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Intelligence Squared
What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith
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Adam McCauley
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Mia Sorrenti
welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Walking the places at the edge of Europe tell us about the continent's future and as some of the most important political struggles of our time unfolding far from the sense of power where most of the world's attention is focused on today's episode. Hannah Lucinda Smith, journalist and author, joins Adam McCauley to discuss her new book, journeys Through Europe's Unfinished Frontiers and what Europe's Borderlands Reveal about conflict, identity and the shifting balance of across the continent. Let's join our host, Adam McCauley now with more.
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Adam McCauley
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Adam McCauley. The refrains are common, history rhymes but doesn't repeat. And yet we stand today both amidst and on the precipice of crisis, perhaps of a new cold war or more worrisome, still tipping ever closer to another great war. Strategists, historians, experts and journalists alike feel that same creeping friction and try where they can to divine signs of what yet might come. Today's guest has spent much of her career working to understand what the slow and sometimes inflective changes in geopolitics might tell us about a changing world and the global powers jockeying to define its shape. Hannah Lucinda Smith is a writer, consultant and reporter for the Times and the Economist. She's a repeat grant recipient from the Pulitzer center, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Wired, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of Erdogan Rising and the co author of Zarifa. Hannah joins us today to discuss her newest book, the New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the West Hannah, welcome to Intelligence Squared.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Thank you very much for having me.
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Adam McCauley
So I hope we might start, as everybody should, kind of at the beginning. So you spent a lot of time in a lot of places and spaces reporting a host of stories that I think at some point sort of appear to you to tell a larger tale. So I wonder if you could tell us kind of how this book came about and maybe that moment where it crystallized for you that you actually had a narrative far greater perhaps, than any of these individual stories together.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah, sure. So one of the joys of being based in Istanbul as a journalist is that you have access not just to Turkey, which is an interesting story in itself, but also to a really, really kind of wide region. Because Istanbul, you know, the cliche is that it sits at the bridge between east and west, but actually it sits at the kind of, you know, center point between the old Soviet Union, Europe, Iran and the Caucasus and the Levant, the Middle East. And it's also the place or in the middle of places where empires, the edges of empires kind of bump up. And it's in those places that you find the. In between places, or what I call the hinterland. So places that are generally kind of ethnically mixed, maybe sort of ambiguous in, you know, terms of who do they belong to or what are they, Are they a nation state, are they part of a different nation state, are they part of an empire? And places that change hands quite often, and these are quite often, you know, just fascinating places in themselves. A few of them, places like Transnistria in. In Moldava or like Nagorno Karabakh in the Caucasus axis, they were sort of born of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the kind of imperfect borders that would draw on national borders when that empire broke down. So Transnistria, although it was part of Moldova initially, mainly Russian speaking rather than Moldovan speaking, and didn't want to be part of that new nation state it actually wanted to rejoin. The Soviet Union was a mixed region. Both, you know, Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians lived there and became the center of a kind of tug of war. And then you have other kind of, you know, liminal places, like, for example, Cyprus. The island of Cyprus has been split since 1974 between north and south, the North Turkish speaking, South Greek speaking. And these places sort of the. Over the past three decades, they were looked at as not particularly important geopolitically. The idea was the, you know, the Cold War was over, the European Union was expanding. You know, Fukuyama had that, you know, famous now sort of infamous and derided phrase the end of history. And they were seen as kind of throwbacks, kooky, quirky places where, for example, in Transnistria you still have Lenin statues up, we still have the House of Soviets, you still have all this kind of Soviet ephemera around that makes it very visually interesting place. Nagorno Karabakh was referred to as, you know, a country that doesn't exist. There were kind of boutique tour companies that could take you there and, you know, take you to see these, what they would call ghost towns. They were actually, you know, inhabited by Azerbaijanis as late as the kind of early 90s, but had been abandoned then, had been looted and then had been sort of left as a military buffer zone, heavily landmined, but sort of marketed as these in between places. And I think, you know, those kind of places are very interesting, not just for journalists, just generally, like there's a class of, you know, traveler and more. Lastly, like social media influencer, you really like going to these kind of places because not many people go there. They're super interesting. You know, if you're bored of going to the Costa del Sol or to wherever in the Med, you want some bragging rights to go somewhere that no one else has been. They're kind of good places to go. So I was really interested by them. You know, Istanbul, when I first moved there in 2013, it was very, very cheap. Actually on there's a budget Turkish airline called Pegasus. Anyone who's lived in Turkey will know this airline. It's sort of a bit fancier version of Easyjet or Ryanair and you can go to a lot of places in these hinterland. So the first one that I was interested in was North Cyprus, which you could get to very cheaply. I think I paid about 15 quid first time I went there from Istanbul. And a lot of Brits particularly know Cyprus very well as a holiday destination. I think there's about a million Brits go there every year, but they all go to the south, the Greek speaking part, which is internationally recognized. It's called the Republic of Cyprus. It's an EU member state fully kind of engaged and embedded in the world in financial systems. But the north, the northern third of the island, it calls itself the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. It, the island, yeah, it was split in 1974, but in 1983, this northern part unilaterally declared sovereignty and has been recognized by nobody apart from Turkey, absolutely nobody. And that leaves it in this weird gray zone, right, where actually it's very easy to get in there, you either. If you want to fly, you have to go through Turkey because only Turkey recognizes it as a aviation