Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe

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 Mikinowski. 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 kind of laugh at your tears, and I think that kind of 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.

And you grew up in Poland, right?

Well, no, I grew up in America in a Polish family, and then I'd go back and forth a few times. And I grew up in a family that kind of got, the parents who kind of got stuck here inadvertently in 1981 when martial law was declared. They were here, they were in America for either 6 weeks or, or 6 months. They had different visas and they kind of got trapped and they lived in a kind of a Polish cultural bubble. They didn't know English when they, they came here or very little. And I grew up kind of in that culture. And yeah, that's absolutely, I don't smile that much. My mom doesn't, we often get asked if we're very serious. Are we sad? Are we depressed? And I do find, and I did find, there are American habits that are a little odd, like nervous laughter. That's not really a Eastern European thing to punctuate sentences with a laughter, you know, just sort of introduce yourself, you know, I'm Bob from Ohio. Hahaha. Very strange. So there is a little bit of a microcultural disconnect. I grew up believing that completely and being told that by my parents too.

I was in Poland last year and I had the sense, this surprised me, that 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 kind of the big, like in Warsaw. I remember how shocked I was when I had like really good customer service in a café. In like maybe 2006, '07 with the kind of that extra American, would you like anything more with that? And I'm like, what are you saying? Why are you talking to me? And the mores had started to shift. That kind of old confrontational, dour way of interacting had inflected and now it's really changed. Now there's a new generation that seems much more Western, seems much more American. And it is like, it's visible in customer interactions, stores, fashion, and yeah, and how people even— facial expressions, eye contact's a little like 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 they were 20, 21, might have even divorced shortly afterwards and then had a kind of a second real marriage. That pattern seems to have shifted. There's much more marrying in the late 20s, which is more of a US higher education, Western European rhythm to childbearing, having children then in the early 30s. What caused that change and why did they have kids so young to begin with?

That's interesting. That's actually very true of my aunt who stayed in Poland. 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. I mean, 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 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 a family at 21, 22, and nothing much to save up for. No real way to save up, no real goal to save towards. And that's completely shifted. People are trying to wait and in a pretty unstable, 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, 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 your 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 2 or 3 books on it, but they're not experts.

It's an interesting question. I, and I feel I come at Polish culture a little bit askance 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, monoethnic, mono-religious, 99% Polish, Polish speaking, 99% Catholic around there. There's 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. 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 minorities 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 the kind of the dominant view. And the Jagiellonians are this bigger, we're a confederation of peoples. We're a bigger country. We can, we have kind of a big tent version of Polishness. And I'm, 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 it will reemerge because it had been part of the past for so long?

Really interesting because it really was deeply rooted deep in the Middle Ages, definitely in the early modernity. And that old, mostly supposedly mostly Polish Poland actually was hard to recover. Actually 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, multiethnic. 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. It's Poland is what it is. Poland is, you know, the White Eagle, the Pope, the Catholic Church. It's a pretty set thing. It's amazing how much I think the war in Ukraine has changed things that we're going towards and the influx of Ukrainians and actually Belarusians too. And people from— actually, they're 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 closed 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 polyethnicity that it had lost. We'll see how lasting that is. But I think something has 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, Rzeszów 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 where Germany and Poland are? Again, that's been wiped out. It's just simply never coming back. Germany's depopulating, bye-bye Germanic influence in Poland in any direct sense. What do you think?

I think the Germanic influence comes from 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 forced to leave. There's some influence, but the bigger thing is that, that border area, people really go to Germany and Switzerland, 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, aren't going that much back to Poland. They do, people with roots. And there are a lot of Germans with roots in both northern Poland and western Poland. They go, they see the old church, the old cemetery, the old house. A lot of that stuff is actually intact. It, there's nostalgia tours, but they're not moving back very much. So I think the, it's from what contexts are, what influences 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 to, 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, all the rest of it's flat. The south has our Carpathian Mountains, has a little difference. And the culture there is a little different, was different. There are Górałs, which kind of just means mountain people in the direct south Zakopane. And in the past, groups called the Boiks and Lemks or Lemkos Orthodox groups. It was a more multicultural area and it was Habsburg and it was under the Habsburgs. It was kind of the most underdeveloped, the most rural, rural part of Poland. It was, 'cause Poland's kind of a nice natural experiment. It was split into 3 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 and Łódź, became the big factory hubs centers. And then Galicia, the south. Joined an empire that was the Habsburg Empire, that 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 artists. And that's speculation. It might just be that the paint's better.

