The Books: “The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy ” (Robert Kaplan)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert Kaplan. This might be my favorite of his. Hard to say. It’s certainly the one I have read more than once. There’s so much in it it gets a bit overwhelming. You also feel like: “Well, at least HE goes to West Africa, so I don’t have to.” He travels through these regions, talking to people, taking busses (he insists that’s the best way to get to know a country, to see how things are working), introducing us to people – Despite the – I wouldn’t call it pessimism – I would call it world-weary realism of his outlook, I don’t find it to be a totally depressing book (although the section in Africa is unremittingly bleak). Kaplan definitely,like I said before, sees things in a certain way. He wears his Kaplan goggles at all times. Of course. It’s his perspective.

I’m going to excerpt a part from the book when he travels through Central Asia, with an Uzbek guide named Ulug Beg. (Obviously, he was very proud of being named after this man.) Look at me – linking to myself as though I’m some expert. I’m really not. But I did write about Ulug Beg, so there you go.

Kaplan brings up Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order – the influential, controversial, and alarming book – in this excerpt.

From The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert Kaplan.

Ulug Beg’s hostility, however atypical, toward Tajiks reminded me of the cracked Greek tombstone in the Tashkent cemetery, of the Iranians’ fear of Turks, of the tensions between Turks and Arabs over the damming of the Euphrates, of the Moslem violence against Copts in Upper Egypt, and other ethno-cultural tensions I had observed in the course of my travels. Was this evidence of what Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order?

The world, Huntington argues, has been moving in our century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict and, finally, to culture conflict. I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world — turning them into vast villages — national borders will mean less, while political power falls increasingly into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, “First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic,” involving, among other things, history, language, and religion. “Second … the interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness.”

Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Moslem, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations.

Because Huntington’s brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal to Huntington’s argument, John Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi’ite who certainly knows the world beyond the ivory-tower America universities, writes in the September-October 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs:

The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus … are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interest of states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal … to the wind … in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia.

True, Huntington’s hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has misidentified which civilizational war is occurring there. Azeri Turks, perhaps the world’s most secular Shi’ite Moslems, see their cultural identity not in terms of religion but in terms of the Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Moslems, but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages adopting a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by the Teheran clergy, and wed to an Arabic script across Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans, the Iranians.

Huntington may be correct to say that the Caucasus is a flash point of cultural and racial wars. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington’s terms are too simple. While Turks are growing deeply distrustful and coming to hate Moslem Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish political life, identifying themselves increasingly as Moslems, betrayed by a West that for several years did little to help besieged Moslems in Bosnia and which attacks Turkish Moslems in the streets of Germany.

To go a step further, the Balkans, where nation-state wars flared at the beginning of the twentieth century, have been on the verge of culture conflict between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of somewhat-sympathetic Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the worldwide House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus, Islam is subdividing into a class between Turks and Iranians. Ajami rightly asserts that this very subdividing, not to mention th emany divisions within the Arab world, indicate that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington’s scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West can still play one part of the House of Islam against another.

“The Clash of Civilizations” is a romantic term, conjuring up massive armies divided by race, language, and religion, advancing across battlefields thousands of miles long, wielding banners of the cross and of the crescent. The reality is different. The desecration of Greek and Russian Orthodox tombstones by a Moslem Uzbek mob in Tashkent was an isolated incident ignited by specific, local factors — like other isolated events, such as a war between Moslems and Orthodox Christians in Bosnia; a decades-long war of words, wiht occasional bloodshed, between a Greek Orthodox government in Athens and a Turksih Moslem government in Ankara; the forced exodus, earlier in the twentieth century, of Greek Orthodox communities from Istanbul, Smyrna, and the Turkish-Moslem-controlled Black Sea coast; and the tensions between various Russian Orthodox and Turkic Moslem communities in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. But these events, taken as a whole, have more to do with historically based religious and ethnic differences than with modern state loyalties. So for such events, Huntington’s civilization clash is an appropriate term — as a crude organizing principle.

But the reality is uglier, more complex, and pathetic. Forget about medieval horsemen giving battle; expect instead a fistfight with smashed vodka bottles in a plywood bar. For the moment, a civilizations competition may exist between the Turkic and Iranian peoples for future trade routes in Central Asia — routes, that for the most part haven’t yet been built, with the battle so far being fought with charts and anemic statements within bureaucrats’ offices. It is a competition that the Russians are joining: The Russians want to upstage both Turkey’s plan to transport Central Asian oil across Anatolia to the Mediterranean and Iran’s plan to tranport the oil to the Persian Gulf with their own plan to ship oil through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus straits. As some states have become increasingly identified with old caravan routes, this might lead to conflict. Meanwhile, what I saw on the ground is a Turkic Uzbek youth, Ulug Beg, pale with anger after being teased by a Persian Tajik woman.

Schuyler’s description of the negative stereotypes harbored by Uzbeks and Tajiks for each other may still apply because of the economic and social disorder arising from seventy-four years of communist rule, and the weaking of other constraints. From Schuyler’s day through 1991, Uzbeks and Tajiks were all subjects of a single authority: the czar, and then the commissar. There was no territory for them to fight over, just as there was none in the Balkans in the days of the Ottoman empire. But now, with very fragile states with little tradition behind them and little logic to their borders, the tensions a visitor notices in Central Asia are less between states than between groups both within and overlapping such states, or between inhabitants of one traditional city-state region and another. The chance that these states will shatter as a result of intensified Turkic-Iranian competition (leading to strife between Uzbeks and Tajiks), or because of economic competition within the Uzbek or Tajik communities, is probably greater than the threat of a traditional war between, say, Uzbekistan and Tajikstan — neither of whose governments can claim the loyalty of their ethnic minorities in such a circumstance, and neither of whose military frontiers coincide with ethnic ones.

All I had learned so far was that states in West Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia were weakening, and that ethnic-religious identities appeared stronger by contrast. Beyond that, I had little proof of anything.