 Conversations 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 mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. I'm talking today with Jacob Mikanowski. He is the author of one of my favorite books this year. It is called Goodbye 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 an all-around smart, curious person. Jacob, 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, sense of the absurd, 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 humor, Ashkenazi humor, and I think it's found everywhere across the region. I know there's a Romanian saying to laugh at your tears. I think that sums it up, laugh at your 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 it completely. You grew up in Poland, right? No, I grew up in America in a Polish family, and that'd go back and forth a few times. I grew up in a family that got stuck here inadvertently in 1981, when martial law was declared. They were in America for either six weeks or six months, had different visas, and they got trapped. They lived in a Polish cultural bubble. They didn't know English when they came here, or very little. I grew up in that culture, and yeah, that's absolutely, I don't smile that much. My mom doesn't. I get asked if we're very serious, are we sad, are we depressed? I do find, or I did find, our American habits that are a little odd, like nervous laughter. That's not really a Eastern European thing, to punctuate sentences with a laughter, just sort of introduce yourself. I'm Bob from Ohio. Very strange. There is a little bit of a micro-cultural disconnect. I grew up believing that completely. I've been told that by my parents, too. I was in Poland last year, and I had the sense, this surprised me, that Poles 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 a bad thing, but a certain set of cultural mores has crumbled, especially in the big Warsaw. I remember how shocked I was when I had really good customer service in a cafe, in maybe 2006, 2007, with the extra American, would you like anything more with that? I'm like, what are you saying? What are you talking to me? The mores that started to shift, that old confrontational, dour way of interacting had inflected, and now it's really changed, and now there's a new generation that seems much more Western, seems much more American, and it is, it's visible in customer interactions, stores, fashion, and yeah, and how people even facial expressions, eye contact's a little more direct than it used to be, I think. If 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 there were 20, 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 and put my, my mom came to America just to visit her aunt. And my aunt stayed in Poland 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 it's a really different political 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 rented, filled right to an apartment. You didn't have a hope of a car. And jobs were a kind of, not exactly a crapshoot, 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 an income to support 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, in Poland, a volatile economy, at least in the past 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 it's a much more Western life track that people are on. You've studied Poland. You've lived there. You're fluent in Polish. If you compare your 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. That's an interesting question. I, and I feel I come at Polish culture a little bit, a scant 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 who come to Poland cold. And from a lot of Poles who see Poland and have grown up in a Poland, that's largely monocultural, mono-ethnic, mono-religious. 99% Polish, Polish speaking, 99% Catholic. Around there, they're a little bit of, a little bit of erosion. 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. And 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 minority like Belarusians who are deeply tied up with this other part of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 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 Piast, Poland, and Jagiellonian, Poland. And Piast is that more narrow one culture, one religion. That's what's been assigned to it. And that's kind of the dominant view. And the Jagiellonians are this bigger, we're a confederation of peoples. We're a bigger country. We have kind of a big tent 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 Poles know. This 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 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. That old, mostly, supposedly mostly Polish Poland actually was hard to recover. Actually it was kind of west of, it's the western part of Poland. It had tons of Germans, which people forget. It was also in a different way, 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 had asked me that 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I'd say no. 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 in Ukraine has changed things, that we're going towards and the influx of Ukrainians, and actually Belarusians too. Actually there are also Chechens in a smaller number, people from the former Soviet Union. And because of that war, the, I think, perceptions of difference have really shifted in Poland. It's become, from a very close society, I think a much, 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 it 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, Roslav was once Breslau. A lot of the achievement in that city came from people with Germanic origins, growing up speaking German. Is that somehow inevitable, given we're Germany in Poland, or 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 Poles living and working in Germany, and especially Silesia. 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 were forced to leave. There's some influence. But the bigger thing is that, that border area, people really go to Germany and Austria to work. People 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 don't are 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? It is. It is from southern Poland. I'll venture a guess. That'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 real terrain. All the rest of it is flat. The south has our Carpathian mountains. And the culture there is a little different. It was different. There are gurals and mountain people in the direct south, Zakopane. And in the past, groups called the Boyks and Lemkos Orthodox groups, it was a multicultural area. And it was Habsburg. And it was under the Habsburgs. It was kind of the most underdeveloped, the most rural, Ruritanian part of Poland. It was... Poland's kind of a nice natural experiment. It was 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 Warsaw, became the big factory hubs, centers. And then Galicia, the south, joined an empire that was... The Habsburg empire was kind of in between economically but was left extremely underdeveloped, extremely poor, up to independence, up to 1918. And I think that maybe incubated and kept some of that folk life intact. It was neither industrializing nor westernizing the way the Prussian... 