Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

As in much of his work, Kaplan looks to history, literature, politics and philosophy to interpret our world, drawing parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic. Weimar faced myriad crises inextricably bound up with international systems, and its emergency became a global one. Today, too, every disaster in one country could spiral across the world, given the singular dilemmas of our century—pandemics, recession, urbanisation, mass migration, destabilisation under large-scale democracy and great power conflicts, and digital media’s intimate bonds. Could stability and historic liberalism, rather than mass democracy per se, save world populations from anarchic breakdown?

Waste Land is a bracing glimpse into a future defined by twenty-first–century technology, but remarkably resonant with the past. The situation may be spiralling out of our control—unless our leaders act first.