But speaking of experiments, if you look at a map, you look at Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg, you look at the Suwalki 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 Kant's birthplace? Not really. I think as much as those like Exclaves used to be and still are in Nagorno-Karabakh very precarious. Being a nuclear power is an awfully big trump card. I can't see any of the countries surrounding that oblast making a big move. It'll be, I don't think it's even that big of a deal to the, to 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 curio. I don't think it's the, I don't think it's the Crimea of the Baltic. I think it'll be a, 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, has that been a stable border?

Not completely. Not completely. There's a part that they swapped post-World War II. There's a, there was Bulgaria used to, no, Romania used to cross down and have a little bit more of the Bulgarian, what's now the Bulgarian coast. So there's a piece of southern Dobruja, I think, that they swapped. But as a whole, the river, you know, it's that great. It's used to be the frontier of the Roman Empire for a long time. It's still a, Solid Bulgarian-Romanian border, real linguistic frontier. So that's a solid, long-time frontier. Are there others? The Carpathians are one of the few natural boundaries. That Slovak-Polish border is pretty set for a long time.

Uh, 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 Suwalki Gap, I have no idea which way it will flip, but that's pretty unlikely.

I mean, it's really Russian there though. There's the— who would take it back?

It's—

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 as another possible equilibrium, right? That's possible. We could all be in a—

Maybe not a pleasant one, but it's happened before.

It's true. I mean, there's so many other points of flexion of tension in Moldova and Transnistria and Belarus and Ukraine. That's where I would focus. Kaliningrad, it's odd, but we could kind of, I don't know, it's like the Malta, you could kind of, 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, I don't know. Some of the best food in Europe.

It's really good. Fantastic.

Yes.

But you know, like the best food I have in Poland, there's some really good Vietnamese restaurants cuz there's a Vietnamese minority that, that comes, goes back to the '70s and '80s. But Polish food is best when it's made by, by babus, by Polish grandmas. So I go to milk bars. And it's always the best meal. I, I was up in the Suwalki Gap 2 years ago in, in Suwalki, went to a milk bar, which is a kind of a communist relic that meant that it was a 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, they wouldn't let you have the, even the utensils, the forks would have 2 tines so no one would steal them. Great food. Very cheap, very good. Uh, 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 is 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 might be?

No, actually, I think the reverse. I think Polish— so I think there's a split in the 20th century. Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I read them in both, but I think a lot of Polish poets, I think there's a troika of great post-war poets. Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert. I think they work really well in translation and they don't rely on the things that make Russian poetry so hard and older Polish poetry so hard, which is rhythm and meter and extremely untranslatable wordplay. There's a poet I love, Władysław Leszczyan, who's from kind of 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, it's such a poetry of ideas. I think it comes through really well.

Where should a person start? What's your advice?

Herbert? There's a little out, I think Louis Alvarez edited the little, Czesław Miłosz translated Miłosz, a Modern Poet. You could start with Hermes, Piesk, Biazda. That's Hermes, Dog, and Star. I think Apollo and Marsyas. 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 Grimm's fairy tales. My dad's a computer scientist. His father started, like, set up one of Poland's first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction. So he used to read the Tales of Perks the Pilot and the Ion Tichý stories, the robot. Kind of the short fun ones, like they were fairy tales. So I grew up with them. I think I actually have trouble going back to those. I go back to Solaris and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it's had lasting influence, but they are, there's something pessimistic about them. They don't have that thing that Asimov does, I know, or even Dune of worldbuilding and forecasting the human future far in advance. It, they are like kind of Kafka in space, and that's, you know, absurd situations, strange turns of events. I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress, and maybe that makes them hard to digest. And also a kind of odd sense of humor with the, the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take. I think there is, there's been a little bit of a Lem revival though. I know technologists, some people like them, futurologists like him.