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 Königsberg, you look at the Swalke 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. I mean, what do you expect? Do I expect, you know, Polish tanks storming, the Kahn's birthplace? Not really. I think as much as those, like, exclaves used to be, and still are, in Nagorno-Karabakh, very precarious, being in nuclear power is an awfully big trump card. I can't see any of the countries surrounding that oblast making a big move. It'll be, I don't think it's even that big of a deal. In Poland, 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 curia. I don't think it's the Crimea or the Baltic. I think it'll be an issue, but not a huge issue. But how many Eastern European borders have stayed the same for, say, even 50 or 60 years? The Danube's always been there. The Danube's a good one. Is Bulgaria, Romania, a possible border? Not completely. There's a part that they swapped post World War II. There was Bulgaria used to, Romania used to cross down and have a little bit more of the Bulgarian, what's now the Bulgarian coast. So there's a piece of Southern Dabruja, I think, that they swapped. But as a whole, the river, you know, it's great. It used to be the frontier of the Roman Empire for a long time. The 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 Slovak-Polish border is pretty set for a long time. There's so few stable borders and the one on the map that looks the weirdest. 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 Kaliningrad and the Swalpy Gap. I have no idea which way it will flip. But that seems to be unlikely. I mean, it's really Russian there though. There's the... Who would take it back? There aren't any Polish people there. 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 but it's not a pleasant one. It's happened before. It's true. I mean, there's so many other points of affection, of tension in Moldova and Transnistria and Belarus and Ukraine. That's where I would focus. Kaliningrad, it's odd but it's like the Malta or Luxembourg. It could kind of maybe exist for a long time. But I'm not sure. These days, why is the food in Poland so good? I'm glad to hear you say that. I don't always think that. The best food in Europe. It's fantastic. But you know, the best food I have in Poland, there's some really good Vietnamese restaurants because there's a Vietnamese minority that comes back to the 70s and 80s. But Polish food is best when it's made by Bobpiches, a Polish grandmas. So I go to milk bars and it's always the best meal. I was up in the Suwałki Gap two years ago in Suwałki. Went to a milk bar, which is a kind of communist relic. They meant that it was kind of a daytime cafeteria where you'd get Polish standards but you couldn't get any alcohol. And usually in the bad days they wouldn't let you have even the utensils. The forks would have two tines so no one would steal them. Great food. Very cheap, very good. There are more levels to Polish gastronomy now. You can get really fancy food. You can get incredible artisanal pierogi but just simple, well-made, country homestop. 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? Or is it more or less lost to us like Russian poetry? 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'm reading them in both but I think a lot of Polish poets, I think there's a troika of great post-war poets. Wysława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert. I think they work really well on translation and they don't rely on the things that make Russian poetry so hard and older Polish poetry so hard and extremely untranslatable word play. There's a poet I love, Wysław Leśmian who's from the early 20th century he's really barely been translated extremely difficult even in Polish doesn't work at all in English but I think especially Herbert is so spare in Polish as well there's so little 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 I think Louis Alvarez edited the little Czesław Miłosz translated Miłosz, a modern poet, you could start with Hermes Pieszk Biazda that's Hermes dog and star I think Apollo and Marseys the poem is maybe my favorite so you could just start with that poem specifically. Why isn't Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer? That's interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on you know the Grims fairy tales my dad's a computer scientist his father started 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 the pilot and the Ion Tiki stories the robot kind of 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 would 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 Asimov does I know we're even dune of world building and forecasting the human future for our advance they are like kind of Kafka in space and that's you know absurd situations kind of events I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress and maybe that makes them hard to digest and also kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to think I think there's been a little bit of a Lem revival though I know technologists some people like them, futurologists like him some of the cybernetics tales they seem weirdly close to the current state 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 that's very much in Lem quite early I think people should go back to them I think you know I was just saying Solaris which I always thought about as a story about contacting a truly alien now it's like well this is it's a little bit what we're doing with virtual reality and NAIs what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams if you could revive people but 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 and 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 when the earliest lines fall where 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 I've actually gone to a lot of provincial museums on the old Lemus, on the old frontier you can go and see that I like going to the last Roman fort you can go to Nbudapest and see the frontier of the frontier you can go to Slovakia and see the last 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 where that and its extensions that really matters the world of orthodoxy versus the world of Catholicism but those lines 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 the 900s and the 1000s so 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 more optimistic so Slovenia has done extremely well right 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 a lot of that I don't think we should be that pessimistic about Romania and Bulgaria I think actually Romania is showing and that's a coming out of