Future Meltdown

Date: March 31, 1996, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Michael Ignatieff

A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century.
By Robert D. Kaplan.
476 pp. New York:
Random House. $27.50.

Robert D. Kaplan is an American master of a newish genre that might be called travel writing from hell. Old-style travel writers went in search of the untrammeled and the unspoiled. New-style travel writers seem to seek out Xanadus that are as trammeled and spoiled as possible. Mr.Kaplan is a connoisseur of malarial marshes, urinous bus stations, flea-bitten hotels and the louche charm of the hustlers, fixers and tramps he meets along the way. Many of the best writers in this new genre are English: Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton and Redmond O'Hanlon. Mr. Kaplan's work does not match theirs in irony, subtlety or humor, but he is their equal in political imagination.


Because he specializes in exploring the San Andreas faults of the modern geopolitical system, his books have had more influence on politicians and policy makers than most travel writing. An earlier work, ''Balkan Ghosts,'' found its way onto President Clinton's Bosnia reading list, and the President reportedly came away less inclined to intervene because of Mr. Kaplan's emphasis on the ancient and intractable character of Balkan feuds. ''The Coming Anarchy'' -- Mr. Kaplan's 1994 Atlantic Monthly article -- was intended as a plea for Western engagement with the problems of the third world, but its nightmare scenario of spreading civil war, ecological disaster and demographic explosion hardly engendered much optimistic activism.

''The Ends of the Earth'' is a continuation of the argument in ''The Coming Anarchy,'' and it is likely to have the same ambiguous impact. He wants us to care about the places he visits, but the story he tells is so disturbing that both policy makers and general readers are more likely to pull the covers over their heads. This would be a shame, for the question Mr. Kaplan keeps asking is essential to global survival: why are some third-world societies successfully coping with resource depletion and population growth while others are going under?

Mr. Kaplan's journey in search of answers begins in Sierra Leone in West Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is the disaster story of his tale: rocketing population, unraveling families, uncontrolled flight to the cities, radical deforestation, raging civil wars and states disintegrating under the strain. Apologists for Africa put this down to slavery or colonialism or the bad old first world, but Mr. Kaplan insists that these are excuses. When Ghana became independent in 1957, for instance, it had a G.N.P. equal to that of South Korea. Now South Korea -- less richly endowed in natural resources than Ghana -- is exporting cars and television sets to Africa.

In Egypt, Mr. Kaplan's next destination, the same factors -- uncontrolled population growth, urban chaos and environmental despoliation -- are putting society under severe strain. But Islam's fierce disciplines are keeping the social fabric from going the way of Sierra Leone; and the Egyptian state, ''a calcifying, Ozymandian monolith'' -- as Mr. Kaplan calls it -- is still unevenly in control. But food scarcity and an exploding population, he predicts, will force the state either to become more authoritarian or to give way to the fundamentalists.

In Turkey, his next stop, Mr. Kaplan becomes more optimistic. Here there is the same tidal wave of people into the cities -- Istanbul has 10 million inhabitants, making it Europe's largest city -- but in slums like Golden Mountain in Ankara ''the architectural bedlam of cinder and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home -- order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants . . . and a stove. The floors were spotless and there were no bad odors.''

For these slum dwellers, the free market is an abstraction and the Turkish state is far away. What gives hope, order and discipline to their lives is what Mr. Kaplan refers to as the ''mortar'' of their society or the ''muscle tone'' of their civilization. Families have kept together through the migration from rural Anatolia to Golden Mountain, and they have hung on to their Muslim faith. Mr. Kaplan here joins those, like Francis Fukuyama, who contend that the third-world societies with the best chance of managing their entry into modernity are those, paradoxically, with deep and stabilizing reserves of tradition, culture and belief. The problem with the argument is its vagueness, and as Mr. Kaplan honestly acknowledges, tradition-rich societies like Cambodia are not managing their transitions any more effectively than Sierra Leone.

Iran, Mr. Kaplan's next stop, turns out to be less fundamentalist, less anti-American and less fanatical than the cliche's of the embassy-siege era would have it. Khomeini's moral revolution is being taken apart by women. Beneath the severity of the chador, lipstick and powder are making their appearance, and in the Teheran streets women boldly return the male gaze. Islamic asceticism is being replaced by a resurgence of Persian pride. Iran, he concludes, is much less obsessed with the Great Satan and its Israeli ally than with its own rivalry with Turkey in the huge region of the Caucasus and Central Asia left open by the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In what was Soviet Central Asia, Mr. Kaplan discovers that all social mortar seems to have given way, along with the balance between man and nature. In Samarkand and Bukhara -- favored destinations of the old genre of romantic travel writers -- Mr. Kaplan finds the fabled splendor all but buried beneath Soviet concrete. No great industrial civilization, he writes, has so systematically poisoned its land, water and people. The view from the bus on the road from Samarkand to Bukhara is of ecological devastation:

''There was no shade. Here and there were the iron-roofed blockhouses of collective farms, with walls of cinder blocks and dried mud. There was no sign that a copse of trees had ever been planted here or a fence painted; no sign of anything personal.''

On overnight bus rides through this blighted landscape, Mr. Kaplan encounters drunken, violent, disoriented Russians, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Uighurs, who, having lost a land to love, have lost their own identities. The Soviet empire has been replaced by ''bazaar states,'' run by local ethnic mafias, but these in turn are being rapidly eroded as Turkey, Iran and China seek to extend their cultural influence and economic control. Only in the province of Xinjiang in China does Mr. Kaplan find a state apparatus in this region that still works. Communism survives here as the necessary sociopolitical mortar for an emerging market system.

As he continues his journey across the high Himalayan passes from China into Pakistan, and then southwards through the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia, he sees more and more depressing evidence of states simply unable to cope. The cities of Karachi, Delhi and Bangkok are growing so fast that infrastructures are breaking down; disease, gang violence and a deadly pall of pollution are taking over. Still, Mr. Kaplan's sense of hope is restored by the Rishi Valley in south India, where he comes upon a program of reforestation and development, entirely sustained by local people.

His journey done, Mr. Kaplan arrives at some stark but also contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, he argues that no amount of aid or outside intervention is likely to turn third world states around. They must develop or recover their ''natural muscle tone'' themselves. On the other hand, he maintains that the West must remain engaged with these societies, helping them -- he does not say how -- to manage their entrance into modernity. Otherwise, disease, environmental degradation and crime will spread north. Policy makers will look in vain for advice and prescription from this grim journey.

Mr. Kaplan's general message -- that the history of the next century will be shaped not in America or in the Mediterranean basin, but by conflicts among ancient civilizations -- Turkish, Chinese, Persian, Hindu and Buddhist -- has been anticipated, in general outline, by Samuel Huntington. But Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument -- that our future is being shaped far away ''at the ends of the earth'' -- makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.



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