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Podcast Summary: Conversations with Tyler - Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe
Episode Overview In this episode, Tyler Cowen engages with Jacob Mikanowski, author of the book *Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land*. They discuss a range of topics related to Eastern Europe, from cultural differences to political dynamics, humor, and the future of various nations in the region.
Key Themes and Discussions
- Cultural Humor
- Mikanowski compares Eastern and Western European humor:
- Eastern European Humor: Characterized by a sense of the tragic and absurdity, often finding laughter in dark situations.
- Western European Humor: Perceived as less nuanced by Mikanowski.
- He reflects on personal experiences with cultural differences in humor, particularly between his Polish upbringing in America and typical American behaviors.
- Polish Society and Changes
- Current Attitudes: Mikanowski observes that Poles appear to be smiling more than in the past, attributing this to economic growth and cultural shifts influenced by Western values.
- Family Structures: Changes in childbearing age in Poland are discussed, reflecting a shift towards later marriages and a more Western lifestyle.
- Political Landscape
- Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap: Mikanowski discusses the precariousness of territories separated from their mother countries, suggesting that Kaliningrad's status is not as dire as others perceive.
- Moldova's Future: Speculation on Moldova's possible integration with Romania and the implications of its relationship with Transnistria are explored.
- Eastern European Identity
- Mikanowski delves into the historical context of Poland's identity:
- The dichotomy between a monocultural perspective versus a multicultural historical legacy.
- Current dynamics of Poland's identity influenced by an influx of Ukrainian and Belarusian populations.
- Art and Food
- Discussion on why the best Polish folk art is concentrated in southern Poland, attributing it to historical and geographical factors.
- Mikanowski praises the quality of Polish food, noting improvements in culinary offerings.
- Literature and Influences
- Mikanowski reflects on the lack of recognition for Polish author Stanisław Lem in the West, attributing it to the complex and often pessimistic themes in his works.
- The conversation touches on the value of Polish poetry and how it can be accessible to non-Polish speakers.
- Future of Eastern Europe
- Mikanowski discusses the future of various Eastern European nations, including Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania. He expresses cautious optimism about their growth and integration into European frameworks.
- Regional conflicts and historical grievances, particularly in the Balkans, are acknowledged as ongoing challenges.
- Human Nature Insights
- Mikanowski shares profound reflections from his study of Eastern Europe, particularly relating to the Holocaust and the complexities of human behavior under duress.
- He concludes that human nature is malleable, shaped significantly by circumstance, and can lead to both commendable and heinous actions.
Conclusion Mikanowski concludes with thoughts on his next steps, including completing his dissertation on ideological masquerade and how personal and historical narratives shape identities in Eastern Europe.
Key Takeaways
- Cultural Shifts: Eastern Europe is experiencing a blend of traditional and Western values, impacting social interactions and political structures.
- Historical Context: Understanding the region’s past is crucial for interpreting current dynamics and future trajectories.
- Human Complexity: The discussion highlights the duality of human nature, capable of both commendable acts and moral failures, especially in times of crisis.
Related Links
- [Jacob Mikanowski's Book: *Goodbye, Eastern Europe*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609940/goodbye-eastern-europe-by-jacob-mikanowski/)
- [Full Episode Transcript](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jacob-mikanowski/)
Follow-Up
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- Join the [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt) for discussions.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. I'm talking today with Jacob Mika Nowsky. He is the author of one of my favorite books this year. It is called Goodby Eastern Europe, an intimate history of a divided land. He is also a well -known journalist. He's published in the New York Times, Atlantic, Harper's and many other places, a historian who studied at UC Berkeley and in general and all around smart curious person.
0:53Jacob, welcome. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a real pleasure. If you had to generalize about the difference in senses of humor between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, how would you put it? The Eastern Europeans have a real sense of humor. I don't know what Western European humor is, but a sense of the tragic, a sense of the absurd, a sense of how those two go together. I think that's a great question. Finding laughter in the worst situations, finding a way to laugh at really dark things. I think that's a feature of German Jewish, your Ashkenazi humor, and I think it's found everywhere across the region.
1:32I know there's a Romanian saying to laugh at your tears, and I think that kind of sums it up. Lapperture sorrows. What do you think of the stereotype that A, Eastern Europeans don't smile very much? And B, they sometimes think Americans are stupid for smiling so much. True? Untrue? I grew up believing in completely. And you grew up in Poland, right? Well, no, I grew up in America and a Polish family. And that'd go back and forth a few times. And I grew up in a family that kind of got... The parents who kind of got stuck here inadvertently in 1981 when martial law was declared. They were here. They were in America for either six weeks or six months.
2:13They had different visas and they kind of got trapped. And they lived in a kind of a Polish cultural bubble. They didn't know English when they came here. They were very little. And I grew up kind of in that culture. And yeah, that's absolutely. I don't smile that much. My mom doesn't. We all can get asked if we were very serious. Are we sad? Are we depressed? and I do find, or I did find, or American habits that are a little odd, like nervous laughter. That's not really a unique thing to punctuate sentences with a laughter, you know, just sort of introduce yourself. You know, I'm Bob from Ohio.
2:50Very strange. So there is a little bit of a micro -cultural disconnect. I grew up believing that completely. And being told that by my parents, too. I was in Poland last year, and I had the sense, this surprised me, that polls right now are smiling a fair amount. Maybe more say than Germans would be doing. Now, is that just 4 % rate of growth for several decades? Or do you think my impression is incorrect? And people still are going around looking somewhat grumpy? I think you're right. I think it's growth plus the hegemonic west expanding, which is not necessarily bad thing, but a certain set of cultural mores has crumbled, especially in kind of the big, like in Warsaw.