I love the cybernetics tales. They seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I've seen this mentioned once, but it's not generally known. The idea that you use them to talk to, that they're weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles. That's very much in Lem quite early.

I think people should go back to them. I think, you know, I was just thinking Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien. Now it's like, well, this is a little bit what we're doing with virtual reality and AI is like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people, but they, you could have the mimicry of consciousness. The appearance of consciousness without anything behind it, without a consciousness. And, 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 and maybe they will.

If we think about Eastern Europe more generally and we're trying to figure out where, where various 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, you know, I've actually gone to a lot of provincial museums on the old Limes, on the old frontier. You can go and see the kind of little, I like going to the last Roman fort. You know, you can go to Budapest and see the frontier of the frontier. You can go to, go in Slovakia and see like the last Roman camp. I don't think it matters in a major way. I think the traces come later. It's where the kind of the ro— the imprint of Byzantium is still around. The imprint of the East Roman Empire, where that and its extensions and the extensions of its church, that really matters. The world of Orthodoxy versus the world of Catholicism. But those lines, there was such an obliteration of the Roman Empire and its legacy, at least in Eastern Europe, between the 5th century and the 10th century, those old lines got obscured and new ones got put in in 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?

Yeah.

It's essentially at Western European living standards. Croatia's 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 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 pretty 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'm not sure. I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria, maybe too. I'm not sure that I believe in the, in a 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 in the, almost anywhere in the EU. Their birth rates are low and probably falling. There's also not so far away, North Africa, growing population. A lot of migration using boats. They're closer to that than Finland is. What's that going to look like? How many people will be in those places and where will they come from?

Well, Romania's birth rate's 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 partly because it's quite rural country.

They change as they grow, right? And a lot of people have left, will leave.

Well, right now there's a huge influx of Ukrainians and probably, well, 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 kind of 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. They don't, it's not a good connection. But I was at the bus station and there were tons of buses to, to places like Campulung Moldovanescu, Sucava, Botoștani, like rural Moldavian cities, the part of Moldova, Moldavia in, 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, in Portugal. And some of those people are going to come back. A lot of them are coming back and you're going to get an influx from over the border. I mean, right now Ukraine's 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, overland from Asia, they tend not to stop in the Balkans. That's a throughway for them. Even in Hungary, they're trying to get to Germany, France, Great Britain. Very rarely do the migrants from— I mean, maybe a little bit, but that's not a major influx because they're also— the living standard gap, I don't think, is 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, has maybe come to an end. They, I think they vote in parliament after my book went to press, 'cause I talk a little bit about Moldavian language and, and the Moldavian national anthem. And after it was in press, they, they had this vote and Moldavian is now I think officially Romanian. And there is a move to— I mean, if they could make it work with Romania, I think a lot of people would do it. I mean, then there'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, there'd be a real problem in how to, 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?

Um, well, it originally was a big transit hub for the Balkans, say 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's in decline.

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 and these boats, these kind of houseboats on the Danube where people party on. To become a genuine transit hub, I guess they would have to make nice with everybody around them and rebuild. I mean, it's, it is hard to travel around the Balkans now 'cause there's no, the rails, there are hardly any long distance railways. I mean, I had a terrible time going from Belgrade to Sarajevo 'cause 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 it's a— 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 term. 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 is in 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 myth-making, that moment, although they really mythologized it, of the great defeat of Serbia at the hands of the Ottomans, and then wresting a kind of victory by assassinating the Ottoman Sultan in the last second after the battle's been lost. I think there's a real pull of history. There's a real pull of defeat, but in terms of a larger value, it's the dream of Serbia as a great country. There are Eastern European countries kind of have fallen to categories. There are countries that are small and they're happy being small, which is a minority, and countries that are small to medium and dream of being big. Poland dreams of being big, but it's— those dreams have— are less prominent than they used to be. Hungary dreams of being big, 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 At least for some Serbs, a, not a Serbian empire, but a, a big sphere of influence where they were the top dog. They were the big player. The Yugoslav Kingdom is very much like that, formed around Serbia. And Kosovo is the last piece of that, is the last piece of that. You know, once they lose that and Montenegro, they're really a small country. 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—

but that doesn't mean they can defend themselves, right? Or do we get another Balkans War where there's an Albanian ethnic movement for some kind of Greater Albania. There's a movement for Greater Serbia. The two clash and they end up fighting.

