In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

Robert D. Kaplan is one of my favorite authors and I’ve read all his books and many of his magazine articles. I especially enjoy the way he examines a region or locale by blending history, current events, politics, and interviews with residents ranging from government officials to clergymen — all the while in the guise of a curious traveler.In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond marks Kaplan’s return to Europe after an extended run of primarily focusing on Asia. In many ways this is a bookend to his breakout Balkan Ghosts, as he explains how he came to travel through the region in the first place. I have Romanian in my ancestry, but admit to knowing less about the country than I would like. I greatly enjoyed filling in some of the blanks with Kaplan as my guide.Other reviewers have noted Kaplan’s strong, vocal support of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and expressed the opinion that his stance effectively disqualifies him from serving as any kind of expert on foreign affairs. I’d counter that he has repeatedly acknowledged he was wrong about Iraq and his recent writing, especially this book, demonstrates a determination to identify and inform on emerging trends and locations of potential interest without drawing too many conclusions. In my (obviously biased) opinion, he is too valuable a source to ignore; whether I agree with his views or not, I always learn a lot from him.

When my wife accepted a position to teach in Bucharest, Romania, I went online to look for books on Romania, and at the top of the list I found Robert D. Kaplan's In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016). I hadn't known about it, but I certainly knew of Kaplan. I'd read his The Coming Anarchy (2000) and Warrior Politics (2001) and thought very highly of them both. I'd also read parts of The Ends of the Earth (2001) and Monsoon (2010). What a wonderful discovery! I dove in, and part way through I recommended it to my wife as we were running errands on our e-bike around Suzhou."Do you know this guy?", she asked."Yes, I've read his stuff. He's good. He's also written books about the Indian Ocean and India, and about China, Vietnam, and the South China Sea.""Is he following us?""I don't know!"In checking the publication dates of Monsoon (2010)) and Asia's Cauldron (March 2014), I determined that we were following him. Anyone acquainted with Kaplan won't be surprised at this. He must need a new 50-page passport every couple of years just based on the published accounts of his travels. (I wonder where he vacations?) No, we're just very lucky, especially with this book.We're especially fortunate to have this book because Kaplan hasn't just passed through Romania or considered as just another piece on the geopolitical chessboard. He's been traveling to Romania since the 1970's, and he's seen it transformed from a gray, Stalinist backwater, racked by poverty and fear, into a what is now a vibrant society that holds membership in the EU and NATO. Romania seems to have found a good place for itself. As Kaplan describes it: "History surely had not ended here, but it had for the moment become more benign." Kindle Locations 3916-3917. Kaplan displays a genuine affection for this nation, and this spurs his interest in its history and its present, as well as prompting him multiple visits to contemplate its unique place in the busy world of Eastern Europe.Kaplan first traveled to eastern Europe as a student in the early 1970s, and then he came a bit later to Romania as a young reporter. Trips back included a stint just after the Christmas Revolution in 1989 that toppled the hated Ceausescu regime and led to the summary trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. His most recent trip back was in 2014, when he observed the changes that have occurred in Romania after it has mostly-completed the transition to democracy and a market economy. This long history of personal involvement allows Kaplan to include not only his trademark travel writing, history, and geopolitical analysis, but it also serves as a bit of a memoir. For instance, his observations and assessment of the brutality and waste of the Ceaucescu regime prompted him to support the Iraq War, a judgment that he reports that he has come to regret. (A pointed reminder of the limits of historical analogy for decision-making.) As he notes, he didn't foresee the subsequent Sunni-Shia civil war that would break out after Saddam's demise.Romania is a fascinating country, and Kaplan's draws on the distant past, the recent past, and the present to create his portrait of this country. Romania is a Westen outpost in eastern Europe. Romanian is a Romance language, closely related to Italian and Spanish (and, I'm thrilled to report, not very difficult to learn). Romania identifies with the West, yet the thread of culture passes via the Romanian Orthodox Church, anchored in the tradition of Byzantium and the cultural heritage of Orthodoxy. Also, the Ottoman, Russian, and Hapsburg empires have exerted influences on this land through which the Danube flows to reach the Black Sea. Kaplan explains that the intellectual class, including prominent figures that reached maturity in the 1930s, such as Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran, were attracted to the political Right, not the Left, unlike most western European intellectuals. Romania suffered the influence of the Iron Guard, a fascist movement that helped prompt Romania to ally with Hitler in the early period of war. Its authoritarian (but not truly fascist) leader, General Antonescu, both protected some Jews (Romanians) and helped ship others to the death camps. Romania committed over a half-million troops to Hitler's war against the Soviet Union. But before the end of the war, Antonescu led Romania to switch sides and aid the Soviets against the Nazi regime. All of this intrigue didn't do Antonescu much good. He was executed immediately after the war.Through Kaplan's efforts in ancient, medieval, and modern history, we obtain a sense of the complexities of this culture and its political fortunes. His tour of the country, as well as neighboring Moldova (also Romanian speaking) and a foray into Hungary (now under a regime administering a "diet of low-calorie Putinism") gives us a further historical perspective. But also, in the tradition of great travel writing, Kaplan provides an intense sense of the present. (Among the several travel writers he mentions, Patrick Leigh Fermor gets a special mention, "that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule". Kindle Locations 732-734). I've now begun Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water--just the prompt that I needed to uncork this champaign of travel writing.) From churches and monasteries to castles and homes, we get an engrossing sense of these places and the people who inhabit them. When my wife and I travel in Romania, we'll consult my Kaplan as much as our Lonely Planet.In all, the publication date of this work (February 9, 2016) could not have been better timed or more welcome. Kaplan's complex layering of history, personal observation, and geopolitical analysis creates the perfect primer for anyone wanting to explore this fascinating nation and its environs. Or it's a treat for anyone who simply wants to enjoy the work of a master of observation and analysis. As Kaplan writes of Fermor, so I would of Kaplan: "to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him." Id.

