From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, journalist Robert Kaplan spent most of his time traveling and writing, reporting from dozens of countries. Kaplan first gained recognition with his third book, Balkan Ghosts (1993), which was read by President Clinton (among many others) to get a handle on what was unfolding in Bosnia. His widely noticed Atlantic Monthly cover story, “The Coming Anarchy” (Feb. 1994), became the basis for his most recent book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (reviewed in B&C, Sept./Oct. 1996).
Kaplan’s writing is distinguished by an unusual combination of firsthand authority (he has been everywhere, accumulating an enormous fund of experience) and historically informed insight. The Ends of the Earth is animated by a restless, exuberant zest for travel and an equally passionate desire to understand what is happening in the world. Kaplan is an unsentimental observer, suspicious of grand theories. He makes a wonderful guide. Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center talked recently with Kaplan about his travels and what he has learned from them.
Mention quickly for our readers the places that you visited to write The Ends of the Earth.
For this book, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
It looks like you picked some of the most difficult places in the world. Why these particular countries?
There were several criteria. As I said early in the book, these countries represent the kinds of places where about 90 or 95 percent of the world’s children are now being born. Babies are predominantly being born in either the poorest countries, or the poorest sectors of wealthier countries.
Not in Japan.
Right. In other words, Taiwan and Japan may have extremely high population densities, like Rwanda and Sierra Leone, but those densities have been the same for decades. Those populations leveled off decades ago. It’s only since then that all their economic growth has occurred. So while many of the places I visited may seem marginal politically, or out of the way, they represent the home ground for many of the world’s newest citizens.
Another criterion was that I’m always conscious of how readers get sick of reading about Israel and Yugoslavia in the newspapers. So to the extent that I could, I picked countries that were not much in the news at the time I did this journey.
Did you know what you were going to find when you went there?
To a degree you always do if you do your research beforehand. For instance, I left out Syria, which is an exhibition of a number of the problems mentioned in this book, because I figured Syria was always on the front pages with the Arab-Israeli peace process. I picked Turkey, which I felt was less known.
Why should Americans be concerned about all of these countries?
For a very basic reason. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: we’re an increasingly interconnected world. You can’t keep disease out because of all of the plane flights-just look at the history of aids. We’re increasingly interconnected because we’re an increasingly populous and increasingly complex world. Complexity leads to its own form of interdependence and instability. We will have to in some way reinvent our own nationalism in the context of an interconnected world. These problems may seem remote, but they will increasingly affect us.
You say that in order to understand what the twenty-first century will be like, “our eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics.” What do you mean by that?
If you travel around the world today to places that are really determining trends-that in the Third World would mean shantytowns made of corrugated iron at the edge of cities; or in America would mean suburbs: the sprawling suburbs of western Omaha; western St. Louis; Johnson County, Kansas; Bethesda, Maryland-none of these places are romantic, and they’re not pretty. There is either a boring sameness, in America’s case, or they’re just ugly, in the case of the Third World. Yet many of the places that we see as romantic may have seemed ugly to people centuries ago. In other words, if you want to see what’s happening today in Turkey, don’t go to the lovely old mosques, go to the shack towns on the edge of Istanbul. If you want to see what’s happening in social dynamics in America, don’t go to Manhattan and its art galleries, go to some edge-city suburb.
Can you describe what you found in all of these various places? It’s a grim book in many ways.
I don’t see it as a grim book. To me, what I’m doing is merely thinking historically and analytically, much like many military and intelligence officials do when they look at the world. That subculture doesn’t write for literary magazines. You tend to have a dichotomy: you have literary people, who don’t look at these problems this way, and you have a whole mass of government analysts, who do, but who don’t publish books like I do. So what I’ve done is a bit of cross dressing here. I’ve written a travelogue, but through the mindset of your average, run-of-the-mill policy wonk or intelligence agent. In other words, where is there going to be trouble, what places are going to produce goods that the outside world is willing to pay hard currency for, and which places won’t? So in that sense, it’s not a grim book, it’s just a report on certain realities.
What I found, generally speaking, is that the world is in the midst of great economic and social upheaval. In many places things are going badly, but even in the places where things are going well on an economist’s chart, there is upheaval-it’s just high gnp upheaval. Whenever in the past we’ve had high levels of economic growth, that has also meant social transformation, and that has usually meant a reasonably high degree of violence and political upheaval. While the long-term future of the human race may be great, for the next 20 or 30 years, in several dozen countries, there is going to be a big mess.
In this book capitalism is both a hero and a villain. Which one is it?
It’s both, because capitalism is the bull in the china shop of history. Nobody’s ever figured out a reasonably smooth and humane way toward economic growth. If you look at industrial-revolution cities like Chicago at the turn of the century, or London in the midnineteenth century, they were as cruel as many of the places that I visited. Some people have argued that nothing compares with some of the hideous exploitation that you would see in Mexican border towns-machiadoras. Some writers, with very good evidence, say this is a whole new thing on a level much worse than previous epochs in history. But growth has always been cruel; it has never been fair, and there has never been equality.
