Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (New York: Random House). 368 pp. $28.99.

THE CONVICTION that travel is a good thing goes back at least as far as Seneca, who observed, “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” G.K. Chesterton would add an important caveat: “They say travel broadens the mind.” But first, he added, “you must have the mind.” James Boswell, who embarked upon a grand tour of Europe in his twenties, had it. So did Benjamin Disraeli when he visited the Middle East as a youth. Then there is the Marquis de Custine, who wrote what is probably the finest account of the Russian Empire. In modern times, however, too many literary travelers set off on their journeys to confirm what they already want to believe, like lawyers in search of fresh evidence to achieve a preconceived verdict.

This is especially true of ideologues with intellectual pretensions whose travel experiences are often little more than international cherry-picking expeditions undertaken to gather selective facts, factoids, and emotional impressions to confirm their existing prejudices and state of mind. T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a classic example of an intellectual writing a powerful, sometimes brilliant narrative that, for all its merits, is fatally flawed by its author’s unresolved emotional conflicts, his desperate desire to portray himself as something he is not, and, ultimately, his inability to view his experience of World War I desert warfare and the awakening of modern Arab nationalism with anything approaching objectivity. The result was great travel literature wrapped around a rousing, semi-fictitious adventure yarn, viewed through the cracked emotional lens of Lawrence himself: good reading and bad history.

The truth is that travel can just as easily narrow the mind as broaden it. Much depends on the heft of the traveler’s emotional and ideological baggage. This is probably why the best modern writers in the genre tend to travel light.

Enter Robert Kaplan. Kaplan’s latest book, Adriatic, is a marvelous mix of history, literature, atmospherics, and personal insight all focused on the little world-within-a-world whose shores are lapped by the Adriatic Sea. While only a modest inlet of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic is where East and West meet and intermingle in the Balkans; it is where Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, Habsburg, and—in the twentieth century—fascist and communist empires clashed and sometimes coexisted amidst mixed populations of Muslims, Jews, and both Eastern and Western Christians. In his subtitle, Kaplan calls it a “Concert of Civilizations,” but, at least so far, the concert has been the uneven work of many different composers, performed by an orchestra with no maestro in evidence. If this complicates Kaplan’s task, it also makes it all the more timely. For the challenges and conflicts that most of our larger world faces today—the rival pulls of regionalism, nationalism, language, religion, ethnicity, and globalization, the blurring of shared strategic interests and loyalties in the post-Cold War era, and the fading of faith in traditional religions and mores—have all been playing out in the Adriatic world for centuries, indeed for millennia.

FROM THE outset, Kaplan makes an eloquent case for exploring foreign societies:

A journey of the mind, the scope of the journey is limitless, encompassing all manner of introspection and concerned with the great debates and issues of our age. The glossy travel magazines, selling pure fantasy as they often do – with photo spreads of delectable fashion models set against backgrounds of Third World splendor – manifest nothing so much as boredom. This has nothing to do with travel. Travel is psychoanalysis that starts in a specific moment of time and space ... Because you stand fully conscious before a moon and a sky that are not exactly like they are in any other place, in any other time, travel is an intensified form of consciousness, and therefore an affirmation of individual existence: that you have an identity even beyond that which the world, your family, and your friends have given you.

His modus operandi is to read deeply, keep his eyes and ears peeled, and weave together strands of the past, present, and future of the places he visits. Perhaps most importantly, he travels to learn rather than to simply confirm, which makes him the ideal guide for readers interested in expanding their understanding rather than reinforcing their assumptions. Key to his approach to travel is that, “you must do so alone!” We see, hear, feel and understand more of what is going on around us in unfamiliar surroundings when we travel alone rather than in a familiar—or familial—cocoon. 

Kaplan’s journey begins at Rimini on Italy’s northern Adriatic coast, very much a part of the European past, but now an elegant—if somewhat frayed—period piece, which may explain Kaplan’s almost apologetic opening lines:

The geopolitical map of Europe has moved south, back to the Mediterranean, where Europe borders Africa and the Middle East. The Mediterranean has now begun to achieve a fluid classical coherence, uniting continents. But explaining this will take time. It involves philosophy, poetry, and landscapes before I can get to international relations. So bear with me.