communism a much more rural much more backward economy than Slovenia but I think it's growing really fast I think things are actually really okay there 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 think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously Bulgaria maybe too I'm not sure that I believe in the kind of orthodox curse I 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-Switzerland 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 there's also not so far away in 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 Romania's birth rate is pretty high I think it's along the top of maybe I'm a little out of date but along the top of European birth rates and probably because it's quite rural country they change as they grow and a lot of people have left well right now there's a huge influx of Ukrainian and probably Moldovans all left I mean a quarter of Moldova left Moldova and Romanians will also return I remember a great way to find out what's going under the surface in European labor and migration is go to bus stations long-haul bus stations I remember trying to catch a bus from Seville to Lisbon which for whatever reason is really hard but I was at the bus station and there were tons of buses to places like Kampulung Moldovanesh Ksuchaava, Bottostani rural Moldavian cities part of Moldova Moldavia in 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 going to come back and you're going to get an influx from over the border I mean right now Ukraine is going to lose people because of that economy is going to be in I think crisis for a long time the migrants that are coming over land from Asia they tend not to stop in the Balkans even in Hungary they're trying to get to Germany, France Great Britain very rarely the migrants from maybe a little bit that's not a major influx because they're also the living standard gap I don't think it's 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 the complicated history of Moldavian as a separate language has maybe come to an end I think they voted in parliament after my book went to press because I talk a little bit about Moldavian language and the Moldavian national anthem and after it was in press 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 and then it's the 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 on how to incorporate it but what Moldavian politics is not split right left it's split pro-EU pro-Russia and pro-EU 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 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 it is one of the best Balkan cities to party in it's one of the funnest Balkan cities it has, it's reinvented itself as a Balkan party center it really has this incredible culture of discos these boats, these 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 there are hardly any long distance railways I mean I had a terrible time going from Belgrade to Sarajevo because you don't get sent to Sarajevo you get sent to Sarajevo that belongs to Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia if they could resolve all their regional conflicts then yes, that city is in a perfect position it's why it 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 have increasingly close links to especially China so maybe they're an island of Chinese influence in the Balkans it's their future the Serbian obsession with I guess you'd have to call it the 14th century is 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 Serbians 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 is it that they really mean when they're saying it the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds 1389 it is pivotal in Serbian memory and Serbian mythmaking 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 battle has been lost I think in history there's a real pull of the feet but in terms of a larger value it's the dream of Serbia as a great country Eastern European countries 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 are less prominent than they used to be of returning to being big and those dreams are still around and Serbia dreams of being big it had that oversized role in Yugoslavia Yugoslavia was in a way these are some Serbs 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 you know once they lose that and Montenegro they're really a small country there 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 well not if greater Albania has anything to say about it I mean Kosovo is so dominantly ethnically Albanian it is a war between the two worlds 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 to clash and they end up fighting I mean if you go to Kosovo everywhere you see big silver monuments to the heroes of of the 1999 Kosovo war and AAL members that's going to be a I mean not just a horrible if Serbia were to take over Kosovo I mean maybe Serbia does it I definitely don't think it's worth it except on a satisfying psychological craving but you know there's a little Serbian majority strip but most of the Serbs live close to Serbia maybe some kind of partial partitioning in the future but an actual Serbian take over Kosovo I hope that doesn't happen because I think it would 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 of Albania and it matters to them I was in Montenegro and I was in the Albanian part of Montenegro that people don't know about and Ulcin used to be the Venetian city there is dominant Albanian the Macedonia has a Albanian majority region is almost a 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 a foreign policy aims they do have to support their ethnic you know their linguistic allies there is a lot of inter-movement I mean Kosovars go back and forth from Albania all the time Albanians go to Kosovo that's an open border it's very easy to cross 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 there's 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's settled there's no reunification but it's quite peaceful and we're just not too worried about it people 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 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 whether it's Ireland or Belgium some people would say Spain maybe that's still up for grabs I think European maybe this is naive but the more European integration happens the more that does lift some of those regional and enclave 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 is there a specific income level I mean they have a far they have a long way to go in Albania, North Macedonia Kosovo aside from Aldova the poorest countries in Europe 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 when I was striking I was in Albania I really did like a deep tour of Albania and the kind of Albanian Albanian regions next to it last year and you do feel that boom you can feel there's a lot of Gulf investment Saudi investment, there's a ton of road building there's a ton