kaplan travels a lot and he wrote quite a few travelogues. This one is about his trip to West Africa and Central Asia. To countries the likes of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Togo, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, or Cambodia.
The author writes about his experiences and the people he met, but almost always provides an interesting historical perspective.
Here are a few quotes I enjoyed:
About the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia:
"Prior to assuming power, the Khmer Rouge lived in these temples. They hunted gibbons for food with their AK-47s, contracted malaria among other illnesses, and survived. It was similar to what they were doing again in the mid 1990s, though further back in the forest. Sleeping at night amid these fantastic stones, which to educated and uneducated minds alike summon up vague notions of lost glory, and then going on to conquer Phnom Penh and the other Cambodian cities, must have infused the Khmer Rouge with a feeling of destiny, which helps explain their certainty that history could be forced, that the victims of their cruelty were mere details in a generally happy story. It could not be accidental that the three principal towers of Angkor Wat make up the Khmer Rouge emblem." p.426
About an acquaintance in Uzbekistan:
"Maria's voice was always tired, postcynical. She reminded me of the Egyptian official I had met in Cairo who had told me that human rights was a joke and that Islamic terrorists were just a bunch of 'painters and plumbers.' These people had given up on the world. But this did not mean that what they had to say, taken in context, did not reveal more about their societies than the bland optimism I heard from others." p. 252
About Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan:
"Kyrgyz nomads had been part of Genghis Khan's Golden Horde, which subjugated medieval Russia. They must have left a genetic trace. In The Magic Mountain, Thamoas Mann describes a captivating Russian woman with "'Kirghiz' eyes" -- the eyes of a "prairie-wolf." To split the Kyrgyz nation, Stalin created two republics. He made a region of the Tien Shan mountains "Kyrgyzstan," and the great steppes to the north -- the home of the original Kyrgyz who fought with Genghis Khan -- he called "Kazakhstan." The differences in language and customs between today's Kyrgyz and KAzakhs are, therefore, minimal.
Nestled high in the Tien Shan glaciers with some three thousand lakes and a population of only 4.4 million, Kyrgyzstan, self-sufficient in both fodd and water, escaped many of the ravages of communism. Another stroke of luck was the e levation of Askar Akaev in 1990 -- a mathematician with little belief in communist ideology -- to the post of republic leader. Akaev opened Kyrgyzstan to the outside world (my visa cost only twnty0five dollars and didn't require an invitation). He also allowed the IMF to practically write the new country's economic program. When I exchanged a fifty-dollar bill at my hotel in Bishkek, instead of a shoe box full of money, I got just a thick wad of bills in return. A more stable currency, I realized, can help create a strong state identity. Any economist could have told me that, but I was learning through experience. Uzbekistan, without a stable currency, had little identity as a state." p.281 -
This is the kind of book every American needs to read...
To truly understand what the rest of the world is like, to truly see the struggles that the rest of the world goes through, and not through some abstract wikipedia article, but through the eyes of an individual who went there...not one who stayed in the touristy parts...but one who actually walked through the worst of the worst and saw the actual conditions that the people in those areas live in.
This is also the sort of book that needs to be read to understand why colonialism has seriously fucked up the planet, and will continue to fuck it up for generations to come. Europeans recklessly drew, redrew, and redrew again, borders which were meaningless to the actual peoples living in those areas, continue to essentially be meaningless to this day, and it is pure idiocy that we demand sovereignty remain status quo ad infinitum with the way that they were drawn.
The author settles upon in the end that we; the West, the UN, what have you, can not help to control this mess...and sometimes intimates that perhaps western-style democracy may not be the best solution for all regions...but he never seems to make the connection that capitalism and continued colonialism through corporative exploitation (which has replaced imperial exploitation) is a big part of what is destroying these area. He rails continuously about the evils of communism (which was long since dead by the time he explored these regions) but praises that he can find Coca Cola on sale everywhere he goes...without the obvious understanding of the ecological damage occurring thanks to all of those bottling plants.
But, what I meant to say was that he was right in that the UN can not control these regions...and I would continue that to say that the UN should not be controlling these regions and that it should be taking an approach to help these regions in ways which are specifically tailored to the needs of those regions...not how they would best fit into the western-style control mechanism, but the ways which are best suited to help those regions out, even if that brought them at odds with other regions. We need to remove the Security Council veto...but that's neither here nor there.
