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Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

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All the reviews either love this book or hate it. Why? It tells the story of a Western in this nuthouse we call Bosnia-Hercegovina during the "troubles".

It is an excellent book. Period. Does it tell the full story? Is it 100 percent fair to Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Vojvodians, Kosovars, Macedonians and Slovenes? How can it be. A war is a complex event. Remember that all, that is ALL the UN peacekeepers such as myself all thought each side was as bad as the next. Yes Serbs could be brutal, Croats mean, Moslems retaliatory.........the list goes on. But in terms of a perspective of what went on before this mans eyes? I believe it 100percent because I saw the same thing.

Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" is a flawed book, but certainly worth reading in order to understand, if nothing else, the prevailing Western attitudes towards the Balkan region of Europe.

The books clear strength lies in the author's lucid, fluid and descriptive writing style - it truly makes the book, from the literary point of view, a joy to read. The reader is given a vivid picture of the Balkan lands Kaplan visits in a sort of `travelogue from hell' or `anti-travelogue' regarding places that most readers will not yet have visited. Added to this is a good deal of insight and reportage, interviews with locals, and so forth, that lend the book much readability and depth.

Unfortunately, however, the book is marred by the author's own Western prejudices and biases. What we have here is a critique, in many ways, of the `backwards East' and a not-so-subtle head-shaking that the region is not more `Western' in outlook.

The problems surface on two levels: First, Kaplan's descriptions of the local cultural life are off the mark, due in many cases to his lack of understanding of Orthodox Christianity. Many ignorant comments are notable regarding Orthodox religious art, piety, liturgical life, church organization, etc. Kaplan is right that the Orthodox tradition has had a profound influence on the region, but his conclusions as to the nature of this impact are nothing more than a perpetuation of the common and long-held Western stereotypes about the Eastern Orthodox part of Europe - in particular, the myth that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a dangerous brew of mysticism, austerity and nationalism. Not only is this an incorrect summary, but the impressionistic conclusion is false -- the reality of the impact of the Orthodox Church on these countries in the twentieth century is much more complex and nuanced than Mr. Kaplan leads the reader to believe. Kaplan would have been better served to study more about Orthodox Christianity before repeating so many tired stereotypes about it in this book. But, alas, many Western readers are not in a position to correct Mr. Kaplan, and will accept what he writes as true, thereby experiencing a convenient confirmation of their existing stereotypes.

Second, Kaplan's `program' for the region is unabashedly biased towards the 'enlightened' Western approach. According to Kaplan, the post-Enlightenment West is the paradigm that the world (or at least this part of it) must follow, and he accords much of the problems of these countries to their non-Western, Byzantine, Slavic, Eastern Orthodox Christian background - in a vast, vast overstatement and oversimplification of the real situation in the Balkans and in Europe in general. The fact that the Enlightenment itself led to the drastic decline of ethical life in the `West', and the development of the political ideologies that are the real cause of the tragedies of the Twentieth Century seems lost on Kaplan, who would solve the problems of the Balkan region by imposing the full-blown developments of Western Enlightenment ideology on these Southeastern Europeans.

The story of the Balkans is simple enough - it is a region that has been `put upon' by outsiders for centuries, each with their own designs for the region - the Venetians, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Nazis, etc. In the act of being downtrodden, rivalries developed and these have in some cases developed into ethnic hatreds. These hatreds are easily manipulable by local political powers to engage the population in one or another act of internal or external agression (read: scapegoating). The influence of outsiders on the region has been profoundly negative historically, and in my opinion, Kaplan is mistaken to assume that yet another `design' for the region would meet with any greater success than the previous ones have.

Read `Balkan Ghosts' for a great travelogue and an excellent portrayal of the present Western stereotypical view of the Balkans. But don't take his strereotypes to heart - the truth is much more complex and nuanced, and the region needs to be understood from the `inside out' rather than the view from the `outside in' that Kaplan presents here.

Kaplan weaves a masterful mix of travelogue, history and sociopolitical insight into a book about his journey through the Balkans, before Kosovo became headlines. He traveled throughout the region during the 80's and wrote stories of his adventures along the way. He uses the word idiosyncratic to describe his writing, given that his style mirrors past journalists/travelers who sought to understand the root causes of social and political behavior through the lens of history. Thus, expect a solid accounting of historical narrative for each country, coupled with a mix of contemporary thought largely begotten through his conversations with local politicians, journalists, and travelers.