destination, or you can go over land. If you go into the south, you can go through this border that cuts right through the center of Nicosia, the. The capital, or left Kosher on the. On the Turkish side, it's called. And it literally, if you have a European passport or British passport, it takes about two minutes. Like, you show your passport on one side and you walk through, show it on the other side, and suddenly you're in this completely different place. It's like going in through a time warp almost. I mean, it's not just that the language is different. It's. Yeah, because this. This northern third of the island has been under embargoes because it's not recognized. Greek side does everything it can to keep it disconnected from the world. So, for example, if a shipping company was to, you know, use a port on the northern side, they would then be banned from using a port on the. On the southern side, which is a big problem because it's a big shipping hub. So, yeah, sort of very kind of underdeveloped. The first time I went there, it was sort of quite a difficult place to get around because even, you know, sat navs and Google Maps didn't work there. You had to rely on, like, paper maps to get around. For the people who live there, it's incredibly difficult because they can't, you know, get Amazon deliveries, for example. There's all these kind of like, things that you don't even think about when you're living in a fully functioning and recognized state that in the modern world we sort of come to rely on and. And you can't do right. So that was the first place I went. And I also spent quite a lot of time in the Balkans. Generally the Balkans was. Kosovo, actually was the first place that I ever went as a foreign correspondent Back in 2007, when it was also a hinterland, really hinterland, because it was still internationally considered part of Serbia, but had sort of actually on the ground broken away following its. Its war with Milosevic and was a UN protectorate. So when I went through the airport in Pristina on that first trip, it was a UN stamp that was stamped in my passport. And I remember, like, turning on my phone and getting a message saying, welcome to Monaco, because, like, they'd lend them the dialing code, like mad stuff like that. So they are very, very just interesting generally. Right. But I would say probably towards the end of the 2010s I started realizing that they weren't geopolitically irrelevant anymore. And actually, what really started with the Syrian conflict, which began in 2011, that very quickly turned into a proxy war between broadly and imperfectly the west on one side, and on the other side, an axis of Russia and Iran, and to a degree, economically, China as well, and other countries sort of aligned there. And that had sort of was spreading across Europe throughout the 2010s through various means, through misinformation campaigns, through patronage of different leaders in these, yeah, liminal places, these unstable places where borders have not quite been agreed, and particularly in the Balkans, which is a very, very fragile place still. Actually, you know, it's three decades now since the war in Bosnia finished and nearly three decades since the war in Kosovo. And, you know, largely the region's been at peace, but it hasn't been really put back together in terms of, you know, the social fractures that those wars caused. And obviously, it's an ethnically mixed region. So particularly in Bosnia, which is the most mixed part of the Balkans, you have three main groups. You have the ethnic Serbs who are Orthodox Christians, you have the ethnic Croats, Catholic Christians, and then you have the Bosniaks who are Muslims. And what I realized was starting to happen was that these different groups were being patronized by different outside powers. So in the case of the. The ethnic Serbs by Russia, using that kind of, you know, intrinsic link that they have through Orthodox religion, through being Slavic, and then with the Muslims from Turkey, which has its own kind of history in the region, obviously it was an imperial power there with some quite kind of, you know, worrying effects of that. Particularly in Bosnia, there's a semi autonomous region called the Republic of Subsco in the north and east that's largely inhabited by ethnic Serbs. And the leader there is a guy called Miller Adodic, became increasingly patronized by Putin. I mean, this guy at this point is going to meet Putin like several times a year, which is insane because he's the leader of a quasi state. Right. Who is he? And, you know, sort of bolstered by that support that he's getting from this huge outside sponsor he's repeatedly threatened to secede from, from federal Bosnia, which is an incredibly dangerous place to be because once you start redrawing borders in that region, it empowers other kind of local nationalists and local populists to do the same. So I think, yeah, it was really in the Balkans that I started to realize that there's something else happening here. And then I started to sort of look into it. More deeply across these hinterlands and kind of see where these fault lines were being drawn.
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Adam McCauley
Yeah. I mean, what you do, laudably, I think, in this book, is you allow each of your readers a little glimpse at a history of a very specific place, a place that's maybe been parallel to or connected to kind of the historical engine as we understand it, but maybe not fully understood. And I think it's quite. I mean, both the diversity of stories inside these small places and the implications they might have, as you tease out, I think are eye opening and will be for many who pick up the book, and I hope they do. I do want to take you back, if I could, to Damascus. Right. And the story of Syria as you understand it. And I take your point. This all number of things sort of coalesced throughout the 2010s in terms of geopolitical changes. Maybe just a kind of overturn signaling from major powers in ways that we hadn't seen it before. And you have kind of this ground truth view on, let's say, how this plays out on the ground in so many of these places that many of our listeners and readers of this book will never or had not yet visited. But for you, the story about the Assad regime and perhaps the way in which the Assad regime both managed its environment and was managed by outside powers in his environment, really sets the. The wheels in motion. Not that history is not always in motion, but certainly sets this new chapter in motion. So I wonder if you could just explain why Syria sort of appears first in this book and what you think it tells us about what's happening behind the scenes that seems to be popping up in all of these places.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. I think the key word that you use there is overt. Right. Because it's not like Putin's Russia, who I would say that's the kind of the major player in this alternative axis or coalition. Right. Certainly the most powerful, certainly in. In Europe, the most kind of malign. It's not like Putin overnight suddenly became hostile to the West. Right. That didn't happen, actually. Hindsight's a brilliant thing, isn't it? When you look in hindsight, it is a kind of dynamic that had been growing since he came into power. I think it just sort of suited Western powers to maybe stick their head in the sand a bit and try and be optimistic about things with Russia.