If you go to Kosovo, everywhere you see big silver monuments to the heroes of the 1999 Kosovo War and the KAL members. That's going to be a— I mean, that's just a horrible— If Serbia were to take over Kosovo, it'd be a nightmare insurgency. I mean, maybe Serbia does it. I definitely don't think it's worth it except on a, just satisfying psychological craving. But you know, there's a little Serbian majority strip. I'm not clear majority, but most of the Serbs live like close to Serbia. Maybe some kind of partial partitioning in the future, but an actual Serbian takeover of 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 Albania and it matters to them. I was in Montenegro and I was in the Albanian, there's an Albanian part of Montenegro that people don't know about. And, and Ulcinj used to be the great Venetian city there is dominant Albanian. Macedonia, North Macedonia has an Albanian majority region, is almost a quarter Albanian, just about a quarter. And then Kosovo is majority Albanian. They, I know that Albania has expansionist ideas, but they have, to the extent they have foreign policy aims, they do have to support their ethnic, you know, their linguistic allies. And there is a lot of inter-movement. I mean, Kosovars go back and forth from Albania all the time. Albanians go to Kosovo. There is, that's an open border. That's very easy to cross. The punzans, people are constantly pouring across and that's, 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 am not sure. But politically, they do have to stand up for their co-ethnics.

Is there some level of per capita income where you think this all more or less goes away? So you look at the two Irelands, 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, right? 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 Irelands and everything festers, but it's just all quite fine because wealth is up? Or do you think it's something darker than that?

That everyone's rich and happy and all the problems are kind of Belgian problems that you kind of just live with.

Yeah, no one's happy and Belgium might split up still, but nonetheless it all feels quite diffused, whether it's Ireland or Belgium. Some people would say Spain, maybe that's still up for grabs.

I think so. I mean, I think European integra— the more, 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 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. I mean, these are the poor, aside from Moldova, the poorest countries in Europe. So the amount of catching up before you can be Switzerland and all live happily together, it's pretty big. If we, if they did get there and 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 don't think, 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 2 was Albania and the place is booming. I mean, what happened there? No one expected that. What have they done right?

It's striking. I was in Albania. I, I really did like a, a deep tour of Albania and the kind of Albanophone regions next to it last year. And you do feel that boom. You can feel there's a lot of Gulf investment and Saudi investment. There's a ton of road building. There's a ton of actually really good cultural infrastructure being built. They're doing a great job with museums and heritage. I was renting a car from somebody, a little like Albanian car rental, and the guy told me, you know, he spends 6 months in Albania and the other 6 months he goes to Great Britain. He works outside London as a programmer and he had programmed, he had designed all his car rental agency's 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, like really prime Mediterranean coastline that hasn't been developed deeply, extensively in a small country. I think that really matters. And what else? I'm not sure. It's pretty, you know, it's under 3 million people. So small effects can have big consequences.

Why are there so few Christian-Muslim problems in Albania relative to many other places in the world?

There are hardly any.

Is it because of the Pitashe Muslims or some other reason?

You know, there is a kind of very moderate Sufi strain to Islam there. Although there are some, there's some proselytizing by the 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 the, all the tribal violence is. Those are the great Catholic hill tribes were the really like violent ones that do blood feud. I mean, the take on this in Albania is that, so I think one of the main poets said that the religion of Albanians is Albanianism, is that they're all Albanian. They're all Albanian speaking, and it kind of dilutes those differences. There's a lot of intermarriage. The Muslim Islam is very mild, and the conflicts run in all different directions. They're most historically, they're clan-based, clan on clan, not religion on religion. And the temperature, beyond just being this very mild Sufi Islam, the Years of official atheism also cooled the temperature on religion a lot. The religion is all three— Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam— are kind of muted culturally, and Albanian national unity is more prominent psychologically.