If you've ever wanted an eye-opening journey through the Ivory Coast area of Africa, or Turkey, Iran, and the various -Stans of the post-Soviet era, or India, or Southeast Asia, read this book. Understand it's lessons. Embrace it's concepts. Yes, it's nearly 30-years old, but it still holds many truisms which are just as poignant, useful, and meaningful today. -
Mr. Kaplan's travels took him through Africa, the mideast, India and Asia during the mid nineties. He traveled by land, whenever possible. These regions have undergone much change since he visited them. Still, it was interesting to read his predictions for the nations he visited and compare them to what actually transpired. He was optimistic that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was losing steam and that relations with the US would soon improve. Other predictions weren't so far off. He sensed an upheaval in the mideast concerning national borders that don't coincide with the ethnic groups residing within them. For each region that he visited, Mr. Kaplan gives an indepth discussion of history and culture. His knowledge seems boundless. The best parts of the book, though, were tales of hardship, danger, and deprivation that a traveler encounters when he or she is brave enough to visit the underdeveloped regions of the world.
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My kind of travel book, alternating narrative, history, politics and speculative digressions about the future of the places visited.
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This book is outstanding. Anyone interested in international affairs, political systems, and the politics of geography should read this. As with most books, I approached "The Ends of the Earth" as a cynic needing to be won over. This book is not a page-turner; Kaplan's prose is cumbersome and laden with so many prepositional phrases that eventually I found myself skimming to get to the "points" (either that or have my eyes glaze over). But once I got used to it, I became absorbed in Kaplan's observations and theorizing as he traveled from Sub-Saharan Africa, to Egypt, then Turkey, Iran (this was my favorite chapter), the Caucuses, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and finally Southeast Asia.
As he explored each region [Aside here: I thought incorrectly that Kaplan, an American and a travel writer for the Atlantic Monthly, would be pampered and fastidious. I was wrong; there were no armored Jeeps or Marriott hotels for this guy. He experienced each country through its own indigenous cuisines, forms of transportation, and hotels. Kaplan must have intestines of steel.], he asked these questions: What makes the societal decay in African nations such as Sierra Leone different from that in, say, Cambodia? How is a nation affected by its geography, availability of resources, and proximity to first-world/third-world nations? And, what IS a nation?
His observations were, for the most part, astute and challenging. So did he come to any conclusions about what separates a growing society from a devolving one? To that, Kaplan quotes Tolstoy: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -
A gargantuan accomplishment. It takes a while to read this man's odyssey, based on the enormous amount of factual and detailed information within. It rewards mostly on two levels: as an anthropological essay on all of the countries involved, and a historical profile of each country's assets, liabilities, beauties, burdens and, worst of all, governments. Many might find the book to heavy (or too depressing) yet the cumulative effect it achieves--as you pass through the West African regions, the middle East, and arrive at Cambodia--is breathtaking. Los of poetic, stark descriptions and observations. Most important, the regular people who inhabit these troubled environments are allowed their time to speak.
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Kaplan's travel journals were popular reads among Peace Corps Volunteers when I was serving in Ukraine. The places he went, the history he surveyed, his grasp of cultures and long trends - they all contributed to a deep understanding of places on earth that are normally well outside an American's grasp. Peace Corps made you see what a tourist you were on all your other trips around the world, and that made you long for books like this to help you dive beneath the surface. Once there, the thought experiments you can do about what it is like to live in these places, to survive there, to ever change things there, all are profound. A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy is a mind expanding trip in the truest sense. You think not just about geography, but politics, ethics, aesthetics, culture, society, family, etc. In short, about what it means to be human. Take the trip. It will help you know the world and know thyself.
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The author takes us on a tour of some of the places least visited by tourists in Africa and Asia. He goes from the failed states of West Africa, such as Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, then takes a brief tour of remote spots in Egypt, followed by some rather, um, interesting spots in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. After this we look at the income disparities of Pakistan and India, before concluding with a tour of Southeast Asia.
Kaplan's underlying point is that the more civilization progresses, the greater the disparity between the haves and the have nots. He goes at length to point out that there is no panacea that will address everything, rather each culture, and by extension, each person is a different story.
All of which I agree with. Trouble is the book moves at a snail's pace, resulting in me taking nearly a month to conclude. Best read in sections... -
Extremely interesting travel book, with a lot of historical insight. A bit shallow at times, and with a clear agenda of US national interest and geopolitics, but overall a great read.