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Adam McCauley
And as long as the power balance perhaps was always sort of tilted against him, more or less, I think there was a comfort in sort of letting that fiction persist, for sure.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
I Think so. I think so. You know, looking back on it, the 90s for the west, at least, was a great decade, wasn't it? You know, there was a sense of sort of hubris again, coming back to Fukuyama's famous essay, that somehow the. The Western idea of liberalism had won, and that was inevitably the way that the world was going. And the fact was, you know, in the 90s, when, particularly when the Balkan wars are happening, you know, this is a place that Russia does have an intrinsic interest in because of the Slavic links, because of, you know, all sorts of things, but Russia just wasn't strong enough to really play its own role there in the 90s. It had its own internal problems. And what's quite remarkable to look back on now is, you know, that Russia was joining in with the NATO peacekeeping operations. It's. It's bizarre, isn't it? And, you know, in the first years of. Of the new millennium, you know, there was all kinds of, you know, discussions, and not even just discussions, actually. You know, Russia and NATO were sort of joining together in these sort of, you know, councils. They were talking a lot. Not just.
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Adam McCauley
Yeah, the famous. The famous invocation that Russia was itself or could potentially be a European country. Right. This idea that it was close enough. Right.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
I remember there was an essay in Foreign affairs magazine. It must have been probably around as late as 2010, I think, where the big question was, could Russia, NATO? This. This was, you know, a genuine question. But if you look back, I mean, yeah, there was, you know, the. The first Chechen war happened before Putin took power, but he carried that on with the incredibly bloody second Chechen war, in which ultimately he placed his kind of, you know, vassal leader in power there. And then, you know, most obviously, most seriously, the. The invasion of Georgia, I mean, the annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, that happened in 2008. But really various reasons, probably a bit of optimism. Money had a huge amount to do with it, particularly in Britain. I mean, that's. That's no secret. The sort of flood of Russian money into. Into London, in particular into the property sector, into all kinds of things, I think dissuaded our government here from really taking on Putin when they probably should have. You know, I think it was as far back as maybe 2008 or nine that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. But the reason why I started in Syria, to come back to your question is because that was really the point where I think Russia under Putin had reached a point where it felt strong enough. Obviously, it had the petrochemicals boom of the, of the 2000s that had really sort of pumped its economy back up, felt politically powerful enough also and had enough of an interest in Syria to really get involved, full scale and fully oppose the west there. You can say, like there were other places in the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya, where, you know, Russia wasn't particularly happy with what was going on. But, you know, Russia didn't block the UN sanctions that were put on Gaddafi in the way that it did repeatedly with Assad. And the reason for that is, you know, there's a relationship that goes right back to the Cold War between the Assad family and their Syria and the Soviet Union initially. And then, you know, Russia lastly on all kinds of levels, but particularly on a military level. I mean, Russia has this military base at Tartus on, on the Mediterranean Sea, which is its only Mediterranean base, obviously incredibly important for it. So it's got this asset that it needs to protect. And then also, you know, the Acid regime has this link with Iran as well through religion. So not to get too down into the weeds, but Assad's regime, Assad himself and his family are Alawite Muslims who are kind of sect of Shia Islam. The majority of the Syrian population are Sunni Muslims. So it was a sort of minority religious rule in that country with links to Iraq. And it is quite bizarre because the Alawites are a very sort of secular and not particularly observant part of Shirazam, whereas obviously, you know, Iran is a fully fledged theocracy. So it's weird, but that's where the link is. So when it comes to Syria, there are these two seriously big powers that are hostile to the west backing this regime. And on the other side, particularly initially, the opposition, both the political and the armed opposition, had a wide range of support from European countries, from the uk, from Canada, from the US from France, also from Turkey, from Qatar, from this wider Asian countries. And very, very quickly. It was, it was obvious really, as early as kind of like early 2013, I think, that this wasn't a civil war anymore, it was a proxy war.