3:32I remember how shocked I was when I had like really good customer service in a cafe in like maybe 2006, 2007 with the kind of that extra American. Would you like anything more with that? And I'm like, what are you saying? What are you talking to me? And the more I said started to shift that kind of old confrontational, dour way of interacting had inflected and now it's what we changed. Now there's a new generation that seems much more Western. It seems much more American. And it is like it's visible in customer interactions, stores, fashion, and yeah, and how people even facial expressions, eye contact, more direct than it used to be, I think.
4:13If I think of the Russian women, I know, they would say be in their 50s largely. It's surprising to me or was originally, how many of them had their kids quite young? Maybe they were 21, 21, might have even divorced shortly afterwards and then had kind of a second real marriage. That pattern seems to have shifted. There's much more marrying in the late 20s, which is more of a US higher education, Western European rhythm to childbearing, having children then in the early 30s. What caused that change? And why did they have kids so young to begin with? That's interesting. That's actually very true of my aunt who stayed in put.
4:48My mom came to America. She divised her aunt and my aunt stayed Paul and had her first daughter at 21, had that kind of first short marriage and then a later marriage another daughter. And that has kind of changed. I think it's a shift to those more Western, more career oriented home and car oriented, savings oriented lifestyles. And this is really different politically economy in the 70s and 80s. You were not waiting to save up for an apartment. You were usually on a list that your parents put you on and you were waiting to be ranted, filled right to an apartment. You didn't have a hope of a car.
5:22And jobs were kind of, not exactly a crap shoot, but you were going to be assigned something. So you could actually start. You could, if you went through college, even if you didn't, you might be in a position to have a place to live and then come to support a family at 21, 22, and nothing much to save up for. No real way to save up. No real goal to save towards. And that's completely shifted. people are trying to wait and in a pretty unstable and Poland a volatile economy at least in the last 20 years growing but with some tremors and people have that more Western of like save up for now you can buy a house you can apartments have become expensive so that's it's a much more Western life crack that people are on.
6:05You studied Poland you've lived there you're fluent in Polish if you compare you're understanding to say you're highly educated American readers. What's the key thing you feel you understand about Polish culture that maybe they don't? And let's say they've been to Poland once and they've read two or three books on it, but they're not experts. It's a person's question. I and I feel I come at Polish culture a little bit a scanced from the way most Poles come at Polish culture. So I might say I feel like I have a different approach to Polish culture than Americans can succumb to pollen cold and from a lot of poles who see pollen and have grown up in a pollen that's largely monocultural, monoeconomic, monorreligious.
6:4999 % Polish speaking and 99 % Catholic around there, they're a little bit erosian and now there's a lot bigger Ukrainian minority than there used to be but up to recently. And that people project that back into the past. That's what Poland's been always. And I come from a Polish Jewish family with Lithuanian roots, split Polish and Jewish, not just Jewish. Historically, Poland's been much more mutable. It's expanded and contracted. It's included many people who we wouldn't call Poles now, but who are under Polish rule. It was multi -religious, Jews were part of this state and entity for centuries, and included other men or like Belarusians, or deeply tied up with this other part of Poland, the Grand Duch of Lithuania.
7:34In Poland, there is a name for there are kind of two schools of thought on what Poland is and should be. They come from the two dynasties that ruled Poland, the first two dynasties. There's Piazd, Poland, and Yegulonian, Poland. And Piazd is that more narrow, one culture, one religion. That's what's been assigned to it. And that's the kind of dominant view. And the Yegulonians are this bigger, we're a confederation of peoples. We're a bigger country. We have a kind of a big 10 version of Polishness. And I kind of come from that. So I think there's more to it than most Americans know. And also in a way than some polls know.
8:10This polycultural background, how much do you feel it has strong deep roots? So is it your view that well, now it's mostly gone, it really will not come back, or the fact that what we now call Poland was so strongly polycultural, say, you know, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, that this will in some sense reemerge and it will reemerge. because it had been part of the past for so long. Really interesting, because it really was deeply rooted, deep in the Middle Ages, definitely in early modernity, and that old, supposedly, mostly Polish Poland actually was hard to recover. Actually, it was kind of west of Western Parapolone.
8:49It had tons of Germans which people forget. It was also in a different way, a different balance, multi -ethnic. But the 20th century did so much to change Poland's geography, Poland's borders, Poland's ethnic and religious makeup. That if you would ask me that 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I'd say no. It's, Poland is what it is. Poland is, you know, the white eagle, the pope, the Catholic church. It's a pretty set thing. It's amazing how much I think the war on Ukraine has changed things that we're going towards and the influx of Ukrainians and actually Belarusians too and people from patch. They're also Chechens in a smaller number.
9:29People from the former Soviet Union. And because of that work, the, I think, perceptions of difference have really shifted in Poland. It's become from a very close society, I think it's opened up a little bit in a very meaningful way. And it's recovering some of that poly -ethnicity that had lost. We'll see how lasting that is. But I think something that was really shifted in the last few years. Is there a future of any kind for Germanic culture and influence in Poland? So as you know, Rochlau was once reslau. A lot of the achievement in that city came from people with Germanic origins, growing up speaking German.
10:11Is that somehow inevitable given where Germany and Poland are again? That's been wiped out. It's just simply never coming back. Germany's depopulating. Bye bye, Germanic influence in Poland in any direct sense. What do you think? I think the Germanic influence comes from Paul's living and working in Germany, and especially Silesia, that part of Poland that's on that side has people there, a larger percentage of them have German or mixed German roots. There's an area in the South that had a larger number of Germans stay. Most Germans were left or forced to leave. There's some influence. But the bigger thing is that that border area, people really go to Germany and Switzerland to work.
10:53People from Eastern Poland, the pattern has been to go to the UK and France and Belgium or America. So the influence, I think, comes from return migration and cross border travel. Germans aren't going that much back to Poland. They do people with roots and there are a lot of Germans with roots in both Northern Poland and Western Poland. They go, they see the old church, the old cemetery, the old house. A lot of that stuff is actually intact. There's nostalgia tours, but they're not moving back very much. So I think it's from what contexts are, what influence are from labor migration. Why is the best Polish folk art from southern Poland?
