Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (New York: Random House, 2016), 336 pp., $28.00.

PRINCE METTERNICH once remarked, “the Balkans start at the Rennweg.” The Hapsburg monarchy was a major player in the region for several centuries, not least as the sovereign power in Transylvania, a major part of modern-day Romania but Austro-Hungarian turf until the death of the dual monarchy after World War I. Romania itself is the quintessential Balkan country, a badly tossed salad of racial, religious and cultural bits and pieces. Like most of its neighbors, Romania is still struggling to reconstitute itself as a cohesive modern nation-state along Western European lines. Unlike neighbors such as Bulgaria, Moldova and the Ukraine, however, Romania has a vestigial link to the West that goes back nearly two thousand years.

After a series of incursions from 101 to 106 A.D., the Roman soldier-emperor Trajan annexed much of what is today Romania, giving it full status as an imperial province, Dacia Felix (“Happy Dacia,” referring to the Dacian tribes—happy or not—then inhabiting the area). The Roman imperium only lasted 165 years, but that was long enough for the natives to develop both a taste for good wine and a unique offshoot of the Latin language that sets Romanians apart from their neighbors, most of whom speak Slavic variants. To this day, anyone with a few years of prep school Latin can make fragmentary sense of Romanian newspaper stories, menus and shop placards; it really is a Romance language. It also gives the Romanian consciousness—at least among the educated class—a Western-oriented link that predates the heavy, and generally repressive, Byzantine and Ottoman Turkish influences that would dominate Romania long after the last Roman centurion was a distant memory.

At times this both inspired and clouded the vision of Romanian intellectuals, as Robert Kaplan illustrates in his superb new book In Europe’s Shadow. In analyzing an early historical work by the distinguished twentieth century Romanian philosopher, Mircea Eliade, Kaplan notes that he “became thoroughly smitten with the fascist and violently anti-Semitic Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.” To the youthful Eliade, Codreanu’s followers were, in his own words, “mainly a spiritual movement meant to bring about the new man and pursuing our national redemption . . . ” Beware the zeal of an excessive user of italics.

Just as Kemal Ataturk encouraged house academics to weave a bogus Turkish creation myth—one that erased traces of earlier Anatolian cultures like the Greeks and Armenians and fabricated the narrative of a Turkic presence long before that group had left the Asian steppes—so late nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual Romanian nationalists concocted their own creation myth composed, in about equal measure, of historical fact and romantic imagination. To understand this mindset, Kaplan quotes another passage from Eliade that sums it all up:

“There are nations whose role in history is so obvious that nobody has ever thought to question it. But there are also less happy nations, who perform quite disagreeable missions without anybody knowing it. A discreet obscure role like the one played by the Daco-Romans’ descendants, the Romanians . . . Ignored, or misunderstood at the best, the life of these nations is more intense. In addition to its tragism (sic), their history is transfigured, one may say, by a permanent divine presence . . . Incessantly attacked, they can only think while defending themselves. Their history . . . is a permanent war, for centuries on end, for their own survival. In each battle they risk everything: their right to life, to religion, to their language and culture.”

Partially true, but also self-pitying and self-deluded, Kaplan compresses this Romanian mind-set into a single sentence of his own: “In other words, not only have Romanians suffered more than other European peoples, but their suffering has created a mystical martyrdom in their souls.” More than one eastern European nation is still gripped by this kind of self-composed myth, resulting in what might almost be called the Evil Twin of American exceptionalism. No notion of a melting pot here. Instead, most Eastern European national exceptionalism is based on the real or perceived grievances of a religious, ethnic or racial group that calls itself a nation while behaving more like a tribe. The fact that most of the urban modernization and economic growth taking place in the region during the twentieth century was in the hands of “alien” groups like Greeks, Jews and Armenians virtually guaranteed an eventual collision that would be ugly and bloody. The rise of fascism and Axis wartime influence created the perfect storm in Romania where some of the worst scenes in the Holocaust, wrenchingly but meticulously described by Kaplan, were played out.

But the seeds were of an ancient planting. Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Ottoman territories that would merge to form modern Romania in 1859, were long governed by a series of Phanariot voivodes, appointed by the Sultans and backed up by Turkish garrisons, but drawn from the ranks of the wealthy Greek population of Istanbul’s Phanar district (hence the name “Phanariot”). Many of these surrogate rulers were cultivated and presided over elegant courts. Like their erstwhile subjects, they were Orthodox Christians, but they gained their jobs through corruption and kept them by bleeding the local peasantry to fatten both the Sultan’s coffers and their own. Thus the ruling and administrative classes that would come to power in newly-born Romania were shaped by a culture of arbitrary authority and oriental corruption and shared little in common with the native peasantry, culturally or even genetically. The result, to this day, is a country that prides itself on its Western antecedents but is still a long way from achieving a Western polity, and that remains steeped in corruption. All of this is summed up pretty well by Sherban Cantacuzino, a Cambridge-educated scholar whose name may bespeak Phanariot ancestry, and whom Kaplan quotes:

“National traits are determined by race, climate and topography. Frequent raids and invasions have made Romanians tough, brave and resilient. Political instability, the uncertainty of what the future holds, has made them intensely resourceful and practical, but also wily and corruptible.”