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The Ends of the Earth follows the travelogue-to-places-often-ignored-byeconomist-optimists-combined-with-political-and-anthropological-observation pattern of Kaplan’s previous books Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary. However the book is not as focused as those books, due to wider spread of his travels and observations on what he has called (in his 1994 Atlantic Monthly cover article) and continues to call “The Coming Anarchy”, and thus the book is somewhat overwhelming. The book is best read through once and then kept around as a reference to look at for various areas discussed.
The first section of the book deals with West Africa. Kaplan’s conclusion is that this area is bound to fall out of the current map configuration of north-south oriented heterogeneous political states (a result of European colonization, mostly post-slavery, and the rise of oppressive post-colonial regimes (thugocracies) that are more content to kill their rivals and play the submissive to their former colonial ruler France) and to eventually become an area (“The Coast of Guinea”) of east-west homogeneously ethnic nations each in conflict with the other over resources. He makes this judgment based on what in 1996 looked like the breakdown of Senegal & The Gambia as well as Liberia & Sierra Leone, and the problems in Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin. (He also discusses Ghana, the “success story” of West Africa and notes that it is only a success when compared to other crumbling West African nations.) Kaplan’s argument is persuasive and should be not be discounted just because these areas have managed to stay in their state form, which is only the result of another group of short-term strong men coming to power. Also his argument is applicable to the majority of sub-Saharan Africa and is not limited to West Africa. The reading of this section should be mandatory for all teachers of MMW, as they seem to only be aware of the “current events” of Nkrumah or Kenyatta (if that!).
The next section of the book deals with Egypt and the area around it. The section is interesting in that it takes Wittfogel’s Oriental Despot Theory (Centralized government arose to control resources, particularly water in order to provide irrigation.) and applies it to the totalitarians that have arose, particularly in the 20th Century, and especially to the “modern Pharaoh” of Nasser (and follower Mubarak). Kaplan’s take on environmental problems giving rise to new forms of oppression is interesting and rather chilling, especially as it seems that the brief time of humans dominating the environment (the industrial and post-industrial revolutions) is about to end, given the rise of floods, droughts, plagues, etc.
The next section has Kaplan revisit Anatolia (Turkey) and the Caucasus. Accordingly, this section could be read as an updating of Eastward to Tartary. Kaplan’s conclusion is that Ataturk’s attempts to absorb all the ethnicities in Anatolia into the state of Turkey will probably not work out exactly as Ataturk planned as Kurds and Armenians will probably make more demands for autonomy once Syria and Iraq collapse. (He believes that these states, like those in West Africa, will not survive in the current formation that was the result of post-First World War Allied division of the Ottoman Empire that had little to do with nationhood.) He eventually sees Turkey reestablishing itself as a dominant power in the area (especially with their control through damming of rivers that provide Syria and Iraq with water) with Kurdish, Armenian, and other small nations shifting from independent to semi-autonomous status based on how they react with Turkey and Persia.
Tied with the previous section is the section on Persia. Kaplan discusses the significance of Persia in the geopolitics of West Asia and Central Asia and how the current isolationist Iranian Islamic Republic is probably a temporary situation that will fall back into the more traditional state of Persia. Kaplan notes that Persia, like Turkey, may have its own problems with groups within it, such as the Azeris (who may want to leave Iran to merge with Azerbaijan), but, as alluded to above, he believes that much of the future of West and Central Asia will be one of fluctuating Turkish and Persian influence much as it was before the conclusion of the First World War. (Kaplan does not see much Arab influence as he does not see them unifying.)
The next section deals with Central Asia. (This section blended well with materials read last year on Afghanistan.) Though done in a quick fashion, Kaplan does tie together this area by discussing how Central Asia in its current formation of former Soviet republics, Sinkiang of the People’s Republic of China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (a state so discombobulated by ethnicities that the actually name of the state is an acronym for Punjab, Afghania (ethic Pathans), Kashmir, Iran, Sind, Tukharistan, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan), is one that is, like the others above, artificial and is only waiting to reform into something more accurate, Turkestan (Turks here being not effected by culturally diffused elements from the Byzantine Greeks, the Persians, and the Arabs, as are the Turks of Anatolia.), with assorted smaller nations, such as Uzbeks (more Turkic), Tajiks (more Persian), and Pathans (currently straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan). His observations of the end of Russian influence and the probable withdrawal of Chinese influence due to their pulling back to control over areas of the Pacific Rim are important and should be kept in mind. One especially interesting observation:
In the 1990’s, the world began to discover in Turkestan a volatile, antiquarian region of medieval city-state identities. In Eastern Europe, history resumed after 1989 after a half-century of dormancy. In Turkestan, it resumed after a half-millennium --for the first time since the Portuguese navigator Vasco de Gama discovered the sea route to India in 1498 making it possible for East-West trade to bypass Central Asia. On the eve of de Gama’s voyage, Ottoman Turkey and China constituted the world’s most important economic and cultural centers, with Central Asia the link between them. A string of Islamic centers, fusing Turkish and Persian cultures, formed a strategic caravan network. It was this caravan network that the Portuguese navigator made obsolete.