Fair enough. But a little bit of Sigismundo Malatesta, a colorful Italian Renaissance soldier of fortune and slayer of Muslim infidels, and of Ezra Pound, the gifted but crankish and unabashedly fascist American poet who memorialized Malatesta in his Cantos, goes a long way. In this opening chapter, the reader is served overly generous portions of both, relieved by some lucid contemporary context:

Of course, there were many other factors to consider besides Christendom’s development and articulation in opposition to Islam. Throughout the Cold war, for example, America had paid the security bill so that European societies could afford generous social welfare states. America also protected Europe from the Soviet Union, whose internal chaos for a decade after its demise did not much affect Europe either. But now, along with the millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, quasi-Asiatic Russia threatens to slowly undermine Europe ... Everything I see here is so beautiful, I realize – erotic even. It is like paradise.

But, Kaplan adds, there is also “a sense of poignancy ... It is as though what I am seeing in the streets and the cafés [of Rimini] is already being consigned to the past.” Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine may have awakened even dozing Rimini. Support for NATO, transatlantic and European Union solidarity, and a new general European awareness of security threats may mean that the somnolence that took hold at the end of the Cold War was more of a catnap than a coma. Russian military aggression—and Chinese economic overreach—may actually be breathing new life into the old framework of what started out as Christendom and gradually morphed into the Free West. Whether this will prove a true turning point or merely a momentary spurt of energy on an irreversible road to decline remains to be seen.

NEXT KAPLAN visits Ravenna, nerve center of the dying Roman Empire in the West, and site of the first significant post-Roman successor state, the viable—though short-lived—“kingdom” headed by a cultivated “barbarian.” The barbarian in question was the Ostrogoth leader Theodoric who, in the words of Procopius, “was a usurper yet in fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning, and love for him among the Goths and Italians grew to be great.” He also won high marks from Edward Gibbon, who extolled “the visible peace and prosperity of ... [Theodoric’s] reign of thirty-three years, the unanimous esteem of his own times, and the memory of his wisdom and courage, justice and humanity...” Theodoric’s achievement did not long survive him but it was an early, “Adriatic” example of how successor states to a dead or dying empire can sometimes preserve and revive some of its finer qualities and govern by some of its better values. In this respect, Theodoric was a sort of Adriatic proto-Charlemagne, anticipating what Charlemagne would later realize on a grander scale in the heart of Europe.

Kaplan’s peregrinations take him, of course, to Venice, where an isolated city-state, surrounded by protective lagoons, and influenced by the cultural and commercial heritage of both Rome and Byzantium, would become the first mercantile republic—a sea-going commercial empire that was really more of a multinational trading company headquartered in Venice but engaged in trade from India to the Middle East to Europe. The Serene Republic, as it called itself, was founded before the Renaissance and survived all the way through the Age of Enlightenment, only to be overrun by a youthful, pre-imperial Napoleon Bonaparte as part of his triumphal Italian campaigns in the 1790s. Venice is followed by Trieste, part of the Habsburg domains—and subsequent Austro-Hungarian Empire—from 1382 to 1918. It is now an Italian city by nationality but with many visible traces of its long Habsburg past everywhere in public buildings, theaters, and a lingering haze of Viennese charm and imperial grandeur of days gone by. This remains true, in varying extents, in towns and cities throughout what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not just its Adriatic coast.

SPEAKING FOR myself, I’ve always had a particular soft spot for the Habsburg empire, and I suspect Kaplan does as well. In the 1970s I had the good fortune of becoming friends with the last of the Viennese waltz and operetta kings, Austrian composer-conductor Robert Stolz, and collaborating with him on his memoirs. Robert was born in Graz, the capital city of Styria, the Austrian province bordering Slovenia. His mother and father ran a music academy and, as a boy, he met Viennese friends of his father including Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner, who couldn’t stand each other but both liked Robert’s dad. On a visit to Vienna, the young Robert met Johann Strauss II who encouraged him to concentrate on Viennese light music once he completed his classical studies. Robert did, and he landed his first conducting post before his twentieth birthday. It was as music director at the provincial opera house at Marburg an der Drau (now Maribor, Slovenia), a short train ride from Robert’s native Graz.