Criticisms:
1) His approach is fairly egotistical since he believes that few Western reporters actually capture the complexity of the region, and none, except a rare few (of which he is one), ever understand the people or their real motivations. Although his assessment of Western reporters may have elements of truth, he seems to make the point numerous times throughout the book as if to create his own air of superiority.
2) Kaplan's assessment of Greece seems to carry the most weight since he lived there for seven years, whereas he sometimes only spends days in other regions. Nevertheless, he feels obliged to draw the same broad generalizations from those areas where he spoke to relatively few people, as he does from places where he met many people and spent much time. His underlying assumption throughout the book is that only a thorough understanding of history can engender a comprehension for the present state of affairs. Thus, in the countries he frequented little, he feels a fair amount of research in history allows him to make the same prognostications as he makes in areas where he has gotten to know many people.

Barring the above critiques, I enjoyed the book and found myself coming back to it until complete. He complements a firm grip of historical facts with a wonderful ability to depict people and places through metaphor and descriptive writing. Here is an example, "Greeks are married to the East. The West is our mistress only. Like any mistress, the West excites and fascinates us, but our relationship with it is episodic and superficial." His ability to characterize relationships, people and places with words is refreshing. I will definitely read more Kaplan.

One of the most tragic, yet needless, legacies of the Clinton administration is America's continued involvement in the former Yugoslavia. The bombing campaigns against Serbia represent a dark chapter in American history. As Patrick Buchanan recently wrote, "This small nation did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not seek war with us. Yet, we smashed Serbia as horribly as Hitler had, for defying our demand for an unrestricted right of passage through their land, to tear off the cradle of their country, Kosovo."

Prior to the military actions, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, and Kosovo were as familiar to most Americans as the dark side of the moon. George Bush, as a candidate for President, inadvertently summed up American ignorance when he confused Slovenia with Slovakia. Yet when the Clinton administration decided to wreck havoc on these ancient countries, few reasoned proposals were put forward, little debate was offered in Congress, and no historical perspectives were provided by the media. Instead, the great simplifiers labeled the opposing sides with white hats and black hats. The Serbs were "bad" and the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians "good." There was no room for gray.

Was this the whole truth? Are the conflicts and protagonists in the Balkans so easily classified into the moral code understood by most Americans?

In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, reporter Robert D. Kaplan explored the incredibly complex mosaic of Balkan politics, intrigue, and ethnic warfare. Published in 1993, years before the first bombs were delivered by the U. S. Air Force, Kaplan showed that while good and evil certainly existed in the Balkans, the conflicting claims and tangled histories of the various parties made outside intervention by meddling outsiders a very risky proposition.

Written in part as a homage to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and John Reed's The War in Eastern Europe, Balkan Ghosts is part travelogue, part historical analysis, and part polemic. Having lived in the Balkans for several years and traveled extensively in its "backwater" countries, Kaplan combines an extensive knowledge of the region with a clear and forceful narrative style. His brief description of his trip down the Danube to the impoverished town of Sfintu Gheorghe, for instance, better illustrates the hopelessness inherent in Romanian communism than volumes of comparative economic statistics and diplomatic wires. The reader can almost taste the plum brandy, see the peeling paint, and smell the cigarettes and unwashed bodies.

Several key dynamics influenced the course of recent Balkan history. The first is the legacy of centuries of savage Islamic rule under the Ottoman Turks, a veritable Dark Age that was only erased from the overwhelmingly Christian populations of the Balkans in the first decades of the twentieth century. Appended as a monstrous coda to this period was the communist domination of much of the peninsula after World War II, which increased the period of subjugation by more than forty years. After having been held down for centuries, these nations are experiencing both a positive resurgence of Christian faith and a negative resurgence of murderous nationalism.

The second key dynamic is the persistence of historical memories in which each population - Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian - seeks to recover land they once ruled. Serbia and Bulgaria, for instance, were both great empires at different times during the Middle Ages. Kaplan calls it the "Balkan revanchist syndrome" in which "each nation claiming as its natural territory all the lands that it held at the time of its great historical expansion." Unfortunately, these claims all overlap and there's not enough land to satisfy each and every claim. At times the results are absurd, such as the competing Greek and Bulgarian claims to Macedonia, not to mention the Macedonians' claims to Macedonia. On the other hand, the results can also be deadly, including the Balkan Wars, the Hungarian and Romanian conflict over Transylvania, and the current fighting in the former Yugoslavia that's still making headlines.