Kaplan also spends a fair amount of time in this section discussing the environmental problems (ecocide) associated with unbridled industrialization that did occur and is still occurring here.
The last section of the book deals with India and Southeast Asia. The section on India is interesting especially as it dispels much of the overly optimistic economic analysis of that country with some hard facts about the social situation there. Facts such as India has seen outbreaks of plague and other deadly diseases that could cause pandemics due in part to its tropical climate (also a problem in sub-Saharan Africa), that Delhi’s air is so polluted that breathing it is as dangerous as smoking twenty cigarettes a day, and water problems in India are as bad as parts of sub-Saharan Africa, all serve as reality checks to the rosy reports of such periodicals as The Wall Street Journal. After India Kaplan discusses Southeast Asia, an area he compares to the Balkans in that various nations with various historical up and downs are all emerging with the hopes of dominating the remaining groups. Kaplan points to the Southeast Asian tigers of Thailand and Vietnam as well as southern provinces of the People’s Republic of China that are less loyal to Beijing than to their own economics all being likely to compete with each other to try to dominate the rest (to create say, greater Thailand or greater Vietnam) and he notes that the more isolated nations of Laos and Cambodia are already being carved up by these powers with the end result probably being their disappearing from the map. The sections of the development of Thailand and on the history of Cambodia are exceptionally well done. Besides geopolitics, Kaplan also discusses the problems on the horizon with HIV in Southeast Asia.
Again the book is superb take on the emerging ‘culture of discontent’ though is a somewhat overwhelming work. It should be read by all teachers of Making of the Modern World as well as teachers of US History II and probably anyone who teaches social science, as Kaplan’s ideas on states withering and being replaced with nations is one that is critical to understand both for reasons of understanding history (The Roman, British, and possibly American states are all examples of this) as well as the possible world that will emerge. Also important to all teachers of History and the Social Studies are his ideas on potential problems to come and their effect on the US:
Nevertheless, many of the problems I saw around the world --poverty, the collapse of cities, porous borders, cultural and racial strife, growing economic disparities, weakening nation-states-- are problems for Americans to think about. I thought of America everywhere I looked. We cannot escape from a more populous, interconnected world of crumbling borders.
We woke up late to the European disorder that erupted in 1914 and again in the 1930’s. The Cold War, a tailpiece of World War II, kept us involved overseas. But many tens of thousands of people or more were murdered, and a million or more forced from their homes, a few hours’ drive from Vienna in the early 1990’s and we have done little until recently. When we awake it won’t only be Europe that we’ll have to confront, but a wider world, bearing, perhaps, a more amorphous terror than what we confronted in the two world wars: disease pandemics like AIDS, environmental catastrophes, organized crime, that will advance its borders to, for instance, the failed states of West Africa, where government security structures are collapsing, and so on. Or, the threat might be more insidious: future crises beyond our borders --in South Africa and Mexico, for instance-- that sharpen ethnic and economic fissures at home. The boozy soldiers in Sierra Leone and the girl dying of tuberculosis in Cambodia are closer than we think.
Kaplan does not conclude with the US or the UN solving the world’s problems but he does feel that such organizations can help local people, nations or states, find solutions to their problems before they become global problems. -
For this book, Kaplan traveled very much off the beaten track, during the first half of the 1990s. Fukuyama had just announced we had reached the end of history, and Kaplan is looking for cultural reasons for why 'failed states' are what they are, but, eventually, not really finding an answer.
Given the book's age, the book’s at its weakest when Kaplan tries to predict the future by showing off his knowledge, reading and connections.
It’s at his best as a more straightforward travelogue, the author describing his experiences, creating a time capsule of life that no longer exists.
In part as a consequence of this, as Kaplan moves further east, the narrative first starting in Sierra Leone and Liberia, ending in Cambodia, the book gets better as the story progresses.
Kaplan raises an interesting point in that a partial cause for the Iranian Revolution was not poverty, but unmet rising expectations; real income had increased immensely, under the shah, in the sixties, after which growth levelled off, while its benefits were very unevenly distributed.