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Adam McCauley
Yeah. I mean, what I think is fascinating too about that timing and we talk about maybe the shift into overt versus, you know, what was always sort of careful gloved handling behind the scenes perhaps, is that I think there was a real moment post Iraq and the withdrawal from the United States that there was an instrument here that could be manipulated and could shape the Middle east in different ways. And if that was something that even as a spoiler, Putin and Russia could sort of make its way into and use to its own benefit then sort of, why not? Right. And that seems to be, I think, what comes out in your book so often is that so much of what's done with great, maybe not immediate, but eventual sort of geo political effect is actually very low cost. Right. It doesn't take much to be a spoiler in so many places. And so as a result, you've got this scheme of maneuver more or less for a Russian regime which might want to, if not kind of win quote unquote, in a particular region, certainly make it very difficult for their adversary to be successful in whatever it is that they seek to achieve. And so that's, for me, that, you know, it was quite, I think, smart and telling, as it were, that Sirius sort of becomes this fulcrum point in the story that sort of opens up, I think, a far wider great game, as it were, around the edges of the map and then really forces us. And I think you do a good job here of forcing the reader to really think through what's the. So what for this new normal.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Right. I think that's a really, really good point. I mean, I don't, I don't talk actually about the kind of US invasion of Iraq in the book, but it is an important turning point. And that's because I think that marks the real moment where we see the beginning of the decline of the US and the west as a sort of, you know, moral authority in the world. Right. You know, it's so weird to think back now that before the invasion of Iraq, there were two other big kind of liberal interventions. One of them was Sierra Leone and one of them was Kosovo. And both of those were extremely successful in that they stopped massacres, genocides, actually, and returned those countries to some kind of imperfect peace and were widely welcomed by the populations in those countries. You know, it's amazing still, when you go to Kosovo today, it's so pro British and so pro American in a way that is quite bizarre to see because there's very, I mean, certainly in the Middle east, you're not going to find that in many places at all. Right. You know, to the extent, and I mentioned this in my book, there's a crop of children in Kosovo born around the turn of the millennium, just after that Western intervention, who are called an Albanianized version of Tony Blair because he's seen as hero. Right. And Bill Clinton likewise. There's this statue, this sort of medium sized statue of Bill Clinton in Kosovo sort of waves at this horrible snarled up traffic on the outskirts of town on Bill Clinton Boulevard. And it's amazing. But, you know, for the people there, liberal intervention saved lives. You know, it stopped massacres. Right. And, you know, I think obviously a lot of us were very, very against the idea of, you know, liberal intervention in inverted commas in Iraq. You know, I myself joined those protests in 2003. I was a student at the time. I was very, very against it, although I think probably I didn't have the sort of, you know, the expertise and the sort of geopolitical sophistication to know exactly why. Why I was against it. But I. I was in my bones, I think a lot of people fe. And it proved to be not a success in any sense. Although I do have to say there's nuance to it. I mean, when I was reporting in Iraq in sort of 2013, 2014, at the time when the genocide of the Yazidis was happening, it was very, very interesting talking to those Yazidis because a lot of them had worked as translators with US forces during that invasion because they are sort of, by their nature, they horribly oppressed by Saddam Hussein, you know, pro Western by nature. And it wasn't. They weren't annoyed that 2003 had happened. They were annoyed that the Americans had pulled out, actually. And I think that's something that gets lost is just how brutal Saddam Hussein's regime was and how glad a lot of Iraqis were actually to see those forces. They weren't glad of the mess that they're, you know, particularly the US Made of, you know, administrating Iraq after the force of down that was done incredibly, you know, clumsily and with, you know, horrific results. But it's. I think it's far more nuanced than, than is often appreciated. But it certainly marked this moment, not just in the Middle east, but in the world of the kind of decline of, yeah, Western moral authority. And I think that's really something that leaders like Putin can exploit incredibly well in all kinds of places, including in the West. I mean, you know, it's one of the things that does horrify me, and I hope I don't sound like a raging nationalist when I say this is the lack of kind of pride that a lot of people, normal people in the west, take in, you know, the sort of the democracy and the liberalism and the pluralism that we have and the way that there's a lot of, like, self flagellation going on about things that go on in the world. This is not to say by Any means that the west is a sort of, you know, benign actor. No, of course, like it is, you know, responsible for terrible things. But, you know, I do think, like, we have values that are really worth defending, and I think sometimes we're a bit embarrassed to do that. But it certainly created a very, a very, very useful fault line that the leaders like Putin, with not much, with not much effort and not much use of blood and treasure, can exploit very effectively.
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Adam McCauley
What's so interesting here, and I think it does pull together a couple of different strands throughout your book in a useful way, is that we might see some of these hinterlands, as let's call it, the failed realization of state building in that early 1990s period. This expectation that the liberal interventionist arm, if properly deployed and at work, could really help bolster the foundations of what could hopefully be a working governance model in so many of these locations. And instead, as half finished products, they fell victim to all kinds of corruption and those seams that made it very easy for others to sort of move in and shape this space. And so you have both. I think many things can be true at the same time. These interventions were incredibly important in the moments of crisis, and the investment was far higher over time than I think a lot of those interveners wanted to pay. Right. And, or at least wanted to be sort of attached to. And so you've left. We've got these sort of not vacuums, because there's no vacuums in the world. It's just governance we don't understand. But there are these spaces then that become party to a far different set of interests and actors and intentions. And, and so one of the things that I think naturally comes out of your last answer here is this tension between sort of the democratic future and the rising sort of autocratic presentation, let's say, of leaders across so many of these spaces, so many of these hinterlands. Part of this is also it speaks to, I think, a common narrative that we hear certainly in North America when we talk about defense and security, around interference, third party or foreign interference in our political environments or otherwise. I think there's an easier way to talk about this just corruption, right? Corruption happens all the time, and it's actually the best and most effective way to influence all sorts of things and has happened since time immorium here. But I wondered if we could spend a little time. I mean, there's so many interesting cases