The third great dynamic are the unresolved issues from World War Two, in which pro- and anti-Nazi puppet regimes and resistance groups staged infamous massacres of Jews, ethnic minorities, and each other. In Croatia, great debates continue to rage over whether or not the fascist Ustashe regime slaughtered 700,000 Serbs or "only" 60,000 Serbs. During the war, the Serbs were considered the "good guys" and the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were among the "bad guys."

Added to this tremendous historical mess are the major and minor personalities profiled by Kaplan: Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac of Croatic, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Bulgarian media flack Guillermo Angelov, Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, and the malevolent ghost of Josip Broz Tito, whose legacy has further poisoned the Balkans. Romania itself had a whole galaxy of grotesque leaders including King Carol II and his mistress Magda Lupescu, fascist leader Corneliu Zelea-Codreanu, military dictator Ion Antonescu, and the hideous President Nicolae Ceausescu and his infamous wife Elena. The only American to come off well is David Funderburk, the courageous ambassador to Romania who blew the whistle on American appeasement of the Ceausescu regime.

Balkan Ghosts is a readable and entertaining introduction to Europe's most infamous morass. While Kaplan refuses to propose any specific policy objectives, his whirlwind tour of the Balkans makes it clear that it is a most complicated region. It's to America's everlasting shame that her senior policy makers didn't heed this insightful analysis prior to choosing sides and dropping bombs.

Kaplan's book is very is extremely well-written, and easy to read. It's also easy to get drawn into the author's narrative and take everything he says as given. However, Kaplan is not as well-informed on his subject (basically the entire Balkan peninsula) as he thinks he is. With the exception of Greece, where he spent a lot of time, and perhaps Bulgaria, he doesn't know a whole lot about the region and fills in the gaps in his knowledge with stereotypes drawn from other authors or by transposing the opinions a few people he talked to onto entire populations--often giving distorted impressions of e.g. the Serbs, Croats or Romanians. Nothing is more indicative of Kaplan's essentially unscholarly approach to such a complex topic than the reading materials he says he used to prepare himself for his journeys: for Yugoslavia he depends on Rebecca West's pre-World War II travelogue "Black Lamb and the Grey Falcon," a biased book itself, and based on her rather short (3-4 week) sojourn in Yugoslavia; even more troubling is his use of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as a guide for Romania. Stoker was never in Romania (or rather Transylvania) nor did he ever intend his book to be taken as an accurate view of southeastern Europe; he was simply trying to provide some atmosphere for his novel, and his portrayal of Transylvania draws heavily on Victorian-era prejudices about the Balkans as an eerie and savage place. Yet Kaplan repeatedly cites Stoker as though he is a legitimate authority on Romania. This is, to say the least, irresponsible. As other reviewers on this page noted, the most disturbing thing is that this book's popularity ensured that it helped formulate opinions among broad sections of the public, including policy-makers.

"Balkan Ghosts" is politics, it is history, it is a travel guide. A beautiful descriptive prose, with no ambition for political analysis. Robert Kaplan brings out the typical character in every Balkan nation and society, and writes about the things that innocently clung to the back of his western-world mind and eyes, while travelling through the region. Through his encounters and visions, he manages to show much irony, yet in a respectful manner; it is the freshness and simplicity in his young view that allow an incisive report on old tradition. Kaplan visited tha farther corners of Romania, where Romanians do not go, and he tells about the Jews in Salonika, something Greeks do not talk about. A book that could have only been written by someone who knew the people, and lived by their sides. The result is an excellent journey through fascinating stories, about an exciting part of the world. A must-read for everyone who's been in the Balkans, wants to go, or seeks to understand the developments that took place during the 90's.

As a Romanian living in the USA, who has traveled extensively through Eastern Europe both before and after 1989, this book has left me perplexed. On one hand, it does a good job at depicting a complex situation with fractured societies trying to modernize and come to grips with their past deeds and misfortunes. On the other hand, Kaplan is much too frequently given to overdramatization. Local nuances escape him; for example, in Romanian 'drac' means as much trickster as it means devil. It is not necessarily a bad term. You can call someone a drac and this may mean you admire that person for being devious, while Kaplan would have this name conjure a mystical Dracula as a sign of the Other Europe which cannot ever be enlightened and saved from itself.

