Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
The controversial "Balkan Ghosts" put him on the map. His opinionated, darkly seductive reports of an unraveling world have kept him there.
Apr 17, 2001 | Reading Robert D. Kaplan, the master of writing about globalization's dark side, is like putting on a pair of glasses you didn't know you needed. From the static and overflow of information about world events, layers of crisp, dazzling insight emerge. The rocky landscape of political crisis and conflict suddenly yields patterns, trends and meaning.
Through his writing, Kaplan, 48, evokes a place, and documents the experience of a journey -- though he's not a traditional travel writer. His is a journey to prove ideas. He wants the landscape of his travel map to affirm a larger truth. A kind of idée fixe that threads through his books and articles is that the nation-state doesn't hold, that the way we understand the world to be organized is dissolving, that we are missing the most important trends that determine and portend our own future.
"Forget the map," Kaplan writes. And then he takes us on a journey to a world in which national borders are increasingly meaningless, where driving events are not the usual protagonists of news reporting -- presidents, parliaments, police -- but the forces dissolving the nation-state and the Westphalian world order built upon it: growing ethnic consciousness that conflicts with "artificially" drawn nation-state borders, explosive population growth, disease, crime, environmental degradation, water shortages and the people mobilized by these changes.
In his seven travel books and his foreign reporting for the Atlantic Monthly, he makes you long to experience his film-noir Bucharest or visit the massive Southeastern Anatolian dam being built where the Tigris River meets the Euphrates, and he sends you back to Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (published in the Atlantic in 1941) to reexperience her 1937 tour of Yugoslavia on the brink of the bloodbath that would engulf all of Europe.
"What I try to do is to provide the experience of a backpacker, with the disciplined analysis of a good journalist or a policy specialist," Kaplan said in an interview from his home in Western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and teenage son. "Because policy specialists in Washington, D.C., often have no useful experiences of the culture they are analyzing. Whereas backpacker types often get it."
"I thought of my wanderings in almost geological terms," Kaplan writes in his superb 1994 book "The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century," which recounts his trip from West Africa to Cambodia via Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, China and Pakistan. "I wanted to map the future, perhaps the 'deep future,' by ignoring what was legally and officially there and instead, touching, feeling and smelling what was really there."
Refreshingly, Kaplan often skips over the obligatory interview with the foreign leader, to show instead what it's like to experience the country on the ground. The inconvenience, the dysfunction -- the sheer brokenness -- of life in many countries is his story. Places that don't work intrigue him. Countries whose underpaid border guards hit up travelers for bribes, that issue the most difficult-to-get visas, are often countries at greater risk of collapse. Underneath the abuses of many regimes, Kaplan shows, are governments that are just barely hanging on.
In his writing, Kaplan explodes many of the conventions and grammar by which foreign policy, conflict and security threats have been thought and written about. The vision he offers -- kaleidoscopic, opinionated and seductive -- makes one look at the world and its drivers in a new way. Even if one disagrees with Kaplan's more radical ideas -- that democracy was just a moment, that the future of the world's wealthy democracies is closely linked to Sierra Leone's, that the end of the nation-state is at hand -- his ability to influence the way one looks at the world is hard to resist.
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