to look at, but Serbia, to me here sort of stands out as a space that is both unfinished, right. A state that is in many ways trying to wrestle with a unique national identity, as it were, and what that means and who that includes. And at the same time is both sort of on this precipice or maybe at a tipping point of looking east versus west and what that would mean and I think complicated by our present moment because we're all stuck in the tyranny of it, as it were, in a far more sort of like, scarcity, forward, lower principled approach to international politics here, which is to say Europe is worried about war and what it might take to defend itself against, and as a result, prob. Not investing in sort of the instruments, pro social or otherwise, that could really compel states kind of in these hinterland spaces back into the mix or invite them in in a way that blocks or shields them perhaps from the most worrisome sort of corrupt interventions from adversaries or the east or others or whoever those actors might be. So I'm just curious if you could unpick, not that it's easy to do in any short period of time, but unpick sort of that Serbian story, as you understand it and what it tells us maybe about the future of democracy in some of these spaces or what we're going to have to wrestle with as we understand what form of governance actually takes place in these regions.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
What I find really disturbing is that the EU and now Britain as well, because obviously we're not in it anymore, has sort of lost interest in taking a role as a sort of, you know, promoter of democracy and a promoter of human rights. Nominally it does, but in reality it doesn't. So, you know, when. When those, you know, Yugoslav wars came to a halt, the idea was that it was going to be the EU and to a degree, NATO, mostly the eu, that would be sort of like pulling them towards democratic, liberal, pro Western and peaceful future. Right? It would be the. The kind of carrots of EU membership that would encourage these states or force these states to democratize, to stamp down on corruption, as you say, to make efforts in terms of, you know, reconciliation between different groups, you know, recognize minority rights, all these kind of things. And for a while, you know, I think that was working and including in Serbia. Serbia is still an EU candidate country, right? But under its current leader is a guy called Alexander Vucic, who first sort of. He's an interesting guy because he looks very young and he actually is still quite young. I think he's in his early 50s, but he's got a very, very long political history in Serbia, going back to Yugoslavia, actually. And he was a propagandist for Milosevic during the wars. He was a guy who came up with a very, you know, famous sound bite touted by Milosevic, which was, you know, for every Serb they kill, we will kill a thousand Muslims. I mean, this kind of stuff. And in this sort of golden decade that Serbia had in the 2000s, between ousting Milosevic and Milosevic being carted off to the Hague, where he subsequently died before facing justice, there was this decade where Serbia really seemed to be liberalizing. They had a leader called Boris Tadi who was very pro eu. They hunted down the last of those kind of big war criminals and sent them to the Hague. You know, that in 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared sovereignty. And of course, they weren't happy about that, but still, despite that, they didn't sort of turn away from their kind of European wood path. And that changed in the early 2010s when. When Vucic came to power initially as prime minister, lovely as president. And it's turned back towards this very kind of chauvinistic, nationalist, denialist path. So, you know, denying genocides committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which have been documented, you prosecuted at the Hague, proven building links with leaders like Putin and also Xi Jinping in China. I was in Belgrade for a state visit by Putin in January 2019, and it was something to behold. I mean, he was kind of, you know, when he flew into Belgrade airport, there were fighter jets from Serbian Air Force flying alongside him. And, you know, the red carpet was rolled out, and he gave Vucic some kind of, you know, high Russian honor. I think Vucic gave him a puppy, as I remember, because Putin likes to collect dogs. It's one of the things that he does. And then he came and spoke to the crowds in the center of Belgrade on the steps of St. Sava temple in the centre of the city, which in itself is symbolic. It's one of these. It's a huge Orthodox Christian temple. It looks old. It's, in fact very new. And it was started, I think, in the late 1980s, fell by the wayside during the wars. And then Gazprom gave them money to finish it off. And Putin appeared on the steps. And I'd been waiting for hours and hours and hours. He was meant to, you know, appear at some time. He appeared about three hours late, and, you know, there were all these Serbs waiting with me. And he. He appeared and then he said three words and then he disappeared again. And everyone's brilliant and then turned around and went Home. So there was a real show of, you know, the kind of links that had been built. But I mean, in some ways, you know, Yugoslavia during the Cold War was non aligned, right? Tito, the, the Yugoslav leader famously just refused to fall into line with, with Stalin's Soviet Union and pursued his own kind of socialism. But I think more broadly in the Balkans, what has happened is that the EU has become very, very distracted throughout the 2010s, firstly by the refugee crisis that erupted in 2015 when you saw about a million, mostly Syrians, also Afghans, also people from other parts of the Middle east and Africa going from Turkey to Greece in these small r, and then making their way to principally Germany, also Sweden, different places and that, you know, I mean, it basically it broke the Dublin Agreement, which was the agreement that governed how Europe deals with asylum claims. It broke relations really between a lot of European states because you had Germany trying to dictate that different states would take different number of refugees and other states going, well, no, you know, sort of revealed quite a lot of tensions. And then of course you had Brexit, which in a, in a way was a kind of, of follow on, you know, from that refugee crisis. Certainly the, the Leave campaign used a lot of imagery from, from that crisis to try and scare Brits into, you know, making outrageous claims. They're saying, you know, millions of Turks are going to come to the UK and then you had the kind of authoritarian turn of, of leaders like principally Viktor Orban in Hungary and the EU basically being toothless to, to fight back. Because, you know, when this expansion was happening of the EU in the first part of the millennium, nobody really thought that it could go the other way. Right? It just. I was at university at that time when that expansion was happening. I was studying politics and history and I did quite a lot on European expansionism and it was just such an optimistic subject. I don't remember ever discussing what might happen. If, you know, these countries, they prove that they've reached the norms to reach the eu, but then what if they start then backsliding, right? And that happened in several of these states. So the EU got really distracted by these internal things and it sort of took its eye off the ball in, in places like the Balkans. And this is something that I heard from politicians, particularly in Kosovo, who, you know, they are constantly under pressure from Serbia and are really, they're just so desperate to join the EU and NATO because it will give them some kind of, you know, bulwark against that, but they just feel like they've been abandoned and it created this, this opening for for Putin and also China in an economic sense to really kind of walk in.
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Adam McCauley
Yeah, I think what's, what's telling about that portion of the book where you do kind of report around Putin's arrival on stage and sort of the outpouring of support from the crowd and otherwise reminds me of Stephen Kotkin's work on the Soviet Union and just Russia generally. But he has these, these sort of juxtaposes two different ways of understanding what borders represent, right? There are borders of victory. So those spaces that we've won and now own and there are borders of defeat. And so he thinks a lot of kind of Putin's thinking is very much around this idea that this is territory that's been lost and is part of us as part of the identity of the larger Russian empire. And I would imagine not to be tried about this, but I would imagine that he, in moments like this where perhaps the west or the European Union has not been paying too much attention and has not been inclusive of those spaces, this idea that somebody wants you, right, that somebody would prefer if you looked in their direction, that's particularly compelling not only because I think to the more granular truth on the ground here, it also opens up any number of faucets of support, whether it's financial or otherwise, that really make it interesting to leaders in these regions to toe the line as they move forward. I mean, recognizing I could probably spend the next seven hours sort of pestering you with all sorts of questions around this book, I wondered if we could spend sort of maybe a little bit of time. You know, the one thing that hasn't come up but does percolate throughout the background of this story is the role of Erdogan in Turkey, in this region, maybe both as supporter of kind of Russian interests, at least obliquely in some spaces, or maybe a benefactor, if Russia's influence turns some actors away from an imagined or real adversary or enemy of the Turkish state in different ways. But all of this seems to speak to, I think, the background noise of our present moment, that we sit in an international order, as it were, that is disordered or ruptured, that seems to be subject to, I think, that proxy and third party party effect that we most commonly associate with the Cold War, which is, I think, why the subtitle of your book is so telling. And at the same time, maybe this is a moment where we have to be intellectually humble about how fulsome and thick the principled understanding of the international order ever could be. Right. Perhaps what we've seen now is this reversion to a kind of nationalist realist politics, which has actually been the norm over history. And we just had an interesting sort of chapter in which we thought about it differently, because through a host of international institutions, many of which we've mentioned here, whether it's the United Nations, EU or otherwise, these instruments are real and evident now, but they are young in the story of politics. And so I wonder, from your perspective, not that we all want to be pressed to answer questions about the future, just to give us a sense both of the role of kind of emerging powers or persistent powers, I think in the Turkish case is probably the better way to think about it and what this story of politics looks like for you from where you sit, in the places that you've spent time, and in context of what we start to, or what we're seeing kind of in other national capitals, be they North American or otherwise, like, what's the story you would tell if trying to express, you know, the reality of our present moment and what our future might look like.
- [46:23]
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Sure. Well, I. I think firstly, just to say a little bit about Turkey. Turkey is such an interesting case, Right. Because it sort of sits in both worlds under Erdogan, and actually, like a bit like Yugoslavia, it's never been a perfect ally of the west and it's never been a perfect NATO ally. I don't know what a perfect NATO ally would look like, but it's always been problematic, let's say. Right. And, you know, the reason why it's part of NATO is its geography on this eastern flank controlling or being the custodian of the Bosphorus and Darzanel Straits, being the kind of bulwark against what was the Soviet Union. But I would place Erdogan actually in both camps. And he flits between them quite skillfully. So on the one side, Turkey, of course, is a NATO member. It's got the second biggest army in NATO. It's got an increasingly important defense industry as well, particularly looking at drone production. And there are increasing, you know, conversations going on about whether, you know, Turkey can be, you know, we can rely on Turkey as, you know, a major arms producer for the kind of Western alliance. Right. But on the other hand, and Erdogan, like Putin, is a disruptor. He doesn't want this kind of Western dominated world order. And he talks about that openly. He stopped saying it recently, but about a decade ago, one of his catchphrases was the world is bigger than five. He was talking about the UN Security Council and the five states on that. And he was saying, what about these other states? What about us? And he has a point in that, actually. You, you know, but you know, what we refer to as the rules based order, this order that is based around the UN and its Security Council is only something that's come about post the Second World War. I mean, okay, look, if you go back to the League of Nations post First World War, but really post Second World War and particularly looking at the financial aspects as well, you know, Bretton woods, etc, it's very, very young. It's less than a century old. And I think this again, is, is human nature to look at what we've experienced in our lifetimes and assume that it's permanent. And I think, you know, speaking as a Brit, we tend to do this with borders, right, because we're an island nation. Since the early 18th century, the kind of the island of Britain has been one country or one union, let's say, don't want to offend the Scots and the Welsh. But even that isn't permanent. We sort of, I think because we have these sort of defined borders, that's how we think about borders and that's not how borders are and that's not how the world works when you look at it in the longer term. And I think we are seeing this moment really again, coming back to Syria, one of the reasons why I think Syria is so pivotal because it was the first time that we really saw the inherent weakness in the system, the rules based system that's based on the UN Security Council. Because as soon as you have a situation in which one or more of those members don't agree with the sort of, you know, general consensus, you're screwed. You're Paralyzed. And that's what happens in Syria. Resolution after resolution against Assad was put forward and blocked by Russia and China. And that's going to keep happening. And I had quite a sort of chilling conversation quite recently with a former British diplomat. He's now heavily involved in the UN and, and the panel of experts. And I said, do you think that the UN can survive in its current form? And he looked at me and said, that's not the question. The question is, can the UN survive? And that is chilling because that, that has been the system that has sort of broadly kept peace in the world. Like, I don't want to sound glib about, you know, all the, like, horrific and destructive wars that happen all the time, but in terms of a kind of, like, broader global conflagration, that's what's kept that at bay and that is breaking down. And the question is, what's going to replace that? And I don't think we're anywhere near, I mean, even starting to think about figuring that out, let alone approaching an answer.