This may help to explain why, for most of its existence as an independent Balkan state, Romania has had the unenviable reputation of being the most corrupt country in one of the most corrupt regions in the world. I can remember being told by more than one old Balkan hand—and only half in jest—that “Romania is kleptomania raised to a national level.” I never took it seriously, though, until a surreal Washington evening in 1975. At the frantic, last-minute request of the Atlantic Council, I had agreed to act as host and chaperone for a night on the town with Nicu Ceaușescu, the twenty-two-year-old youngest son of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu. He was visiting the States as head of the youth wing of the Romanian Communist Party, his father and mother being great believers in keeping it all in the family. Nicu’s reputation as something of a rake had preceded him, and I suspect that one reason I was chosen to serve as his cicerone was that I was only nine years his senior and in possession of a sturdy liver (Nicu would expire of cirrhosis in Vienna in 1996).

I was to meet the Ceaușescu scion at the Mayflower Hotel and show him the sights of Georgetown. In the lobby I quickly spotted a trio of dark-haired young men who looked like they were trying to pass for Italian. The first was a thin, rather nervous, bookish-looking fellow with glasses. The second was smirky in a nondescript sort of way. And the third had the tough, confident look of a senior apparatchik. Without a moment’s hesitation, I walked straight over to the latter and introduced myself. So much for intuition. He turned out to be Nicu’s bodyguard, as his agitated interpreter hastily explained. Nicu himself was the least imposing member of the trio. During the course of a long, bibulous evening I managed to keep them away from the fleshpots of Georgetown and persuaded them to settle in at Blues Alley, a fine old jazz joint. The highlight of the evening came when the unfortunate interpreter, whom Nicu and his bodyguard delighted in bullying as the class nerd, had to visit the gents, leaving his suit jacket slung over his chair. Nicu, with the finesse of a pro, quickly extracted the poor fellow’s wallet and pocketed it. At my request, he later returned it, but not before the interpreter, having discovered his loss, sweated it out for half an hour: a minor but clear case of kleptomania at the state level.

KAPLAN HAS spent a lot of time in Romania, and he has a knack for seeking out local scholars, dissident intellectuals, relics of the corrupt old order, and all sorts of other interesting and sometimes rather rum characters making up the Balkan Salad of present-day Romania. He has also read widely and deeply on his subject, something that sets him honorably apart from the common run of journalists. Having visited Romania in the 1970s at the high-water mark of the Ceaușescu regime, in 1989 when it was toppled, and in 2013 and 2014 with post-Ceaușescu Romania still a work in progress, struggling to become a “normal” European country, he can also draw on a layered series of impressions gained firsthand and over time.

To appreciate just how unhappy Romania’s history is you have to realize that the closest it ever came—and that wasn’t very close—to a Golden Age was during the reign of its first king, Carol I, younger son of the Prince of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, one many small German principalities of the day and a cadet branch of the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Trained as a military officer, industrious, dedicated and with a strong sense of duty—though not much else—Karl (Carol in Romanian) was a stern but mostly benevolent ruler who brought a measure of prosperity and modernity to the former Ottoman backwater, and transformed his capital of Bucharest into an elegant belle époque city. So much so that proud, Francophile Romanian aristocrats of the era delighted in comparing their capital to the City of Lights. This was not always to the gratification of Parisians, as illustrated in a short exchange in The Debauched Hospadar, an amusing erotic novella written by Guillaume Apollinaire on the eve of World War I. As I recall it, a visiting Romanian boasts to a Parisian, “Bucharest is like a little Paris,” to which the Parisian replies, “Perhaps, monsieur, but fortunately Paris is not like a big Bucharest.”

Romania’s first queen, a rather large, earnest, talented but loopy lady drawn from another of Germany’s minor princely houses, threw herself into her role as royal humanitarian and self-appointed poetess laureate. Her poems, fairy tales and essays, were written under the pen name “Carmen Sylva” and many of them were inspired by the beautiful Romanian countryside and local folklore. She was widely read in her time, not just in Romania but also in Europe and America. Before suffering a mental breakdown, she also presided over a cultured circle of courtiers and visiting poets, painters and writers. My paternal grandmother was a friend of one of them, an Armenian painter and bon vivant she always referred to as “Calouste the Artist” when he visited Washington in the early inter-war years. He once hosted a private banquet for her at the same Mayflower Hotel where I would meet Nicu Ceaușescu, a far less cultivated guest, nearly half a century later.

