What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith

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**Mia Sorrenti** (0:58)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.
What can the places at the edge of Europe tell us about the continent's future? And are some of the most important political struggles of our time unfolding far from the sense of power where most of the world's attention is focused? On today's episode, Hannah Lucinda Smith, journalist and author, joins Adam McCauley to discuss her new book, Hinterlands, Journeys Through Europe's Unfinished Frontiers. And what Europe's borderlands reveal about conflict, identity and the shifting balance of power across the continent. Let's join our host, Adam McCauley, now with more.

**Adam McCauley** (1:35)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Adam McCauley. The refrains are common. History rhymes, but doesn't repeat. And yet we stand today both amidst and on the precipice of crisis, perhaps of a new Cold War or more worrisome still, tipping ever closer to another great war. Strategists, historians, experts, and journalists alike feel that same creeping friction and try where they can to divine signs of what yet might come.
Today's guest has spent much of her career working to understand what the slow and sometimes inflective changes in geopolitics might tell us about a changing world and the global powers jockeying to define its shape.
Hannah Lucinda Smith is a writer, consultant, and reporter for The Times and The Economist. She is a repeat grant recipient from the Pulitzer Center, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of Erdogan Rising and the co-author of Zarifa. Hannah joins us today to discuss her newest book, Hinterlands, The New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the West. Hannah, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (2:44)
Thank you very much for having me.

**Adam McCauley** (2:46)
So I hope we might start, as everybody should, kind of at the beginning. So you spent a lot of time in a lot of places and spaces reporting a host of stories that I think at some point sort of appeared to you to tell a larger tale. So I wonder if you could tell us kind of how this book came about and maybe that moment where it crystallized for you, that you actually had a narrative far greater perhaps than any of these individual stories together.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (3:13)
Yeah, sure. So one of the joys of being based in Istanbul as a journalist is that you have access not just to Turkey, which is an interesting story in itself, but also to a really, really kind of wide region because Istanbul, you know, the cliché is that it sits at the bridge between East and West, but actually it sits at the kind of center point between the old Soviet Union, Europe, Iran and the Caucasus and the Levant, the Middle East. And it's also the place, or in the middle of places where empires, the edges of empires kind of bump up. And it's in those places that you find the in-between places or what I call the hinterlands. So places that are generally kind of ethnically mixed, maybe sort of ambiguous in, you know, terms of who do they belong to or what are they? Are they a nation state? Are they part of a different nation state? Are they part of an empire?
And places that change hands quite often. And these are quite often, you know, just fascinating places in themselves. A few of them, places like Transnistria in Moldova or like Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus, they were sort of born of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the kind of imperfect borders that were drawn, national borders when that empire broke down.