Hungary, what 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, could be 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 Orbán, knew him as a student, knew him as an activist, as a kind of libertarian-ish student leader. And the thing they all say is that he's incredibly smart, incredibly attuned to— incredibly professional politician. He's obsessed with the details of politics. He's obsessed with the details of policy. He's obsessed with the details of self-presentation. He has no particular ideological allegiance. This idea of him as a Christian nationalist is something he came up with to strategically— everything with him is a strategic calculation on how to build and maintain power, 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 and kind of transformational things across Hungary. And so he controls more and more of the media, more and more of the economy. He's harder and harder to unseat. 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 like excessive violence. I don't think he has the support in the police or any of the security services to be that kind of ruler. Even if you wanted to be. So it's a strange hybrid.

And you think it's broadly compatible with Hungary just staying in the EU, people looking a bit the other way on both sides, but it can just continue or not?

I think it's amazing it's gotten to this point. And the EU has abetted him effectively. EU funds, which are hugely transformational in Hungary. If you drive around the Hungarian countryside, every— it's kind of annoying because every 500 meters it feels like you come to a roundabout under construction. Pointlessly, and that's all EU money and it's all under the control of companies that construction firms essentially act as extensions of 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, 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, the realm of, of national symbols and symbology. You see, like, you'll see the Trianon belt buckles for sale and people wearing them where you have like pre-Trianon, like big Hungary. You can have a big silver one as a kind of like Texas style belt buckle. I don't think that literally means when people wear those, does that literally mean they want Backa back from Serbia, that they want southern Slovakia back from Slovakia? Not, not exactly. They're one of those Eastern European countries that's small. But dreams of being big. They still have that sense of being robbed, which in a way they were, since that their historical destiny was denied. And Orbán 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 that there's a little corner of Ukraine that was once Hungarian over 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— it's something— it is a little bit like 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, or do you actually start seeing the rest of the world more in those terms? How has it shaped your general views of humanity?

I can give 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 Bácska back. The part that's really struck me deeply is the Holocaust. Is so my family, a lot of them went through the Holocaust in Poland and studying the German occupation of especially Poland, right? 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, well, this is a Polish-Jewish thing. This is about antisemitism. I think there's actually something deeper. So after 19— so in the kind of 3 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 in a few months, there's Operation Barbarossa, and a few months later they start clearing the ghettos out. They start, they start the real process of eliminating Poland's Jews and shooting people outright, shooting people as they're invading and rounding people up, taking them from ghettos to concentration camps where they're gassed and killed. And then there's this period. And so that's when most of the actual murder and death 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 hunted by anyone, can be killed by anyone and have to find a way to survive. And this truly mouth— I mean, Malthusian, Hobbesian, a true Hobbesian world and where food is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Money is scarcer. Everything is scarce. And a real world of poverty, 'cause 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 or 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, whatever 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 do 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, 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 will make that bargain and be like, I'll take your money and I'll put you up. I'll put you in my cellar. I'll put, I'll hide you in a room for a few months, for a year, for 2 years. But the longer that goes, the riskier it becomes and the harder it becomes. And the more there's the temptation to say, actually, I'm going to give you up. My neighbors can see this. I can't go on with this. I need the money. I'm too scared. I just, Doesn't seem like a point. Everyone's dead. So if the war had been shorter, a lot more people would've been saved. And the war, the longer the war runs, the more people are either denounced by their neighbors or their own protectors denounce them. But the ones who are saved in the long run, this is where the human nature comes in. What's so interesting is the kind of, so how do you know who to trust and the people who end up protecting the people they protect the longest, hold out the longest, hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins. People who— widows, outcasts, 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 Jews and you were to take their money and buy something like that, Immediately all your neighbors would know what you're doing. 'Cause every village is 100 eyes watching everybody else. So you make one move, you make one change, you buy a tin roof, everyone knows what you're doing. Everyone knows you're hiding a Jew. 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 kind of on the margins will also like, you know, 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 Jews. And if you were to ask them beforehand, how would you act in this situation? What would you do? I don't think they'd have any idea what they would do. I don't think they could predict themselves how they would act. And that's where you get at 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 backstop. 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, I mean, to me, although I'm not primarily a historian of the Holocaust, that's the lesson I take away. I'm sorry for a very long answer.

