An ambitious travel book that realigns the global landscape
Admirers of his 1993 bestseller Balkan Ghosts should be warned that The Ends of the Earth is quite a different kind of book. Balkan Ghosts is essentially a memoir, a loving (and well-timed) evocation of the previously obscure places Kaplan had haunted early in his career. The Ends of the Earth is very much an artifact of its moment; hence the subtitle.
The Ends of the Earth is an account of a particular journey of global scope by an experienced, thoughtful and well-informed journalist, at a particular historical moment. It is important to make this observation, because the book's true subject is a cluster of big, complex patterns and truths.
"This is a travel book," writes Kaplan in the preface. "It is concrete to the extent that my ideas arise from personal experience. It is subjective.... It is idiosyncratic.... Think of it as a brief romp through a swath of the globe, in which I try to give personal meaning to the kinds of issues raised in Paul Kennedy's Preparing for the Twenty-first Century."
Kaplan's grim assessment of Africa's prospects was one cause of the uproar over The Coming Anarchy. For the book he revisits West Africa, then moves on to Egypt, Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, then overland via the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, before visiting India briefly and moving on to South-east Asia.
Kaplan gives his readers a great deal to think about; he has realigned the global landscape in a startling yet entirely valid way that other writers must take into account. In short, he asks all the right questions—and, not surprisingly, reaches some unsettling conclusions.
With impressive quiet authority, for instance, he remarks: "This was not my first but my 10th trip to Pakistan. I had used it as a rear base to cover the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s, and had been almost everywhere in the country. Each time I returned I encountered the same trends: some things were always getting better, and many others even worse.... Pakistan has already become what the former Soviet Union is in danger of becoming: a decomposing polity based more on criminal activities than on effective government."
In a hearteningly bullish chapter on ecological and social regeneration at the Rishi Valley School founded in the 1930s by J. Krishnamurti, Kaplan writes: "Rishi Valley may be less an Indian success story than it is a human success story. Rishi Valley shows that there is hope, that we as a species will not necessarily destroy ourselves. But it also taught me that if these hopes are to be realised, then solutions must emerge locally."
The book's least strong chapter is on Thailand; a reviewer who lives in Bangkok—and breathes that city's loathsome air—can see that the chapter belongs to a genre of writing by outsiders who are too quick to credit Thailand's alleged economic "success story". But the weakness of the Thai chapter must be assessed in the context of the much greater strength of the book as a whole. At any rate, for now Thailand is more or less a success story, and Kaplan's impressions on arriving there from India (in 1994) will interest Indian readers.
"Thai doctors examined all the Indian Airlines passengers arriving from Calcutta for symptoms of plague before letting us off the plane in Bangkok," he writes. "Disease had helped erect an invisible, if penetrable,wall between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. Now, while the panic lingered, another wall stood between the Indian subcontinent and Indochina."
It is unfortunate that Kaplan did not visit Myanmar; his thoughts on that blighted land surely would have been most interesting. On the other hand, it's precisely the applicability of his thoughts on Uzbekistan to the plight of Myanmar that best illustrate the scope and great value of what he has done, as well as the troubling nature of the big questions that face the human race as it limps into the 21st century.
Citing Uzbek president Islam Karimov's ugly human rights record, he writes: "Karimov, the Nigerian generals, and others like them are betting that democracy is not the final word in political evolution. The West believes they are wrong. But what if they are right, or even partly right—in their cases? For us it's a matter of principle; for tens of millions threatened by the spectre of civil conflict, it is a matter of life and death."