11:35It is. It is from southern Poland. I'll venture again. It's hard for me to say for sure, but some of it is the mountains are a little different. The South of Poland is the only place that has and real terrain. All the rest of it's flat. The South has our Carpathian mountains, has a different, and the culture there's a little different. It was different. There are gurals, which kind of means mountain people, and the direct South, Zakkabana. And in the past, groups called the Boikes and Lemcos, Orthodox groups, it was a more multicultural area, and it was Habsburg. and was under the Habsburgs. It was kind of the most underdeveloped, the most rural, rural, and part -pollin.
12:21It was, Paulins, kind of a nice natural experiment, split into three parts in 1795. One part went to Prussia and became kind of economically prosperous but culturally uninteresting as the kind of agricultural hinterland of an industrializing state. The Russian part became the industrializing core, like center of a more economically backward state became the war son, which became the big factory hubs centers. And then Galicia, the south, joined an empire that was, the hapsicle empire, this kind of in between economically, but was left extremely underdeveloped, extremely poor, up to independence, depends up to 1918.
13:06And I think that may be incubated and kept some of that folk life intact. It was neither industrializing, nor westernizing the way the Prussianers. And that's a speculation. It might just be that the paint's better. Speaking of experiments, if you look at a map, you look at Kaliningrad, formerly Kernigsberg, you look at the Suolky gap. What's the actual equilibrium there? Like territory separated from the mother country, Alaska aside, it tends not to go very well. most of all in the history of Eastern Europe. What do you expect? Do I expect, you know, Polish tanks storming the cons birthplace?
13:46Not really. I think as much as those like X -claves used to be and still are in the Gornal Carbuck, very precarious, being a nuclear power is an awfully big Trump card. I can't see any of the countries surrounding that oblast making a big move. It will be, I don't think it's even that big of a deal to the, to, to, Paul, and you never talk or think about it a little bit, but I think it's hard for the Russians to stage anything major from there, but it's also hard for any of the surroundings to do a lot against it. So I think it's a carrier. I don't think it's, I don't think it's the Crimea of the Baltic.
14:25I think it'll be a, an issue, but not a But how many Eastern European borders have stayed the same for say even 50 or 60 years? The Danube's all that's been there. The Danube's a good one is Bulgaria Romania. Is that been a stable border? Not completely. There's a part that they swapped Post World War II there's a there was Bulgaria used to no Romania used to cross down And have a little bit more of the Bulgarian was now the Bulgarian coast So there's a piece of southern De Brucia, I think, that they swap. But as a whole, the river, you know, it's like, it's used to be the frontier of the Roman Empire for a long time.
15:07It's still a solid Bulgarian Romanian border, real, linguistic frontier. So that's a solid, long time frontier. Are there others? The Carpathians are one of the few natural boundaries. that slow -buck Polish border is pretty set for a long time. So few stable borders and the one on the map, I'm searching. I'm searching. Why not think that will be unstable too? So 80 years from now, I would be shocked if the status quo were still holding. In Eastern Europe. Well, with Colleen in Grat and the Soviet cap, I have no idea which way it will flip. That's true, but... That's true, but... I mean, it's really Russian there, though.
15:47There's the... who would take it back? It's there aren't any Polish people. There are no Lithuanians. There's a Lithuanian nostalgia for part of it. Part of it had Lithuanian culture that's been almost wiped out. So unless it goes independent. Well, Russia could grow as another possible equilibrium, right? That's possible. We could all be not a pleasant one, but it's happened before. It's true. I mean, there's so many other points of a flexion of tension in Moldova and Transnistria and Belarus and Ukraine. That's why I would focus. killing Greta, it's odd, but we could kind of, I don't know, it's like the maltail, you could kind of, or a Luxembourg, you could kind of maybe exist for a long time, but I'm not sure.
16:29These days, why is the food in Poland so good? I'm glad to hear you say that. I know I'm the best food in Europe. It's really good. But you know, the best food I have in Poland, there's some really good Vietnamese restaurants, because there's the Vietnamese minority that comes back to the 70s and 80s. But Polish food is best when it's made by bybaches, by Polish grandma's. So I go to milk bars, and it's always the best meal. I was up in the Souvalki gap two years ago, in Souvalki went to a milk bar, which is a kind of a communist relic. They meant that it was a kind of a daytime cafeteria where you'd get Polish standards, but you couldn't get any alcohol.
17:11And usually in the bad days, they wouldn't let you have the, even the utensils, the force of a two times to know what's to deal with them. Great food. Very cheap, very good. There are more levels to Polish astronomy now. You can get really fancy food. You can get incredible artisanal parogi, but just simple, well -made country, a home stop at Polish food is fantastic. So it's Ukrainian though. 20th century Polish poetry. I try reading it as a non -polish speaker, and it doesn't really make sense to me. It seems untranslatable. Is there a way a non -polish speaker can access the glories of those works?
17:55Or is it more or less lost to us, like Russian poetry might be? No, actually, I think the reverse. I think Polish, so I think there's a split in the 20th century. Maybe I'm biased, maybe I read them in both, but I think a lot of Polish poetry, I think there's a trica of great post -war poets. Viswavishin Boryska, Chaswafniewos, Zbigniew Herbert. I think they work really well on translation. They don't rely on the things that make Russian poetry so hard, and older poetry so hard, which is rhythm and meter, and extremely translatable word play. There's a poet I love, Leswaf Leshmion, who's from the early 20th century, he's really barely been translated, extremely difficult even in Polish.