It's about Romanian geography, history, culture, politics, geo-politics... Also a very personal travel memoir. Tucked in there, as if you could fit more into the same pages, there's a great review of travel memoirs about Romania, and a gloss over the history of Europe in the 20th Century.What Robert D. Kaplan brings out is the incredible diversity packed into a small country that is still working to discover itself and its place in the mega-globalized world of today. For Romania to find itself, having fresh eyed perspective from the outside is essential, and Mr. Kaplan provides that.His book, in other words, may help outsiders understand Romania, and also helps Romanians understand Romania... But the best part, I think, and what stitches it all together is the very personal touch present throughout the book. The narrator describes not only what he sees but how he is touched and changed by what he's seeing, all painted onto a canvass of other past things he experienced or read - in short, a true intellectual journey, at once personal as it is universal in its reach and in its message.

This is a fascinating and in-depth cultural, political, and military study of a country most people couldn't locate on a map. Kaplan captures the thrill of visiting an Eastern European country and experiencing the zeitgeist of its peoples. I just visited the country, and Romanians deserve more attention and more study as a critical and close ally of the United States. It has the feeling of a country on the move and very happy to be part of the West again. I'm glad Kaplan chose to write this book, probably fully aware that the sales would not come close to matching his other books.

I've learned to turn to Kaplan for deepening my understanding of current geo-political realities by his illuminating comments and detailed descriptions of the past. I postponed reading In Europe's Shadow until I had first read Balkan Ghosts, his first examination of the Balkans with a special emphasis on Romania. I strongly recommend reading Ghosts first as doing so helped me put today's Romania in perspective. I was surprised by what I learned of Russia's current and on-going efforts at weakening Romania and other states that are on the West's border with Russia.

It is fantastic that someone as eminent as Robert Kaplan should write a book about Romania. For such a big and important country it is really extraordinary how little is written about it in English. Kaplan's style is part analyst and part reportage which works well and the fact that he has known the country for so long gives the book real depth. He also has a chapter about Moldova. The last phase of research was done in 2014 so a lot has happened since, (eg., the billion dollar bank theft in Moldova and the rise of the DNA anti-corruption unit in Romania,) but overall this book fills a really huge gap. In a couple of places the text drags a little. Kaplan tackles Putin's subversion of Romania and Moldova and points out that you don't need boots on the ground to do this anymore. There is too much marvelling about churches, ecclesiastical chanting and meeting priests and nothing significant about Romania's single biggest problem which is emigration and demographic collapse but, as there is actually no other book on modern Romania, Kaplan deserves congratulations on writing something which fills a big gap but is hardly going to be a best seller given the subject.

As someone who spent years with a Romanian partner, I’m grateful a book like this is even available to read.Kaplan’s view is that you have to be frank about the worst of a country, before you can make a case for building on the best of it.For the author, the worst of Romania lies in a history of successive leaders who tried to play both sides, leaving Romania, still today, with a weak institution after centuries of opportunism and trying to survive as a sovereign state between East and West.The problem for me is that it’s unclear what good Kaplan sees in Romania, and what credit he wants to give the country other than it’s use to the EU as an ally against current-day Russia’s influence.Maybe i struggled to see what positives Kaplan credits Romania with, because i skipped a lot of the travel writing where he details his journey from Bucuresti to Giurgiu, then leaving the country to visit Moldova and Hungary. The travel writing didn’t work for me. It was a series of separate articles strung together, where Kaplan often gives room to his interviews with philosophers and church members to make the argument you have to observe the past to give perspective on the present and future.I agree more with political science writers like Francis Fukayama that the past is useful, but that history and technology combine to give moments where we express our ideas, our belonging and our desires in ways simply not possible before. Whereas writers like Kaplan rely heavily on analysing the merit of nostalgia and nostalgia alone.His painting of current-day Russia’s growth in the Balkans as nothing but another Cold War is a very limited way to look at things, in my view.His nostalgia for the Byzantine empire means he dismisses any modern new buildings in Romania as, he labels most architecture that came out of the Communist era as “monolithic” while claiming that Romania’s possible future as part of the West and EU is already “muticolor”. This division in the author’s head is overdone, and i felt like i couldn’t really trust the nostalgia-coloured glasses he was wearing as he travelled around the country.But i am grateful the book even exists, and there’s a lot of political detail worth reading here to shed light on Romania’s legacy.

I guess it depends on what you are expecting. I was hoping for a more conventional history of modern Romania. Instead there's a lot of personal reminiscences littered with passing references to other authors and commentators on the Romanian situation. All very erudite but not really what I was hoping for. It is no doubt a great book, based on what other reviewers have said, but not for me.

Great narrative of the trials and tribulations of Romania, if from the slightly odd perspective of an Israeli-American. Traveller who apparently got to see and interview various Romanian shakers and movers. A bit annoyingly autobiographical, but interesting nevertheless for his take on the progress of civilization.... that is read lots of important books (as he has).

Kaplan covers a range of thoroughly researched historical contexts whilst also offering his personal impressions from his travels. The excellent writing, interviews and modern relevance keep up the pace from the dryer historical retellings.