Oh, 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, and started being aware of it in, in 2022, Ukraine is just a natural fact and they weren't necessarily sure what it is, where it comes from. I think there is such a complicated story there of Ukraine between Poland and especially Russia, of being entangled with both of those and, and creating itself in relation and against both of those. It's a, 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, which is always looking for something in the past to like an old wound to come back and celebrate and show off about, they, they're really showing off about, they're celebrating, but commemorating 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, in a, in a flash, it's come switched to Poles and Ukrainians brothers because of the big enemy. And there's more to that, like just growing up, I don't know, Chmielnicki and who he is to Ukrainians and Poles, that these are entangled stories. But do I actually understand the course of the war better? And do I have a prediction for it? And did I understand 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 they're some kind of manly man and they work out, they lift weights, they have muscles. 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? Hmm.

Well, 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 down in former Yugoslavia. You know, maybe Greece would be the place to track. I don't think Greek men have, have followed some kind of postmodern Wilbeckian course. I think we're a long way off from losing the Balkan male as, 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, design 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 2 weeks, where do you send them? What's the itinerary?

Can I 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.

That's a shame. And Budapest is off the table. So I selfishly will start you in Warsaw because I love Warsaw and I'm a Warsawian and Warsaw is derided, but actually one of Eastern Europe's most interesting cities. And you get that history. The architecture's not great, but the, the history's 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. You can skip Kraków on the same basis as, as overtourists did, although it's wonderful, as, as Prague and Budapest. Go down to Przemyśl. Near the Ukrainian border and get a sense of that old Habsburg infrastructure and, 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 east, old Eastern Orthodox part of Poland, which used to be, you can go to the, you can go to Sanok to one of the wonderful museums there. And then down through Slovakia, through Eastern Slovakia, the kind of Ruthenian Slovakia. So the, the, the parts of these Catholic countries are Eastern Orthodox and into Northern Romania. Northern Romania is the best place to see traditional Eastern Europe, to see the world of haymaking and hand-built houses and that, and the land of hay and wood. Maramurescu is my favorite area. Maramurescu is kind of proverbially poor northernmost hat. Romania and go to just the village I love called Breb. But the whole Valley of Iud 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, too late then? Maybe down to Bucharest?

You have a few more days left.

Yeah, we have a few more days left.

Yeah, take another place or two.

Let's go around Transylvania, which is beautiful and has plenty of great places to stay. Sibiu is great, but I, I like actually outside, Cluj is interesting, but Viscri, 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 like culturally diverse places in Eastern Europe. And you have like real Roma 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 then 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 border, let's go to Belgrade and go to one of those houseboats and have a great, have some great risotto. I have a place, some great Burek, meet Burek, and party on a houseboat, on a raft on the Danube. We can finish there. Because Belgrade's another—

Great.

Yeah.

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. It's an idea from The Captive Mind by Joseph Milosz of ideological masquerade or disguise that he took from— it's a concept in Shiite Islamic practice that he read about. Where Shiites under duress, under Sunni rule, would pretend to be Sunni and had an obligation religiously to do that under the Abbasids. And then he's like, 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 for, or, or regular science, and there's an outward face that is doctrinarily Marxist or doctrinarily Soviet or something. And how that was, how he came up with that, how it, the dialogues he had with some of his peers, especially one kind of 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 is like, is that Did that really happen or did it 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. And Jacob, thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Tyler. It's 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 @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.