18:38It doesn't work at all in English, but I think especially Herbert is so spared in Polish as well. It's such a poetry of ideas. I think it comes through really well. Where should a person start? What's your advice? Herbert, there's a little out, I think Louis Alvarus edited the little Chesof Miewicz translated, mewosh, a modern poet, you could start with Hermes Pesk, that's Hermes, Dog, and Star. I think Apollo and Marcy's the poem is maybe my favorite, so you could just start with that poem specifically. Why isn't Stanislav Lem more popular in the West today? It's a writer. That's interesting.
19:17I grew up on Stanislav Lem, like some people grow up on, you know, the Grims fairy tales. My dad's computer scientist is father started like set up one of Poland's first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction. So he used to read the tales of perks of pilot and the Eontih stories, the robot, the short fun ones, like they were fairy tales. So I grew up with them. I think I should have trouble going back to those. I go back to Solaris and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it's had lasting influence, but they are There's something pessimistic about them. They don't have that thing that that as a mob does I know even do of world building and forecasting the human future for our advance it they are like kind of Kafka in space and that's that's, you know, absurd situations, strange turns of events.
20:18I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. And maybe that makes them hard to digest. And also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. And also childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take. I think there is, there's been a little bit of a lemur of evil though. I know technologists, some people like them, futureologists like him. I love the cybernetics tales. They seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I've seen this mentioned once, but it's not generally known. The idea that you use them to talk to, that they're weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles.
20:57That's very much in LAM, quite early. I think people should go back to them. I think, you know, I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as a story about contacting a truly alien. Now, it's like, well, this is a little bit what we're doing with virtual reality and NAIs. Like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams? If you could revive people, but they, you could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness without anything behind it, without a consciousness. And there's something seductive about it, and there's something monstrous about it.
21:30And I think he was there way ahead of anyone else. And people should be going back to them. Maybe they will. If we think about Eastern Europe more generally, and we're trying to figure out where various lines fall, where are the Roman Empire stretched to or not? How much significance do you think that has for the current day? Or has that just been obliterated as a factor? The old, you know, I've actually gone to a lot of provincial museums on the old leames on the old frontier. You can go and see that kind of a little bit. I like going to the last Roman fort. You know, you can go to in Budapest and see the frontier of the frontier.
22:06You can go to go in Slovakia and see like the last Roman camp I don't think it matters in a major way. I think the traces Come later. It's where the kind of the row the imprint of Byzantium is still around the imprint of the East Roman Empire or that and it's extensions and the extensions of his church that really matters the world of orthodoxy versus the world of Catholicism. But those lines, there was such an obliteration of the Roman Empire, and its legacy, at least in Eastern Europe, between the 5th century and the 10th century, those old lines got obscured, and new ones got put in, and then 900s in the 1000s.
22:50So the fact that so much of Croatia is Catholic, rather than Orthodox, should that make us more optimistic about economic growth for Croatia, or it's just not going to matter? more optimistic than. So Slovenia has done extremely well, right? Yeah. It's essentially at Western European living standards. Croatia is not there, but the fact that it is not dominantly orthodox Christianity, should we then infer? It's going to join the Western European community in some fundamental way that perhaps Bulgaria will not. I think we should be optimistic about Croatia. I think the EU is the driver of law that.
23:28I don't think we should be that pessimistic about Romanian Bulgaria. I think actually Romania is showing, and that's a, you know, coming out of communism, a much more rural, much more backward economy than us in Slovenia. But I think it's growing really fast. I think things are actually really okay, they're politically, I think that idea of a kind of orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I'm not, I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously Bulgaria, maybe two. I'm not sure that I believe in the kind of Orthodox curse.
24:03I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria is what's wrong. How will Romania and Bulgaria in particular deal with depopulation? So you can move anywhere, almost anywhere in the EU. Their birth rates are low and probably falling. But there's also not so far away, North Africa, growing population, a lot of migration using boats. They're closer to that than Finland is. What's that going to look like? How many people will be in those places and where will they come from?
24:43Well, Romania's birth rates pretty high. I think it's the top of, maybe I'm a little out of date, but along the top of European peripherals and probably because it's quite rural country, they change as they grow, right? And a lot of people have left to believe. Well right now there's a huge influx of Ukrainian and probably Moldovaans all left. I mean, a quarter Moldova, Moldova, left Moldova. And remains will also return. I remember a great way to find out what's going under the surface in European labor and migration is good bus stations, long haul bus stations. I remember trying to catch a bus from Seville to Lisbon, which for whatever reason is really hard.
25:24They don't, it's not a good connection. But as at the bus station and there were tons of buses to places like Campouloong, Moldova, Nash, Suceava, Botostani, rural, Moldavian cities, the part of Moldova, Moldavia, and Romania. So 17, 25 hour bus rides because there's so many Romanians in Spain and you can see the same thing in Italy same thing in Portugal and Some of those people are gonna come back a lot of them are coming back and you're gonna get a influx from over the border. I mean right now You can't just go to these people because of that economy is gonna be in I think crisis for a long time the migrants are coming over overland from Asia, they tend not to stop in the Balkans.
26:12That's the through way for them, even in Hungary. They are trying to get to Germany, France, Great Britain, very rarely do the migrants from maybe a little bit. That's not a major influx because they're also the living standard gap out these big enough. Does Moldavia have a future as an independent nation? Obviously it's very small, it's next to conflict, shouldn't they just join Romania and then just be part of the EU? Why isn't that a dominant move for them? That has been a big political movement and that I think they, if they could do it, I think a lot of people would do it. They just renamed their language, Romanian.
26:53The complicated history of Moldavian as a separate language has maybe come to an end. They, I think they vote in Parliament after my book went to press because I talk a little bit about Moldavian and the Moldavian National Anthem, and after it was impressed, they had this vote. And Moldavian is now, I think, officially Romanian. And there is a move to, I mean, if they could make it work with Romania, I think a lot of people would do it. I mean, then it's a problem of transnistria, which would not want to do it, which is much more ethnically Russian and essentially a separatist enclave. And so there would be a real problem in how to incorporate it.
