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

Robert D. Kaplan, “In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania,”  Random House, 2016, 233 pp.

Robert David Kaplan is the author of many books on foreign affairs and travel. In 1973 he began what would become a lifelong pursuit focusing, reporting, and journeying through the Balkans and Romania.  Areas he mostly had to himself as a roving reporter up to 1989.  He is a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and is chief analyst at Stratfor. 

This current book is written from Kaplan’s perspective as a traveler in Romania beginning in 1973 and continuing thru 2014, letting the reader discover how Kaplan became Kaplan.  I felt I personally knew the author as the book went on.

 It is interesting how Romania was Fascist, with all that entailed including transportation of Jews to the death-camps; then Communist (to an extreme best compared to North Korea when Ceausescu was in charge); to today’s EU membership.  Russia, under Putin, is again a threat to Romania as shown by their encroachment into the Ukraine and Crimea.

I am somewhat disappointed that the author does not explain how the elites and their power structure, under Ceausescu, just disappeared after his execution.  This sure did not happen in Iraq.  Should North Korea execute its dictator you can be sure the current power structure would mostly remain.  It will be equally interesting to follow events in today’s Cuba.

My Notes:

Pg. xxxii:  The loss of Eastern Europe to Stalin had its roots in Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler at Munich in 1938.  Great Britain’s and France’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler’s Germany had damaged the reputation of the West in Eastern Europe even before WWII.  It was during this 1930’s era that the Communists were most associated with standing up to the Nazis.  Furthermore, it was the disunity of the Eastern European states themselves that had facilitated the Soviet Union’s conquest and continued hold over the region following the war. 

Pg. 16:  In 1981 Ceausescu’s extreme Stalinist Communism in Romania was even an affront to the Soviet leadership itself, which had moved beyond Stalinism more than a quarter century earlier and had long tired of Ceausescu. However, Ceausescu’s leadership represented a tolerated variant within Moscow’s imperial system.

Pg. 22:  The author’s disgust with Ceausescu’s leadership led him two decades later to support the US effort to topple Saddam—a mistake he regrets to this day.  He later realized that Ceausescu probably could not have fallen any sooner than he did.  The specific act of removing a tyrant could only rarely be the work of foreigners.  The advisers around Reagan were men who understood that as awful as such regimes as Ceausescu’s and Saddam’s were, in the end their subjects would have to liberate themselves.  Reagan and the men around him never would have countenanced the kind of military action chosen in Iraq.

 Pg. 47:  Romania joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2004 and the European Union (EU) in 2007.  No sooner had they joined than the EU itself fell into the greatest crisis of its existence: a mountain of debt spiraling out of control that put the future of the welfare state—the political and moral response to centuries of war and suffering on the Continent—in doubt. 

Pg. 77:  The attraction of the postmodern European Union, in spite of all its difficulties, constitutes a desire on the part of the peoples of the former Communist states—from the Baltics to the Balkans—to escape the strictures of modern nationalism and enter a world of individual rights beyond ethnicity.

Pg. 101: When Gheorghiu-Dej died on March 19, 1965, Ceausescu became first secretary of the Romanian Communist Party.  Ceausescu represented the lumpen urban peasantry.  Ceausescu’s 1971 visits to China under Mao Zedong and North Korea under Kim II Sung constituted a turning point.  Rather than being repelled at those two totalitarian systems, Ceausescu and his increasingly powerful wife, Elena, were suddenly envious of the mass mobilization and perfectly choreographed pageants in celebration of the tyrant that characterized Mao’s and Kim’s leadership style.  The Ceausescu’s henceforth embarked on a methodical plan to turn Romania into an Eastern European version of North Korea.  A key feature of this plan was systematization, a crackpot scheme to reduce the number of Romania’s villages by half by the year 2000, requiring the destruction of thousands of them.  Though systematization was only in its early stages by the time the Ceausescu’s were executed in 1989, the very concept embodied much of the dehumanizing and maniacal aspects of their Stalinist ideology.

Pg. 148:  Putin’s aggression plainly has put Romania and Moldova/Bessarabia in the front-line states in what some have dubbed a ‘new Cold War’ which has erupted in 2014. 

Pg. 190:  Metternich was a man of peace who believed in legal states, not in ethnic nations.  States are sanctioned bureaucratic systems governed by the rule of law; ethnic nations are ruled by blood-and-soil passion, the very enemy of moderation and analysis.  Given Europe’s present situation, with right-wing nationalist parties banging at the door of a fragile EU, Metternich’s efforts at conserving the status quo are truly relevant. 

Pg. 194:  The European Union’s expansion in the first decade of the twenty-first century to included Poland, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, together with their incorporation into NATO, has represented much of the security needs that Poland’s Pilsudski foresaw long ago, even if Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and the countries of the Transcaucasus lie stranded in the neither-nor geopolitical landscape of the EU’s eastern Partnership, which has offered insufficient protection against the designs of Russia. 

Pg. 218:  Empires with monarchs were cruel in their way but also allowed a mechanism of intercommunal coexistence, where borders and identities built on race, language, and religion mattered less, since everyone obeyed the same sovereign.  The horrors of the twentieth century in Europe had as their backdrop the collapse of empires and the rise of modern, uni-ethnic states, with fascist and communist leaders replacing the power of traditional monarchs.  We still live in the aftershocks of that nightmare.  No solution had as yet been found in the Middle East for the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.  Can the EU endure to permanently solve the riddle of the collapse of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire?