Robert D. Kaplan is no newbie when it comes to the Balkans, a part of the world forever known to be unstable – even by Americans who couldn’t find a single Balkan country on a globe or map, with the possible exception of Greece. Democracy, Santorini and all that. So all we might know, picking up Kaplan’s most recent book about the countries along the narrow Mediterranean splinter known as the Adriatic, is that they seem to keep changing names, borders and allegiances.
One of the many things that makes Adriatic so fascinating, especially to anyone who spent his younger adulthood covering news and never totally stopped, is that Kaplan did too. The fact that he wrote about countries and cultures rather than city council meetings, about history, religion and geopolitics instead of car crashes, only adds to his new work’s exoticism. Still, this guy hates the word “exotic,” seemingly because some people think that’s the only description of a place that means anything. But, like espionage novelists, he doesn’t exactly mind if we find the places he travels exotic for us.
The author of Balkan Ghosts, published 31 years ago, makes a similar journey in Adriatic – except the similar journey is astoundingly different now. Europe is a Union, for better and worse. Russia is a threat but not one still brimming with Soviet communism since the “end” of the Cold War. And, most striking of all, the dangers of Chinese power and especially Chinese money are practically everywhere Kaplan stops along this coast. Desperate migrants fleeing Africa and the Middle East are factors in today’s Balkans too, once again setting up fears of “invasion” as ancient as Rome and as current as Donald Trump and his equally despicable thugs on the Continent.
Adriatic is a travel book, but not really. Kaplan uses a trip from Italy along the eastern shore down to Greece as a frame for the intellectual trip he also makes, reading constantly, meeting with authors, professors, politicians and other experts on what they see happening around them. He makes a point of listening, of letting them talk, not because he has little to say but because he has a journalist’s respect for information. Places familiar in the West, like Venice and mosaic-rich Ravenna, fairly quickly give way to Ljubljana, Rijeka and Tirana. Yet the fact that even the “Italian” stops are laden with Byzantine artifacts is a reminder that the East has always been in competition (as well as cahoots) with the West for trade, for religion, for power, for culture.
Kaplan covers his chosen waterfront as exactly what he became – not merely a reporter cranking out hard news and feature stories from the road but a scholar and foreign policy analyst. While he does encounter and listen to the “man on the street” in some cities, he really zeroes in on intellectuals most of us couldn’t meet if we tried. And most of us, in our finest American tourist attire and Google Maps pointing us to beach and “typical” seafood restaurant, wouldn’t try.
As in Balkan Ghosts, or in Kaplan’s ultra-Big Picture The Revenge of Geography, he is at his most engaging when he is writing about the power of history to form our todays – and even our tomorrows. The Greek and Roman empires, the Venetian doges, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Soviets – all these and more are never lifeless displays in a museum to him They are living memories and potential explanations for everything that can at any moment go right or very wrong in the lives of kings, prime ministers and everyday people alike. You will turn the last pages of Adriatic much more able to understand the headlines of tomorrow – and to find Montenegro on the map.