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27:33But what, well, David politics is not split right left. It's split pro -U, pro -Russia, and pro -U is the dominant force right now. Is there a future for a Serbian comeback where Belgrade again becomes a major transport hub? The country does well. It moves away from flirting with fascism, becomes less close with Putin's Russia. Is there any path you can see for that happening or that's just a pipe dream? a transit hub. Well, it originally was a big transit hub for the Balkans, they 30, 40 years ago, and it was relative to its peer group, quite prosperous. And now you go there, you see nice, old buildings, but it feels like it doesn't have much of a future.
28:14It's into decline. It is one of the best Balkan cities to party in. It's one of the funnest Balkan cities. It has has its reinvent itself as a Balkan party center. It really has this incredible culture of discourse. And these boats, it's kind of house boats on the Danube where people party on to become a genuine transit hub. I guess they would have to make nights with everybody around them and rebuild. I mean, it is hard to travel around the Balkans now because there's no the rails. They're hardly any long distance railways. I mean, I had a terrible time going from Belgrade the Sarajevo because you don't get sent to Sarajevo, you get sent to Sarajevo that belongs to Repulka Serbska, the Serbian part of Bosnia.
29:02If they could resolve all their regional conflicts, then yes, that cities in a perfect position. That's why I was so strategic for the Ottomans and the Hungarians and the Yugoslavs. But yeah, it's a political issue. And I think it's one that's not going to be resolved very quickly. Between the Bosnian problems, between Kosovo, it's not happening in the short time. However, the Serbian solution is to be close to Russia and China. So they are increasingly close links to especially China. So maybe they're an island of Chinese influence in the Balkans. Is there a future? The Serbian obsession with, I guess you'd have to call it, the 14th century.
29:45Is it an actual historic obsession or is it a stand -in for some other clash of values? How do you frame that or think about it? So when you ask Serbian about Kosovo, they'll tell you all these long stories about the Serbian heartland, isn't Kosovo and Kosovo is Serbia. And putting aside whether or not one agrees with any of that, what does it that they really mean when they're saying it? But the battle of the field of blackbirds, 1389, it is pivotal in Serbian memory and Serbian myth making that moment, although they really mythologized it, of the great defeat of Serbia at the hands of the Ottomans and then resting a kind of victory by assassinating the Ottoman Sultan in the last second after the battles have been lost.
30:33I think there's a real pull of history, there's a real pull of defeat, but in terms of a larger value, it's the dream of Serbia as a great country. There are Eastern European countries kind of have fallen two categories. There are countries that are small and they're happy being small, so minority. And countries that are small to medium and dream of being big. Poland dreams of being big, but those dreams have are less prominent than they used to be. hungry dreams of being big, returning to being big. And those dreams are still around. And Serbia dreams of being big. It had that oversized role in Yugoslavia.
31:12Yugoslavia was in a way, so these are some serves a not a Serbian empire, but a big sphere of influence where they were the top dog. They were the big player. The Yugoslav kingdom is very much like that, formed around Serbia. And Kosovo is the last piece of that, is the last piece of that. You know, once they lose that and Montenegro, they're really a small country. They really is no more dream. So that's how I read it. Once the United States steps back from that region, which sooner or later will happen, probably not sooner, won't it just become part of Serbia and they'll get their larger nation back?
31:53Well, not a greater Albania has anything to say about it. I mean, Kosovo is so dominantly ethnically Albanian. It is a... But that doesn't mean it can defend themselves, right? Or do we get another Balkans war where there's an Albanian ethnic movement for some kind of greater Albania? There's a movement for a greater Serbia. The two clash and they end up fighting. I mean, if you go to Kosovo, everywhere you see big silver monuments to the heroes of the 1999 Kosovo war, and AAAL members, that's going to be a, I mean, that's a horrible, if Serbia were to take over Kosovo, it would be a nightmare in search and see.
32:30And maybe Serbia does it, I definitely don't think it's worth it, except on a, just satisfying psychological craving. But you know, there's a little Serbian majority strip, not a clear majority, but most of the Serbs live like close to Serbia, maybe some kind of partial partitioning in the future. But an actual Serbian takeover cost of it, I hope that doesn't happen. Because I think it'll be ugly for both sides. Does Albania still have dreams of being something greater and larger? Because if you look at an ethnic map, it at least feels from the picture like maybe it could be. It... well, there are a lot of Albanians outside Albania.
33:11And it matters to them. I was in Montenegro. And I was in the Albania, There's an Albanian parliament in Egrom that people don't know about. In Uliqin, used to be the Phoenician city there is dominant Albanian. The Macedonia, North Macedonia has a Albanian majority. A region is almost quarter Albanian, just about a quarter. And then Kosovo is majority Albanian. I don't know that Albania has expansionist ideas, but they have, to the extent they have of foreign policy aims, they do have to support their ethnic, their linguistic allies. And there is a lot of inter -movement. I mean, Kosovours go back and forth from Albania all the time.
33:58Albanians go to Kosovo. There is, that's an open border. It's very easy to cross. The puns and people are honestly pouring across. And those relations are very close. So, I mean, does Albania have the power, have the ability to project a lot of power into its neighbors? Maybe I'm not sure. But politically, they do have to stand up for their coethnic. Is there some level of per capita income? Where you think this all more or less goes away? So you look at the two Ireland's, you can't say it settled, there's no reunification, but it's quite peaceful and we're just not too worried about it, right?
34:37people are not religious, they're fairly well off, whatever the problems may be. Is that the likely future for the Balkans that they become like the Ireland's and everything festers, but it's just all quite fine because wealth is up or do you think it's something darker than that? That everyone's rich and happy and all the problems are kind of Belgian problems that you kind of just live with. Yeah, no one's happy and Belgium might split up still, but nonetheless it all feels quite diffused, rather it's Ireland or Belgium. Some people would say Spain, maybe that's still up for grabs. I think so.