So is development good?
It’s the only way forward. Whether it’s good or bad, people have no choice, especially in the next century. For the first time, every little country in Africa will be in direct competition with Latin America or Southeast Asia, because world markets, financial markets, and global corporations are really creating the new world government of sorts. They are defining growth in many places. It’s not enough to be an African success story anymore. In this world you are either able to produce goods for hard currency, or you are going to have a lot of problems. Though the places that are booming are certainly places with a lot of problems, like China, the places that are left behind are no better off. This idea of an idyllic rustic village in the Third World is increasingly nonsense.
Now would some of your critics say that the capitalism in Singapore or South Korea or Japan is not cruel?
They would be right. I was ambivalent in the book on Singapore. I described Lee Kuan Yew’s regime as a sort of meritocratic, neo-authoritarianism of corporate military interests.
But the economy there is thriving.
Right. But again, these are places that are rather exceptional. Capitalism is not as wonderful elsewhere as it is in Singapore and South Korea. But I’m not criticizing capitalism, because there is no other choice.
I’m wondering if there are things that can be learned from the success stories that might apply elsewhere.
That is certainly possible, but we need to remember that the culture of a place, or the structure of a society, is always more important than the type of system implanted there. Democracy in Cambodia is not like democracy in Denmark, even though they both wear the same category. Isaiah Berlin said you will find dictatorships that are civil, and you will find democracies that are uncivil. So that limits, to an extent, what a place in Africa, say, can learn from Singapore.
You make a strong case for the superiority of religious cultures-in Turkey and Iran, for example-that are capable of socializing and bringing discipline in the population.
I do. To me, random crime says much more about a society than political crime. Political crime, like riots in order to get voting rights, can be turned on or off through a successful or unsuccessful politician. Nelson Mandela came to power in South Africa, and political violence dropped substantially. But what social engineers like Mandela or Helmut Kohl are unable to control, or control much less, is the level of crime in their society, which in turn is a measure of the level of social peace and organization.
What did you find in Iran?
A very dynamic, orderly society that is ruled weakly by a government consisting of radical mullahs in league with goons in the security services. The reason this government can stay in power is for a very ironic reason: it’s too weak to be totalitarian, so there is no practical reason to overthrow it. Everyone has figured out a solution to daily problems-work around the government. This is a government that is eminently receptive to bribes. There is almost no problem an Iranian faces that cannot be solved through a bribe, so why change the government? The fact that the government is very inconvenient, even criminal to the West, well, that’s a foreign policy problem. But in terms of the work ethic, the level of crime, the education level of the society and what not, Iran is still the most significant single Middle Eastern society around, along with Turkey and Israel-exactly as it was in 1799 before Napoleon’s invasion, which brought in the whole European era of Middle East affairs. When the Europeans first got involved in the Middle East, the two biggies were Turkey and Persia. The only difference now is that there are three: Turkey, Persia, and Israel.
I imagine that some people might have been surprised by your comments on Iran and said that Kaplan is praising an authoritarian regime, or that Kaplan is condoning regimes that need bribes to make them orderly.
What are bribes? Bribes are another way of doing business when institutions are weak. We have lobbying; future historians may call it bribery. Turgut Ozal was a great leader of Turkey because he brought back and institutionalized the bribe so that the system could function. High bribery is a symptom of societies in transition, where existing official infrastructures can’t solve problems; so unofficial ways of doing things solve the problem.
Throughout the book you refuse to read maps as if they portray objective reality. Why is that?
The official borders only tell you part of the story. They’re partial truths. For instance, in West Africa you see countries lined up vertically. They’re tall, but they’re not very wide-maybe a few hundred miles north to south, but maybe forty miles west to east. But when you actually travel through the region you find that what really exists is a densely populated costal megalopolis that goes west to east rather than north to south and is divided illogically by these colonial boundaries. A real ground-truthing of the region would show a black stain going from east to west showing population density, growing increasingly lighter as you move to the north toward the Sahara Desert. In Southeast Asia you would find that the Mekong River valley as an economic and perhaps even political unit of the future is more significant than the region of northern Thailand and Laos.
You say in the preface to The Ends of the Earth that the purpose of your book was to give personal meaning to the kinds of themes discussed in Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the Twenty-first Century. What did you mean by that?
Paul Kennedy’s book follows a deep tradition going back to Montesquieu and Gibbon, which is that politics is more than just political forces: it’s culture, economics, physical environment, climate-and people are expressions of all of these things. What Kennedy did was emphasize a lot of physical factors, like population growth and climatic change and technology, as indicators of what the texture of the next century would be. He pointed out a number of problems in the Third World, and, to me, this was like a line from previous philosophers. I said that what is needed is for someone to do a human-interest travelogue on this rather than just an academic thing.