But Romania was much more than courtly glitter in the reign of Carol I. Although there was a bloody—and bloodily suppressed—peasant uprising, there was also the first stirring of a “native” middle class as schools were built and scholarships were made available to promising young Romanians from humble backgrounds. Romania became a major petroleum producer and the granary of the Balkans. The momentum of the age seemed to favor gradual, peaceful progress as feudal Wallachia and Moldavia started to cohere into a modern nation-state.

WORLD WAR I put an end to all that. King Carol I died in 1914, some said of a broken heart, as Romania was pressured and bribed into joining the Allies. King Ferdinand, Carol’s nephew and heir, a dutiful, well-intentioned man of modest attainments whose main pleasure in life was driving steam engines, had to flee the capital and spend much of the war sheltering in Jassy while most of his country was occupied by the Central Powers. And while Romania ended up on the winning side and picked up Transylvania at the peace table, the country had been bled, humiliated and destabilized. Meanwhile two lethal imps—Fascism and Communism—had escaped from their bottles, and Romania became one of many battlegrounds for fanatic supporters of both the new “isms.”

Throughout the interwar era, Romania experienced a political running fever or walking pneumonia in which an ever-more-corrupt monarchy headed by Carol II—a scheming, unstable opportunist who squandered the prestige of the monarchy that his father and great uncle had painstakingly amassed—alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, waged war on the fascist Iron Guard and the Moscow-backed Romanian Communist movement. It was a low-budget, slow-motion version of the more explosive struggle going on in that other European periphery, the Iberian Peninsula, during the Spanish Civil War.

Romania’s Franco would be Field Marshal Ion Antonescu, a ruthless soldier-politician with genuine nationalist sentiment and, alas, equally genuine anti-Semitism. Kaplan accurately describes him as “the Nazi-era military ruler with a complex legacy (his alliance with Hitler was based more on necessity than on philosophical conviction, even as he fitfully began the process of switching sides in the midst of World War II after the Nazis had been defeated at Stalingrad).” Perhaps the biggest difference between Franco and Antonescu was geopolitical rather than personal. Spain, thanks to geography and the diplomatic dexterity of Franco, managed to stay out of World War II (Hitler once said that he would rather have a tooth pulled than negotiate with Franco) and was in a safe space far away from Russia in its aftermath. Antonescu—like Romania—was forced into the war and ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He was quickly executed after a show trial. Romania’s Communist era will be more familiar to most of today’s readers, although Kaplan’s narrative gift and eye for the telling bit of color or dialogue fill in many details and do a great job of evoking a semiautonomous Marxist-Leninist regime that was only slightly less wacky than Enver Hoxha’s Albania or the North Korean regime run by several generations of a dynasty that combines the worst characteristics of Stalin and the Kardashians.

WHERE DOES Kaplan see it all heading? A bit of atmospheric impressionism gives us some idea:

“In the center of a park [in present-day Bucharest] I came upon a plaza, around which were arranged massive stone busts of postwar Europe’s founders: Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer . . . The sculptures, which had the monolithic, minimalistic style of Easter Island heads, were powerful and mythic in their effect. These were the liberal gods that offered a respite from history for this Latin nation in the Balkans. United Europe meant not only the end of war: it also meant a world of modern states—with all their impersonal legal norms, which offered protection for everyone as a sovereign individual—rather than a world of ethnic nations with age-old disputes, which had been the curse of Romania all along. That, even more than prosperity, was the underlying raison d’être of the European Union to which Romanians so aspired.”

Kaplan’s closing reflections are by no means Panglossian, but they are moving and offer some hope for the future. What, he asks, will postmodernism bring to Romania, and, by extension, all those other wounded former satellites in and around the Balkans?

“At the very least we can hope that the central horror of the twentieth century—that ‘baroque synthesis’ of Communism and fascism, as epitomized by the Ceaușescu regime, in the words of the scholar Vladimir Tismaneanu—will not be equaled or even approached . . .”

At journey’s end, looking across the Danube from the Hungarian side, Kaplan finds himself thinking of

“the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and his disciples living in the Carpathian Mountains during the worst years of the Ceaușescu regime, holding intense discussions that went on deep into the night about Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Foucault, Hegel, and Goethe—keeping the flame of humanism alive, since it was the canon of Western philosophy and literature that constituted, in and of itself, a hopeful rebuke to the low culture of Communism all around them . . . And as I looked out over the nighttime Danube and its many bridges strung with lights—I thought of an Orthodox priest I had met seven hundred miles downstream on this same river . . . who had told me about the Gothic-inspired roof of his wooden church, and how it indicated Romania’s yearning for the West.”

A noble prospect, in both senses of the phrase.

Aram Bakshian Jr. is a former aide to presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan. His writings on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts have been widely published in the United States and abroad.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Fototeca online a comunismului românesc