35:12I mean, I think European integr - the more - maybe this is naive, but the more European integration happens, the more that does lift some of those regional and unclay problems, as you can devolve some things to to the EU. If the EU were to expand there, I think it would help a lot of those problems.
35:33Is They have a long way to go in Albania, North Macedonia, Costa Vos. These are the poorest, aside from Aldova, the poorest countries in Europe. So the amount of catching up before he can be Switzerland and all live happily together, it's pretty big. If they did get there, maybe they will. I'm sure I think the temperature would go down. I don't think it's bread and the bone in some way. I think the temperature has been going down. I looked at some data recently, the most rapidly growing economy in Eastern Europe is Poland, no surprise. But number two was Albania and the place is booming. I mean, what happened there?
36:10No one expected that. What have they done right? It's striking. I was in Albania. I really did like a deep tour of Albania and the kind of Albania, Albania, Albania phone we just next to it last year. And you do feel that boom. You can feel there's a lot of golf investment, Saudi investment. There's a ton of road building. There's a ton of actually really good cultural infrastructure being built. They're doing a great job with museums and heritage. I was running car from somebody, a little like Albanian car rental. And the guy told me, you know, he spends six months in Albania. And other six months, he goes to Great Britain.
36:44He works outside London as a programmer. And he had programmed. He had designed all his car rental agencies programming. I think there's an openness. I think you have return migration from Italy and Switzerland and the UK that's doing well. There's enormous untapped tourism potential because it's the last piece of European or like really prime Mediterranean coastline that hasn't been developed deeply extensively. In the small country I think that really matters. And what else? I'm not sure. It's pretty, you know, it's under 3 million people. So small effects can have big consequences. Why are there so few Christian, Muslim problems and Albania relative to many other places in the world?
37:30They're hardly any. Do they have two kinds of Muslim or some other reason? You know, there is a kind of very moderate Sufi strain to Islam there. Although there are some proselytizing by Salafis. So there's some, it's not just that anymore. And there's also two kinds of Christian, the Orthodox South, and actually the Catholic North was where all the tribal violence, those are the great Catholic hill tribes for the really like violent ones that do blood feud. I mean, the take on this in Albania is, so I think one of the main poets said that the religion of Albanians is Albanianism, is that they're all Albanian, they're all Albanians speaking, and it kind of dilutes those differences.
38:15There's a lot of intermarriage. The Muslim Islam is very mild and the conference run in all different directions. They're most historically they're clan based, clan on clan, not religion on religion. And the temperature beyond just being this very mild Sufi Islam, the years of official atheism also cooled the temperature on religion a lot. The religion is All three, Catholicism, orthodoxy, Islam are kind of muted culturally. And Albanian national unity is more prominent psychologically. Hungary, what does your read on the current political situation? This has become a political football of sorts amongst the American, right?
39:06How bad is it? How far is it straying from either whether it's democracy or rule of law that is itself debated? How should I think about politics and Hungary? Hungary is pre -past knitting. It's like if an American red state were completely captured by one party, one party leader, like maybe a... No, you're not, it doesn't have to be a red state, it could be like a Huey Long type of figure. And who then had was powerful enough to start really changing the rules and to always is always color within the lines technically, while changing what those lines are, to be able to change the constitution, and a kind of legal authoritarianism.
39:51I've talked to people who know Orban, Newham as a student, Newham as an activist, as a kind of theitarian -ish student leader. And the thing they all say is that he's an incredibly smart, incredibly attuned to, incredibly professional politician. He's obsessed with the details of politics. He's obsessed with the details of policy. He's obsessed with the details of self -resultation. He has no particular ideological legions. This idea of him as a Christian nationalist is something he came up with to strategically. Everything with him is a strategic calculation on how to build and maintain power.
40:37His own power and his party's power is extremely good at it. He uses countless small measures that add up to small electoral victories and then takes those small electoral victories and parliaments into a huge constitutional and transformational things across Hungary. So he controls more and more of the media, more and more of the economy is harder and hard to unseat. And yet it's not a hard dictatorship. I don't think he would ever fire on crowds. I don't think with faced with mass protest, he would resort to like excessive violence. I don't think he has the support in the police or any of the security services to be that kind of ruler, even if he wanted to be.
41:22So it's a strange hybrid. And you think it's broadly compatible with Hungary just staying in the EU. People looking a bit the other way on both sides, but it can just continue or not. I think it's amazing it's gotten to this point. And the EU has abetted him effectively. EU funds, which are hugely transformational in Hungary. If you drive around the Hungarian countryside, every, it's kind of annoying because every 500 meters it feels like you come to a roundabout under construction, pointlessly. And that's all EU money. and it's all under the control of companies that construction firms essentially act as extensions of Fedess and Orban's power.
42:03They control as a party this tap of money and that helps solidify their power. So the EU effectively helps fund their dominance as a political movement, as a big movement in Hungarian society, which has tended to be pretty quiescent. I don't know how the EU would really, or why the EU would decisively step in. And the things that have gotten people really out in the streets in Hungary, one of the big ones was when internet prices were going to go up and they back down. He tends to back down when there's a big protest. He does respond to that signal, but they keep the temperature pretty low in Hungary.
42:48Why are so many Hungarians so concerned with Trianon, the loss of territory? Who cares? Why should they care? What are they hoping to get? I don't think they care literally. I think it's a little bit of a remember of the Alamo. You know, it is by this point has moved into the realm of national symbols in Symbols. You see, like you will see the Triennan belt buckles for sale and people wearing them where you have like free Triennan like big Hungary. You can have a big silver one as a kind of like Texas style belt buckle. I don't really literally means people wear those. Does that literally mean they want Batschka back from Serbia that they want Southern Slovakia back from Slovakia?