of actually really good cultural infrastructure being built and doing a great job with museums and heritage I was running a car from somebody a little like Albanian car rental and the guy told me that's in Albania, the other six months he goes to Great Britain, he 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 really prime Albanian 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 under 3 million people so small effects can have big consequences Why are there so few Christian Muslim problems in Albania relative to many other places in the world? There are hardly any Is it the Kashi Muslims 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 there's some, it's not just that anymore and it'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 were the really violent ones that do blood feud I mean the take on this in Albania is, I think the main poets said that the religion of Albanians is Albanianism is that they're all Albanian they're all Albanian speaking and it kind of dilutes those differences there's a lot of intermarriage Islam is very mild and the conflicts run in all different directions historically they're clan based clan on clan not religion on religion and the temperature on 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 common psychologically Hungary what is your read on the current political situation this has become a political football of sorts amongst the American right how 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 in Hungary Hungary is pretty fascinating it's like if an American red state were completely captured by one party one party leader maybe it doesn't have to be a red state it's like a Huey Long type figure and who then had was powerful enough to start really changing the rules and to always 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 I've talked to people who know Alban Nuhm as a student Nuhm as an activist as a kind of libertarian ish student leader and the thing we all say is that he's incredibly smart incredibly attuned to the 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 presentation he has no particular ideological legions this idea of him as a Christian nationalist is something that he came up with to strategically everything with him is a strategic calculation on how to build and maintain power his own power and his party's power and he's extremely good at it and he uses countless small measures that add up to small electoral victories and then takes those small electoral victories and parlays them into huge constitutional transformational things across Hungary so he controls more and more of the media more and more of the economy and yet it's not a hard dictatorship I don't think he would ever fire on crowds I don't think faced with mass protest he would resort to 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 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 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 Fidesz and Orbán's power they 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 political party and to me it's strange that it's gotten to the point that it's gotten but unless there's 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 backed 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 why 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 remember the Alamo you know, it is by this point has moved into the realm of national symbols and symbologies you will see the Trianon belt buckles for sale where you have free Trianon and big Hungary you can have a big silver one it's a kind of like Texas style belt buckle I don't think that literally means people wear those, does that literally mean they want Bácska back from Serbia that they want southern Slovakia back from Slovakia 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 since that their historical destiny was denied and Orban will play with that a little bit he will suggest that maybe if Ukraine were to fall apart and it's about to fall apart maybe there's a little corner of Ukraine that's on 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 aspirations I don't think there's the way Texans are about Texas Hungarians are about Hungary 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 has it shaped your view of just human nature flat out is it that you think well what I see in Eastern Europe is a bit of an outlier you actually start seeing the rest of the world more in those terms how has it shaped your general views of humanity you a little longer answer it has shaped a view of humanity and the part but 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 Bačka back the part that's really struck me deeply is the Holocaust is so my family a lot of them went to the Holocaust in Poland and studying the German occupation of especially Poland where the Jews were 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 will talk about this is a Polish Jewish thing I think there's actually something deeper so after 19 so in there are kind of three phases to the Holocaust in Poland there's an early phase where people are 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 they start the real process and shooting people outright shooting people as 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 so that's when most of the actual murder that happens and so but then from late 1941 to early 1945 there's a small group of survivors in Poland Polish Jews who are in peril from all sides are 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 mouth to mouth who's Hobbesian a true Hobbesian world and where food is becoming scarcer and scarcer money is scarce everything is scarce 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 but the ones who escaped from the ghetto or were surviving or ran away from transports are otherwise just out at sea in Poland have to usually make a bargain with somebody have to find someone and they can trade whatever they have whatever money they have they can promise for shelter and they do and 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 I had family members who actually survived this way miraculously but some didn't and what I find in the short run a lot of people make that bargain be like I'll take your money and I'll put you up I'll put you in my cellar I'll hide you in a room for a few months for a year for two years but the longer that goes the riskier it becomes and the harder it becomes and the more there's a 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 dead so if the war had been shorter a lot more people have been saved and the longer the war runs the more people are either denounced by their neighbors or their own protectors denounced them but the ones who are saved the long run this is where the human nature comes in what's so interesting is the kind of you 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 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 