Kaplan refers to a scholar who underscores this, where they predict that these unmet expectations will be a strong driver for dissatisfaction, perhaps even revolt, in the near future.
This is one of the few moments where Kaplan comes close to identifying an important driver for today’s global struggles; the rise of the right, in recent years in many countries, is fuelled by dissatisfaction in unmet expectations, on the back of broken promises of golden futures.
In the end, what seems to be Kaplan’s overarching conclusion is that, for humanity to save itself from overpopulation, climate destruction, and ethnic annihilation, is that solutions have to be forged at a local level. That is, they can not be superimposed by outsiders.
A few notes:
+ Kaplan visited Freetown a good ten years before I did, but his experience, and the places he visited, are almost identical to mine.
+ Kaplan makes the point that Turkey, through Ataturk, celebrated paganism over Islam in its drive to become more secular.
+ I was unaware of outbreaks of violence in Azerbaijan around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, both against autocratic control from Moscow, and through ethnic conflicts with the Armenians. At the time of his writing, Azerbaijan had not yet embarked on its autocratic future.
+ Kaplan's predictions are sometimes wildly off the mark, but, a major reason for this being the black swan of 9/11. -
Back in the early-to-mid nineties, freed by the end of the Cold War, travelling third-world journalist Robert Kaplan set off on a long journey across some of the war-torn and economically ravaged countries in the Old World(and a few not-so-bad off): Western Africa, Egypt, much of Central Asia, and Indochina, offering his observations and thoughts.
Kaplan is a superior writer who really knows how to show instead of tell. At times his prose verges on the poetic
. There is a running theme throughout the book of a world in which villagers are forced by resource depletion to give up their traditional way of life to migrate to the big city, enticed by the dream of better jobs and education for their children; this in turn creates pressure on the cities, 'village-izing'them and putting pressure on them. He predicts inevitable conflicts as the more conservative rural values clash with modern urban values.
This all seems pretty prescient now (consider Egypt where he introduces us to the Moslem Brotherhood, a fundamentalist citizen group that woujld eventually play a huge role in the Arab Spring in 2010.) In fact, a lot of the places he visits seem to have developed much as he predicted, though some of the predictions were wrong.
Over it all there is what seems now like a quaint and comfortable assurance of the nineties American; a time when the USA was the world's undisputed superpower: an innocent time in many ways. I am disappointed I found this book so late! It must have been quite an eye-opener back in the 1997, when it was published. AS an middle-aged man in 2017, I wish I had had the gumption to travel the world back in my twenties, in this time.
Dated, but still endlessly fascinating and worth reading. -
A bit dated as far as historical analysis goes, this book still reflects a rare account of much of the developing world today. Kaplan doesn't brush over a country or culture, he delves deep, and from what I can tell really does his due diligence to give a picture of matters and the future opportunities.
I would have preferred if his account wasn't filled with invented narratives that he ascribes to many random strangers he sees but never speaks to throughout the book. I understand his effort to describe the type of individuals that he is seeing and their prospects for the future, but his half-romantic way of making it sound like he is gleaning their thoughts and their lives seems slightly arrogant.
I thoroughly appreciated his analysis of the Central Asian countries. This region is seldom discussed or event recognized by most folks, and a deep account of his experiences there are really eye opening. It is interesting to hear about the cultural heritage that dominates these regions and the legacy that Soviet rule left behind in many of these places only a few years removed from it.
He was pretty clairvoyant in his recognition of the challenge that climate change will pose to many of these countries and the developing world. These challenges haven't changed since Kaplan wrote this book, they have only exacerbated.
All in all, this is a book that really draws me in. It is thoroughly researched, I found many books I will be reaching for in the future by simply taking a look through the bibliography. But I also found myself stopping and working through maps to geographically understand where things were and how he was travelling. It made me yearn for travel again. -
Robert Kaplan sought to achieve a rather ambitious aim when he set out to research and write this book; he wanted to find a new paradigm to understand the early decades of the 21st century. Kaplan noted that some experts focused on the effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation as the dominant forces (particularly in the developing world), while others spoke of a "new anarchy" (such as former UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar, he and others noting that of the eighty wars between 1945 and 1995, forty-six were either civil wars or guerilla insurgencies). In 1993, forty-two countries were involved in major conflicts and thirty-seven others were suffering some lesser form of political violence (sixty-five of these seventy-nine nations were in the developing world). Kaplan journeyed through sub-Saharan West Africa from Guinea to Togo and through Egypt, Turkey, Iran, former Soviet Central Asia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia in his research for the book.