- [50:50]
Adam McCauley
Yeah, I mean, I, I think about this often with a similar background to you, at least in the academic sense, and spending a lot of my time thinking about international stability and order. The glib what's the UN Good for? Response usually elicits, at least from my side, let's run the counterfactual. Do you think the world would have been a better place without the United nations having existed? And I don't think you can honestly answer yes to that question. What it is, I think what's striking about this puzzle right now is that it does not appear to be a management tool for the international system the way that it was intended. And that, I think, has everything to do with shifting power in the international system and where it lies. And also just the fact that the interdependencies between states are so great today that a solution in any one domain becomes a problem in another. And there's a real risk aversion to playing kind of that real great game in and through this system in any meaningful way. And so we start to, we think now and we hear this around sort of minilateral arrangements and otherwise we think about different ways in which coalitions of states are going to try and manage either their region or broader issues. And it isn't to say that those aren't fruitful, but it does suggest that there's a certain, there'll be a necessary increase in variability, as it were, and a far higher chance of friction between different spaces and actors over time. And I Don't think that should be under appreciated by any means. But to your point, I mean, we stand at this interesting moment where everything seems to be suggestive of a decreased appetite for cooperative solutions to global commons management. And that strikes me as being symptomatic of other historical periods. Right. We can think a little bit about the 1930s. I think that and the pre 1914 period are the two that, that often get thrown around as best sort of historical echoes. But it's all to say, like, yeah, I'm not sure what a world without the United nations looks like, and I'm not sure what a world without the United nations, but still some other instruments of great power management, what that looks like and how that system sort of emerges and what the implications are.
- [53:16]
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Right, I think that's right. And I think also there's been a kind of careless cynicism about the UN and also about the European Union, actually. Look, both of these organizations are massive, unwieldy in many ways, undemocratic, imperfect organizations. There's a lot to criticize. However, ultimately in their aims, they've succeeded today.
- [53:47]
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Like I say, they've broadly kept the world and particularly Europe. I mean, you know, it's so fashionable to hate on the European Union for so many things and particularly amongst a certain part of the British population. But you know, you only have to go back to my grandparents generation and this continent was at war. War, right. Destructive, horrifically destructive war. Do we really want to go back to that? No, Come on. Like, not on any level. And you know, the fact is, okay, it starts as a trading block, it then expanded into other things. Yeah, I, I personally believe that trade is the kind of basis of peace, actually. I think it can be a real kind of basis of good relations. And I think we've been far too careless to sort of criticize and throw out these institutions or not defend them staunchly enough.
- [54:52]
Adam McCauley
So before we go, I just wanted to ask a little bit more about another case in the books. You speak at length and I think in great detail usefully about Crimea and, and what this as a place, but also as a political event, more or less as you've captured it, might tell us about the powers behind the scenes and how the politics of influence in this region work. Most of us now stare sort of at Eastern Europe and think about the conventional conflict between two states. But the story of Crimea I think hints at a kind of subterranean politics which is always there, and a subterranean effort to influence that will be persistent. And this involves both Russia and Turkey. Not to mention a host of other European countries and beyond. But I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what this hinterland in particular might show us about the world of politics we live in now.