As such, for example, Ceausescu was as much admired as he was feared and hated; he tricked them (and us) all. In fact, I believe it's this multiplicity, which is a characteristic of the whole region, which puzzles Kaplan and which he never quite gets; after all this is South Eastern Europe, where Latins meet and mingle with Slavs, various breeds of Southerners and Levantines. You get treachery, you get backstabbing, you get shifting alliances, you get hot blood and high emotions, and also you get a (often times very black) dose of humor which somehow makes things very light. I believe this is the case with other leaders of the region, who managed to get to the top and stay there by a combination of cunning, deceit, ruthlessness, and other Byzantine skills, by taking advantage of a largely rural, unsophisticated, and especially careless population.

Besides, some of the things he says (this may be in a different book though) are downright silly; he notices how no one in a crowd is wearing a watch or how people in a certain place don't have coffee for breakfast. Gee, my American co-workers have Coke for breakfast and I never took this as a sign of a past or future tragedy.

The area indeed has quite a few identity problems to solve yet. Poverty is widespread, and maybe not so much poverty as gaping discrepancies between the few haves and many have nots; an independent legal system is not fully enforced yet (politics get in the way); various Mafias run rampant; there is a lingering nationalism and even disillusionment with the West, which often times has approached the region with glaring lack of understanding of the local cultural sensitivities. However, after the bloody hell that was Yugoslavia, no other major conflicts have emerged, and I believe that slowly (sometimes VERY slowly), more trustworthy relationships between the countries, communities, and ethnic groups, are developing. There is a significant young population which is Westernized, professional, urbane BUT has a strong attachment to the local values. All these paint a moderately optimistic picture, where in a foreseeable future the area will have left most of its 'troubles' behind and have become a conflict-free part of Europe. This is not the ever cursed land Kaplan would have you believe it is.

I picked up Balkan Ghosts because I was interested in the subject matter, and I hadn't read anything by Robert D. Kaplan before this. It's interesting that this book was published in the "Vintage Departures" series because it might not have occurred to me that this book is a travelogue, even though Kaplan does spend much of the book on rickety trains and in decrepit hotels throughout the Balkans. So unmethodical are his travels that "travelogue" seems a misnomer. Nonetheless, Kaplan's descriptions of the Balkans just months after the fall of Communism are illuminating. At every turn, he is digging up hidden details unseen by Western eyes during the decades of communism. Through the shattered republics of Yugoslavia he travels, then on to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Kaplan imbues the book with an impressive amount of historical context, going to great lengths to avoid the generalizations that are more typically employed to explain the seemingly perpetual strife of the Balkans. The book was published in 1995, the mid-point of a bloody decade in the Balkans, and it contains a good deal of forewarning of what was to come to pass in the region in the coming years. In this sense the book is impressive in a third way. Beyond a travelogue, beyond a regional history, Balkan Ghosts is the rare "current events" book that will not soon become obsolete.

When I first read this book, I thought it was great. That was four years ago (I was the ignorant reader of my review title). Since then I have completed a Masters in History studying the way the New York Times and Le Monde covered the Bosnian war (not very well), for which I read the academic heavy-hitters on the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war. Without exception, professional scholars heap contempt upon the best-selling Kaplan for spreading the impression that the conflicts of the nineties were based on deep-seated ethnic animosities shared by all members of each ethnic group. For those who are considering Kaplan's book because they are interested in figuring out why peoples who lived so closely together seemed to turn against each other so viciously in Yugoslavia, I recommend that you read some of the best academics first, and then read Kaplan's book, to get a feel for the latter's drastic flaws and its deceptively popular appeal. Some really good, and very readable, academic books are Sabrina Ramet's 'Balkan Babel' (4th edition), Eric P. Gordy's 'The culture of power in Serbia : nationalism and the destruction of alternatives,' and Susan Woodward's 'Balkan Tragedy.'

I read the book a few years ago. The style is very captivanting and I found many bits of interesting history. Still, I was furious about some of his conclusions which made me wonder whether he can beyond the ``Balkan'' connotation. Balkan people are not all obsessively anti-semitic as one is dangerously left to believe. I know, for a long, long time, many of the people and sites he's seen and I was outraged by some of his conclusions. I strongly disagree with most of his conclusions about the Romanian college students and with his value judgements about current life. The system of values in that part of the world is not identical to the Western system, and this does not make it better or worse. I personally know that some of people who got ``good grades'' in his book sold him a nice flashy package and I wondered whether he even bothered to check what's inside. And then I wondered about the people he interviewed and whom I haven't met. Are they really the way they are presented? I was left feeling dark, and I know there's a lot of soul out there.