The Silk Roads To Nowhere

I'm currently grinding my way through a hugely over-rated book, The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. It's just barely good enough to keep me reading, but I've come close to giving it up a couple of times. At this stage, I think I'm continuing only because I tend to fall for the sunk cost fallacy.

But one particular comment demands a response. One of the better chapters is on the Holocaust. At the end of this description of horrific genocide, Frankopan sees fit to finish with... a dig at the EU.

Blink.

Really ? 

Yes, really. 

Instantly my estimation of the author has plummeted from cynical mediocre writer to borderline loony. He begins not at all unreasonably :

One result of this was that Hitler's oppression was deemed worse than that of Stalin. The narrative of the war as a triumph over tyranny was selective, singling out one political enemy while glossing over the faults and failings of recent friends. Many in central and eastern Europe would beg to differ with this story of the triumph of democracy, pointing out the price that was paid over subsequent decades by those who found themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. Western Europe had its history to protect, however, and that meant emphasising success – and keeping quiet about mistakes and about decisions that could be explained as realpolitk.

Which doesn't seem outlandish to me. All I could raise here would be that Frankopan doesn't present any alternative as to what would have been better course of action : war with Russia hardly seems like a credible option and a certain amount of realpolitik in disastrous situations is inevitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be disasters. Still, nothing crazy here. 

But he follows this with one of the dumbest comments I've ever read in a serious history book :

This was typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 : how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades.

Righto. The European Union isn't the same as Europe, you twit, any more than Germany is the same as Prussia or Italy is the same as the Roman Empire. With Europe indeed having been a hotbed of nation-state conflict for much of the previous millennium, the EU was founded in part with the ideal of preventing this. Through economic interdependency, it has, again in part, at the very least played a key role in fostering better internal relations. So we went from one state of affairs (intracontinental warfare between independent states) to another, markedly different one (intracontinental economic and political cooperation under the auspices of a multi-national organisation). To deny the success of this new, previously non-existent entity, to confuse it with the wholly different state of affairs that existed before it, is not just cynical - it's plain wrong.

Frankopan is having none of it, however. Immediately he continues :

In late antiquity, the equivalent would have been giving the prize to Rome a century after its sack by the Goths, or perhaps to the Crusaders after the loss of Acre for toning down anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Christian world. 

Umm, no, no it wouldn't. Neither of those comparisons makes a lick of sense. The rise of an organisation deliberately fostering mutual assistance and cooperation is in no way comparable to the conquest and submission of the Roman Empire of the loss of a colony in the Middle East. The things simply do not equate. At all.

The silence of the guns, perhaps, owed more to the reality that there was nothing left to fight for than to the foresight of a succession of supposedly brilliant peace-makers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or to the wonders of an unwieldy international organisation of European state whose accounts have not been signed off by its own auditors for years.

Whut ? Yes, seriously, end the chapter on genocide by critiquing the financial imperfections of the European Union. That's definitely a sensible thing to do and not at all in bad taste. Let alone that yes, in the first years after WWII there wasn't much left to fight over, but - bloody hell ! - things have improved a very great deal since then. In terms of pure resources (which Frankopan tends to obsesses over to the enormous detriment of everything else), things are much better now than they ever have been. Yet do you see any hint - any at all - of any of the major European powers even considering military force as a solution to diplomatic difficulties between themselves ? No, you don't.

They say a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. I'm not sure Frankopan knows either. True, the world and even Europe isn't a perfect, peaceful, harmonious Utopia - hardly ! Look, I'm not even saying there isn't a case to be made here (although I very much doubt that any argument along Frankopan's lines would ever hold up). But this kind of casual, throwaway comment with no substance whatever to back it up, this mingling of cynicism and stupidity... that's something I'd expect from a UKIP supporter, not a professional historian.

Aaargh.

(If you're wondering, Frankopan isn't a nationalist. If anything the opposite : he hates everyone and everything equally. His version of history is nothing but one long sequence of horrible events with not a single good thing ever happening to anyone, ever. But more on that in a fuller review.)