What should be done for these countries? Is there anything the United States can do?
Yes, I think there is. Simply because we can’t solve their basic problems doesn’t mean we can’t gradually make things better so that the problems level off sooner rather than later-in 15 years rather than in 30 years. That’s not a dramatic overnight solution, but at least it’s some sort of solution that is attainable. Therefore, what I always emphasize is long-range, bread-and-butter, region-wide programs rather than expensive stunts and spectacles like sending troops to Somalia and Haiti.
There are several reasons for this. Every time you send troops abroad, if that mission is even perceived to be a failure, you then threaten a lot of well-executed, undramatic programs that are ongoing. The cuts in aid budgets in Africa came in the wake of our failure in Somalia. Second, as we know from our own experience, it’s better to deal with little problems daily than do nothing and only pour money in when there is an emergency.
So you’re not happy about foreign aid?
I’m not happy about foreign military interventions. I think the American public has a limited appetite for these things. If we blithely ignore those constraints we will stoke the fires of isolationism; we will get precisely the opposite of what we intend if we force people into these missions. What I’m in favor of, as I said, is low-budget, gradual programs-women’s literacy, environmental renewal-those sorts of things.
And your concern for population control would be in that same area?
Yes, it would be.
So you would condemn the more draconian measures used for population control in, say, China?
Put it this way: If you are really interested in preventing abortions, or in reducing the levels of abortions in the world, you have to be in favor of population control, because what all the statistics show, as I wrote in the Atlantic in an article just last August, is that the more money spent in giving women choice in terms of birth control, the fewer abortions there are going to be. Also, we’re not forcing anything on anybody. I’ve been throughout the Third World, and this is what people want. They want aid for these things, and there is a real international consensus on it to the extent that even the fundamentalist Iranian government has one of the most successful birth-control programs in the world in recent years, though they don’t shout about it.
What is your view now, after your travels, of human nature?
I think that human nature never really changes. Technology is merely a magnifier of good and evil. Established religions that have become bureaucratized are magnifiers of good and evil. Better values have to percolate up from local communities; they cannot be imposed from the outside. There’s an organic synthesis to these things. If you’re interested in promoting democracy and better values, then you should also be interested in literacy programs and population control and environmental renewal. The record shows clearly that countries that are less environmentally savaged, whose populations are not dramatically soaring, where literacy is not too low, are places also where democracy has a much better chance.
Then you wouldn’t be as optimistic as Julian Simon would be about the role of large populations and human ingenuity?
It’s not that I disagree with Julian Simon, it’s that our perspectives in terms of time and geography are different. Let me give you an example: Simon is saying that in the world as a whole, over the drum roll of the centuries, life gets better. I’m saying maybe that’s true, but for a few dozen Third World countries over the next 20 or 25 years, the kinds of things that keep policymakers up at night are not going to get better. They may get better in terms of gnp, but in terms of political upheaval caused by economic and social upheaval, we’re in for a lot of trouble. So those two views of the world are not necessarily contradictory if you understand that I’m looking in terms of what’s going to keep a national security adviser up at night for the next few decades rather than what the whole planet is going to look like 120 years from now.
I think it was Tocqueville who wrote that Americans tend to exaggerate the degree of human perfectibility because of their own equality and historical experience. I see my book as an example of a more European approach to history.
In what sense?
Not every place automatically has a good scenario just because America has had a good scenario. There are no solutions to a lot of problems. The idea that every problem has a satisfactory solution within a reasonable time frame is simply false.
That’s a peculiarly American illusion?
Yes, because we’re a pioneer society, a nuts-and-bolts, solution-oriented society. I was fascinated that a lot of the criticism of the book came because I didn’t propose solutions. The end of the book really turned people off. I was talking to my editor about this as I was writing the end of the book, and we joked that the easiest way to win an award is to have a last chapter with ten solutions. It will all be disingenuous, and it will be your weakest chapter, but it will blunt criticism. But I didn’t want to do that. For one, it dates the book. Seven years from now, when this book is still in print in paperback, all of those solutions will be dated in one form or another, whereas the ending I wrote will not have to be changed one iota even ten years from now. I’m not writing for today’s policy discussions, I’m trying to give a Gibbonesque view of the world.
Is there a lesson that jumps out in retrospect from your travels?
That the problems we all deal with are the problems of success. Example: Why does Africa have so much disease, so much conflict, such high rates of population growth? Because modern technology brought canned food to Africa and modern roads and other things, which raised the life expectancy but which also generated devastating turmoil. We’re constantly dealing with the problems of our past successes.
Michael Cromartie directs the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 26
7B2lm7B20267224