It turned out that the “orchestra” he had been hired to conduct consisted of half a dozen musicians who couldn’t read sheet music but were able to memorize almost anything after hearing it played once on the piano. Later in life, Robert would be a guest conductor for many of the finest orchestras in the world, but he swore that he never encountered more raw, intuitive musical talent than he had with his “orchestra” in Marburg.

His first big career breakthrough was as a musical director in the major opera house at Brünn (now Brno in the Czech Republic). There, he coached a very talented young girl named Mitzi Jedlichka who would later gain fame as Maria Jeritza, one of the greatest operatic sopranos of her time and a star of many Metropolitan Opera productions. Stolz then moved on to Vienna where, as music director at the Theater an der Wien, he conducted the original production of his friend Franz Lehar’s immortal operetta, The Merry Widow. Lehar, incidentally, had been born in Hungary and, before achieving success as a composer, had served as a navy bandmaster at the Austro-Hungarian port city of Pola (now Pula, Croatia). On a more personal note, Stolz would later be cuckolded by the third of his five wives when she engaged in an affair with an Italian-speaking drummer playing in the dance band at the Park Hotel in Abbazia (now Opatija, Slovenia) while Robert and his wife were vacationing in what was then a leading seaside resort on the old Austro-Hungarian—and Adriatic—Riviera.

Stolz, a Catholic and certified “Aryan,” became a voluntary exile from Austria after the 1938 Anschluss annexed it to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. He would, among other things, receive two Academy Award nominations for his musical contributions to American films before returning to Vienna after the war. There, in 1967, he conducted a gala performance of Die Fledermaus attended by Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito, an ethnic Slovenian who had served as a cavalry sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the outset of World War I. Despite his conversion to South Slav nationalism and communism while a Russian prisoner of war, Tito had never lost his youthful taste for Viennese operettas, and was so impressed by Robert’s conducting that he spontaneously awarded him the “Order of the Yugoslav Flag with Gold Band,” the highest Yugoslavian award for artists. This was an appropriate gesture coming from the charismatic dictator whom historian Claudio Magris characterized as, symbolically, the last of the Habsburg emperors, holding Yugoslavia together by “a mixture of benevolence and repression in true imperial style.” While these events took place in what are now five different sovereign nations, they were all part of a single political and cultural superstructure at the time: the magnificent—but rather creaky—Austro-Hungarian Empire.

MORE THAN a century after that empire died, its echoes still resound throughout much of Mitteleuropa and the Adriatic. Kaplan illuminates this phenomenon by alluding to a 1935 story by Joseph Roth, the journalist and novelist who grew up in Galicia and who lamented the passing of the old empire as much as he detested the way Nazism filled much of the power vacuum it left behind. He ended up dying while exiled in Paris after the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. According to Kaplan,

[Roth’s] story, “The Bust of the Emperor,” [is] about an elderly count at the chaotic fringe of the former Habsburg Empire, who refused to think of himself as a Pole or an Italian, even though his ancestry encompassed both. In his mind, the only mark of “true nobility” was to be a “man above nationality,” in the Habsburg tradition. “My old home, the Monarchy alone,” the count says, “was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men.” Such a patriotism is almost contemporary, even futuristic, in its character. Indeed, the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, Roth wrote presciently, had as their backdrop the collapse of the empires and the rise of uniethnic states, with Fascist and Communist leaders replacing the power of traditional monarchs.

After Trieste, we head south along the Adriatic’s eastern coast to areas now flying the flags of Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania. The last stop is Corfu, Greece’s northernmost island just off the coast of Albania and, like Albania, once ruled by Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy.

