cking's Full Review: Robert D. Kaplan - The Coming Anarchy: Shattering ...
Robert Kaplan is the author of Balkan Ghosts, which is an excellent and highly recommended (by me, anyway) travel book/history/journalistic treatment of the former Yugoslavia. It was published just as that nation began its bloody implosion. Kaplan’s clear-eyed analysis of the tensions and internal stresses in Yugoslavia was a valuable primer for understanding the horrors that have occurred there.
The Coming Anarchy is a collection of nine essays that have, with one exception, been published elsewhere. Sadly, it is no Balkan Ghosts. The title essay, however, is probably worth the price of the book. (If you are a cheapskate like me, head to the library. If the book is out, get the February 1994 Atlantic Monthly.)
Kaplan believes that the problem of the new century will be the environment. This is sad, since a mention of the environment elicits yawns in foreign policy circles (and, though Kaplan does not mention it since he is a fellow traveler, angry derision in right wing political circles). As he puts it:
The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, and, possible, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign policy challenge
A compelling case in point is China. The phenomenal economic growth in that country has largely occurred on its eastern coast. These areas will increasingly resemble the rest of the Pacific Rim and cause a schism between that part of the country and the rest. At the same time, the central and eastern parts of China are experiencing rising populations and the dire effects of deforestation, loss of topsoil and salinization*.
As the per person amount of arable land shrinks, the poor will be increasingly herded into the increasingly unlivable big cities. Here we face a paradox. People congregate where the land is best. Then they build cities that cover the good growing land. [I see this every day where I live. Every summer, we go just outside Portland, OR to pick blueberries at Lolich’s Berry Farm—if you live in the Portland area go there…they advertise in the classifieds of the Oregonian during berry season. This is prime agricultural land and every year a new subdivision is built one farm closer to Lolich’s. I figure that in a year or two Lolich’s will be no more.] This shouldn’t hurt us First Worlders too much, but Kaplan paints a very frightening and compelling picture of a limo driving through some big bad city. You and I and our First world cousins are in the limo, insulated from what’s going on outside. Outside are a lot of poor, desperate and resentful folks looking in at us.
However adept Mr. Kaplan may be at portraying the differences between the rich folks in the limo and the resentful many outside it, his ideas on addressing the underlying problems is, I believe, mighty suspect. He has an excellent point: insisting on multi-party democracy in a place like Bosnia and particularly Rwanda, is identical to creating “new political parties [that] become masks for ethnic groups that organize murderous militia, and the coalition nature of the new governments help to prepare the context for the event that leads to…genocide” Instead of imposing a fragile democracy with pretty much no chance of success, he argues that the people of the third world should have enlightened autocrats at the helm. This is hardly a new point, and many smart (and typically first world) people have been beguiled by it. But blandly wishing an “enlightened” dictator on the poor of the world is unfair and disingenuous. One could as easily wish a “strong and vibrant” democracy on them. While we’re at it, let’s also wish them a standard of living roughly equivalent to that of the Swiss. Sadly, you don’t get to pick which dictator you want (though some might argue that the CIA does exactly this); they tend to pick themselves. For every autocrat admired by Kaplan I’d be willing to bet you get 5 Noriegas or worse, the occasional Pol Pot or Idi Amin.
Another flaw in his argument is that the failed democracies of his examples are all in areas where ethnic strife predominates, and his examples of successful, mildish autocracies are from places that enjoy relatively homogenous culture. These enlightened despotisms are not the rule. Whenever you look to dictatorships in nations where there is a significant ethnic diversity, you will find, at best, prejudice and discrimination on an institutional scale. And typically you will find an Iraq wiping out Kurds, “Soviet” Russians deporting and killing ethnic minorities like the Tatars and Chinese oppressing Uighurs.
I sincerely hope that Mr. Kaplan brush off The Coming Anarchy and will return to the kind of writing that made Balkan Ghosts such a riveting and important book. I hope he turns down the political philosophy and turns up the journalism he excels at.
* For an excellent article detailing the coming water crisis that is only alluded to here, I highly recommend Jacques Leslie’s excellent and in-depth “Running Dry” in the July 2000 Harpers.
From the bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth comes a fascinating new book on the imminent global chaos that is as brilliant ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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