but 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 100 eyes watching everybody else you make one move you make one change you buy a tin roof everyone knows what you're doing everyone knows you're hiding 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 so but how would you know that because just as possible those people on the margins will also like they can denounce someone for a tiny reward for a bottle of vodka for a kilo of sugar those are some of the rewards that people gave for juice 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 of 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 instinct some people will do it out of an innate feeling but most won't and to me that means human nature is in some ways completely plastic has no bottom has no backside most people in the right situation in the wrong situation the worst situation will act in any way behave 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 to me although I'm not primarily answering the Holocaust that's the lesson I take away I'm sorry for a very long answer that's great given all your study of Eastern Europe what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well informed people would not what do I understand about the war in Ukraine I'll tell you what that Ukraine what Ukraine is has shifted over time and is continuing to shift I think people who look at this war and started being aware of it in 2022 Ukraine is just a natural fact and they weren't necessarily sure what it is or where it comes from I think there is such a complicated story there of Ukraine between Poland and especially Russia of being entangled with both of those and creating itself and against both of those it'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 is always looking for something in the past like an old wound to come back and celebrate and show off about they really show off about they're celebrating but creating the Polish-Ukrainian violence in World War II was a major thing kind of platform of like remember what the Ukrainians did to us and in a flash it's come switched to Poles and Ukrainians, brothers and there's more to that like strolling up I don't know Khmelnitsky and who he is to Ukrainians and Poles that these are entangled stories but do I actually understand the course of the war better do I have a prediction for it and did I understand it 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 they lift weights women there's a particular set of roles and Putin 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 informer Yugoslavia you know maybe Greece would be the place to track I don't think Greek men have followed some kind of postmodern will becky and of course I think we're a long way off from losing the Balkan male as 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 anything 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 ask one is war a concern is Ukraine on the table they're not going to go to Ukraine whether they should or not right not the shame and Budapest is off the table so I selfishly and I'm a Warsaw and Warsaw is derided but actually one of eastern Europe's most interesting cities and you get the history the architecture is not great but the history is right there under the surface if you know what you're looking for good airport too and then I would send you south down to the mountains skip crack on the same basis as over tourists did although it's wonderful as Prague and Budapest go down to finished near the Ukrainian border and get a sense of that old Habsburg infrastructure and get a whiff of that that you're right on the border of Ukraine you're right on the border of Ukrainian influence and that you're in that old eastern orthodox part of Poland used to be you can go to the you can go to Sanok to the wonderful museums there and then down through Slovakia to eastern Slovakia the kind of Ruthenian Slovakia Slovakia so the parts of these Catholic countries that are eastern orthodox 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 the land of hay and wood Mara Mures it's my favorite area Mara Mures is kind of proverbly northern most hat of Romanian village I love called Bred but the whole valley of Jude is one of the most traditional lastly traditional parts of eastern Europe and you can get a taste of what it things might have been like certainly 30 years ago 100 years ago I think we are we too late then maybe down to Bucharest you have a few more days left yeah we have a few more days left yeah let's go to another place or two let's go around Transylvania which is beautiful actually outside inclusion is interesting but Viscre, Biertan these places that used to be German they have these fortified churches and usually there's a cool Hungarian nobleman's house that you can stay in Prince Charles loves this area and has these like refurbished castles that he owns that you can or manor houses that you can stay in and it's really neat and Transylvania is also one of the most culturally diverse places in eastern Europe and you have like real life that a lot of the formerly German towns are now mostly inhabited by Gabor Roma, Seventh-day Adventist Roma it's pretty neat and you can go down to Bucharest no you know what I'm gonna call an audible if you can if we can get across the board let's go to Belgrad and go to one of those house boats and have some great risotto I have a place some great Borek meet Borek and party on a houseboat on a raft in the Danube we can finish there Belgrad is another very last question just to repeat though to everyone Jacob's book Goodbye Eastern Europe an 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 writing the book I went back to it dumped most of it rewrote it and took it on a different topic and it's done and I can file it probably this month and what's that on? it's on Ketman this idea from the captive mind of ideological masquerade or disguise that he took from it's a concept in Shiite Islamic practice that you write about where Shiites under duress under Sunni rule would pretend to be Sunni and had an obligation religiously to do that that's what life is like under Stalinism that's what my peers were all doing they're practicing Ketman they're splitting themselves to an inner self that believes in some older pre-war ideal of Catholicism or art or regular science and there's an outward face that is doctrionarily Marxist or doctrionarily Soviet or something and how that was up with that the dialogues he had with some of his peers especially one 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 said did that really happen 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 bibliography and it's done congratulations on that Jacob thank you very much that has been a blast thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm at Tyler Cowan and the show is at Cowan Convos until next time please keep listening and learning