The recent exchange of attacks between the followers of Osama bin Laden and the American government highlights the eternal problem facing the diplomats and strategists of any nation: how to appropriately react and clearly respond to conflicts with an alien people who derive their beliefs and goals from a significantly different set of cultural influences, spiritual desires, and geopolitical imperatives.

Neighbors and Strangers is a lucid survey of how various empires, nations, and city-states throughout world history have dealt with the strangers beyond their borders. Using a wide variety of examples, the book explains how groups of people united by a sense of kinship use war and diplomacy, trade and theft, cultural exchange and espionage, assimilation and extirpation, and a mixture of public and private initiative to survive when faced with groups of people who are seen as aliens (and therefore as potentially dangerous).

Polk draws out the essence of this lack of trust in his introduction:

All our senses tell us that with [the foreigner] we lack bonds of kinship, shared memories of childhood, intimacies of ritual and religion, and a comforting similarity. No matter how maddening the brother or the cousin, we see something of ourselves in him. But the foreigner looks different, speaks incomprehensibly, and even smells odd. His clothes are outlandish, his habits often violate our norms, and his religion challenges or insults the true faith we cherish; his very existence parodies our lives or calls into question the systems under which we live [...] [1]

 
The most interesting and original (as well as initially confusing) statements in Neighbors and Strangers are made in the first two parts of the book, where Polk draws on the work of William McNeill to present analogies between the way human tribes (of whatever size) deal with foreign tribes and the way the human body deals with foreign objects. In particular, Polk notes that neither the body nor the tribe, however they may fight them, can either survive without or permanently defeat foreign entities. Both, therefore, must seek a rough balance with that which is beyond their control in order to enjoy health and well-being.

Polk, a former professor of history who has been prominent in American diplomatic circles since the Kennedy administration, demonstrates his mastery at organizing and synthesizing vast amounts of seemingly unrelated information in order to make and bolster his points. Unfortunately, however, a great many of the book's anecdotes and narrative segments -- while interesting in themselves -- distract the reader from the main flow of Polk's argument. For example, most of the section on the evolution of weaponry is fascinating, but superfluous.

That minor caution aside, Neighbors and Strangers is a well-written and thought-provoking book on a topic of eternal and immediate relevance.

Review posted: 28 August 1998