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Featured every Sunday in the
Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN
March 11, 2001 Issue

Eastward to Tartary
by Robert D. Kaplan

An Extraordinary Journey Through the Balkans and the Near East
Robert D. Kaplan is like the journalists of old who made a region of the world their special domain, lived in it and/or traveled through it extensively, learned its history, political intricacies, culture, languages and in short, lived and breathed the life of the region's inhabitants.

Kaplan's new book, "Eastward to Tartary" is a treasure trove of information about his chosen region - the Near East, "from the Balkans to Central Asia, what the Elizabethans called Tartary."

He begins this journey at the most western outpost of the Balkans - Budapest, and meanders by seedy trains and sometimes busses and boats, through Transylvania and the rest of Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and then backtracks north to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, concluding this extraordinary journey in Armenia. Kaplan gives us a valuable historical perspective by analyzing the current political situations in each one of these volatile states and the historical events that have shaped the present. "For what is the present if not the sum total of the past up through this moment?" the author observes. He looks at the universal issues of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, globalization and global economy and how they affect the region. Everywhere he goes he meets with local intellectuals, writers, political leaders, journalists, artists, and everyday philosophers who appear to have a deeper knowledge and understanding of world history than Americans have.

Kaplan points out that conflicts in that particular part of the world are the result of cultures shaped by two opposing and warring religions - Orthodox Christianity and Islam. In addition, the western Balkans - Hungary, Transylvania (today part of Romania) and the Slav Croatia and Slovenia, as part of the Habsburg Empire were shaped by Catholicism and influenced by the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Thus, the western Balkan countries have much more in common with Central and Western Europe than with the rest of the geographic area. But the legacy of communism brings all of the Balkan and Central Asian nations closer together.

"The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border," the Hungarian historian Rudolf Fischer tells the author one morning over slivovitz and red wine in his Budapest apartment cramped with maps and books. The difference is evident in "the real service provided by MacDonald's" in all the formerly communist countries as "the only places where people - women, especially - can find a clean public lavatory."

In Romania, the professors and the students with whom Kaplan meets, emphasize, "that the main problem in this Eastern Orthodox country was the absence of an Enlightenment." And Bulgarian writer Zhechev tells the author, "The Bulgarian (Orthodox) Church continued the Byzantine tradition in which the church and state were synonymous...I'm not sure if Protestant rationalism can work in a place so geographically separated from the Reformation...The Orthodox world needs a Reformation of its own."

Capitalism and democracy take on opaque characteristics as interpreted by the various countries through which Kaplan journeys. Rampant government corruption, mafia control of business activities, police extortion, squalor, poverty and lack of service unite the former communist countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan with dictatorships like Syria. In Romania Kaplan finds outside an editor's office, "a large anteroom filled with hangers-on, men in tight-fitting suits, smoking with evidently little to do except bring Turkish coffee to visitors, escort them to and from the staircase, and answer the phone, a familiar scene in the Turkish, Arab, and Persian worlds. I would encounter it often in the course of my journey, but I saw it for the first time here in Bucharest."

These former communist countries, quickly descending into the Third World, see their acceptance into NATO as their only salvation from the current political and economic mire. Repeatedly they cite the transformation of Greece into a western nation as affected by NATO.

Of all the countries on Kaplan's journey, Turkey is the most westernized because of NATO's presence and the political power of the military. The military has been Turkey's ruling political party, its power challenged only recently by the Islamists. But Turkey's complete acceptance by the West is haunted by its savage 1915 genocide of the Armenians, which it refuses to acknowledge and its peace is threatened by its alliance with Israel and quarrels with Syria. Kaplan notes that the Turks are better disposed towards Balkan Orthodox Christians than they are towards fellow Muslims Arabs.

In Syria the author finds a world vastly different from Turkey. The city of Aleppo, filled with the squalid conditions in former communist countries, reminds Kaplan of "a Middle Eastern version of a Communist Eastern European city."

Efficiency and honesty at the border of Armenia deceive the author initially, but with time here too he discovers government corruption and mafia activities similar to those in the Balkans. Orthodox Christianity and hatred of the Turks strengthen the bond between Armenia and the Balkan countries.

Thus, Armenia, a Central Asian country across the Black Sea on the opposite side of Bulgaria, has much more in common with the Balkans than with its Asian neighbors.

Ophelia Georgiev Roop
Library Director
San Bernardino Public Library

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