He found a predictably bleak situation in Africa. While 13 percent of the human race lives in Africa, they contribute only 1.2 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Crime - particularly violent crime - is soaring in much of Africa; for a time the United States suspended direct flights from the U.S. to Lagos, Nigeria due to the rampant violent crime at the terminal and nearby, the first time any such embargo had occurred for non-political and non-terrorist reasons. Soaring malaria in Africa is intensifying the spread of AIDS (as malaria can result in anemia, which requires blood transfusions), just as AIDS and tuberculosis are helping each other's spread.
As bad as the economy, crime, and disease in Africa are though, Kaplan believes the real problem in sub-Saharan Africa is too-rapid urbanization, a problem he comes to again and again in the book. Festering "bush-slums" that appear on few maps border many African cities, where relatively prosperous cities end up being "slum-magnets for an emptying countryside." He visited several such slums in Ivory Coast and elsewhere in West Africa, many packed with migrants from Mali, Niger, and elsewhere (50% of the population of the Ivory Coast is now non-Ivorian). The native forest culture of Africa, however primitive, was being destroyed by soaring birthrates, alcohol, cheap guns, and extremely dense concentrations of humanity in slums that lacked any stabilizing and unifying government or culture. Though he does not believe this to be the only factor in the bloody conflicts in Liberia and elsewhere, he does believe it to be a dominant one.
Though not leading to the level of social breakdown as seen in Africa, rapidly growing cities - packed with peasants drawn in from the countryside - was a dominant feature in other nations he found as well. China, while touted at the time of writing as having a 14 per cent growth rate, really meant that coastal China was growing; this growth did not apply to inland China (and also could be said to favor the cities and not the countryside), leading to a mass migration from the countryside. Migration to shantytowns in Pakistan is tremendous, owing in large part to a skyrocketing population rate (only 9 percent of Pakistani women use contraceptives and the population of Pakistan is close to doubling every twenty years), a situation leading to empty villages and a poorly urbanized peasantry that cities are unable to cope with.
Kaplan found similar problems in Egypt, where urban poverty and newly urbanized peasants, threatened with the loss of traditions, the government unable to help them, with basic services like water and electricity breaking down, having found something to turn to; Islam. Islam is thriving in a time of unregulated urbanization and internal and external refugee migrations. With increasingly militant Islamic Egyptians turning against Christian Arabs (both Coptic Christians, who like the Lebanese Kaplan met in West Africa and the Korean grocers of South Los Angeles, formed a "middlemen minority" in Egypt, as well as the Christian leaders like UN secretary-general Boutros-Ghali who failed to aid Bosnian Muslims) and turning to the Ikhwan el Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) for social services instead of an increasingly overburdened state, Kaplan sees scarcity and woes of the urbanized peasantry of the shantytowns as the driving force in many ways in Egypt.
The growing marriage of Islam and urbanized peasantry was not unique to Egypt. To a somewhat lesser extent Kaplan found a similar process on-going in Turkey, as the Turkish migrants to the gecekondus (literally "built in the night;" shanty-town houses) on the fringes of Istanbul found more aid from the Islamic Welfare Party in the form of water, coal, and food than from the Turkish government itself. In some areas of western China such as Kashgar, overcrowding, unemployment, and the lack of any real middle class was leading to a Muslim resurgence there among non-ethnic Chinese.
So what did Kaplan learn from his travels? He was quite frustrated, and found that the more he traveled the less he felt he knew. Kaplan did grow disgusted with the idea of political "science," paraphrasing Tolstoy in _Anna Karenina_ in writing that while successful cultures are in many ways alike, unsuccessful ones fail each in their own way. He did come to the conclusion that nation-states at least in West Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia were weakening. In some cases organizations and entities outside or beyond the state - such as the various Islamic groups in Egypt and Turkey - were starting to fill in the vacuum, while in other, failed states such as Sierra Leone, nothing was taking its place. Borders in some regions, the legacy of long-gone European imperial powers, were becoming less and less important. Laos and Cambodia were in some sense creations of the French, areas that might have long been swallowed by the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai and were now being divided up economically if not politically by these countries. I think his firmest conclusion though was that poorly and newly urbanized rural poor flocking to the cities represented the greatest challenge. -
Too much politics for a travel book but much of it still interesting.
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4,5/5
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A bloody racist and a contemptuous fool.
https://www.vqronline.org/euphorias-p...