- [55:50]
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Sure. Well, Crimea is one of the two hinterlands in the book where borders have already shifted, the other one being Nagorno Karabakh, which was, yeah, was ruled by an ethnic Armenian administration for nearly three decades and then seized back by Azerbaijan. But Crimea, of course, it was part of Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and then it was annexed by Putin in 2014. And now, I mean, it's still internationally recognized as the territory of Ukraine, but in practice, on the ground, it's controlled by Russia. It is, like all of the hinterlands, a place that's incredibly complicated in terms of its demographics. So this is a peninsula. I mean, first of all, again, like a lot of these places, its geography is incredibly strategic. It's Black Sea peninsula. The deep sea port at Sevastopol was one of the kind of key Soviet naval bases. There was actually sort of deals done after the collapse of the Soviet Union, even though it was in Ukraine, to allow Russia to keep using it to a certain extent. And that was about to run out, actually, or had just run out when the annexation happened, which I think is a sort of story that started not widely told in the sort of understanding of it. But its population has had different kind of majorities at different times. So for many centuries, the majority was actually a kind of Turkic population who today we. We know as the Tatars, the Crimean Tatars, who make up still a significant portion of the population. Actually, during the Soviet era, they were hugely oppressed by Stalin. He deported most of them to Central Asia. Absolutely. You know, horrific stories of. Of, you know, that expulsion and the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Many of them came back and to sort of reclaim their land. But a minority, but a big minority there in question, influential minority as well. And then you have Ukrainians and you also have people who would identify as Russians. And in Sevastopol particularly, that's a, you know, particularly Russian identifying city. So Turkey has an interest there. The Crimean Tatars are super interesting because they speak a form of Turkish and have. They are Muslims and they have very close links with Turkey itself. And so actually, that's the main basis when Crimea was annexed by Russia. The main basis for Turkey not recognizing that wasn't necessarily a sort of strong alliance with Ukraine. It was to do with its relationship with the Crimean tatas. Because the Crimean Tatars they are not well disposed to Russia. They have these memories of what happened to them under Stalin. Almost immediately after annexation, a kind of new crackdown on Tatas began, this time under the. Under the pretext of them being sort of radical Islamists, you know, being rounded upon territories, terrorism charges. So, yeah, they've formed a sort of major part of the opposition in Ukraine. And actually the defense minister in Ukraine for a long time, a guy called Rustem Umarov, he's from the Crimean Tata minority. He's been quite a sort of key figure both in the Ukrainian government and also in negotiations, negotiations going on between Kiev and Moscow. But you also had this quite large population within Crimea that actually welcomed the annexation. And I met people in Crimea who were extremely happy about it, including the. The lady that I begin the chapter with. She was a tour guide before annexation. She's got this sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the Crimean war of the 1850s, which is such a, you know, key part of the, the British historical imagination because it was the first trench war, first war to be documented in a newspaper. And if you're sort of British and into history, Crimea is one of the things you'll get very excited about. And prior to annexation, there were a lot of British tourists who went there to look around the Valley of Death, which was obviously immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem. Look around those war grave sites. There are British war graves that. And that had been this lady's profession and income was mainly taking Brits around this area and explaining to them, well, this happened here and this happened here. And the bottom fell out of that overnight after annexation. Because Crimea was put into sanctions, it's now very, very difficult for Brits to travel there. British organizations can't work there anymore. So there was an organization that was, you know, raising money in the UK and using it to look after those war graves in Crimea. And they had to stop working, you know, overnight. So I went and found some of those British war graves and they're sort of, you know, falling into disrepair. There was actually, it was very touching, actually. There was one site and there was a village nearby, and the locals were actually sort of themselves just keeping it maintained, which I found really, really touching. You know, they had no reason to do that really, but they were. But despite that, despite her livelihood disappearing overnight, she was nothing but enthusiastic about Russian rule. And it was nothing really to do with, you know, economics or reason, really. It was about gut feeling. On the other hand, there were other people who I met who had supported Russian rule. You know, one was a Cossack leader who'd actually been involved in the annexation. He was one of, you know, what they call the little green men who was sort of helping the Russian troops take over sort of key buildings and government installations during that annexation. And he changed his mind because he said, well, I didn't expect the economy to be quite so bad and they're destroying our environment with all this building. But what was also interesting, it was 2019 when I went there, and it was really clear that Russia was embedding its presence through construction. It built a huge new airport in Simferopol, which is sort of of capital of Crimea. It obviously built the Kerch Bridge, which connected Crimea to Russia. And one of the key sticking points, actually, when the Ukraine war began and there were backroom channels going on through Turkey and through Interesting Roman Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea, he was kind of playing quite a key role in bringing together Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul. And the key sticking point, as I've been told by contacts, was always Crimea. And they just could not agree. And I think that speaks, you know, not only to the sort of depth of historical feeling about this place where so many wars have been fought. And, you know, what's really interesting about those war grave sites is, you know, the same trenches that were dug in the 1850s were then used by the Soviet troops when they were battling the Nazis in the 1940s. Sevastopol was briefly occupied by Nazi forces, aided by Romanian forces, and had the status of a Soviet hero city because they fought back using these same trenches, but also for its strategic importance. As soon as Putin annexed the Peninsula in 2014, they started rebuilding up that Black Sea fleet. And that's been really important in the kind of the control or the influence that that Putin's been trying to project navally in the Black Sea as well.
- [63:43]
Adam McCauley
So I think what I mean, what the story of Crimea captures, but really the rest of the book entirely does, is it puts a finer point on a far larger strategic game that I think has always been present, has looked perhaps different through time, and has been either peopled and. Or cast in that. That theatrical sense by different actors. And what I want to thank you for in this conversation today, but also in this wonderful book, is bringing to light, I think, parts of this story, parts of this play that we don't often get to see. I mean, so much of the tension I think that we've talked about today and comes out through the book has been evident from certainly the study of international relations and politics. I'm reminded here of E.H. carr's famous distinction between sort of the utopian versus the realist sort of approach to politics. Do we take at face value or do we dig a little deeper? And so I want to commend you in particular for sort of taking one of your countrymen's maxims to heart here. Orwell's decision to become a journalist was fueled by this idea that he had both the skill and the power of facing unpleasant facts. And so much that comes out of this book is very much, perhaps unpleasant, but no less important and perhaps maybe more important for that. So from all of us here, I want to thank Hannah Lucinda Smith. Her new book, Hinterlands the New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the west, is available at your nearest bookstore or online. And from all of us here at Intelligence Squared, I want to thank you for joining us today and we'll see you next time.
- [65:19]
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Thank you so much.
- [65:21]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member at intelligentsquared.com forward/membership. If you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets over@intelligentsquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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