John West
Robert Kaplan’s book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis paints a portrait of civilisation in flux. Drawing insights from history, literature and art, he examines the effect of modern technology, globalisation and urbanisation on the decline of great powers and increasing domestic polarisation.
The title of Waste Land is inspired by T S Eliot’s famous poem of 1922, ‘The Waste Land’. According to Kaplan, this captures very well the situation of the world today—the end of the old world and a new world not quite coming into being, and a sense of alienation, disjointedness and fragmentation. Kaplan’s book reads like an essay, despite its length of 224 pages, and is triggered by his feeling that we are always in a crisis of some sort.
The first of the book’s three sections argues that Germany’s Weimar Republic, from 1919 until the ascension of Hitler in 1933, is a metaphor for the world today. Weimar was an attempt at forming a stable democracy that would prevent the rise of an autocrat. But it was a sprawling and badly managed system that was always in crisis.
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