Behind the new national flags of Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro—and in landlocked neighboring states like Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina—lies a tangled web of conflicting imperial ties, both dynastic and religious. Slovenia and Croatia, Catholic and governed by the Habsburgs for centuries, identify strongly and unambiguously with the “West” while still ethnically and linguistically “Slavic.” Bosnia’s Muslim majority, and centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule before its annexation by Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century, exert a different ancestral pull, as do Orthodox Christian Montenegro and Macedonia, and Muslim-majority Kosovo and Albania.

Superficially at least, the degree of “Western-ness” decreases steadily as Kaplan heads south along the Adriatic’s eastern coast until his terminal destination at Corfu, where the Greek flag flies and a uniquely Greek sensibility—in some ways European and even cosmopolitan, but still Greek to the core—prevails. No Slavic melancholy here and certainly no regimentation, as Kaplan points out with a simple twilight vignette:

Before sunset, on a weekday no less, the cafés and restaurants are absolutely jammed with people: grandparents, parents, and young children all together, the latter of whom noisily scamper around the tables while the fathers sip ouzo and the mothers nurse babies. Family. This is the true indestructibleness of Greece, despite economic depression and populism, and it is true of the Mediterranean in general, where the generations are not isolated from each other by technology and loneliness to the degree that they are elsewhere. There are no family scenes quite as poignant as Greek ones, where alcohol is not taboo, but something children grow up with and therefore do not abuse; nor is there quite the chicness of Italy or the sloppiness of the postmodern West. In the grounded stability of this evening crowd ... I sense something eternal. And then, of course, there is the language, which, with its gyrating phonetic eruptions, is meant for the stage as much as its ancient counterpart.

Of course, there is a down side as well, and Kaplan is not blind to it. In Greece, a Greek friend tells him, the emphasis on strong family ties can also lead to corruption, since family norms have historically outweighed legal and ethical standards. Ever since the consolidation of the modern Greek state in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been “an implicit bargain between government and people: we will give you little but we will also take little from you.” While much less severe than in nearby Montenegro and Albania, “Greece remains arguably among the more corruptly governed states in Western Europe, though this has been changing lately.”

There’s an important lesson here, and one worth remembering in a world where too many of our choices must still be made between greater and lesser evils: “Don’t ever think that an economic depression—as devastating as what America experienced in the early 1930s—has damaged Greece as much as half a century of Stalinism has done to Albania.” For all of its divisive, often extreme political rhetoric, Greece is “something you can hold on to. It never did leave the Eurozone. It never did crumble into anarchy, as many had predicted a few years before.”

Which, once the dust settled after the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, can be said of the Adriatic in general: it didn’t succumb to the anarchy so many had predicted. And since Kaplan chose the Adriatic to serve as a microcosm of what is going on in the larger world during what he sees as the end years of the modern age of large nation-states, perhaps “not crumbling into anarchy” is a practical—and achievable—goal for the scary new world of postmodernism. Mass migrations cannot be stopped, but borders can be maintained and the flow of immigration regulated. For all its flaws, the European Union has provided a rational overlay for Europe. Its strength may lie in its very weakness: its inability to become an imperial superstate while still regulating and encouraging the free flow of goods, services, knowledge, and technology among its very idiosyncratic member nations.

KAPLAN CLOSES with a sketchy, half-formed vision of a “neo-medieval” future with small but autonomous and economically strong city-states and other micro polities after the fashion of Singapore. In this vision, the Gulf states play a role akin to the city of Venice’s medieval maritime trade network, or of the Hanseatic League of commercial city-states in the Baltic in late medieval and early modern Mitteleuropa. Vision or pipe dream? At the moment, the conventional, old order of Western democracies seems to be more vigorous than it was in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, thanks in large measure to Putin overplaying his rather rusty iron hand in Ukraine. And there is no evidence that the “mystic chords of memory,” as embodied by a sense of place, a common language, and shared values, will prove evanescent. Europe is back, and Kaplan’s erudite and humane study offers an exemplary guide to it.

Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts for American and overseas publications.

Image: Reuters.