BOOK REVIEW. The bleak side of Europe

It sounds like a contradiction in terms: a right-wing intellectual. The fact remains that we, here in India, are blessed enough to be able to jeer and snicker contemptuously at such hollow epithets, despite having been overrun by this terrifying wave of jingoism in recent weeks. The question of why India lacks a lively culture of right-wing debate and thought, as well as a serious narrative of nationalist history, was asked some time ago by the historian Ramachandra Guha in a widely-read magazine piece.

For a convincing response to this question, though, we may want to look beyond Guha’s own essay, and consider what the French philosopher Ernest Renan, writing at the cusp of what would turn out to be Europe’s bloodiest century, had to say on this matter.

“To forget,” wrote Renan, “and get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation...and thus the advance of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.” But Robert D Kaplan reminds us in his new book, In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond , that some intellectual traditions have tended naturally to incline towards the right, with Romanian thinkers being the more prominent exemplars of this tendency.

“The idea of the ethnic nation, rooted in geography, the rural peasantry, and Latinity, has always run deep in Romanian intellectual and political life,” Kaplan writes.

The author briefly touches upon the respective biographies of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s poet laureate in the late-19th century, who “resented foreigners”; the philosopher Mircea Eliade, who called the Nazi Iron Guard a “spiritual movement...pursuing our national redemption”; and the philosopher Emil Cioran, who “fell under the sway of the fascist right”, only to repent and, in Kaplan’s words, “morally evolve” later.

This kind of selective, broad-brush analysis will always have its limits. Why would you choose to see only these thinkers as central to the Romanian canon? And why not writers like Eugene Ionesco (whom Kaplan lazily describes as the “antithesis” to the right-leaning establishment, leaving it at that)? Why not the Nobel laureate Herta Müller?

Kaplan gets away with similar oversights, since his book isn’t an intellectual history of Romania. Indeed, this book isn’t a serious work of scholarship. What Kaplan has attempted here, as in some of his previous works, is to put together a confused mishmash of travel writing, journalism, memoir, amateur history and art criticism.

Now all this works out very well when a writer like Geoff Dyer does it. But Kaplan, to put it mildly, doesn’t have the chops to handle this wide a range. Anyhow, he is more interested in intellectual posturing than actually engaging with his subject, falling back all too often on aesthetic platitudes and herd opinions.

The sight, for instance, of a Gothic church inspires him to dumbfounded contemplation, but the Soviet-era apartment blocks in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau to him appear as though “sprouted like yellowing teeth”. Ordinary men, to Kaplan, look like “slobs”, having “ashy, moldy faces”, and women, if you “scrape away the lipstick”, would reveal to him their “mournful, mealy face”. Perhaps Kaplan’s position as a top policy wonk in Washington is to blame for his patronising tone.

Moreover, here is an author who is widely considered as a right-wing intellectual himself, having, among other things, published an unabashed apologia for imperialism as a stabilising force.

The problem here is also of perceptions. Our understanding of that haphazard geopolitical entity called Eastern Europe is influenced overmuch by the region’s 20th century history — which is in the main an account of ceaseless suffering, conquest and political humiliation of the weakest nations of the continent at the hands of a few dominant powers of the era.

And so, we often tend to forget that Romania — once an outpost of the Roman Empire — was more western in a sense than even Germany was (which, confusingly, itself rebelled against the dominance of “western” Europe, i.e. Britain and France, in the 19th and early-20th centuries).

It is to Kaplan’s credit that he’s always aware of Romania’s “Latinate” past, reflected most starkly in its national language. But he is mainly interested in Romania’s journey through and beyond what he calls the “Ice Age of Communism”, choosing to see modern Romanians, and indeed modern Romania, as victims instead of regarding them as survivors. In other words, Kaplan chooses pity over sympathy.

The horror of the Ceausescu regime in Romania has few parallels in world history, except for North Korea.

Yet the Ceausescu episode comprises only a short span in Romania’s recurring historical nightmare of crushing conquests and autocratic rule. The cause for so much suffering, Kaplan suggests, lies in the country’s geography. Kaplan believes that one of Europe’s hottest geopolitical conflicts, being played out in the Ukraine now, thanks to an increasingly revanchist Russia, can have a direct bearing on Romania’s future.

Romania can best avoid another descent into chaos, Kaplan says, by strengthening its social, political and, yes, intellectual institutions. As long as Europe stands for diversity and multiculturalism it remains a bulwark against the poison of blood-and-soil nationalism that made Europe, and the rest of the world, pay such a heavy price in the last century.

Kaplan’s book, for all its faults, makes the convincing case for the whole of Europe to choose its founding principles of internationalism over its many provincial narratives of national pride.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist