‘A great European war will come one day,” Otto von Bismarck is said to have prophesied in 1888, “all because of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Time was to prove Germany’s Iron Chancellor right. But what if that same region and its neighbours are sparking international conflict all over again and the West has barely woken up to it?
This is the troubling question posed in Hinterlands, a discursive blend of history, travelogue and geopolitical analysis by British journalist Hannah Lucinda Smith. For 15 years she has reported from disputed territories around the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, “grey zones” cut off from global banking systems where Google Maps goes haywire and Amazon won’t deliver.
These fringe areas of Bosnia, Moldova, Crimea and other old empire outposts, Smith declares, are rapidly becoming the faultlines of a 21st-century cold war. In particular she charges Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan with fuelling separatist tensions there, an axis of upheaval that uses criminal technologies and propaganda to exploit the EU’s weakness.
Smith is a resourceful and empathetic observer, always concerned about the pawns on this chaotic chessboard. Her 1,000-mile journey includes encounters with northern Cypriots still piecing together skeletons from the ethnic cleansing that followed Turkey’s invasion in 1974.
She tiptoes “like a ballerina” through the plains of Nagorno-Karabakh, where Azerbaijani scientists send light-footed gazelles to detect landmines planted by Armenian troops. She interviews budding revolutionaries and disillusioned veterans as well as nationalist politicians such as Kosovan prime minister Albin Kurti, a “professional pain in the ass” who is presumably happy that so many men born after the 1999 Nato intervention are named Tonibler (an Albanianised Tony Blair).
“Damascus in 2011 was the equivalent of Sarajevo in 1914,” is Smith’s slightly melodramatic conclusion, arguing that the Syrian civil war, which she witnessed, has effectively created a new world order. She skilfully traces the links between Putin backing cryptocurrency mining operations in Transnistria, building Russian Orthodox churches in Republika Srpska and digging military trenches in Ukraine. “History tells us that the small tremors in these places,” she warns, “are the first rumblings of something much bigger.”
A bleak but revelatory dispatch, Hinterlands urges western strategists to readjust their centre of gravity before another Balkan-like powder keg explodes. Bismarck’s ghost can only sympathise.
Andrew Lynch is a freelance reviewer