Joshua Kucera

The End of Europe - Slate/Roads & Kingdoms

I have a new project that's just been published, a series of dispatches from along the border between Europe and Asia, exploring how the border got to be where it is and the ongoing debates about what and where Europe and Asia really are.

It's published in four installments, jointly on Slate and Roads & Kingdoms, and covers Turkey; the Black Sea and Georgia; Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and Kazakhstan; and Russia. And it was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This, roughly, is what I was exploring: The border between Europe and Asia, unlike the other continental boundaries, has no scientific basis. There are no tectonic plates that meet around the Bosphorus or the Black Sea or anywhere else on this imagined line. By the time the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it in the fifth century B.C., the origins of the continental borders were already obscure and struck him as arbitrary. “I cannot conceive why three names [Asia, Europe, and Africa], and women’s names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one,” he wrote, “nor can I even say who gave the three tracts their names, or whence they took the epithets.” And yet the border defined by the ancient Greeks—from the Bosphorus across the Black Sea, along the Caucasus isthmus and up through Russia to the Arctic Ocean—remains pretty close to the line we use today. For the ancient Greeks, the distinction between Europe and Asia had no political or cultural significance; they meant nothing more by it than “to this side of Greece” and “to that side of Greece.” In the intervening millennia, however, the division between Europe and Asia has accrued layers upon layers of meanings and stereotypes. In the Middle Ages, it became the difference between Christians and heathens. The Enlightenment brought the idea of reason, which was supposed to be the unique property of Europe, as well as notions of enlightened versus despotic rule, which were thought to be European and Asian attributes, respectively. In the 19th century, this distinction became a racial one, with the idea that the Western world, via European colonization, was fated to rule over the benighted East. This transitioned into the geopolitical divide of the Cold War, when the “West” came to mean democracy and the “East” communism and tyranny, connotations that persist today in the promotion of human rights—that is, “Western values”—around the world. As this global history of us-vs.-them progressed, something strange happened to the Europe-Asia border. The borders of a political, cultural “Europe” or “West” shifted to coincide more and more precisely with the Greeks’ arbitrary geographic border between Europe and Asia. In the Middle Ages, Christianity and a European identity spread through formerly pagan territories of Scandinavia and the Baltics. Christian forces reconquered Muslim Spain and Sicily and the Ottoman Empire gradually lost its European possessions in the Balkans. Various Muslim peoples settled around the Ural Mountains, and were then conquered by Russians. The post-WWI population transfers between Turkey and Greece made the Aegean Sea and the Bosphorus a much harder “East-West” boundary than it had ever been before.

And there's much more. You can find the whole series on Slate here, and the four individual dispatches on Roads & Kingdoms from Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan/Kazakhstan, and Russia.

Where exactly does East meet West? - PRI's The World

I spoke with PRI's The World about my project for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on the border between Europe and Asia:

Herodotus wrote about the border but said he didn't even know why the continents divided this territory — a territory that was obviously one unitary land mass, and to the ancient Greeks, there really wasn't any meaning to Europe and Asia. They were just purely geographical terms.

Of course today, that's no longer the case. When you say Europe, all sorts of cultural, political, and geopolitical associations come along with that — even more so when you talk about the West, which people often use interchangeably with Europe.

Associations with "the West" include things like civilization, enlightenment, democracy, individualism, and materialism — while "Asia" or "the East" has been associated with the opposite of all those things.

The thing that's most interesting to me is that these countries along this artificial, geographical border are exactly those where you have some of the most profound and serious debates about national identity: Where do we fit? Are we European? Are we Western? Are we Eastern?

Plenty more to come...

As ties with the West suffer, Russia embraces its east - Al Jazeera America

I have a new story on the website of Al Jazeera America, on the changing role of Islam in Russia today:

An enthusiastic embrace of Russian, much less Soviet, power may seem unlikely coming from a Muslim cleric. Historically, Muslims have been at best tolerated, and often persecuted, in Russia, where either Orthodox Christianity or socialist atheism has been the state ideology. And today, President Vladimir Putin’s political dominance and Russia’s newly assertive foreign policy have been in large part driven by Russian nationalism as Putin has tried to defend the rights of Russia-identifying people in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

But there is another, countervailing trend that also has been gaining momentum: the government’s embrace of its multinational identity, in particular its Muslim heritage. And many of the country’s Muslim leaders, in turn, have taken the opportunity to position themselves as allies of the regime by defending traditional values against the decadence of the West.

“Just like after the fall of Byzantium, [when] Moscow saw itself as the Third Rome, defending orthodoxy, under Stalin we were the defenders of the proletariat, [and] today Russia is the defender of traditional values on the world stage,” says Batrov.

Read the whole thing here.

And earlier this summer, I had another story at AJA, on a culture war with geopolitical overtones in Kyrgyzstan. 

“This is really Russia's influence,” said Amir, an LGBT rights activist in Bishkek who asked to be identified only by his first name, echoing the opinion of most liberals here. “I'm sure they're connected.”

Neither law has passed. Both are still very slowly winding their way through the legislative process. And both could be subject to a veto by President Almazbek Atambayev, who so far has refused to say how he'll act if the laws make it through parliament. But questions remain: Has all this been orchestrated by Russia behind the scenes? Or has Russia merely been a reactionary inspiration?

Two and a half decades after gaining independence, many post-Soviet states are grappling with issues of identity as they navigate their way through an intimidating complex of strong currents: the disappointing fruits of democratic and capitalist reforms, a resurgent Russia, the emergence of an Internet-borne global culture and the reemergence of pre-Soviet forms of religion and traditional values. All of these have come together with particular strength in the battle over Kyrgyzstan's values.

Read that one here.

Azerbaijan Snubs the West -- New York Times

I have a new piece in the New York Times (international edition) on Azerbaijan and its relations with the U.S.:

The payoff for Baku of putting up with Washington’s hectoring on democracy and human rights shrinks as the West loses influence worldwide. It’s a measure of the Azerbaijani government’s disdain of Washington that the raid on RFE/RL was conducted just days after Secretary of State John Kerry spoke with President Ilham Aliyev on the phone.

In an interview in December, Ali Hasanov, a top presidential adviser, was asked why the government began to so sharply criticize the United States but not Iran or Russia. “Because they don’t criticize us, that’s why,” he said. “Russia, Iran, and China, too, deal with us on the basis of noninterference in our internal affairs.”

Washington, meanwhile, increasingly judges partner nations according to their opposition to Russia. At her confirmation hearing in September, the new United States ambassador to Uzbekistan — one of the most repressive governments on the planet — praised the country as “an increasingly important partner,” thanks to “its deliberate, reliable resistance to Russian pressure.” Azerbaijan’s mimicry of Russian rhetoric and rapprochement with Moscow is an implicit threat to Washington: Give us what we want, or we’ll go over to Russia.

 Read the whole thing here.