43:33Not not exactly. They're one of those Eastern European countries that's small, but dreams of being big. they still have that sense of being robbed, which in a way they were, since that their historical dissonance denied. And Orbán will play with that a little bit. He will suggest that maybe if Ukraine were to fall apart, it's about to fall apart, maybe there's a little corner of Ukraine, those ones Hungarian, on the other side of the Carpathians, maybe they should get that back. But that's more in the realm of dreams and symbols, not actual foreign policy I don't think there's, it's something, it is a little bit like the way Texans are about Texas.
44:15Hungarians are about hungry, but I'm not sure it's totally, we should read that totally literally. So all the study of Eastern Europe, all the time you spent there. Well, Greater Poland, earlier, Greater Lithuania, maybe Greater Serbia, Greater Albania, Greater Hungary. How is it shaped your view of just human nature flat out? Is it that you think, well, when I see an Eastern Europe as a bit of an outlier, or do you actually start seeing the rest of the world more in those terms? How has it shaped your general views of humanity? You will a little longer answer. It has shaped a view of humanity.
44:52And the part that has the most isn't the kind of petty, I think, a little bit petty national aspirations. It's not Lithuanian dreams of getting a little bit of Poland back or Hungarian dreams of getting the Batchka back. The part that's really struck me deeply is the Holocaust. So, my family, a lot of them went to the Holocaust in Poland and studying the German occupation of especially Poland, where they're used for so much. And the process, what happened there after the ghetto clearances, after 41. And I think there's a real message about human nature there. And sometimes it's people who talk about that, we'll talk about, well, this is a Polish -Jewish thing, this is about anti -acemesism, I think it was actually something deeper.
45:44So after 19, so in, there are kind of three phases to the Holocaust in Poland. There's an early phase of people being rounded up and put into ghettos. And then after, in 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union, and a few months of Operation Barbarossa and a few months later they start clearing the ghettos out. They start the real process of eliminating Poland's Jews and shooting people out right, shooting people, they're invading and rounding people up, taking them from ghettos to concentration camps where they're gas and killed. And then there's this period and so that's when most of the actual murder and death happens.
46:24And so but then from late 1941 one to early 1945. There's a small group of survivors in Poland, Polish Jews, who are in peril from all sides, have no legal standing, are non -persons, can be haunted by anyone, can be killed by anyone, and have to find a way to survive. And this truly, a true Hobbsy in the world and where food is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Money is scarcer. Everything is scarcer. And a real world of poverty. Because they're surviving usually in, some people have false papers and can survive anywhere hopefully as long as they're not denounced. Some people have a lot of money and can use that for themselves.
47:12But the ones who escape from the ghetto or were surviving or ran away from transports are otherwise just out at sea and pollen. have to usually make a bargain with somebody, have to find someone that they can trade, whatever they have, whatever money they have, whatever they can promise for shelter. And they do what a lot of people did that. And it's hard to know exactly how many, but a lot of people did that in 42. And then the war goes on and on, much longer than people expected, 42, 43, 44 winter after winter things getting harder and harder. And the longer that runs, The more this becomes a real kind of experiment in human nature, who survives and who doesn't, who is denounced and who doesn't.
47:56I had family members who actually survived this way miraculously, but some didn't. And when I find in the short run, a lot of people will make that bargain and be like, I'll take your money and I'll put you up. I'll put you in my cellar. I'll put, I'll hide you in a room for a few months, for a year, for two years. but the longer that goes, the risk here becomes and the harder it becomes. And the more there's the temptation to say, actually, I'm going to give you up. My neighbors can see this. I can't go on with this. I need the money. I'm too scared. I just doesn't seem like a point, everyone's there.
48:30So if the war had been shorter, a lot more people would have been saving. The longer the war runs, the more people are either denounced by their neighbors or their own protectors denounce them. But the ones who are saved in the long run, this is where the human nature comes in, what's so interesting is the kind of, so how do you know who to trust and the people who end up protecting the people they protect, the longest hold out the longest hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins, people who who widows outcast people with no money, people in terrible shape, people whose lives would be transformed by having an iron stove or a pair of pants.
49:14But if you were to take that, when you're hiding juice, you were to take their money and buy something like that immediately all your neighbors would know what you're doing. Because every village is a hundred eyes watching everybody else. So you make one move, you make one change, you buy a tin roof, everyone knows what you're doing, everyone knows you're hiding it's you. But the people who were the best at saving the people they saved tended to be people who never made a bargain, who never asked for money, who just did it out of moral instinct. Because if you buy a life, you can sell it. And the people who didn't enter into that transaction, they held fast the strongest.
49:59So, but how would you know that? Because just as possible, those people on the margins will also like, you know, they can announce someone for a tiny reward for Balavata for the hero of sugar. Those are some of the rewards that people gave to you. And if you were to ask them beforehand, how would you act in this situation? What would you do? I don't think they'd have any idea what they would do. I don't think they could predict themselves how they would act. And that's where you get out the human mystery. I think you don't know. Some people have that moral and say some people will do it out of an innate feeling, but most won't.
50:40And to me that means human nature is in some way it's completely plastic, has no bottom, has no backs on most people in the right situation. The wrong situation, the worst situation, will act in any way, behaving in any way. I think there's almost no bottom to human behavior. And the flip side of that is in the worst situation, some people will act in the most remarkable way, in the best way, and there's kind of no way to know. So it's really, I mean, to me, although I'm not primarily considering the Holocaust, that's the less than I take away. I'm sorry for a very long answer. Oh, that's great.
51:21Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine? Maybe other well -informed people would not. What do I understand about the war in Ukraine? I'll say what? That Ukraine, what Ukraine is, has shifted over time and is continuing to shift. I think people who look at this war and start being aware of it in 2022, Ukraine is just a natural fact and they weren't necessarily sure what it is where it comes from. I think there is such a complicated story of Ukraine between Poland and especially Russia, of being entangled with both of those and creating itself in relation and against both of those.
