Robert
Kaplan is one of America’s top foreign correspondent and was named one of the ‘world’s
top 100 global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy Magazine. With over 30-years of
journalistic experience, his books give you tremendous insight into how ‘foreign
policy elites’ in the United States perceive the world. Kaplan likes to think
of himself as a big thinker and big ideas man.
However, I
find his works archaic, unoriginal, uneven and generally over-simplified. I picked
up his book ‘Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and The Future of American Power’, which
I had hoped would be full of useful insight. The basic thesis of the book is
that the Indian Ocean is now the key strategic centre for global power and
control and access to the Indian Ocean will determine the future of great power
politics and more importantly who can be considered a ‘great power’. He argues that the real contest in the Indian
Ocean is between India and China, but other states such as Burma, Pakistan,
Oman, Bangladesh and Indonesia also play a pivotal role.
The first
problem I had with the book was I don’t feel I learnt about the Indian,
Pakistani, Chinese or Burmese discourse on Indian Ocean power politics. Instead
I learned about the American ‘foreign policy elites’ discourse on these
countries and their position. Keep in mind that this book was written for that
audience, and like a lot of successful writers and journalists, his works
reflect the social and political prejudices of the audience. He himself comes
from this audience and thus his book can be understood more in terms of reproducing
knowledge with a more contemporary twist, rather than challenging and
introducing new knowledge to his audience. Anyone who seeks hard-hitting
critical analysis on Indian, Pakistani, Chinese or Burmese discourses are
better off looking else wares.
This problem
manifests itself throughout the book and this colours everything he attempts to
do. Like many Western Journalists, he cannot speak the local languages of the
countries he reports from. He has a tendency to rely on English speaking elites
and sub-elites to inform him on local politics. He does critique some of what
they say; however there is only so much you can critique, if you are unable to
speak the local languages for the simple reason that beyond them you have
nothing to compare them too. Because of the more globalist rather than localist
nature of his book, he is unable to provide comprehensive analysis of the
countries he’s in and often resorts to sweeping generalisations in order to
support the thesis of the book. There are countless examples of this and to go
through all of them would be time-consuming and pointless. It will be immediately
obvious to you, if you pick the book up.
His
contention that borders are artificial is quite correct, however he degenerates
with his ill-define notion of illogical countries. By Illogical he means states
that he perceives to have no basis of existence, no ‘scientific’ or ‘empirical’
reason for being and yet they do exist. But what this distinction implies is
that some states do have ‘scientific’ or ‘empirical’ reasons for being. He
frequently makes unqualified statement such as Pakistan and Iraq are the most
illogical states conceived and make no sense. By unqualified, I mean he offers
no real explanation or definition as to what he means by this and there’s an
automatic assumption that the audience should understand what he means (which
of course is based on their cultural prejudices about these places). This
discourse of natural and unnatural states is unfortunately a very common prejudice
in western political science and international relations.
The other
example of these unqualified and yet crucial statements he makes is about
democracy. He correctly, points out that Americans only understand democracy in
terms of the legalistic and functionalities. But they tend to disregard ‘informal
democracy’ which is less reliant of legal functionalities and more on the
practise of power. This is an interesting critique, however, he does not expand
on this thesis and the rest of the time when he speaks about democracy it’s
unclear what he understands democracy to be. Again the assumption here is that
you ‘should know’ what he means, but the highly problematic nature of this
assumption makes the book archaic.
He has one
long chapter on Pakistan and focuses on two provinces, Sind and Baluchistan,
both very interesting, complex and important subjects. However, he does not
explore the complex social dynamics of these two places. He does talk about
Baluchi and Sindi separatists, which is very much welcome as they are not
discussed enough. But he again does not explore the details of these movements
and their social dynamics; he talks to one or two English speaking Baluchi
activists and one or two Sindhi activists and takes much of what these two say
at face value. He makes no real attempt (at least that can be detected in the
book) to talk to a wide range of activist nor does he go into the streets and
speak to non-activist peoples in these regions. The rest of the chapter he
spends his time listing the many failing of the Pakistani state, which is fair
enough as they are pretty numerous, he then concludes in the ten-years he has
been visiting the country he has seen no ‘progress’ and that Pakistan is a ‘semi-failing
state’. He could find no basis for the
existence of Pakistan.
My own position
(which I may expand upon in a later post) is that the Pakistani state does not fare
well and looks failed when compared to Sweden. It fails to live up to the
ideals of the western enlightenment and their notions of state. However, the
Pakistani state needs to be judged in relative terms to the region it’s in, and
not only to western philosophical ideas about the state. Next to India, Bangladesh,
Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan the Pakistani state does not fare too badly. Scholars
like Anatol Lieven, would locate Pakistan in the ‘South Asian’ model of
state-formation and classes Pakistan to be average and not failed. There is an
enormous discrepancy between India and Pakistan in terms of the economy and
private sector, but in terms of the state they are more evenly matched. I will
expand on this notion further in a later post.
But back to
Kaplan’s book. After leaving Pakistan we are treated to numerous chapters on
India, but again much of the same problem exist here too. He spends most of the
book with a few English speaking elites and he spoke briefly to some NGO and
charity workers. But the bulk of his talks were with Indian military leaders
and strategic analysts. He had an extensive interview with Narendra Modi, who
is a member of the BJP, and was blamed for the massacre of Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat
riots. The BJP are right-wing Hindu nationalist who are famed for their extreme
anti-Muslim hatred. It’s perfectly reasonable to interview Mr Modi and try and
understand him and Kaplan does an interesting job of revealing his complex
character. But there is a discrepancy here, while he rightly tries to explore
the complex nature of Hindu far-right politics, he does not do the same for
Islamists and often use the term pejoratively (negatively) as if they are a
void with no social context.
He also
discusses some of India’s ‘internal’ problem with Kashmir and other places, but
interestingly, he does not do what he did in Pakistan. He did not speak to a
single activist or anyone from these areas and he would make unqualified categorical
statements. When he does discuss some of India’s ‘internal’ problem he only
discusses them in passing and keep’s ‘re-assuring’ the reader that India is a
democracy. He consistently adds this statement ‘India is a democracy’, but does
not give an explanation of how democratic India can overcome these ‘internal’
troubles. He also spends a number of long chapters discussing India, which
stands in contrast to his chapter on other countries.
He had a very
short chapter on Bangladesh, which was quite frankly, not worth reading because
he did not say very much. The same problem exists for his chapters on Sri
Lanka, Zanzibar and others. Even China did not get the treatment it deserved,
but what I found perplexing, is that while he spoke of ethnic division in other
places. There was little reference to this with India and China and was like he
was sub-consciously suggesting that these two places were homogenous. It not
ethnic division it’s diversity type of argument.
He seems to
like Indonesia, but he suggests that Islamism was little threat in Indonesia
because of the ‘plurality’ of Islam and its tolerance in Indonesia. This was in
contrast to the ‘Islam’ in the Middle East, which was singular and almost
Wahabbi-like.
These are
some of the major flaws in the book and because they are so numerous this book
misses for me. However, it’s an important read if you wish to understand how ‘foreign
policy elites’ think about the world. I would give it three stars out of ten.