52:12It's kind of a tangled family tree and seeing how the pendulum has shifted even in a couple years in the relationships between those three countries where it was actually kind of historically very tense between Poland and Ukraine. And the Polish government, which is always looking for something in the past, like a old wound to come back and celebrate and show off about. They were really show off about. They're celebrating, but commemorating the Polish -Ichranian violence in World War II was a major thing kind of platform of like remember what the Ukrainians did to us and in a in a flash it's come switch to polls and Ukrainians brothers so the big enemy.
52:53And there's more to that like, strolling up, I don't know, Camille Nitsky and who he is to Ukrainians and polls that these are entangled stories. But do I actually understand the course of the war better and do I have a prediction for it and did I understand that better when it started? Probably not. I feel like I understand some of the roots and the roots don't predict that well. So maybe I don't have that much insight. Looking forward. In Eastern Europe, sexual dimorphism, maybe especially in parts of the Balkans, is it likely to go up or down? So a lot of men, they at least put on an air, there's some kind of manly man and they work out.
53:34They lift weights, they have muscles, women, there's a particular set of rolls, and put it in particular, but many other leaders there like to attack the West for confusing the roles of men and women. Is that going to intensify in the East or that's just going to go away as per capita income rises? And they'll feminize too. They haven't started yet. The Balkan male ethic is alive and well, at least to this observer. And they're also just gigantic people, town and former Yugoslavia. you know, maybe Greece would be the place to track. I don't think Greece men have followed some kind of postmodern Wilbeckian course.
54:12I think we're a long way off from losing the Balkan male as is a natural species. I think we can improve the economy a lot and that male culture that ethos is going to be around for a while. I don't think they have any to worry about. Last two questions. First, an educated American comes to you and says, Jacob designed for me a two week vacation in Eastern Europe, but forget about Budapest and Prague. They've already been there. They're not going to go or they want to go anyway for two weeks. Where do you send them? What's the itinerary? And ask one is war a concern. Is Ukraine on the table? They're not going to go to Ukraine.
54:48Whether they should or not, right? Not the same. And Budapest is off the table. So I selfishly will start you in Warsaw, because I love Warsaw. and I'm a warsobian. And Warsaw is derided, but actually one of Eastern Europe's most interesting cities and you get the history. The architecture's not great, but the history's right there under the surface, if you know what you're looking for, could airport to. And then I would send you south down to the mountains, you can skip crack on the same basis as overtourist did, although it's wonderful. As Prague and Budapest go down to Pshemish near the Ukrainian border and get a sense of that old Habsburg infrastructure and get a whiff of that that you're riding the border of Ukraine.
55:37You're riding on the border of Ukrainian influence and that you're in that old eastern Orthodox part of Poland. You can go to the Sanctuary, to even the wonderful museums there and then down through Slovakia, Eastern Slovakia, the kind of Ruthenian Slovakia. So the parts of these Catholic countries are each north of the Ducks and into Northern Romania. Northern Romania is the best place to see traditional Eastern Europe. To see the world of hay making and hand -built houses and that and the land of hay and wood.
56:20Maramuresh most hat of Romanian, go to the village I love called Brett, but the whole valley of you. It's one of the most traditional, lastly traditional parts of Eastern Europe. And you can get a taste of what it thinks might have been like, certainly, 30 years ago, 100 years ago. I think we are when you do the late, then maybe down to Bucharest. You have a few more days left. Yeah, if you have a few more days left, let's go to another place or two. Let's go around Transylvania, which is beautiful, and it's my favorite places to stay. CB, it's great, but I like actually outside, conclusion is interesting, but viscry, the air time, these places that used to be German, they have these fortified churches and usually there's a cool Hungarian noblemen's house that you can stay in.
57:05Prince Charles loves this area and has these like refurbished castles that he owns that you can, or manner houses that you can stay in. And it's really neat. And Transylvania is also one of the most key culturally diverse places in Eastern Europe. And you have like real Roma life that a lot of the foreign -nly German towns are now mostly inhabited by Gab or Roma, 70 Adventist Roma. It's pretty neat. I think you can go down to Bucharest. No, you know what? I'm gonna call it audible. If you can, if we can get across the border, let's go to Belgrade and go to one of those houseboats and have a great, have some great risotto, I have a place.
57:39some great Borek, meatborek, and party on a houseboat on a wrap on the day. We can finish there. But still, that's another, yeah. Very last question. Just to repeat though to everyone, Jacob's book, Goodby Eastern Europe and intimate history of a divided land. I'm a big fan of this book, one of my favorite of this year. But finally, what will you do next? I am going to file my dissertation after an ungodly amount of time in between reading the book. I went back to it, dumped most of it, rewrote it, and took it on different topic. And it's done. And I can file it probably this month. And what's that on?
58:19It's on Kathman. This idea from the captive mind, but just of Mewash, of ideological, masquerade or disguise that he took from, it's a concept in Shiite Islamic practice that he read about, where Shiites under duress, under a senior rule would pretend to be a SUNY and had an obligation religiously to do that under the abyss and then he's like, that's what life is like under Stalinism. That's what my peers were all doing. They're practicing Kathmand, they're splitting themselves into an inner self that believes in some older pre -war ideal of Catholicism or art for order or regular science and there's an outward face that is doctrinarily marked Marxist or Dr.
59:07Nearly's Soviet or something and how that was how he came up with that how it the dialogue he had with some of his peers, especially one and a very interesting philosopher and then how that was received in Poland, what people actually thought about it when they read about this guy who defected and it's like, is that that really happened or not? So maybe I'll do something with that, but I've got actually, I've got all the signatures ready. I've got to do some. The biography is done. Congratulations on that, Jacob. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Tire's been a blast.
1:00:03convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.
From the publisher
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded September 5th, 2023.
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